Oso waited for the light to turn green. A family of Hasids marched across New Utrecht and the sound of their voices mixed with the clattering of a D train passing overhead and MCA's basso shouting from the dinky Hyundai's phenomenal sound system in Oso's ears.

He felt loose and bored.

The light finally changed to green and Oso popped the clutch, accelerating down New Utrecht towards Coney Island. Oso always drove when he and the boys went out, because he was the only one who knew how. C-Los rode shotgun, as always. Behind Oso sat Shorty, with Eddy G. to his right. As always.

By the time they hit 14th Avenue, the sun finished setting and the air-raid sirens that let the Jews know that Shabbos had begun were wailing all around. Eddy G. lit a strawberry Philly Blunt double-stuffed with a dime's worth of Haze, since no one was on the street to give a shit.

"Yo bitch, roll your window down," Eddy G. said.

"Nigga, please, it's twelve fuckin' degrees outside," C-Los called back.

"I got asthma, Oso's got his fancy goggles on, we need to air this out."

"I told you to wait to spark that shit until we hit the beach."

"We're like five minutes away!"

"Exactly."

"What do you mean, 'exactly?' We got five of these shits to smoke. We don't space this out, we'll be too fucked up to paint."

The loose spring in the back seat creaked as Eddy G. leaned over to pass the blunt to Shorty. The smoke was starting to burn Oso's eyes behind the new glasses.

"C-Los, man, crack that window," he said. C-Los huffed, but did as he was told. Oso hated siding against his best friend almost as much as he hated siding with Eddy G., but the Hyundai didn't drive itself.

"Man, what do you even need glasses for," C-Los muttered, just audible over the Beastie Boys.

"To read this," Shorty replied, thumping his foot down on the center console and proudly displaying a shining new pair of boots. "C'mon, Oso, tell me what that says."

"Shorty, get your fuckin' stinky feet the fuck off my armrest, son, c'mon," Oso yelled. Shorty's face appeared between the front seats.

"C'mon, Oso, you can see everything nice and pretty now. I worked hard for these bastards, so just read off the name on the side so everyone can hear."

Oso glanced away from the road, looked at Shorty's boots and burst out laughing.

"What?" Shorty looked at him, genuinely confused.

"Shit, son, I knew pay wasn't much at the deli, but I didn't know it was so low you had to buy knock-offs."

"Fuck you talkin' about, knock-offs?"

"Yo, C-Los, how you spell Timbalund, son?" Oso choked the words out between fits of laughter. He rolled to a stop at the red at 86th Street, took off his glasses and wiped the tears from his eyes.

"T-I-M-B-E-R-L-A-N-D," C-Los rattled the letters off.

"Okay," Oso wheezed, "Now read this stupid motherfucker's shoes." C-Los glanced at the label and dissolved into his own fit of laughter as Shorty simultaneously threw a slap at him.

"Fuck you, nigga, that spells Timberland, not Timbalund," Shorty said as C-Los dodged the swipe.

"Man, you Cubans is some ignorant motherfuckers," C-Los responded, throwing a hard punch into Shorty's arm and causing him to fall into the backseat. C-Los then took Shorty's place and loomed over him. "You think we don't got accents? You think things are spelled with ignorant Brooklyn-Cuban phonetics? I mean, what fuckin' store did you go to that's actually selling something that says Timbalund on the fuckin' label? You just boost these out the back your uncle's deli or some shit?"

Shorty's boot withdrew from the console, headed towards the back seat. Oso laid a hand on C-Los' shoulder, easing him back into his seat. He also snuck the weed from C-Los' hand and took a couple of hits. He didn't want to be driving the Hyundai while smoking weed and having a fight break out all around him. Two out of three would've been fine, but all three? And since Oso wanted to smoke more than roughhouse, he made it happen.

