#Byron sidetalk guy pro
Angie danced through them like a pro she didn’t have a dad mowing her yard either. The yard was a minefield of dog turds and spiky weeds. Angie, go find out-maybe Byron’s in there already? Then I grabbed the chunky arm of some girl who talked to the sister enough to count as a friend and shoved her through the fence. For a minute we just stared at the house like it might float away. We wanted to see the twenty change hands. We wanted to bolt, to stand outside of Ricky’s house and wait for Byron to stomp by, fingers rattling the chain-link fence as he passed. That day, neither showed up for school, and by the end of sixth period, it was all we could do to stay in our seats. Ricky, who was only in sixth grade, was enough like her school-wise but worse because he had glasses and baby fat and was always doing weird shit like mumbling and blinking hard and smacking himself in the head when he got lost on his way to class, which is why we knew his name-to mess with him in the hallways-but not hers. She was a ninth grader like us, but she talked about going to college, about going out-of-state (no one asked her about it-she just said this stuff, like in the lunch line or if you got stuck working with her in groups). She knew the names of teachers she didn’t even have. That girl was a weird ghost who, out of the four thousand people they crammed into North Miami Beach Junior High back then, was the only one who hadn’t missed a day of school since kindergarten. We said this stuff and waited around our lockers for Ricky or his sister. The girls debated: is it BY-ron or by-RON? Who cares, we answered. They were like, Who the fuck is Byron? And other people would go, I don’t know, don’t fucking ask me. Someone-not me-must have seem him with the flyer, must have heard that he called this Byron, because by the next morning, all forty of us in first period were talking about the fight. It was weird to see Ricky outside of school without his big sister three steps ahead of him, and I was taking a break from my boys’ usual drama, so those two things put together are probably why I backed off and just let him go. Ricky tucked that promise into his school binder and tried to sneak past me outside, where I stood by the broken baby merry-go-round (someone-not me-had jammed the coin slot). That week there was the promise of Byron-Byron who would beat the crap out of you for twenty bucks. Usually at Sedano’s there’s only flyers for lost pets, choreographers offering up their services for the next Miami-area quinceañera, people renting apartments near the beach who were in over their heads and now needed roommates, crazy homeless people looking for things like chess partners, and the store’s weekly specials (ground pork by the pound, about-to-spoil mangos, bread). Ricky thought no one was looking when he pulled one of those flyers-the whole thing, not just the little tabs Byron (or someone) had made at the bottom with only phone numbers hanging off-down from the corkboard by the entrance of Sedano’s grocery store.
Still though, no one knew any Byron in this neighborhood, and way after, when I went around asking again, people acted like they’d never even seen the flyers in the first place.
No one knew who put them up, but I guessed it was this Byron guy. The first one we noticed was up high on the half-dead palm tree in front of that kid Ricky’s house-this was a few years back, before the city widened the streets and got rid of the palm trees altogether-and after that, for at least the next three days, we saw those flyers everywhere, on every pole and tree for blocks, all the way to the strip mall and back.
That’s pretty much what the flyer said, and the flyer was all over the neighborhood. For twenty dollars, this dude named Byron promised to beat the crap out of you.
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