Derek clicked the side button on his phone to shut off the video feed. A thin white cordless headphone still hung from one ear. What he’d been listening to wasn’t music. It was his favorite musician talking on a web show he knew very little about. He knew what it was. Everyone knew who Alex Jones was. He pushed that story about the school shooting being fake and they got him for it. Derek didn’t think the shooting was fake–he knew a half dozen kids who carried to school. He just didn’t care about it. A smirk flitted across his lips as he remembered the meme, “Niggas get shot every day, B.”
Derek shoved his hands in his pockets and started the short walk to school. He lived less than a mile away, but his city wasn’t shaped right. It coiled like a snake. You couldn’t just find a main road in this part of town. As he walked he felt the weight of his mother’s pistol shift in his waist band. He used his left hand to put it back in place. He wished he had one of those under the shirt holsters like he saw in videos. It would be so much easier to carry the piece around that way. Of course he’d have to move it back to his waistband to flash it, but that was fine. He wouldn’t be moving around so much when he did that.
Some Thoughts:
- Part of what we need to do as writers is inhabit the minds of the characters involved, and realize that they won’t necessarily make the same choices we would or even the best choices for themselves. They will do things based on personal motivations and personal history. You as a writer might not share that history. Yet you are beholden to it.
- I don’t have any direction to this one either. I was thinking about Kanye on Alex Jones and about how much publicity that moment is getting and how it trickles down to the kids who worship his beats. I wanted to know what one of those kids was like.