The car was parked three blocks away on Stillwell, which made sense in case they had to make a run for it, but Oso never liked having the Hyundai out of sight. Somewhere inside he knew that no one in their right mind would steal a shit-brown, beat-to-shit piece-of-shit '88 Hyundai Elantra, but it was the one thing he had that was his. Besides, he'd lived his whole life in Brooklyn, and he knew that one thing the borough had plenty of was people who were not in their right minds. It had been worse before he got his glasses, of course. Every time they were out and a brown car drove past, Oso would feel a panic in his belly and squint, making sure that the car wasn't a coupe. And if it did have two doors, he'd panic further internally and squint harder, making sure the gas-tank cover was intact. Plus, every time he saw any human movement he was tempted to yell "Five-Oh" and book, since he knew that he wouldn't be able to tell a cop from a six-year-old until it was too late. But he always kept his head, played it cool, and once again he'd saved his money until he could go to LensCrafters and get his shit right.

Not that having glasses made his life into some kind of cakewalk, of course. The glasses, the fact that he read incessantly, beyond what any teacher assigned, the job in the library and the fact that since he was a little kid he'd played catcher for the baseball teams all made him ripe for fag jokes. Eddy G. was the worst. "Oso, man, I finally figured out why you got such an ugly color car." Pause for effect. "It's 'cause it's the same color as a guy's dick when he takes it out of your ass!" And then Eddy would do that horrible hissing laugh. Eddy was useless and stupid, though, and it wouldn't be long before one of the girls he fucked without a rubber got pregnant and then his life would be over.

Oso sat on the corner of the concrete border that ran around the KFC parking lot with an empty can of Hawaiian Punch on his right and an open forty of Colt .45 concealed in a white paper bag on his left. He'd killed off the first third of the forty with one long pull, then dumped the fizzy pink soda into the remaining malt liquor to create what he and everyone he knew termed "Ghetto Fruit Punch," and now he swigged from the bottle every now and again while manning his post as lookout.

The four of them were on a mission, and had been for some time.

The job would take the other three about two hours. They picked KFCs that didn't have drive-thrus to ensure privacy, but Oso's attentiveness was still required, so he couldn't read or listen to music. He usually passed the time by counting stars or texting with Kristin, who was very understanding about his life as a miscreant. But tonight it was overcast and he'd forgotten to plug his cell in last night, so no naughty messages about how the fine, faint hairs in the small of her back drove him to distraction. And he couldn't keep drinking without losing focus, nor blaze without making himself noticeable. The only things he could find to keep his mind occupied were listening to the banter of his boys and counting the black coins of old gum on the cracked sidewalk all around him. There was a paybox on the corner, but he'd used the last of his quarters to buy the bottle of malt liquor, so no dice on maybe actually calling Kristin.

"Son, I'm livid, son." Shorty's words came without sibilants. He almost certainly had an unlit blunt between his teeth. The sound of a lighter being flicked confirmed Oso's suspicions.

"Livid? Livid? You been reading Oso's books, or does he just use words like that when you two have pillow talk?" And then the hissing laugh.

"No, man," C-Los' voice interrupted the laughter, "you know that Oso would've taught him to use a word correctly." The spray cans made their pissing noises as the three kept working through their banter. "Shorty, if you were livid, you'd be down at whatever rat bastard store ripped you off either getting your money back or putting a brick through their window. What you are, Shorty, you're distraught."

Oso chuckled.

There were one hundred thirty-four gum stains and no end in sight.

