The Usual Suspects

by Maurice Broaddus

  “Now that we’re all in a good place, you want to tell me what’s up?” Moms scoots us down the couch to make room for her. Me and Nehemiah squish into each other, leaving a couch cushion between us and her as if the space of a cushion was enough to save us if she blew up again.

  “The school call you?” I ask.

  “Thanks for reminding me to check my voice mail.”

  Dang it. I kick myself for tipping my hand. Never give up information they don’t already have. That is a straight-up rookie mistake. “Then what?”

  “What do you think all them kids were buzzing about? Was quick to run their mouths about what the principal had to say. Then that little so-and-so got in my face.”

  “No one knows what’s up. All they know is that someone brought a gun too close to the school.”

  “I’ll be talking to Mrs. Fitzgerald soon, don’t you worry.” Her already knowing also explains why Moms was so on edge and emotional. She doesn’t like the idea of guns anywhere near us. She studies me first, then Nehemiah, then returns to me. I open my mouth to fend off the inevitable accusation when she cuts me off. “Well, I know it wasn’t either of you two. Thelonius, you know I’d bust your butt two times if you even thought about bringing a gun up in here. And, Nehemiah . . . Lord knows you’d be waving it around showing it to everybody before you even made it in the door.”

  “That’s what I’m saying!” Nehemiah yells.

  “They rounded us all up anyway,” I say.

  “Guilty before proven innocent. You’re caught in a bad place, between it being a prejudging world and you all being so proud to wear the reputation you have spent so much time and energy earning.”

  “It don’t feel fair,” I say.

  “It isn’t, but let’s not act too innocent. Sometimes you have to look at the common denominator. You need to have a long talk with yourself. ‘Self?’” Moms shifts her body to the side as if she’s talking to an imaginary friend. “And then yourself says, ‘Hmm?’ So you tell yourself ‘We’ve made some bad choices. If we continue to make bad choices, well, I don’t know where we’ll end up.’”

  “You’re silly.” I relax a little, letting go of the arguments and stories my brain is furiously crafting to deflect her.

  “While I have any say, you’re going to be raised right and have all the opportunities to choose and do well. Have I mentioned that I don’t care if I have to scrap with every raggedy person on the block? Or in your school? You two will always know that you had someone fighting for you. So no excuses.”

  She can be embarrassing sometimes. She loves to talk almost as much as Mr. Blackmon. But I think part of me needed to hear that me and her were cool. My little antics aside, the thought of disappointing her with anything for real bothered me.

  “Thanks, Moms,” I say.

  “Yeah, thanks, Moms,” Nehemiah echoes with a smile on his face. He props his feet up on the coffee table.

  “Boy, get those crusty shoes off my furniture and act like you’ve been raised with some sense.” Moms swats his feet. “What are you going to do now? We can’t have this cloud over my babies’ heads.”

  I bend forward on the couch. “If I had to guess, we need to figure out what really happened. Try to clear our names before the school assembly. Because you know how they do with us.”

  “Need me to come up there and talk to your principal?” she asks. “It’s probably only a matter of time before she wants to see me.”

  “No!” I say with a little too much force. I imagine Mrs. Fitzgerald and Moms both taking off their earrings, knocking over desks, and papers flying all over the room. “Not yet. I want to try to find out a few things first.”

  It was almost time for her to pick up Ahrion from the Applied Behavior Center, so Moms grabs her purse preparing to leave us to our games. “That’s the son I’ve raised. Handle your business.”

  When life weighs on you, even the blankets become too heavy to move.

  My alarm goes off ten minutes before Moms comes through to wake me up. Every morning, I hit the snooze bar before sparing a glance at the wrought-iron-framed picture of me and my dad. He left nine years ago. Moms gave the photo to me one year for Christmas. I can’t remember the occasion that was worth us trying to preserve the memory. A candid shot of me smiling too hard and my dad with a soft frown (because he doesn’t take pictures well, Moms says). The image has no memory in my heart, but it seems important to Moms for me to have it.

