Trouble

“What the fuck did you do?” Liam screeched. All the blood had drained from his face, and he looked at me like I was a complete stranger, despite the fact that we’d known each other far too long. “What did you do, Sol?!”

“He was going to kill Alejo,” I answered shortly as I made my way over to my best friend.

He was on his knees in the dirt, his arms crossed in front of his chest, shaking harder than I’d ever seen. I was almost afraid he’d bite his tongue off, which I’d heard was possible, so I placed a hand on his shoulder as I walked by and demanded, “Breathe.”

He tried to follow orders, but his breaths were ragged and contained little to no oxygen. It sounded incredibly painful, and even I couldn’t keep myself from wincing, grateful that my back was to him so he couldn’t see.

I looked down for a second at the man lying on the ground. His gun was a good foot away from his hands, the side of his always-perfect ponytail askew against the ground, his dark eyes staring off into nothingness. I felt no guilt as I leaned over and pressed my index and middle fingers against the side of his neck, checking for any kind of pulse.

After a full minute of not feeling so much as a twitch, I straightened back up and wiped my hands off on my dirty jeans, turning around to face the other two boys.

“Sol, what did you do?” Liam was still repeating in complete shock, his eyes locked on the dead man. His hands were shivering as he rubbed them together, but he was nowhere near the traumatized state Alejo was in. “SOL. I can’t believe you-”

“Liam, shut up,” I snapped, yanking Alejo’s phone out of my pocket and dialing 911 as quickly as my thumbs could go.

“911, what’s your emergency?” a feminine voice asked me. Her tone was incredibly pleasant, which I guess it had to be, since it was kind of her job to calm people down at crime scenes, from outside their burning home, from watching their mother die of a heart attack in front of them.

I cleared my throat and said in a conversation tone, “There’s been a shooting, one man’s dead, and another is in shock.”

Alejo glanced up at me, but it was almost as if his eyes didn’t compute that I was standing there. He looked lost and wounded, and he was still having trouble breathing. His throat must have been raw by then from his noisy attempts at inhaling.

“Okay, crews will be right over,” the woman said shortly. “The boy in shock, what’s he doing?”

I explained Alejo’s condition in an even voice, going over and touching his forehead. His skin was clammy and uncomfortable, and I made a soft clucking noise, just like a mother watching over a sick child.

The woman on the other end was giving me directions of what to say and what to do, but I couldn't hear a word she said. Instead, I implored in a low voice, “Alejo, listen to me. If you don’t breathe properly, you’re going to die.” I reached for his hand, closing my fingers around his palm. “Breathe in slowly through your nose. Don’t use your mouth.”

“Ma’am? Are you listening?”

“No,” I answered shortly. “I’ll talk to the police when they get here.” After hanging up the phone and tossing it in the dirt, I turned to look at Liam. “You have to get out of here.”

“I can’t leave you guys!” he argued. “Look at Alejo! He can’t stay like that.”

I barely noticed that he was back to using Alejo before I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter, Liam. Get out. You can’t be seen here, or they’re going to think you were involved.”

“Sol…”

I let out a harsh breath, realizing the task was going to be much harder than I’d anticipated, patting Alejo’s knee encouragingly before getting to my feet. “Okay, I know that you want to be high and mighty right now, but it’s not working. I don’t even know what the fuck you’re doing here, but you need to high-tail it back to your hotel before a cop shows his face. The last thing I need is for this to be plastered on the evening news, in all the newspapers, and all over the internet.”

“I’m here because Alejo told me to be,” Liam argued. “I was standing behind you the whole time, and he told me that if it looked like you were going to shoot, I had to stop you. Because he didn’t want you getting taken away from your sisters.”

My heart sank. How was it fucking possible that I’d forgotten about my sisters when I’d stood up and put the bullet in Cristobal’s brain? They were my flesh, my blood, and I’d turned my back on them. For the first time in my life, I was going to be thrown in jail, and there was nothing I could do about it.

“Liam,” I whispered, not thinking about what I was saying before I said it, “I want you to listen to me. I’m going to jail for this. Probably for a long time, but maybe not forever. But listen, okay?”

