Hood God

Nobody plans for a Tuesday to change everything. Jayvion Mercer didn't plan for it. He was sixteen years old, late for first period, cutting across the parking lot behind Westside High with his backpack over one shoulder and his earbuds in, thinking about nothing more serious than whether he'd aced yesterday's chemistry quiz. He heard the engine first. Loud, revving, the kind of sound that registers in your chest before it reaches your ears. Then he heard the shots. Two of them, so close together they almost sounded like one. And then Jayvion Mercer was on the ground, and the sky was tilted at the wrong angle, and he couldn't feel his legs, and the only thought that made it all the way through was: I didn't even do anything. He'd heard that before — from boys in the neighborhood, from older kids who'd told their stories on corners and porches. Wrong place. Wrong time. Didn't even do anything. He'd always thought that was a thing people said. He'd never understood it was just the truth, plain and cold and final. The parking lot was silent now. His earbuds had fallen out. He could hear birds somewhere, which seemed insane. He could hear a car alarm in the distance. He couldn't hear his own heartbeat. But he could see — that was the strange part. He could see everything with impossible clarity: the white lines of the parking space, a flattened soda can by the curb, a red-tailed hawk circling way up high above the school. Am I dying? he thought. Is this what it is? And then the light changed. Not the light from the sun — that was still there, ordinary and indifferent. Something else. Something deep gold, coming from a direction that didn't make sense, from a place that wasn't exactly here. A voice came with it. Not a voice from the parking lot, not from whoever was calling 911 — he could hear that now, someone screaming for help — but a voice from somewhere else. Somewhere old. Not yet, it said. Jayvion Mercer blinked. The gold light pressed against him like a warm hand on his chest, steady and sure. There's something you have to do first. He wanted to ask what. He wanted to ask who was speaking. He wanted to ask a hundred things that were piling up behind his eyes like water behind a dam. But then the EMTs arrived, and the world came rushing back — sirens, voices, hands, the cold slap of the asphalt — and the gold light was gone. It left something behind, though. Something he couldn't name. Something that hummed in the center of his chest even as they loaded him onto the stretcher. Something that felt, impossibly, like power. When Jayvion opened his eyes in the hospital forty-eight hours later, the first thing he did was look at his hands. They looked the same. Regular hands. Sixteen-year-old hands. But when he clenched his right fist, a small flame — no bigger than a candle's — appeared in the center of his palm. He stared at it for a long time. Then he closed his hand around it, and it disappeared, and he decided — at least for now — that he would not tell a single soul. Across town, in a building that didn't appear on any city map, someone had already been informed.