Oso watched his shoes tapping half a rhythm and realized that he was half-drunk and full of desire for Kristin Segnitz. He didn't understand why he liked her. Before they'd started hanging out after Geometry, he could count the number of white people he'd liked on one hand: Mike D., Ad-Rock, MCA, and Mr. Costanza, his baseball coach at P.S. 169. They didn't have much in common beyond a love of reading, a love of the Beastie Boys and a love of nicotine, but somehow he'd alchemized these materials into a real girlfriend who really put out really well. He laughed as he thought of three mornings ago. Her parents had gone to Montauk for their twentieth wedding anniversary and Oso moved in for the weekend. They listened to a lot of music, watched a half-dozen movies, and had sex in every room in the brownstone. Her parents were due back at noon on Monday and Oso had to be home before nine to babysit his sisters while his parents went to work, so no problems on the getting caught/father-with-a-gun-or-knife-or-other-means-of-inflicting-pain-on-spic-in-bed-with-his-daughter front, except that in his haste out the door, Oso had grabbed the wrong pair of rimless glasses and hadn't realized it until he put them on halfway down the block. He didn't want to wake her, so he went about his day until about eleven o'clock when he plopped his sisters down in front of an old Disney video and headed back to her place. He rang the bell and turned around, putting on her glasses that made him feel dizzy. He heard the door click open and spun around, crying out, "Guess what's wrong?" He only got through the first part of "guess" when he stopped, faced with the blurred image of a trim man with gray hair and wearing what appeared to be a corduroy blazer.

Oso laughed now not only because of the awkwardness of having his first encounter with Kristin's father through his daughter's prescription and that this awkwardness was due to the fact that his own glasses were perched on Kristin, who kept bumping into things in the living room when her father called her down, and that all of this had been caused by wanting to not meet her father at all, let alone on the morning after they'd carved the date into the back of the headboard of her parents' bed. He also laughed because her father had been such a pleasant, approachable man. Not that Oso was at ease enough to show Mr. Segnitz the photo of Oso with two fingers in his daughter's vagina while Kristin smiled and gave Oso two thumbs up.

He saw the cop car stopped at the red a block away. Their lights weren't on, no siren, but the turn signal wasn't on, either. He picked up his bag and walked off the corner. He made no sudden moves, just stubbed his cigarette out, picked up the bag, walked off the corner, like any average guy who stopped for a smoke on his way back home from the deli. He waited until he was alongside the crew, working silently now with their hoods up.

"Five-oh's a block away, coming up to us," he said as he passed the wall. He snuck a peek at the night's work. Popeye the Sailor Man had The Colonel's Van Dyke grasped in one fist while with the other he punched the rival logo's glasses clean off his face. This same tableau now adorned KFCs in Fort Green, Sunset Park, Kensington, Greenpoint, Midwood, and Park Slope. C-Los, Eddy G., and Shorty had only just started filling in the outlines with color, though the Slider signature was vivid and blaring over Popeye's head.

He saw a paybox straight ahead, just short of the next corner. Dull steel against a dull brick wall, perfect in its anonymity.

"Pick up the paints, fool."

"Fuck you mean, pick up the paints? You wanna be walkin' 'round with spray cans in your hoodie with cops around?"

"Fingerprints, C-Los!"

"Fuck you using my name for, bitch? And what, you got a record they could tie prints to? Just walk, nigga."

Oso set the paper bag down next to the phone and moved into the metal arch. He decided not to ditch the cigarettes, since if he did encounter police, it would be better to give them a pack than give them nothing and have them search around for something to pin on him. Like a big-ass mural on the back of a chicken joint. He picked up the receiver and listened to the dial-tone as the three shapes snuck back into the light and split off in different directions. C-Los had just finished crossing the street, heading away from Oso, when the blue and white rolled up to the intersection and turned right, its headlights dazzling Oso and causing Shorty, walking Oso's way on the opposite side of the street, to stop and duck into a doorway, hands coming out of his pockets with his smokes and a lighter. Clever.

He stepped off the curb.

"'Scuse me," a white-sounding voice called from the stopped patrol car.

"'Sup, boss?" Oso was good at talking to cops. He didn't like them, to be sure, but years of not liking any authority whatsoever had made him very good at hiding this dislike. Don't be respectful, it reads as sarcasm. Don't be sarcastic. Don't lie. Don't tell the truth. Evasion, ambiguity and detail that can't be corroborated. Be a phone booth against a brick wall, average Brooklyn.

