Local rapper and YouTuber Boosted Jay was caught in the crossfire of a deadly shootout in East Highland late Tuesday night. Multiple fatalities have been confirmed. The artist, whose real name has not been officially released, is alive but remains in a coma. Authorities are investigating. Two suspects are in custody.
* * *
Rue Bennett
I went into his room the next morning while my mom was at the hospital and Gia was at school.
I told myself I was just checking on things. Making sure nothing was left out that shouldn't be. I don't know if I believed that even when I thought it.
I started with his desk. Papers, receipts, nothing. The closet was just clothes and shoes and two boxes I already knew about. Under the bed was the usual. I was about to give up when I checked the nightstand.
The phone was in the back of the drawer under a hoodie. Small. Cheap. Not a real phone, a burner, the kind you buy with cash. The screen had a lock on it and just the number 33 sitting in the corner.
I sat on the edge of his bed and looked at it for a second.
I tried my mom's birthday. Wrong.
I tried Gia's. Wrong.
I tried mine. Wrong. It locked for two minutes. I sat there and waited.
Then I tried the day I came back from rehab.
It opened.
I sat there for a second just looking at the home screen. Then I opened the messages.
I read everything.
I don't know how long I sat there. Long enough that my legs went numb. Long enough that the light in the room changed. I read it all the way back to the beginning and then I sat with it and tried to figure out how I felt and the only thing I could come up with was: what the fuck, Jordan.
Not because I didn't know something was going on. I knew. I had known for a long time, in the way you know things you have decided not to look at directly. But knowing and reading are different. Knowing lets you keep the shape of it vague. Reading fills in every detail.
I took the phone.
I rode to the pier. I stood at the railing for a minute looking at the water. Then I threw it in.
I watched it disappear.
Then I rode to the hospital.
* * *
Savannah
She found out from a notification. Local news app, breaking alert, rapper in East Highland shooting. She clicked it and read it standing in her hallway and then she sat down on the floor right where she was.
She tried to call him twice. Both times nothing.
She thought about going to the hospital. She wanted to. She got as far as getting her keys before she stopped. She did not know his mom. She did not know what she would say or how she would explain who she was. She was not family. She was not a girlfriend. There was no word for what she was and the hospital was not a place where that ambiguity worked in your favor.
She put her keys down.
She sat on her couch and pulled up his Instagram and went through every post. The car videos. The freestyles. Stay Down. Girl of My Dreams. She watched all of it. She had seen most of it before but she watched it again because it was the only version of him she had access to right now.
When she got to the end she just sat there.
She did not know what to do with herself. So she did not do anything. She just stayed on the couch with his music playing and waited for news that she had no way of getting except from the same app that told everyone else.
* * *
Rue Bennett
I went back to the hospital late. After visiting hours. I told the nurse at the desk I had forgotten something earlier and she looked at me for a second and then let me through, which either meant she believed me or she recognized what kind of tired I was.
I sat in the chair next to his bed. The room was quiet. Just the machines and the light from the hallway under the door.
I looked at him for a while. His chest moving. His arm wrapped. His face completely still in a way his face never is when he is awake. Jordan is always somewhere. Always calculating something, reading a room, deciding something. In a coma he just looked like himself without all the motion.
I started crying at some point. I did not plan to. It just happened
I leaned forward and put my hand over his.
I said: you have to wake up. You don't get to do this. You don't get to be in a coma, Jordan. That was my thing. I did that. You came and sat next to me and waited and now it is your turn and I am sitting next to you and I need you to wake up.
He did not respond. The machines kept doing what they were doing.
I wiped my face and sat back.
I thought about the phone at the bottom of the pier. I thought about everything I read on it. I thought about Jordan sitting in this same hospital when I was the one in the bed, how he must have felt sitting in a room just like this one, not knowing.
Now I knew what that felt like.
I stayed until a nurse came and told me I really had to go. I squeezed his hand once before I stood up.
Wake up, I said again. Quiet. Just for him.
Then I walked out