The problem with cereal is the milk situation. You can have the best cereal in the world — and Darnell had Honey Nut Cheerios, which was not the best but was solidly respectable — and it means nothing if you open the refrigerator and there's just a carton with two swallows left, the kind of two swallows that only a petty person would claim count as milk. He shook it. Poured it. Watched it turn his Cheerios beige and sad.
He put the bowl back in the cabinet. Set the carton in the recycling. Stood in the kitchen of his apartment on Miller Street with his arms crossed, looking at the Honey Nut Cheerios on the counter, which were not going anywhere without him.
The card table in the front room had his third project spread across it — the identity package for a made-up packaging company he'd been inventing for the past two weeks for Design III. He'd put in three hours already tonight, which was why he was hungry, which was why cereal felt reasonable, which was why this milk situation felt personal. His printouts were taped to the walls: logotype variations, color studies, a grid he was actually proud of. His instructor, Professor Mbeki, had said the grid showed real discipline and then paused, like the word surprised her. Darnell had held onto that pause. He thought about it sometimes at the Kinko's counter, between the guy who needed forty copies stapled and the woman who needed a poster blown up to a size that seemed optimistic. Real discipline. He was building toward something. He wasn't totally sure what, but the building was happening, and the printouts on the wall were evidence of it, and that counted — the apartment looked like someone was trying to make something, which was probably because someone was.
The fridge kicked on — its rattle, the one that said I'm working on it — and Darnell went to get his shoes.
His mother called while he was lacing them up. He tucked the phone between his ear and shoulder, which she hated.
"You're doing that thing," Patricia said.
"I'm tying my shoes."
"You're holding the phone with your neck. I can hear it in your voice."
He switched hands. "I'm going to Ajay's."
"What for?"
"Milk."
A pause — the pause she made when a nutritional argument was not worth having, which was most of the time but not all of it. "You need to eat actual food, Darnell."
"Cereal is actual food. It has vitamins."
"Vitamins they spray on after."
"That's still vitamins."
He could hear her shift the phone, could picture her at her kitchen table with the mail sorted into the piles she always made: bills, junk, things to deal with. She worked billing at St. Agatha's, and she came home with the day still in her shoulders, but she always sorted the mail. He didn't know when she'd started doing that. It was just something she did.
"Saturday still on?" he asked.
"Why wouldn't it be?"
"I'm just checking. Robbie said something about the gym floor—"
"Gym floor's fine. I called Coach Terrell myself. You're good."
He'd been coaching the under-12s at the Parkwood Community Center for two years, Saturdays at nine, which meant he had to be there by eight-thirty because Coach Terrell ran things at eight-thirty or not at all. Twelve kids who'd rather argue than dribble, which was honestly fine with Darnell because the argument was usually more interesting. Patricia came to watch sometimes, sitting in the bleachers with her coffee, not saying anything, just watching.
"Alright," he said. "I'll text you when I'm back."
"Darnell."
"I know, I know—"
"Be careful." She said it the way she always said it, which was the way she'd been saying it since he was twelve years old: not panicked, not dramatic, just steady, like a thing she needed to confirm was still true. He remembered being in seventh grade and thinking the phrase was embarrassing, something other people's mothers said. He'd stopped thinking that somewhere around sixteen.
"I will," he said.
"Love you."
"Love you too."
He pocketed the phone and headed downstairs, past the barbershop, which was closed now but still had its light on in the back where Mr. Earl did his bookkeeping. The clipper smell hung in the stairwell — cedar, oil, something chemical and familiar. He'd been smelling it his whole life. When he was eight his mother had brought him downstairs to meet Mr. Earl because she'd wanted him to understand they weren't just living above a business, they were living above a person who'd built something, and she thought that was worth understanding.
Parkwood at dusk ran without hurry. The light was going orange over the row houses on the west side of Miller, the kind of light that made everything look like it was being remembered even as it was happening. Mr. Henderson was out in front of his house watering his garden — the man watered that garden every evening regardless of whether it needed it, and his petunias were an argument against moderation — and he raised two fingers at Darnell without looking up from the hose, and Darnell raised two back.
A pair of kids on bikes came through the crosswalk on Delancey going too fast, as kids on bikes always did, as he had always done on bikes, as bikes seemed designed to produce. A car at the light had something playing — not loud enough to make out, just bass and the shape of a melody. Someone on a porch two houses down was on a phone call, gesturing at someone who wasn't there. Ordinary Tuesday evening, Miller Street corridor, Parkwood, the city that didn't notice itself.
