All American Boys

On Sunday, Quinn, his mother, and Will head to the Galluzzos’s barbecue. Quinn and Jill quickly pair off, and they discuss the pressure he feels to win the basketball state championship. Quinn reveals that he saw Paul beat up “that kid” (107) on Friday, and Jill tells him the kid is Rashad, a friend of Quinn’s basketball teammates. Quinn immediately remembers Rashad as an “ROTC dude” (108), an unnerving parallel to Quinn’s own dad in his ROTC uniform, immortalized in family photos.

Paul calls Quinn over to the grill, where he’s flipping burgers, and Quinn is uncomfortable to see that Paul is icing his right fist, nursing his wounds from Friday night like it’s “NBD” (110). As the party continues, Quinn can’t stop envisioning the beating, even while “nobody else seemed to be wondering about why the Galluzzos felt the sudden need for a party” (113).

Quinn walks in on Jill and her mom fighting. Mrs. Galluzzo asks Jill to “respect” Paul, saying that he “has a hard job, and sometimes he has to make tough decisions” (115). Meanwhile, a promo for the evening’s news comes on the television and mentions both Paul and Rashad. No one knows how to react, but then Paul himself asserts that “everything’s going to be just fine. This just comes with the job” (117).Paul emphasizes that he needs his family to support him and adds, “You too, Quinn” (117).

Paul asks Guzzo and Quinn to shoot hoops with him, but Paul keeps blocking Quinn, “bumping” him “back and back” (119), until Quinn gets frustrated and walks away. Paul tells him to keep “[his] head in the game,” but Quinn responds that “this isn’t a game,” and he’s “done” (120). As Paul tells Quinn, “I’m just trying to help you” (120), Quinn, no longer sure what to think of the man he once saw as a role model, leaves the party alone.

On Monday, Quinn returns to school to find everyone talking about the news coverage of Paul beating Rashad, which Quinn won’t watch, explaining, “[…] there was no way in hell I was putting myself back there” (124). Jill asks Quinn to grab lunch, and they discuss the video, with Jill saying, “It just changes things for me” (130). She’s not sure her cousin Paul is the “good guy” people have always viewed him as (129). Quinn suddenly remembers Paul beating up another kid, Marc Blair, years ago, and Jill wonders if those are the only two times.

As he heads back to class, Quinn thinks about Marc, a boy a few years older than Quinn who lived right by Gooch Park. Marc is a bully who once pressed Quinn’s face into the park’s chain-link fence “so hard it left a crisscross hatch of red” across his skin (131). Quinn fantasized with “a kind of freaky hunger” (132) about Paul beating Marc up, and a few weeks later, when Quinn told Paul what happened, Paul did in fact “beat the hell out of” Marc, calling him a “fucking thug” (132). For the first time, Quinn realizes he himself is responsible for what happened to Marc, as talking to Paul was “no different than ordering a hit” (133).

Quinn’s teacher, Ms. Webber, orders the class to work silently, encouraging them to focus on exams rather than the student who’s in the hospital today. Another black student, EJ, points out that Rashad isn’t here to focus on schoolwork “because he’s, you know, beaten to hell” (135). Quinn, suddenly forced to think about racial issues he’s never considered before, wishes everyone would just “shut up about it” (136).

After school, Quinn heads to basketball practice, where the coach explains that “media shit’s gonna hound [them] every day” but how his players need to “ignore that shit” and work “as one team” (138). Quinn wonders if he can take Coach’s advice outside the court, too, trusting that whatever truly happened to Rashad, “the law would work it out” (140). However, as the chapter ends, he concludes that as much as they’d all like to see their team of black, white, Latino, and Vietnamese players as “color-blind and committed like evangelicals to the word ‘team’” (140), that simply isn’t possible. Rather, Quinn is realizing that racism is a real problem and is “beginning to think [that he] was a part of it” (140).

As the chapter opens, Rashad explains that he’s been interested in art since he was five or six, when, as part of an after-church tradition, his dad would read the paper and give Rashad the comics. Rashad was drawn to one comic that was just a single picture, called The Family Circle—he loved the images and muses, “Maybe I was fascinated by the fact that it seemed like white families, at least in comics, lived simple, easy lives” (143). In ninth grade, Rashad’s art teacher “turned [him] on” (141) to Harlem Renaissance painter Aaron Douglas, who painted silhouettes as if seen “through the thickest fog ever,” yet “you can still tell they’re black” (144). Rashad was inspired to create similar scenes, but he frames his in a circle “like The Family Circus” (144). Now, in the hospital, with his sketch pad and pencils, Rashad is using his singular style to “re-create the scene” (144) of his beating.

Clarissa, Rashad’s young nurse, walks in and says she “knew” Rashad was an artist—she “could just tell” (145). Once she leaves, Rashad wanders down to the gift shop, where he chats with the cashier, Shirley Fitzgerald, but can’t bring himself to tell her what happened to him. Instead, he says that he was in a car accident. In this shop, where no TV is replaying what happened to him, Rashad feels “the most comfortable” he has “in a while” (151). Mrs. Fitzgerald tells him to visit again, and he promises he will.

That afternoon, English, Shannon, and Carlos arrive to visit Rashad. While they’re taken aback by his injuries, the boys joke like their normal selves and tell Rashad that his crush, Tiffany, wants to come visit. The guys add that with the attention from the beating, Rashad is “finally popular” (156). Even as Carlos and Rashad trade zingers, their barter comes out “flat. Like The Family Circus” (157).

English reveals that the officer is Paul Galluzzo, Guzzo’s brother, and Rashad remembers Guzzo as “the ogre-looking dude on the team” (158). They all want to hear Rashad’s side of the story, and when he tells them, English’s face becomes “a fist, tight and angry” (159). Rashad realizes that for the first time, English’s cool exterior is crumbling.

As the boys leave, Carlos says, “I can do something. Somebody gotta do something” (160), even if English and Shannon refuse to do anything about Rashad’s situation for fear of upsetting their basketball coach. Rashad worries that Carlos will “put himself in some stupid situation where he got his ass beat too” (161). Feeling “hurt” (161) for both his friends and himself, Rashad again sees himself and Paul Galluzzo on TV, and as the chapter ends, he rips the TV cord from the wall because he “couldn’t take” the sight any longer (162).