  Maybe I need that fresh pinprick of pain to start my day. I plunge my head under the pillow to shield me from the inevitable. Moms flips on the light and bellows in her full singsong voice.

  “Time to wakey, wakey, wakey!” She emphasizes each syllable of the last “wakey.” She’s been singing my wake-up call since the first day of kindergarten. It’s old, annoying, and comforting all at the same time. “Do me a favor and make sure your sister is ready. It’s almost time for breakfast.”

  I slip into my school uniform while still half asleep. I lay my clothes out every night before I go to bed so that I don’t have to think first thing in the morning. Everything in my room is in its proper place—my trading cards in binders on my bookshelf, my Peyton Manning, Andrew Luck, and Russell Westbrook posters framed and on the wall with a carefully maintained layer of dust on the shelves and posters—so that I can tell if someone (either Moms when she’s in trust-but-verify mode or, more likely, Ahrion) has been snooping in my room. (It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you.)

  Ahrion’s room next door is a complete disaster area. Toys scattered all over the floor. Whenever she wants a particular toy, she tosses every other one out of her way until she finds it. Clothes thrown around the room in the same way. If you pay attention, you can see bits of order in the chaos. Her Matchbox cars organized by type and color. Her crayons and art pencils lined up by color, all sharpened to the same length. Her curtains flutter. A mismatched pair of shoes poke out from underneath them.

  “I wonder where Ahrion is?” I sing out while circling the room.

  “Here I am!” She flings open the curtains. Though eight years old, she likes her hair cut short, which makes her head appear too big for her body. She’s darker than me, like Moms. Her eyes dominate her face. When she looks at you, you hold her full interest. Nothing distracts her from paying attention to just you. It’s a little intense, but kind of cool, too.

  “You’re not very good at hide-’n’-seek,” I say.

  “You sounded worried. I didn’t want you to be.” She runs to me and wraps her thin arms around me. She radiates such joy it’s infectious.

  “I will always worry about you. It’s okay.”

  Some people treat her like she’s broken. Moms explained what she has, something about being on the autism spectrum. I hear so many labels placed on me and my friends, I tune them out. All I know is that she’s my sister. So she gets a little hyper sometimes. She doesn’t always understand people. On the flip side, she doesn’t grasp the idea of strangers. As far as she’s concerned, everyone just needs a hug. If she’s broken, I wish more people were broken like her.

  I stand next to her loft bed. Before I can protest, rather than use her ladder, she scrambles up me. Two Matchbox cars rev to life—as she does a pitch-perfect imitation—and immediately crash into each other.

  “Cars?” She invites me to play.

  “No, Ahrion. We can’t. Breakfast is almost ready.”

  She crosses her arms and lowers her head, but she can’t maintain being pouty for more than a few seconds. “Only if you carry me.”

  “Fine.” Before the word is fully out of my mouth, she climbs on my shoulders and I stagger down to the kitchen, weaving back and forth as I walk, the way she likes it. When we arrive in the kitchen, I freeze in the doorway. The sight horrifies me.

  The electronic whine and drum snares burble along as a voice chimes, “‘It’s time for the percolator.’” Sliding along the linoleum, Moms lip-synchs the words into a spatula.

  “No, n
o, no.” I lower Ahrion to the ground and cover her eyes. No one should have to see this. My sister can’t stop giggling.

  “It’s too late, son.” Moms drops to the floor, one arm tucked behind her head, flapping, the spatula holding arm extended like she’s a coffeepot about to take off.

  “Oh. My. God. Mom, stop it!”

  “What? Some people do yoga . . .” She bounces in place, still low. If she jumps up and says “drop it like it’s hot,” my day is done and I’m going back to bed. Thing is, this wasn’t the worst I’d seen. If I’d heard Boyz II Men or Jodeci playing, I wouldn’t have even dared enter the kitchen. I can’t deal with her doing full body rolls first thing in the morning. I shudder at the memory.

