Maybe Smith Street was a better bet after all.

Tomorrow eighth grade began.

Aeroman wanted to emerge before it was too late, but he needed crime to call him out.

Beneath his feet the pavement rumbled as the A or GG slowed at the underground platform, then a handful of lonely figures leaked from the station into the night. He stood beneath the lamppost across Schermerhorn, watching. One white woman glanced in his direction, eyes darting, surveying the empty street. She turned down Bond, then onto State Street.

Sweating, hunchbacked, Aeroman followed.

Maybe something would happen. He was magnetized by her fear, a thing he understood. Seeing it reflected in the woman was acutely thrilling. Here was precisely what Aeroman meant to combat, the hectic, accelerating heel steps in darkness, on a block where the canopy of limbs masked the streetlights. He reached down, not breaking stride, and palmed the ring up from his ankle, slipped it onto his left forefinger. The voices of hidden paper-bag drinkers drifted from the recessed stoops, idle jaded watchers who’d never help a woman in danger.

She was underdressed, rape-able, regretting she’d ever heard the word Brooklyn, let alone nibbled the bait of the reputed astonishing rents here, the hardwood floors.

Just one catch: the scene sorely lacked a villain. No one followed the girl apart from him.

He was chasing her down the block. It was his footsteps she fled.

It was a mugging like an egg on a roosterless farm, unfertilized, incomplete.

When she began actually running he stood still in the middle of State Street and let her go, made dumb with chagrin. Should he fly ahead, somersault over and intercept her, perhaps, to apologize? But he’d only scare the shit out of her worse than he already had.

Aeroman had met the enemy, and it was Aeroman.

Now he trudged to Smith Street.

He went unnoticed here in his humped shirt, his hands bunched at his waist, right covering left, the finger with the ring. Happy enough for the moment to be scaring no one, to be a part of the crowd. The summer night was alive, Puerto Ricans spilling from social clubs in groups of four at sidewalk domino games, younger men in Yankee shirts tuned to the game. The entrance to the Bergen subway station was clotted with Gowanus Houses kids, teenage boys in stocking caps, angry girls he might or might not recognize from school. School, ready to resume, ready to pin him in place. He felt urgently again the need to find a meaningful crime, something he could handle. He slunk past the crowd of Gowanus kids at the subway, certain there was less than nothing for him there.

He was hungry. Looking both ways, he fished in his other sock for the dollar tucked inside. It was soaked. He transferred the dollar to his pocket and rubbed it against the cloth at his thigh to dry it. At Bergen and Smith was a pizzeria, also thronged with older teenagers, a place he and Arthur Lomb had braved one afternoon on the way from school to Pacific, to Arthur’s stoop, in the early days of their friendship. It seemed possible now his friendship with Arthur Lomb had peaked in the first month of that summer, during the deplorable chess marathon, that he would never taste Arthur’s mom’s red juice or turkey sandwiches again. He couldn’t permit himself to be nostalgic. Arthur was a phony, and Mingus would know soon enough. He imagined Arthur saying, Yo, Mister Machine sucks, Jack Kirby can’t draw anymore, dang, but a number one’s a number one, yo, seal it in airtight plastic and put it on the shelf, that’s my policy, yo. He went into the pizzeria and ordered a slice, spread his moist dollar on the counter.

A hand clapped over the two quarters change as they appeared in place of the dollar. Dylan looked up. Robert Woolfolk scooped the coins into his pocket. The men at the pizza counter were uninterested: the event occurred at the teenage stratum, which they filtered at a preconscious level. Dylan or Aeroman was a little uninterested himself. He kinked the slice of pizza at the crust, folding it so it supported the floppy weight of its own tip, fluffed the sheet of translucent paper underneath, then shook garlic salt onto the pizza’s surface, tan grains which saturated instantly in pooled oil. With the slice he stepped into the populated street. Robert Woolfolk followed. Robert had a companion along, a small version of himself, dark and rangy, whom Dylan had never seen before.

“Don’t bite that, man,” said Robert.

“Why not?”

“Take it off him,” Robert told the other boy, who was smaller than Dylan.

“What you talkin’ about?” said the younger boy, disbelieving the obvious.

“Take his slice.”

Among yokings, this was a familiar format to Dylan: the master instructing apprentice, commanding Take it off him or Check his pockets, man. Call it the Batman-and-Robin.

Never for a slice, though. That was fairly original.

“C’mon, man,” implored the protégé, not looking at Dylan.

“Take it, man. Do it.”

Dylan bit the pizza’s tip. Chewing open-mouthed to ventilate molten cheese, he sought out the younger kid’s eyes. He felt a peculiar cheer at the animal bewilderment he inspired there. Yes, I am your first whiteboy. Gaze on me. You’ll know many before you’re through. Some you’ll be large enough to handle, some you’ll even terrify.

He took a second bite.

“Don’t eat it, I told you,” said Robert, his voice rising. “Take the slice,” he directed again.

“Awww, he’s bitin’ on it,” said Robert’s trainee, misery in his voice.

Robert pointed at the pizza. “Quit now, man, or I’ll fuck you up!”

Dylan swallowed, sank his teeth in again. Robert Woolfolk was hamstrung by his intractable sidekick-if he reached for the pizza himself it was an admission of failure. The slice was dwindling anyway, so the principle was all that remained, if there’d been anything apart from principle in the first place. Dylan understood he functioned as a passing occasion here, object in an obscure ritual which had for once nothing to do with Dylan himself. The young black kid would take the brunt tonight, be bullied through a series of low-end quasi-criminal stunts.

The kid knew it too. He sulked in the background as Dylan’s bites made the slice irretrievable. Robert Woolfolk turned to Dylan now, but was jangled, distracted, with only a minute more to spare, seemingly a bit out of his skin.

Last day before school could get to practically anyone.

“I’m still gonna kill you one day,” Robert Woolfolk said.

Dylan chewed, facing Robert with a dope-eyed, cowlike aspect.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know.”

Dylan shrugged, only certain Robert wasn’t killing him tonight.

“Fuck’s the matter with yo back, man?”

“Nothing,” said Dylan between bites.

Robert looked harder. “Lemme see that ring for a minute.”

“It’s a present,” said Dylan. “From my mother.”

“Fuck your mother, motherfucker.” Now Robert Woolfolk danced as though attacked by invisible insects. The ring, anyway, was clearly off-limits, tainted with Rachel-magic. Robert twitched like a bot moving in circles, his circuits blown.

“Think Gus be gonna proteck you forever?”

No, Aeroman be gonna proteck me forever, thought Dylan, swallowing unchewed chunks of pizza defiantly.

But Aeroman hadn’t flown tonight, there was no pretending.

Dylan had now gnawed all the way to the ragged crust, which he held at his mouth like a jack-o’-lantern smile.

Robert herky-jerked his arm out and slapped the crust from Dylan’s hand. Like hilltop observers musing on a distant nova they watched it tumble to the gutter, officially ruined. Robert’s worst excess of tension was spent in the act. He could return to his protégé who stood abjectly to one side.

Robert Woolfolk pointed a finger at Dylan as they parted, but his voice was lost, his menace dispelled by the conundrum of this encounter.