"You old enough to be smoking?" The cop was, indeed, white. He was leaning out the window, ear to elbow, unwilling to leave the warmth of his car. He was also young. Young, relaxed, and white—Oso was lucky tonight. The white cops, and especially the young ones, were so afraid of racism charges nowadays that they treated Oso almost like a human being. Hispanic and middle-aged was much more of a problem.

Rather than respond, Oso flicked the cigarette away, not even taking a last drag.

"Was at a house party," he explained. "You want the rest of the pack?" He reached into his back pocket and held the Reds out at arm's length.

"What was that," a sharp, higher-pitched voice called from the passenger side. Oso squinted into the headlights and saw a dark-skinned female officer leaning out of the passenger side window.

"I'm just saying, don't let 'em go to waste," Oso said, shrugging innocently. He continued to hold the pack out in the direction of the driver. Even if this dreadlocked girl cop smoked, she almost certainly favored Newports.

"You break the law and now you try and pawn off some nice guy act?" Oso felt his eyes widen slightly and his jaw clench as he swallowed all the words he felt welling up.

"Look, I..."

Oso finally stepped away from the driver's side to look his interrogator in the eye. "No one. Like I said, I was at a house party. Packs were just floating around."

"Beer, too? Shots? Marijuana?"

Oso let the edges of his mouth drift upward. "Plenty, but I didn't have any. Designated driving tonight."

"The people you driving for, are they underage?" Oso nodded. This conversation was fast becoming a game of chess. She wanted to catch him in a lie, which meant he had to continue to lie until either she caught him or he put one out there so good she couldn't question him. He made his face blank and his voice flat, giving facts to his questioner without any inflection, any feeling about the facts, like a newscaster or some shit.

"So where are they?"

"Don't know. They left to get some Nathan's down the way, I haven't seen 'em in like an hour. Party's done, so I'm leaving."

"Not a very good friend."

"They got home without me before, and more fucked up. Believe me."

The girl cop's dreads were tucked into the fake fur collar of her parka, very neat. Fastidious people didn't believe other people. They did the job themselves. Oso knew this because he'd spent seventeen years in his own skin. But then the white boy cop asked, in a voice dripping with boredom at his partner's need to bust the great Brooklyn underage-cigarette-selling ring, where the party was, and Oso knew he was safe.

"Couple blocks back up. Like I said, I was just headed back to my car." All explanation was gone from his tone, replaced by placation.

"Out late, huh? What, no school tomorrow?"

Oso looked the white face up and down, uncertain if he was being fucked with or not. He decided the young officer was probably just overworked and underpaid, like everyone.

"It's Friday, Marty," the girl said.

Marty laughed, a small, tired laugh, and rubbed both hands down his face. Overworked and underpaid, definitely.

"Just gimme the pack and go home, kid," Marty said.

Oso tossed the pack into the passenger window. The female officer caught it, flipped open the box top and set one of the cylinders between her lips. She glanced sidelong at Oso, his face still neutral. "You shouldn't smoke," she said as she flicked a stubborn match again and again. She pulled her cap down low over her eyes, and the flash and smell of sulfur emanated from beneath the brim. She dragged and did a cool French inhale. Only Kristin ever did that. "But if you are gonna smoke, you picked the right brand." She laughed. Marty laughed. Oso stepped back and the car rolled through the intersection.

He walked to the safety of the opposite curb as the car's taillights receded down the misty street and disappeared.

Shorty emerged from his dark doorway and joined Oso on the corner.

"Shit, Oso, that shit you just pulled, that's the shit they need to be teaching us. Fuck geometry."

"No, Shorty man, geometry's good. Geometry's what really saved my ass just now."

"How you figure?"

"My glasses, son. No geometry, no glasses."

Shorty stared blankly at Oso. Oso crooked a finger at Shorty. Shorty stepped into the small pool of streetlight. Oso pointed at his glasses. Shorty shrugged and shook his head. Oso removed his glasses and Shorty laughed. Without the glasses reflecting light, Oso's cherry-red eyes and Haze-glazed stare were just as noticeable as the Fried Chicken Mascot Battle Royale would have been if only one of the officers had turned around.

