On Wednesday I was driving down Canal Street, headed home, with my brand new haircut a little too "done" so I had the windows down so the wind would mess it up. Andrew called. He'd just seen a shooting in the park across the street from our house. A bunch of African American kids from Kennedy High School had skipped school to have a crawfish boil in City Park. Andrew had just taken the streetcar home from school, and he was eating a bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats, looking out the window at two guys who were mixing it up over a girl in a pink shirt. They started to fight and punch each other's faces, and kids from the crawfish boil came running over to watch. Like, 100 of them. And then some guy pulled out a gun and started shooting at one of the kids in the fight, and everyone scattered, went running everywhere. They dove through the hedges, hid behind cars and trees. Friends of the kid who'd been shot threw him in the back of the car and they sped off to the hospital. The shooter bolted, and when the police came none of the kids would identify who he was. When Andrew heard the first shot, he ran to the middle of the house, so he didn't see who had the gun, but he heard seven shots and saw the cars leave the scene.

When I drove up he was sitting on the front steps of our house with some of the neighbors. They were talking to the detective. Andrew described the cars by color, make, and spinners. He explained what the guys had on, huge white T-shirts and black denim pants pulled down low on their butts. The detective needed to establish a crime scene but he was having no luck finding shell casings, or blood. Andrew told him to look by the red and yellow Popeye's cup, that's where the fight had been.

Within minutes, the media arrived with their satellite trucks, and before Andrew went to soccer practice, he'd done two stand-ups, on Channel 6 and 8. One with Helena Moreno, the "hot" star reporter who manages to be the first one at every crime scene, which in New Orleans means she's first every night. He didn't want to show his face, so one interview blurred him, and the other one showed the back of his head. Everyone in the world, seems like, saw/heard him and so he enjoyed some notoriety. At school the next day, Father Hermes had him speak to the Juniors about what had happened.

I hope he's okay. He's not saying much, although he asked me to pick him up from school on Thursday and Friday. Blamed it on the possibility of rain.

The kid's in stable condition with a stomach wound, and the shooter's been arrested.