The cameras were on the utility poles every block and a half, city-issue, blue-bodied, angled slightly down. He passed the first one at the corner of Miller and Delancey without looking up. He passed the second at Delancey and Fourth the same way. They'd been there four years now — deployed when the city applied for the federal Neighborhood Safety Infrastructure grant, which Darnell had learned about because his mother had gone to the community meeting. She'd come home with a pamphlet and a headache. They're going to tell us it's about safety, she'd said, and that's going to be true in a way that also isn't true. He'd been eighteen, not sure what to do with that. Now he was twenty-two and he didn't look at the cameras because that was just how his neighborhood worked, the way the buses worked and the way the street lights worked: things that ran, things you moved around, things that were there. Three blocks to Ajay's, familiar as walking to school. He turned left on Fourth.
The bell over Ajay's door was a single brass note, and it had been the same note since Darnell was old enough to remember coming in here with his mother, and it was the note now when he pushed through at 9:47 on a Tuesday evening. The fluorescent lights made everything a little more itself — the lottery ticket display at the counter more yellow, the candy bars more vivid, the faded linoleum more definitively faded. He knew every aisle. He'd been coming here for fifteen years.
"Hey D." Ajay Patel looked up from behind the register, where he was doing something with a stack of receipts. He was thirty-four, though he'd looked thirty-four for as long as Darnell could remember, which probably said something about thirty-four. His grandfather had opened this store in 1987, his father had run it through the nineties, and Ajay had taken over at twenty-five and still seemed slightly surprised about it. "What you need tonight?"
"Milk." Darnell was already heading for the back. "Half gallon."
"Two-percent's on the second shelf. We got whole if you want."
"Two-percent's fine."
He walked down aisle two — cleaning supplies, paper goods, a section of random hardware items that had appeared one summer and never left — and pushed through the clear plastic strips into the back corner where the coolers ran along the wall. The cold came off the dairy case in a blast. He found the two-percent on the second shelf, pulled a half gallon, read the date out of habit. Three more days. Fine.
On the way back he picked up a bag of hot chips from the rack near the register. The move was automatic, the same way it was always automatic, the chips existing at the precise altitude and position where his hand went without being asked.
Ajay rang him up without ceremony. The register was the same cash register that had been there for twelve years. "$4.11," Ajay said, and Darnell tapped his card, and the machine beeped.
"You catch the game last night?" Darnell asked.
"Some of it. You see that third quarter?"
"Wild," Darnell said, which was his contribution.
"Wild," Ajay agreed.
The receipt printed and curled off the end of the machine. Darnell didn't take it. Ajay didn't push it. He tucked the half gallon under his arm and the chips in his jacket pocket and went back through the door — the brass note again — and out into the warm Tuesday evening.
The cameras watched him go. He didn't watch them back.
Three blocks home felt shorter than three blocks to Ajay's, because home always worked that way. Mr. Henderson's garden was watered, its porch light now on in the dark. The kids on bikes were somewhere else. The car with the music was gone. The porch phone-caller was still at it, different gesture, same urgency. Darnell ate three chips on the walk home because he was hungry and the chips were already in his pocket, which was a kind of planning.
He went up past the barbershop, past the cedar-and-oil smell, and into his apartment. The card table with his project was where he'd left it. The fridge rattled its greeting when he opened it and put the milk on the second shelf.
He made the cereal. Honey Nut Cheerios with two-percent milk, in the bowl he always used, standing at the counter because he hadn't turned on the overhead light and the lamp by the couch was enough. The barbershop radio played something with horns through the floor — Mr. Earl's station, the one that went smooth jazz and oldies and sometimes things that were neither but Mr. Earl played anyway. It came up faint, the way music does through floors, which is almost better than music through speakers because you can only hear the best parts. He ate his cereal while the streetlight came through the curtains in a parallelogram on the kitchen floor.
The radio below shifted from something with horns to something without, and Darnell stood there in the half-dark, and the apartment was quiet in the way apartments get quiet when it's late enough that the street has mostly gone home. He could hear a bus on Miller distantly, the hydraulic exhale of the doors. A door somewhere on the floor below. His own chewing, which he was aware of in the way you are only when things are quiet.
His design printouts were in the front room where he'd left them. He needed to finish the logotype variations before Thursday. His quilt was on the bed — his mother's quilt, the one she'd sent with him when he moved in here at twenty, blue and green squares from shirts he recognized and some he didn't, which was the kind of thing she did without ceremony, just here you go, it'll keep you warm. He was going to call her back about Saturday. He was also supposed to call his cousin Dre about something — he couldn't remember what, something about a car. The Cheerios were good. The milk was cold the way milk should be cold.
He washed the bowl, brushed his teeth, and went to bed.
Nothing happened. This was, as far as he knew, a Tuesday.