Excerpt from Witness by Jamel Brinkley, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

As we resumed our walk, one word seemed to come to all of our minds at the same time: Reginald. Why were those white people referring to Headass as Reginald? we screamed, which sent us into more fits of laughter. And then—again, all at the same time, it seemed—we invoked Toby for Kunta Kinte, SoHa for lower Harlem, DoBro for downtown Brooklyn, all the examples we could think of that illustrated the ways they claimed the right to name and rename whoever and whatever they pleased. We agreed without debate, without an utterance of doubt, that Reginald could not under any circumstance be his government name, but we did not speak of the fact that we too had named him—we had done it ourselves, or our uncles and older cousins who had grown up with him and gone to school with him and were also, sometimes, a part of us, had done it—and so it was easy to avoid that particular complication since he had always, as far as we knew, answered to Headass, and, after all, it was a different thing entirely to speak of what we, whoever we comprised at a given moment, decided to call ourselves. We avoided the complications of that too, the idea that Headass was also, sometimes, in a peculiar way, a part of us, because in that moment all that really mattered was the beautiful hazy dream of we-the-five restored to harmony.

But then, when it was suggested that we go over to Antonio's apartment, which is exactly what we would have done before, back when things were normal, he hesitated. In the span of a silence like that you could hear the sound of the breeze plucking, stalk from stem, a yellowing leaf away from its branch. Antonio looked down at his hands as they gripped the sides of his jeans. He told us we shouldn't come over today. It was messy. Things were still weird at home. He said lately his mother had been feeling even worse, and he started to say something more, anxious to offer additional excuses, as if he needed them, but instead let it trail away. "Yeah," he added uselessly after another heavy pause, rubbing the splendid bulb of his nose. Cherise cleared her throat and said she had to go too. Then the two of them said hasty goodbyes and walked off as if holding hands, going in a direction where neither of them lived.

"So," Roni said to Walidah, "what was it you were gonna show me? One of your cartoons…?"

Walidah nodded, her eyes shrouded beneath their lids. "Yeah, that's right…" Then the girls, who had developed a new and hard-won intimacy, left together too, a careful distance maintained between them, together but apart, and just like that, with inexplicable ease, our reunion, our alliance, was again, however lovely the bond, broken.

* * *

Two weeks later, though, our dormant group text lit up with a message from Cherise, telling us all to come by the animal rescue again to see what was happening. She was already there, a second message said. So was Antonio.

Walidah and Roni were the last to arrive, but they made it in time to see some of the spectacle. Headass was stalking back and forth outside of the rescue, wearing a bulky costume. The intention was probably to attract people who were, or could be, lovers of the Leporidae, but he was playing it all wrong. From where we stood along the curb, the fur was convincing enough, smooth as though someone had carefully combed down all the fibers, and aside from a smudge here and there it gleamed a solid silvery-white. But below at the feet and up by his hands, which were raised, fingers rigid and spread as in the posture of a demon giving chase, the color graded into the hideous fleshy pink of skinned game. As Headass moved his feet and hands mechanically up and down, he seemed to carve the air with the costume's pointed yellow nails. For some reason, he was also wearing a stiff plaid vest, which jumped on his body like an ill-fitting shell. But the strangest thing, the thing we couldn't stop whispering to one another about, was the way Headass's face peeked out of the creature's open mouth, as though he was being swallowed or bizarrely birthed. The costume gave him a frightening crown of sharp buckteeth that were the same awful yellow as the nails. Up top, the eyes were garish rings shaded pale blue and salmon. If it wasn't for the ears, which were as languid as those of the real rabbits inside, it would have been reasonable to think Headass was pretending to be a rat with albinism.

Excerpted from Witness by Jamel Brinkley. Copyright © 2023 by Jamel Brinkley. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.