Tainted (Urban)

Chapter 1: Back In Town

"What would it take for you to kill somebody?" I had asked my best friend Keith that years ago. We were eighteen back then - naive to the world and still blooming.

I remember the exact look he had given me when I posed the question. His face wrinkled, his lips sunk into his mouth, and his eyebrows drew in.

It wasn't hard to tell that this was a question he had never given any thought to. I mean, why would he have?

We had grown up in the suburbs where the only violence we had really been exposed to were the occasional brawls in the high school lunch room. Attending a black public school, I'd be a liar to say that they were a rarity.

We had never been in any of the fights, but we were eager to watch them. There were only a couple of occasions where Keith had been the target of some ill intent.

Damn. Actually, now that I think about it, this was the case pretty often.

There was the time in 8th grade when he almost got jumped in his apartment complex, and then a few years later when a scuffle almost broke out between him and a couple of younger guys.

Keith was a straight-shooter - blunt, relatively honest, and went right for the jugular. He held nothing back. That might've pissed off a few people back in those days.

Or it could have been his demeanor. Standing a bit over six feet, skin that shared the complexion with an ebony oak - his lanky arms like branches -, and a posture that exuded nothing but confidence; the guy was basically the definition of "cool".

Though I gotta admit, he did tend to look mysterious. A dark hoodie usually covered his small head and Beats by Dre always adorned his ears.

But as his best friend, I knew that there was nothing actually sketchy about him. He was the complete opposite in fact.

He was the most honest and sincere guy that I knew. But now we were twenty-two and things were different. We were different.

"Allen." Keith's voice entered my ears, bringing me back down to earth. I had sunken deeper into the corduroy cushions of the sofa than I remembered.

It took a second, but eventually I clawed my way out using the armrests only to hear him speak again.

"Hand me the controller, will ya?"

I careened my neck and watched his lanky figure maneuver around in the compact kitchen, sliding from one drawer to the next. I couldn't really tell what he was making.

I grabbed the other game controller and made my way to the cook's den.

"Hand you the controller how? You got a bag of fruit snacks in one hand and a bowl of-what is that in the other? Ramen noodles? Man, what the hell are you making anyway?" I had snuck up on him, but the man didn't flinch.

Instead, he moved the bag of fruit snacks towards his mouth and clenched it tight with his teeth, gesturing me to place the controller in his newly freed hand. I obliged and we moved towards the living room.

"You ready to get popped in 2K?" He asked through snack-clenched teeth while drooping down to the sofa, making sure his noodles didn't fly out of the bowl. I only chuckled at the trash talk.

It reminded me of all the other times we had gone through this routine, back before either of us could grow a lick of facial hair.

We dove into the game, our attention solely on the virtual people running around on the screen, but there was something deeper there.

We hadn't seen each other in years, yet in this moment, it felt as if we were kids again.

We played for hours at a time, forgetting everything else as our interest was slave to the video game. I won only once, while Keith won...actually, I lost count.