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

BLESSED DELIVERANCE

Who knew that old-ass Headass was capable of even greater feats of headassery? Our little crew had become accustomed long ago to his foolishness, the imbecilic way he walked around Bed-Stuy with his lips swelled up, duh-duh, all the various look-at-me antics. We were bored with him, he was dull, the five of us paid him no mind. He might as well have been a fire hydrant. It had ceased to affect us when he interrupted our hangs in the park by barking out one of his nonsensical jokes, every punch line a non sequitur, or by unzipping his dusty jeans and pulling forth from the opening, inch by inch, the ashiness of his dick. By the time we started high school, his pratfalls on the basketball court while a couple of us tried to hoop were no longer amusing—we just dribbled around him and told him to go bother people his own age—and when he would dig in the trash for scraps of pizza or the half-eaten remains of fried-hard chicken wings, clowning wasn't worth it anymore, it was no longer worth the breath for one of us to say to another, hey bitch, hey motherfucker, hey, peep it, there he goes again, you see him right, look, there he is, there goes your father.

Truth be told, we didn't even know Headass was still around. Word was he'd been framed for armed robbery or some such and was doing a bid. Others said he'd been tracked down by a very distant relative and was living in Louisiana among his people, if it's possible for near strangers to be your people. The most dubious and therefore most prevalent rumor contained some version of him plummeting tragically into the East River from the hive of coffin-size, bike chain–bound plywood shanties that sheltered the homeless just below the upper deck of the Manhattan Bridge. What had actually happened, we eventually found out, was a police raid of an abandoned building on Lefferts, a former hotel where Headass, among others, had been squatting. Nothing had changed about the status of the building—it hadn't been sold to some developer, at least not yet—but for whatever reason (we knew the reason) certain cruelties of the law were now being strictly enforced.

By the time senior year rolled around, however, it didn't really matter what had happened. The five of us weren't thinking about Headass at all. Other things were on our minds. College, for instance, was becoming an exciting prospect, even though we were each interested in different ones, and regardless of the fact that the guidance counselor had cast a puckered frown at our lists of schools, striking out the Harvards and Yales, and the Howards and Spelmans too, meanwhile telling us through his teeth that despite our grades and vocabularies and test scores we shouldn't get our hopes too high. Our parents all seemed to be going through it too, some losing their jobs, some suffering the very first symptoms of what would be fateful illnesses, some separating divorcing reuniting testing new loves, and though we hardly talked much to one another about these things in any explicit way, there was an awareness among us of a common feeling, disgust but also bafflement that we had so little sense of who our mothers and fathers really were, and that despite our trepidation about growing dull with age, life apparently would never stop with the excitement, leaping from the gray shadows of alleyways to jump you, knocking you to the ground and seriously kicking your ass. We weren't old yet, however. Far from it. Which meant that our bodies, unbeleaguered, and intact as far as we knew, weren't dull at all, they were fascinating. Which meant that we could do whatever, or whoever, we wanted with them, and who and what we wanted to do could change from week to week or day to day or moment to precious moment, in such a sudden and all-consuming way that each new desire was, in essence, the first ever desire, with every one prior to it cast instantly into a pitch-darkness as formless and empty as the original canvas of the earth. Much of what we (a few of us, at least) wanted to do was sex. For the most part we (a few of us) hooked up, or approached doing so, with those outside of our crew, but since the summer we (again, a few of us) had also developed new and irresistible interests in one another. The fact that we were friends, that we had grown up together since we were little boys and girls, didn't make these particular desires strange, it made them strong. Even though some awkwardness ensued, some friction, there had always been trust among us, you see, and with trust comes the gift of an ample room, or better yet, an open field, like the ones in the Botanic Garden or in Prospect Park where on warm days, when things seemed simpler, we used to lavish time, each field providing a volume of space in which to flex and stretch ourselves freely, to play, to recognize that our bodies absolutely belonged there, among all the other fragrant and colorful organisms surrounding us.

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.