  Moms has plates of food waiting on us. She enjoys the ritual of fixing breakfast. I scarf down the eggs (two eggs, always scrambled), toast (two pieces, always buttered, one with strawberry jam), and bacon (always overcooked because Moms is paranoid about giving her babies undercooked pork). She turns off the music and flips over to the Today show. “Homework check.”

  I open my planner for her to sign off on my homework.

  “My turn,” Ahrion says, so I hand her my binder. She draws a smiley face with extra bushy hair. “That’s you.”

  “Thanks.”

  Moms hands me a book. Langston Hughes: An Illustrated Edition. “You have a week.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Moms “assigns” me books to read every so often. It’s how I earn video game privileges. Her library is full of books like this. With all the posters and paintings of Malcolm X; the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.; Sojourner Truth; Harriet Tubman; and Marcus Garvey hanging around the house, sometimes it feels like I’m living in a black history museum.

  “All right, let’s go.” Moms grabs her keys and shoos us out the door. Moms doesn’t want to leave me waiting at the bus stop without her hypervigilant supervision; she thinks it’s better for me to get to school a half hour early. I want the independence of catching the bus. We split the difference: Moms drops me and Ahrion off at our respective schools on her way to work and I catch the bus home.

  As we drive to school, I can’t help but think that I really love Indianapolis. Sure, it’s the only place I’ve ever lived, but this city is just so . . . me. Not so big that it doesn’t still feel like a small town (we only have to drive ten minutes to find llamas, horses, and cows). Not so small that we escape big city problems. And the city operates like a gangster: it rolled up on all the towns surrounding it and straight took over. Take Persons, for example.

  I read that Persons was a small farm town tucked into the northwest side of the city. When farmers drove their animals to the Indianapolis stockyards, they stopped in Persons. A railroad depot in the heart of the area gave it the “Crossing” part of its name. That was one story of how this area of town earned its name. Another version was that there was an important family named Persons who helped found the area. I really don’t want to think that folks were so simple that just because people’s paths crossed there, people literally decided to call the place “Persons Crossing.” But that’s the thing about Indianapolis, stuff like that just happens.

  “You all right, baby?” Moms asks, interrupting my thoughts.

  “Yeah. You know, school stuff.”

  “Remember, you can’t count on others to protect your name. Only you can do that. You got this.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “You got this,” Ahrion echoes.

  “Thanks, Ahrion.”

  The Persons Crossing Public Academy building mirrors all the schools in the district. A massive redbrick building broken up by tan concrete lines, its long drive in front forces parents to travel the length of the building to drop their kids off. I’m pretty sure they designed the walls to be so tall in order to intimidate the students, though it gave the building that much more of a prison look.

  I close the car door behind me and take a couple steps toward school. I turn to wave bye to Ahrion, who enjoys calling my name until the car moves out of sight like I’m some gladiator heading into an arena. Rather than enter the school through the car drop-off door, I walk around to the side entrance. Key-card entry is required for all the entrances except during the morning arrival. Otherwise, people have to be buzzed in to report to the office. The way Persons Crossing is laid out, only one side has bushes. It has the added advantage of having little traffic over there since it isn’t by the main, playground, or parking lot entrances, so there aren’t any security cameras. But it does face Northwestway Park. If someone was going to stash a gun in the park, they’d need to be able to retrieve it with as little notice as possible. The bushes create a natural barricade to hide shenanigans. I made a mental note of that for future reference.

  Though the police are going to take any found gun seriously, it’s not like they are going to go full-on crime scene investigation over it. Moms had her car broken into once and called the police. When they came to take the report, she showed them the broken window and told them she didn’t disturb the crime scene in case they needed to dust for prints or run all kinds of tests we can’t pronounce (Moms really loves those shows). The cops were like “ma’am, we don’t do all that unless there’s a body involved.”

  I’m not sure what I even hope to find. Maybe start here and trace my way back to the park along a likely route, see if I turn up anything. Perhaps scrounge around to see if anything is out of place. Lots of footprints have tromped back here. The early-morning light glints from something half buried in the dirt. A twisted bit of metal. I brush it off.