He nodded shortly, and I reached over and put my hands on his shoulders. “I want you to make sure that my sisters get put in the best care possible. I don’t care what strings you have to pull, who you have to talk to, but you have to make sure they’re not put into foster care. I can’t have them go through that.”

“What about your mum?” Liam questioned. “They’re not going to take the kids away from your mum.”

“There will probably be an investigation,” I replied. “For lots of gang members, when one of the kids gets sent to jail, their home life is evaluated. Families get ripped apart. Social Services is going to see that my mother is rarely, if ever, home, and they’re going to take those girls out of the environment.”

“Sol, you don’t know that.”

“I do,” I argued. “Liam, please. They can’t…they can’t end up like me. I swear to God, if a man ever touches any of them the way that I’ve been touched, I will march up to him and kill him as slowly as I can, and that’s a promise.”

The twinkle that was always present in Liam’s brown eyes had completely disappeared as he looked down at me. All this time, he’d started to fall for a romantic version of myself, but not the real me. He thought I was tough and strong, unbreakable, beautiful, and heroic.

I’d been right all along. He had an idealized version of what a gang was, and he’d accepted that as truth, no matter how many times I tried to convince him otherwise. And he was there, watching me, when I stood up and shot a man through the head for what he saw as an unjust, rash reason. It was something that could have been avoided, yet wasn’t. There could have been over methods of shutting Cristobal down, but I didn’t evaluate them. I did what I had to do, and Liam didn’t want to accept that.

But whether he still had feelings for me or not, he nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”

I nodded shortly before gesturing toward the trees. “The cops here are slow, but they should be here soon enough. Just escape as soon as you can.”

He glanced back at me once and opened his mouth. I figured he’d say something cheesy, like something out of a chick flick. Some shit like I’ll wait for you, even when he didn’t mean it.

But instead, he shut it again and ran faster than I’d ever seen anyone run in my life. I had no idea if he was scared I’d shoot him in the back or if he was just fast. And I had no idea if I’d ever get to see him again to find out which one it was.

Once Liam was out of view, I turned my attention back to Alejo, who was starting to look a little blue. “Alejo,” I snapped. “Don’t even fucking tell me that I just killed someone so you could die anyway. Mírame ahora.”

Alejo brought his gaze up slowly, panting like crazy. I reached up and put my hands on the side of his face. “Uno, dos, tres. Respira. Uno, dos, tres. Respira.”

His breathing still didn’t sound perfect, but he was doing much better than when he was trying to do the task on his own. The counting and talking was probably helping him focus on something other than what he witnessed, what had happened right in front of him, which he hadn’t been expecting.

Flashing blue and red lights filled my vision, followed by the cut-off sound of a siren, and then the men were upon us. A couple cops started interrogating me while a med crew darted over to Cristobal with their kits to make sure he was indeed dead.

One cop started snapping questions at Alejo, and he was starting to look completely overwhelmed again with his wide eyes and shaky hands, so I intercepted and said, “He doesn’t know anything. I followed him here because I thought something shady was going on, and I shot the guy. Alejandro had nothing to do with it.”

The man looked down at me, at the relatively slight girl in front of him, and he had this kind of smirk on his face like, You? Shoot someone? Oh, please.

“Here’s my gun,” I offered, handing it over to him. “The bullets will be a match, and you’ll find no fingerprints but my own. I’m confessing. And if you need an official one, let’s go right now.”

The police still looked unconvinced, but they whipped out the handcuffs anyway. “You have the right to remain silent,” one read to me in a monotone voice that almost put me to sleep. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”

Just for a moment, I glanced over at Alejo, and he had seemed to gain back most of his consciousness. His eyes were pained, hurt, almost betrayed, because I’d acted against what we’d discussed. But I’d saved his life. I could only hope he’d understand.

I mouthed to him, “I love you,” just before the cop turned me around.

And just barely, as I stumbled away, I heard Alejo mumble, “I love you, too, hermana.”

That was all the justification I needed.