High Price

senses heighten to take in every sight and sound. Memories rupture into snapshots. The next thing I heard was Joyce shrieking desperately for my sister Beverly because she, Joyce, was hit. She was on the ground, bleeding and just screaming and screaming. Beverly was holding her.
    Wes was hanging out of the window of a car, with the huge black barrel of a shotgun pointing toward the crowd at the McDonald’s door. My sisters and brother Gary were still vulnerable. I saw Wes pull the gun in. Then whoever was driving him began pulling away.
    Someone called an ambulance, which arrived almost immediately because we were close to Hollywood Memorial Hospital. By the time the EMTs arrived, staff from the McDonald’s were already with my sister, bringing out whatever they had on hand to try to stop the bleeding. She’d been shot in the head with buckshot and her face was drenched with blood. I was afraid that she’d die. I thought about how we’d once been so close. But my sadness and concern were quickly replaced by anger and a desire for revenge.
    No one talked about those thoughts. Or rather, those who talked about get-back were quickly discovered to be braggarts or cowards who wouldn’t actually do anything. We weren’t so stupid as to incriminate ourselves like that. You might say a few words like “That motherfucker needs to get his,” but it was your body language and rep that spoke for you. It showed you were a man.
    What seemed like only a few seconds later, the police showed up with Wes in the back of their car. They asked me to point out the shooter. I looked straight at him. He was desperately trying to seem hard, but I could tell that he was really terrified. He looked diminished and shrunken somehow; in handcuffs he seemed like a child. I pointed my finger accusingly, acknowledging to the police that he was the one I’d seen with the gun. You didn’t protect the kid who had shot your sister from the police. But I also wanted him to pay with more than an arrest and conviction.
    Meanwhile, my cousin Wendy had gotten into the ambulance with Joyce, holding her hand and trying to console her. Beverly stayed back, trying to reach my mother to let her know what was going on. I didn’t know it then but the fact that Joyce had remained conscious suggested that the wound wasn’t that bad. It turned out that she’d been hit over her right eye and on her tongue. She escaped being blinded in one eye or worse by only inches. But the doctors were unable to remove the buckshot from her tongue, which remains there to this day.
    However, she stayed in the hospital only a few hours that night, until she was stabilized; she returned a few days later to have plastic surgery on the wound over her eye.
    All that time, I focused on revenge. I was young, but I knew that men didn’t tolerate that kind of offense against their family. If I didn’t stand up for my sister, my reputation would fall. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t the intended target: Joyce was the one who got hurt. But there was a complicating factor: Wes’s family and mine had been close. My sister Patricia had previously dated him and I’d dated his sister Lisa in middle school. Our mothers were good friends and whenever I visited, Wes’s mom had been especially kind and welcoming to me. I also liked his brother.
    Still, while I waited to find out whether Joyce would be all right, I thought about how to get back at Wes. I tried to get a gun, but at twelve or thirteen, I didn’t have friends my age who had guns, though many of them pretended that they did. Guys who had real access wouldn’t take me seriously. I think they were trying to protect me from doing something stupid. And even if I had managed to acquire a weapon, I didn’t know how to find Wes. He’d been taken away immediately to juvenile prison. There wasn’t really more that I could do.
    By the time I saw him again, everyone had moved on. To the family, Joyce seemed fine. Amazingly, she wasn’t even disfigured. Thinking back over the course her life later took, however, I wonder now about how traumatic it must have been for her. She went back to school just a few days after the shooting. This was not the age where people received counseling for possible psychological distress. And once we knew she was physically okay, no one said another word about it in the family.
    Joyce was left alone to grapple with having had a profoundly life-threatening experience. No one in the family