  “What do you have there?” Marcel’s voice scrapes my ears like manicured fingernails clawing my brain.

  “Nothing. Just tying my shoe.” I palm the twisted piece of metal, pocketing it when I stand up. On my tiptoes I can barely see over the row of hedges.

  “Behind the bushes?” She saunters closer, just enough to not be overheard but still far enough away to not be associated with me.

  “I’m a man who likes privacy.”

  “You a man now, huh?” She smirks. “You look like you’re trying to pee back there.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Thought I’d inspect the bushes, see if I can find some new friends.”

  “You all about making friends, huh?”

  She doesn’t fool me. She wants to throw me off my game. Either she wants to know what I know or she had the same idea I had about seeing what evidence was left. Her eyes don’t flinch, and she studies me like a hawk about to swoop in. “Unlike you. I hear RaShawn’s sister can get heated quick.”

  “Nothing but a thing.” I shrug my shoulders.

  “You have a good day. Be careful, though. I hear there might be some unsavory characters looking to bring in weapons.”

  Protected behind a glass case, trophies and awards and faded pictures of the school from back in the day hang next to a yellowed newspaper article detailing the opening of the school. I read it for the millionth time. Persons Crossings Academy has been around in one way or another since the early 1900s. From 1913 to 1938, Persons Crossings Elementary School began as a rural school that held grades one through six. I can’t imagine what classes were like back then. A bunch of corn-fed farmer boys all in one room, smelling of sweat and cow manure, sitting around trying to stay awake after getting up at 4:00 a.m. to do their chores. They probably stared out a window daydreaming like I did when I was on the computer, except they didn’t have the internet.

  They also didn’t need school. Their lives had already been scripted for them. They were going to be farmers like their daddies before them and their sons after them. They had little say in what they were going to be or what they were going to do. Their world decided that for them and expected certain things of them. Maybe that’s why the school closed down when it did.

  The article goes on to describe how the school switched to being a rooming house. Then a lawn mower repair shop. Then a grocery store. Then an auction house. Soon after, it was like p
eople discovered the northwest side of town and the area suddenly boomed again and the district decided to build a new building. So in 2003, with a forgotten history and a name based on a forgotten area of town and a forgotten railroad, Persons Crossing Public Academy opened, this time housing kindergarten through eighth-grade students.

  I lean against the glass cabinet and wait for the inevitable passing teacher to tell me to stand up straight and tuck in my shirt. Like I says, students and teachers all have their roles to play. Wrapping my hand around the bent metal in my pocket, like I’m afraid I’ll lose it, I cut to the head of the parade of kids lined up outside the cafeteria waiting for the eight o’clock bell to signal us to go to class.

  When the bell rings, the other kids will run down the hallway, in a hurry for no reason. Rushing is its own point, I guess, one last release of energy and chatter before they have to be quiet and sit in their seats for the next six hours. But there’s no rush for me. Only the slow walk down the long corridor few kids go down, to get to the room at the end of the hall that no kids want to enter.

  There’s no guilt or shame, though. It’s my class. I am where I belong.

  Going through the motions of being hungry, I grab a strawberry yogurt, a package of Teddy Grahams, and a container of apple juice from the cooler outside our classroom. Part of the free breakfast program—the district makes sure every kid has a balanced breakfast to start the day. No kid left behind or something like that.

  On the second floor are the seventh-grade lockers. I spin my lock and open mine. A mirror greets me and I check my hair. Beneath it is a cup containing pens and highlighters. On the top shelf, what few books I need—since they have me mostly on computers—are stacked in a neat pile. Three rows of hanging shelves organize my folders. Taking the bare minimum I need for class, one folder and tucking a pen behind my ear, I close my locker and lean against it. I just manage to fit the straw into my apple juice when Nehemiah storms down the hall with a mean mug on, like he’s mad at the air.