Upcross

by brujaja

Chapter 2

Don’tell had lived in the same city for all of his 14 years, and spent most of his time hanging out on the corner in his neighborhood: everybody talked shit and clowned each other, and scattered quick whenever someone got shot. Don'tell had already seen a lot of blood and a lot of money and a lot of cops in his life. He wondered sometimes about his name, and he tried to ask his mama about it once — but apparently it wasn’t just a name, it was also a declaration of policy. He decided that the name was pretty cool and that he didn't need to know what it meant anyway. Besides, none of his friends had names that meant anything, as far as he knew.

Some of his friends were really worked up about a new Slipdream world called GangBanger: you could have big giant guns shooting hot lava or sulfuric acid, you could have a ten-foot dick if you wanted, you could have stacks of money taller than you, you could even shoot stuff and score points (no one had thought to use Slipdream for gaming yet, but it was only a matter of time). Don'tell wanted in, and he talked his mama into taking advantage of the new lower pricing and getting him a Slipdream box for Christmas.

Everything went great for a few weeks: his grades even got a little better, though his attendance rate continued to hover at about 60 percent, and he checked out a bunch of places he'd been wanting to see. (To his furtive surprise and delight, there were still nude beaches in France. Goddamn.) GangBanger was everything they said it was: like a gruesome, tasteless, Insane Clown Posse version of Disneyland. A funhouse in the madhouse. Everybody got capped a dozen times a day and re-spawned down at the Giant Burger. Don'tell’s avatar looked like Superfly on acid, and the women loved it. He had a checkbook that wrote checks like those great big ones he’d seen on TV: two foot by three foot, with six zeros already filled in. Every morning he woke up with a big smile on his face.

One night, as he sauntered up to his boys in Slipdream, Don'tell felt a vicious hatred fill his belly. “Weird,” he thought, because all these guys were his friends from a child; for all of their strutting and squabbles and drive-by murders, they were tight. Nobody hated anybody, not like the slow-poison toxic feeling Don'tell was getting behind his eyes as he looked at them standing together there on the corner of 29th and MLK.

"DON'TELL! 'SUP?" Tyrell was hollering at him from two feet away. “Why do they do that?” he thought, “I'm right here.”

“’Sup,” he responded, hesitating at the edge of the crew. Most of the time he walked right up in the midst of everyone, spewing friendly insults and asking who had the smoke. This time he felt . . . revulsion. Like when you see a whole lot of roaches, or a big rat. The strangest thought crossed his mind: diseases. He wondered if his friends had diseases. Something was not right. Don'tell mumbled something about being on a mission, and set off away from his boys as fast as he could without looking goofy. He ignored their shouts and taunts, and as he rounded the corner he forced himself to wake up and out of Slipdream. It was a much better idea to swim up slowly back through alpha state and into consciousness when you were ready to wake up: it gave you time to adjust. Coming awake suddenly and directly like that was jarring, and it always felt like waking up from a nightmare.

But there wasn't usually a cold sweat involved.