Kristin's hands were wrapped around the steaming paper cup. Oso stroked her hair, allowing his coffee to cool on the concrete steps of her stoop. Her elbows were propped on his knees. Her arms seemed the shape of butterfly wings. Her hair, streaming out from under her wool cap, made her look like a marvelous, colorful creature emerging from a dull, doleful gray cocoon. She slurped at her coffee and cocked her face up to look him in the eyes. In turn, he looked down at her and nearly knocked his cup over as he struggled to keep his glasses from sliding down his nose and hitting her.

"Don't be jumpy, my parents sleep like rocks." She wasn't even whispering.

"Yeah, well, bad news comes in clumps. Almost caught once tonight, I'm not anxious for more."

"Drink your coffee. Relax. You're here with me." She reached for his ribs, knowing he would recoil. He did.

"Tell me to relax by drinking coffee and being tickled. You tell depressed people to read The Bell Jar, too?" But he was smiling. And he did feel better. Cold, though. The first flakes were coming down, and the elms of Sunset Park grew suddenly older in the black of night and white of snow, as though they were transported out of those black and white photos of old timey New York that hung in the Historical Society. Oso sipped his very sweet, very light coffee. Kristin was right, the warmth relaxed him. He leaned in and kissed her. The warmth of her lips and breath loosened him far better than the coffee.

"So, wait," she said, licking her lips to protect against chapping, "did everyone else go back to the car, or just scatter to the train, or what?"

"Beats me. Like I said, my cell was dead. Shorty and I rode around for like fifteen minutes..."

"Whyn't he just call them?" Clever girl.

"No phones. If they've gotta run, they don't wanna lose 'em. Enough numbers on them to make an ID, or so C-Los figures."

For the first time that he could remember, Kristin looked bothered with him. "So first they left you, and then you left them?"

Oso moved down to join her on the lower step, slid his hands up and down her thighs, a familiar, soothing rhythm.

Kristin dipped the ends of her hair in her coffee and sucked at the strands, unsoothed.

"Kristin, it's not like any of us in that situation had a choice. I mean, we can't just stand there and wait to get arrested, and Shorty and I couldn't just drive around in circles, 'cause what if the cops rolled up again and recognized us, I mean, it's like when we did the walls by the bus station and we had to cut across the backyards of all these brownstones, right? And not yards like yours, no herb garden and shit. Like these people probably moved in, looked at the backyard and were like, 'what a great place to put all the shit that won't fit out the front door. Fuckin' bathtubs with all these raw, rusty pipes, broken bedframes, bottles everywhere, weeds and…" Her eyes hadn't widened, but her neck was crooked at an awkward angle, she'd inhaled so much of her hair. "Well, to cut it short, some psycho shot at us. I mean, not at us, he shot the gun in the air and told us that the next ones were coming at us, so in comparison to that, what I'm saying..."

Kristin finally let the hair out of her mouth. Oso sat blinking, dumbfounded. He broke eye contact and gazed for a long moment out across the park towards the skyline of Downtown Manhattan. A dense mass of fog and snow was punctuated by tiny yellow embers of windows and, higher, flashes of red. A warning of calamity for nights when the world is unclear. Oso had read the flashes of revelation that occur in the stories of J.D. Salinger. He had seen folks in movies suddenly become aware of their unimportance, their faults or their destinies, yet he was unprepared as the feeling swept over him. In his head, he played back the story he'd just related.

"I am so fucking stupid," he sighed, shaking his head. She was rubbing his hands between the thumbs and forefingers, the same rhythm he'd used on her thighs. She was always colder than him, but Oso had always been fond of the cold side of the pillow.

