23. The Flash Drive

Richie's Uncle makes him an offer.

The sun had begun making its presence known when we left the club. As we all got in Rohit’s car and made our way through LA’s streets, the black sky began to crack and give way to purple. By the time we arrived at the diner, morning light was pouring in from every window.

I absently fiddle with my stack of waffles as Rohit flips through pictures of the rave a few hours ago on his phone and Daren lays his head face first on the table.

“So what happened, bro?” Quan asks me. “She was all over you and then five minutes later she’s walking out pissed?”

He chuckles in disbelief as he talks. Rohit looks up from his phone, wanting to hear the answer too.

“I dunno, man,” I reply, staring down at my iced coffee. “Turns out we just didn’t really get along.”

Rohit smiles and shakes his head.

“Leave it to Richie to get the baddest girl in the club and screw it up.”

I roll my eyes as he takes a bite of his pancake.

“What did you do the rest of the time?” Quan asks. “Just sit at the bar in shame?”

“I just chilled, you know,” I answered with a shrug. “I got back up and danced.”

“With a different girl?”

“By myself.”

He sighs condescendingly. “What a waste.”

“Isn’t the point of a rave to dance?” I defend.

“Time out,” Rohit says. “Since when can you dance?”

I shrug again. “I mean I can’t, but so what? Half the people there couldn’t either, they just drunkenly stumble around to the music, so I joined in and soberly stumbled around.”

“That’s lame.” Quan scoffed.

“It’s called having fun. You know, the object of going out at night.”

He simply shakes his head, then yawns while rubbing his eyes. Rohit leans over to the barely conscious Daren’s ear.

“You had plenty of fun last night, didn’t you?” he says as loudly as he can without the rest of the diner hearing him. Daren, without moving at all, lets out a barely audible groan that translated roughly to ‘Shut up, dickhead.’

His hand feels around the table until it finds a cold glass of orange juice, which he grabs and holds to his head. Rohit, who is somehow the most awake and energized of us, rolls his eyes then goes back to the pictures on his phone.

“We need to do this more often,” Rohit says, setting his phone down. “You guys can’t hang at all, but that was fun.”

“It was a miracle we all had off the same day,” Quan replies. “The universe musta threw us a break.”

I yawn, glancing at a nearby clock hanging on the wall. “I work at a disgusting nursing home and get paid in peanuts and gum wrappers, a day off is the least the universe could do.”

The truth in that joke is all too real; without the extra money I make from art commissions I would barely scrape together rent each month.

Our waitress walks back up to our table, shoving a pen into the crook of her ear and running a hand through her dark, wavy hair. She seems only a year or two older than us, and is a curvy latina the other guys can’t stop gawking at.

“Are we all liking the food?” she asks with a teethy, mirror-rehearsed smile.

The three of us still alive all give reassuring words and nods and she heads off to tend to some other business.

“Yup,” Quan says as soon as she’s out of hearing distance. “She can most definitely get it.”

I shrug. “She’s alright I guess.”

Quan and Rohit look at me the disappointed scowls. I simply shake my head, and as I’m doing so, I catch a glimpse of another waitress. She seems a bit younger, has somewhat pale skin, orange hair tied up in a ponytail, cheeks full of freckles, and thick-framed glasses hang in front of her dull, green eyes. She is absolutely beautiful. I can’t help but stare at her from across the diner. She passively chews gum as she carries a big tray full of food to an elderly couple. I can’t hear what she’s saying, but from her inexpressive face I can tell she is skipping the formalities and theatrics the rest of the staff is piling on.

Rohit notices me frozen there like an unresponsive coma patient, and then realizes who I’m looking at. He sucks his teeth.

“I think we found your type,” he says. “I always catch you staring at white, nerdy, Jinkies-looking girls.”

“Yo, you’re right,” Quan laughs with realization. “You got some weird tastes, Richie.”

We arrive at our apartment complex, for the first time since we left the previous night. Climbing out of the car, I feel the fatigue and strain of dancing all night without sleep suddenly hit my body. I begin trembling and feel the sudden urge to collapse on the sidewalk.

“Yo,” Quan calls, summoning the group’s attention. “We got a visitor.”

In unison, the remaining three of us notice the man in the superfluously expensive grey suit descending the stairs to our place.

Rohit replies, “It’s just Richie’s uncle.”

Keegan approaches us, sunglasses over his eyes, a bluetooth in his ear and a cup of coffee in his hand.

“It’s cool,” he says. “I’m not your landlord, you don’t have to duck me.”

“Morning,” I greeted. “Sorry, we were out getting breakfast. I didn’t know you were gonna stop by.”

“It was last minute, but I had to talk with you.”

