“I keep telling you, you have to pay attention, sweetheart,” her mother said now. “You have to look both ways and all ways. That even includes, despite what your dad says, down.”
The next day, Fatima looked down the whole time. Studied the ground with such concentration she didn’t notice the clouds forming above her head. The rain came almost at the exact spot where the crack was that had clipped her the day before. Came by the bucketful. Drenched her in seconds. And as the same bus crept by, the same kids smashed their faces to the glass. They laughed and pointed again. Predictable. The boy with the lisp splattered spit on the window, wiped it clean with his sleeve. The boy behind him sat with the notebook up to his face again. No jokes in his eyes.
And the singing lady was there. Came bopping down the street like it wasn’t raining. She was singing, but the rain was louder than her voice. This time she was wearing a tuxedo and a top hat and was carrying a closed umbrella.
She extended it to Fatima. “You play guitar?” she asked.
“Huh?” Fatima was confused. There was no guitar.
“Do. You. Play. The geetar?” she asked again, this time strumming the closed umbrella. And before Fatima could answer, the lady said, “Yeah, you do. You play it. I can always tell. Ha! Benni can always tell!” The lady—Benni—extended the umbrella again. Fatima took it this time, opened it. And Benni said, “Woo! Sounds amazing!” bobbing her head and snapping her fingers to nothing. “It’s your solo! Go, go! Put on a show for the people!” Benni stopped walking, waved, and cheered for Fatima, who played nothing. Just held the umbrella over her head and walked faster.
* * *
“Nothing changes, Fati. At least nothing major,” Fatima’s mother explained that evening over dinner. She worked as some kind of environmental scientist, so everything for her was like this. “If you see clouds, expect rain. If you see cracks, lift your feet. If you see houses, expect them to be the same houses every day, because houses don’t move. They don’t change.”
“Routine lessens risk,” her father chimed in, scarfing his food because he had a flight to catch.
Routine lessens risk. And Fatima was tired of the risky stuff. The tripping. The rain. She needed this walk home to be one she could predict so that she could get there safely. That night she thought about the boy with the notebook. The one on the bus sitting behind the spitty one. She thought about how he hid behind the spiral and lined paper. How it somehow made him feel safer. Less… out there. At least that’s what Fatima thought. So she decided to use a notebook to try to do the same. To write down things in her life so she could pay attention to how they stayed the same and know whenever they changed so that she could be ready for what that change might bring. Her mother did this all the time with her experiments. Always taught her to do this with her science projects over the years.
“In order for us to know how these plants grow in natural sunlight, as opposed to how they grow under the house lights, we have to write down every single constant and every single variable, then record all progress. Every leaf. Every inch. Every day,” she preached, just a year before all this.
So the next day, the moment the bell rang, Fatima’s data collection began. An ongoing list of things that almost never changed. The bell. The hallway. The locker. The lock. The door. The corner. The crossing guard. The houses. The signs.
And the singing lady, Benni, who since then has stayed the same in that she’s changed every. Single. Day.
(cont.) Today Benni’s dressed in a black wig. The hair is straight and falls just to her chin. She has on a sky-blue dress. And combat boots. Difference: She’s singing a song that goes “Runaway child, running wild, better go back hooooome, where you belong.”
Difference: She’s doing dance steps. One looks like she’s shoveling the ground. Like she’s digging.
I speak to her.
She speaks to me. Calls me “Fatima the Dreamer.” Says “Dreamer” like “dream-uh.”
I ask how she’s doing. She says fine. Difference: She tells me she saw a school bus fall from the sky.
She always says stuff like that.
She asks me if anything’s different today.
I tell her about Trista Smith and Britton Burns running out of class faster than usual. And how I have homework. I have to imagine myself as something else, for Ms. Broome’s class. Also, pointed to the roses missing from House No. 8. Thought Benni would pull one from behind her back or from under her wig, which is something Benni would do. She’d probably call it a microphone.
Benni nods. Difference: And started mumbling, “But how you gon’ change the world? How you gon’ change the world?”
Benni walks with me. Difference: Now screaming, “How you gon’ change the world? How you gon’ change the world? How you gon’ change the world?!”
I ignore Benni. I keep counting the houses. Difference: Benni won’t stop. This is not a song.