"I'm not ashamed of you, Oso Koala." He winced at the sound of his full nickname, the one his parents had given him on the day of his birth. She'd heard his parents use the name sometime and now he was going to have to live with it a while longer. His prominent ears, sleepy-lidded eyes and bushy, loose hair had followed him from infancy to the present, as had the thickness of his limbs, torso, neck. But he had hoped to at least lose the youthful moniker.

"I'm not ashamed, but I've gotta know, why KFC?"

Oso looked from side to side—the Segnitzes be damned, he needed to make sure C-Los never knew he snitched. "Eddy and Shorty both think it's 'cause C-Los loves Popeye's."

"Makes sense, from what I've seen of the tags."

"I know, but it's a cover. I mean, the boy does love Popeye's, no doubt. He thinks that little touch screen that gives you deals for your change and shit is the best thing since sliced bread, but no. Uh-uh. You know Olga?"

"Describe her."

"Cute Colombian girl, grade under us. She wears a diamond stickpin."

"...In her lower lip, sure, I know who you mean."

"Okay, so C-Los and her had a thing going on for awhile, back when she worked for her uncle, he owned a Colombian restaurant down on 8th Ave. C-Los used to go down there and have some Manzana soda and chicharron, pass notes, make out with her in the kitchen when there wasn't anyone to serve, which was pretty often. Gets to be too often, the restaurant goes under, she starts at the KFC. KFC doesn't like deadbeat Puerto Rican boyfriends hanging around passing notes to the counter girl. She tells C-Los they need to figure something else out. C-Los doesn't bother, she moves on."

"And now he blames KFC for breaking them up rather than his own lack of effort?"

"'Oso, man, they stole her, man. C'mon, son, you gotta help me!' 'C-Los, you ever think of trying to just talk to her again?' 'Fuck do you mean, son? I do that, she'll think she's got the power to get to me or some shit!' 'Um, doesn't she?'" Kristin's whole body shook as she laughed silently.

"For a while after you told me, I thought this was some new, hip marketing scheme. Some Converse-wearing twenty-five year-old from Madison Avenue sees C-Los on the platform and pitches him this new front in the fried chicken war," she spurted out between giggling fits.

"Yeah, only money or love make a man do something this crazy."

Now it was Kristin's turn to break eye contact and make Oso nervous. "Which of the two is it for you," she asked his shoes softly.

"Friendship. Apparently friendship makes people do crazy things, too." She reached to tickle him again, and this time he did knock the coffee over.

"Shit. Sorry."

She'd been quick to hoist herself off the step, but a stain steamed from her jeans. She turned and kissed him, her sapphire eyes open and pressed close. His whole field of vision consisted of these bottomless, warm gems. "Now you've done it," she admonished, shaking her head in mock disappointment. "Now my pants are wet and it's cold, so I have to go inside and take them off." Oso stood and kissed her, picked up the last bit of coffee and made to leave. When he'd reached the end of the stoop and reached into his pocket for the keys to the whip, he heard an exasperated sigh. Turning, he found a beaming, flaxen-haired girl shaking her head, perplexed. Every bit of her acquired a halo from the porchlight. Individual teeth were ringed angelically. "How many times do I have to say that my parents sleep like rocks?"

Oso took the steps two at a time and grabbed her tight, kissing her with all the hunger and ferocity of his nicknamesake. Still laughing, she fumbled with the door. He clutched her hand in his before she could turn the knob. She tensed in his embrace and he kissed her wrists, nibbling the hard curves where bone pushed against pale freckled skin. Like the end of a drumstick of spicy fried chicken.

They didn't talk any more that night, nor did they indulge their hormones fully. They touched, kissed, snuggled, slept. Oso awoke before dawn and lay next to his girlfriend, watching her warm, white and blue checkered comforter twitch along with her. He wondered what she was dreaming. He wondered how he could explain to his best friends that he was, for all intents and purposes, abandoning them to pursue a fascination with the dreams and twitches of a white girl. He wondered if this fascination was love, teenage love, lust, curiosity. He wondered if it really made a difference.