They circle him. The dark-haired one elbows Gold Tooth in the ribs, motions to Luis’s pizza, rubs his hands together. He tries to step around them, but Gold Tooth grabs his shirt, pulls him back. The paper plate wobbles in his grip. They make their eyes big, looking at the pizza, cartoonish and stupid and mocking, then the dark-haired man reaches for a slice, folds it, and takes a bite that makes a third of the slice disappear. Gold Tooth laughs and does the same, each of them returning the slices to Luis’s plate, nodding at him in pretend thanks. Just when he thinks he’s free, one of them trips him from behind. His chin scrapes the sidewalk and there is pizza smashed into the front of his shirt.

He knows he’s done nothing wrong and still, he feels the shame, hot and bright, in his cheeks. It’s the same as when he was a boy, at school. When the other kids beat on him, but he was the one left feeling as though he had done something bad. His shame expands when he feels the tears begin to well behind his eyes. The men look down at him, and their smiles get bigger. He wants to kick their shins, land punches to their guts, tear at them, rip those chains from their necks. Finally, Gold Tooth pats him on the arm—the greatest insult of all—as though they are friends, they’re all in on the joke. They part to let him through, and though he thinks of the way his grandmother showed him to take deep breaths, to count to ten on his fingers, and sometimes that still works, this time he leaves behind the mess of plate and half-eaten pizza and breaks into a run.

He doesn’t stop until his chest is heaving and he’s reached a barren part of town, where a single house stands in the shadow of the blue glass tower, the one built a few years ago that’s already empty and locked up. He keeps picturing that gold tooth winking, the cruel gleam in their eyes. His hunger has now been replaced with a desire for revenge. A desire to make them sorry, to make them—the men, the cops, the city, everyone—hurt worse than they hurt him.

JANE 4