He motions his head to the three behind me.

“What did I tell you all about standing around outside together? If there’s more than two of you in the group all the white people around get uncomfortable.”

I glance over to my roommates, each at varying levels of consciousness.   

“You guys head in,” I instruct. “I’ll catch up.”

“Word,” Quan yawns. “Don’t tell me twice.”

Soon my uncle and I are alone on the curb.

“You were out all night, weren’t you?” he asks. He takes his sunglasses off, mainly so I get the full effect of his judgmental stares.

“We had today off,” I explain. “So we made a night.”

“That’s you millenials’ problem. The nights you spend doing drugs and catching STDs is time you’ll never get back, you know.”

I audibly sigh. It’s too early in the morning for tough love or self help.

“Did you come all the way here to give life advice?”

“No, I have an offer. I was gonna go visit Tobias in New York at the end of the month, but my schedule’s getting way too crazy. Thing is, I already bought the ticket.”

“What are you implying?”

“That you should go instead.”

The suggestion strikes me off guard, I verbally double back. “To Queens?”

He speak plainly and matter-of-factly. “It’s been years. Your uncle misses you.”

“I mean, I can’t just pack up and go.”

“Why not? You have a month’s advance here.”

“I have a job, you know.”

“Take off. Summer’s starting, they were probably expecting you to go on vacation anyway.”

Vacation, that wasn’t my first choice of words for it.

“Here I was thinking you would value family for once in your life.”

“Hey,” I defend. “It’s a little difficult when that family still lives on the other side of the country.”

I think about it for a second, and the old house I grew up in flashes through my head for the first time in what feels like forever.

“Come on, Rich,” my uncle sighs. “You moved out here so you could figure out what you wanted to do with your life. Clearly there was a delay in that plan, so maybe being back home for a little while might put you back on course.”

I stop, and with my tone of voice hard and direct, I sternly correct him.

“I am on course. I don’t need correcting, and I don’t need to figure anything out.”

He averts his eyes, not as ready as he thought he was for this conflict.

I sigh, suddenly remembering how tired I am. “Is that all you came for?”

“No,” he replies, reaching a hand into his suit jacket’s pocket. “I came to give you this.”

As he pulls his hand out and I see what he’s holding, my body freezes. My mind nearly shuts down.

“You left it lying around when you moved out of my apartment,” he explains. “Been meaning to give it back.”

He holds it out to me. It’s a flash drive, a small, green one, and as I see it a whole pantheon of locked away feelings breaks free inside me, like a Pandora’s Box in my head was just opened. I had forced it out of my memory. Maybe I had even left it on purpose, deep down.

I take it and for a moment I’m taken to another world as I look down at it in my hands.

“Take the trip, Richie,” my uncle says. “Whatever you’re running from in Queens, you can’t hide out here forever.”

I enter the apartment as silently as I can for my roommates’ sake. I quickly spot Daren sprawled out on the couch, apparently not having bothered with the extra couple of steps to his bed. My eyes wander down to the small collection of fast food bags and used dishes spread out across the floor beneath him.

When we had moved to California, Uncle Keegan and I were on the same page, wanting the same things and going on the journey together. I was a fresh out of high school with no plan and no clue, and he offered what became my first real choice in the direction of my life, the first step into my own impending adulthood. But since I had moved out to this apartment with the guys, he suddenly started having concerns and disapproval of my choices. Ironically, establishing my independence somehow in his head regressed me to being a helpless child again, in need of advice and guidance. But instructions from anybody on what to do with my life is the last thing I need.

I kneel and grab the paper bag full of empty wrappers, napkins and leftover fries, and walk it over to the kitchen’s trash can. Maybe I do need some figuring out, maybe there is a next step I’m supposed to be taking, but this stage of life I’m at now isn’t a mistake. It’s what I wanted, and what I got to on my own, not what any self aggrandizing “grown up” or societal convention decided and imposed on to me. For maybe the first time in my life I feel free.

I walk over to the folding chair beside the kitchen table and sit, just to think for a moment. I place the flash drive on the table and take a good, hard look at it, as if to force myself to accept its existence. Looking at this cheap, tiny piece of plastic and metal, if only for a second, any feeling of freedom I was holding onto is ripped away and I’m trapped in my own mind, with a cold and dismal emptiness in its place, wearing me down completely.

“Yo,” Rohit calls, entering the kitchen to search through our mostly empty fridge. “I thought you’d be asleep by now.”

My current crisis of decision and the silent war in my own mind are of course unbeknownst to him. But I know now what I have to do. Maybe this is that next step.

“Yo, bro,” I say to him. “We gotta start grinding early on the rent. I gotta go on a trip soon.”