Bad Karma

ten

Leilani Elrod

Episode 2. The Lucky Compass

"And then we were all outside, like this." JJ got up against the wall, "And all we hear is just, 'bam! bam! bam!' Knocking paint off the wall, G! From the inside! All right? And I'm just looking at them, like- Wait, first off, look at this shit!" JJ bent over and began ruffling his hair, paint falling out.

"That's dandruff, disgusting." Kie grimaced.

"Nah, look." JJ walked over to me and began shaking my hair around, paint falling from my head to prove his point. "Look at all that. All right? That's paint. At that point, I was just, like... I'm waiting for death."

Hearing JJ's perspective of things was always a bit jarring. In the moment, he was always putting himself over me and putting on a brave face. It never really occurred to me that he was scared out of his mind too, keeping calm for the sake of myself. JJ was the best possible friend that I could ever ask for.

"Oh, okay, so you saw the guys that shot at us, right?" Pope clarified.

"Yeah."

"I couldn't even bring Miss Lana her flowers!" The group just looked at me and I sunk back in my seat. I still wasn't really over the flower thing.

"Did you get a good description of them? What did they look like?"

"Yeah. Anything."

"Anything we can bring to, like, a police report, maybe?"

"Uh.." JJ thought for a moment, "Burly."

"Burly?"

"Yeah. You know, like-"

"That's not very helpful."

"Okay, well, no, like the type of guy at my dad's garage. I mean, you guys know he made cargo hides for drug smugglers."

We did, sadly, know that. We knew all about JJ's father, or, really, lack thereof.

"Yeah, we- yes. No, we know."

"I can tell you with full confidence, guys, these boys, these killers..." JJ leaned on the wall again, pulling weed-device thingy out from his pocket and poking it into his mouth, then blowing out the smoke or whatever, "... they're square groupers."

"They're square groupers, like narco square groupers? Like Pablo Escobar square groupers?"

JJ puffed out another cloud of smoke, using his hand to waft it away before it hit my face, "Yeah, man."

"You guys, not everything is a kingpin movie." Kie reminded them, bringing them back to reality.

"Okay, so what does this square grouper look like specifically? If you wanna, like-"

"Okay, you weren't there, bro!"

"Well, apparently, you don't know what to look for!"

"Dude! I wasn't taking little mental Polaroids the entire time, man! I was under duress!"

"Lei, did you do anything other than pick flowers?"

I looked over at Pope guiltily. I'm sorry that I wanted to do something nice for Miss Lana after losing her husband.

JJ sat down next to me, "I can tell you by the way Miss Lana was screaming.. that these guys are serious, serious hombres, man. It's a heavy vibe right now, okay? I'm not liking it very much."

I put my arm around JJ and my other arm around his torso. I felt guilty for not looking out for him more. I need to start putting my issues aside and doing my best to keep him calm, too, because I've never seen JJ Maybank this stressed out.