I keep counting the cracks. Difference: Benni is still screaming as the bus drives by. Screams, “There it is!” But I don’t look. I don’t want to see if anyone is laughing at Benni. At me.
I keep counting the signs. Difference: I can barely hear myself think. Even though the signs have been there every day.
I stop at House No. 15. One block from my house. Usually where Benni leaves me. Difference: Benni runs in front of me. Leans against the stop sign and asks, “Fatima, I’m serious. How you gon’ change the world?”
I look both ways. Difference: Then I think about Ms. Broome’s assignment. What could I be? What do I wish I could become to change the world? I think about telling Benni I might want to be wet cement to fill the cracks in the sidewalk. Not to hide. But to stop someone else from tripping. Or maybe I’d be an umbrella to keep rain from someone’s head. Keep someone dry in a storm. But I don’t say none of that to Benni, because I don’t think either of those things would change the world. So I tell her I don’t know.
I don’t know. I don’t know how to change the world.
Then ask her if she’d maybe let me borrow one of her instruments to play.
CALL OF DUTY
BRYSON WILLS didn’t go to school today. His mother let him stay home, not because of all the pain in his face—the black eye, the busted lip, the swollen jaw, the scrapes—but because she figured it was a good idea to let things cool off. To put some space between him and what happened. To let the situation breathe. Before she left the house she told Bryson a bunch of things—that she loved him and was proud of him, but most importantly, that he shouldn’t play video games all day. Bryson’s father came in his room after his mom and told him the same things, minus the part about video games.
“Love you, Bry,” his dad said, kissing him on the cheek over and over again like he did every morning, until Bryson grunted something that his father translated as, “Love you too.” Then Bryson rolled over, his plush mattress suddenly prickly like a bed of nails against his bruised body.
A few hours later, Bryson was awake, standing, yawning, stretching—all of which felt like he was pulling himself apart. He eased down the hall into the kitchen, microwaved a bowl of oatmeal, poured a glass of apple juice. Then sat in front of the TV, where, even though his mother said not to, he’d planned to play video games. Allllll day. He didn’t want to think about school. Or after school. The walk home. None of it. But he couldn’t help it. The thoughts were there like the smell of coffee that seemed to linger in the house long after it had been brewed.
Bryson chewed his lumpy oatmeal slowly, choked it down, replaying the scene. The moment that landed him there with a body on fire. The punches thrown, the kicks kicked. Everyone’s phones out, recording. He’d seen the clips all over social media the night before. Commentary. Filters. Memes. Hashtags. #BurmanStreetBeatdown. The shaky footage of him throwing haymakers, trying not to fall, because once you fall, it’s over. Everyone knows that. Ain’t no getting up. Ain’t no coming back.
He signed out. Then signed back in. Then deleted all the apps from his
phone. At least for a few days. He wouldn’t have—he wouldn’t have been able to—but his mom made him. Made him unplug from the laughs and likes. From the catchy captions and antics from kids who barely spoke in school but had mastered saying the right things online, matched with the perfect light and angle to turn out-of-this-world boredom into an Oscar-worthy blockbuster. And now Bryson was sitting alone on the living room floor, trying to swallow sludgy oats and forget it all.
By going to war.
The television glowed.
Call of Duty.
Xbox, powered on.
Headset on.
Controller gripped,
as Bryson Wills crawled into World War II.
* * *
Ty Carson went to school today. And the whole time he was there he felt like he was being watched, stared at even though the new rumor had taken over yesterday’s old one. Because rumors only last a day. But still, Ty felt like his classmates were following him. Not stalking him, peeping around corners and things like that. No. But more like looking away whenever he’d catch their eyes. Or cutting their conversations whenever he walked by, like he was some kind of human mute button. Made him paranoid. So paranoid he even felt like every clock was actually a giant eye, and every time the bell rang he imagined it was the building laughing at him. He was losing it and wished he could make himself small. Unseeable. Turn himself into a speck. Into a black streak swiped across the floor from a sneaker sole. Turn himself into a penny swept into one of the corners by Mr. Munch’s big broom. But he couldn’t do none of that, so he shrank mentally. Tried to crawl inside himself, another thing he wished he could really do. Be like a turtle. Pull his head into the home of his body. Look around the shell. Try to figure out why he felt how he felt. Why he did what he did, which was nothing but felt like something. Yesterday. Figure out if it was wrong. It wasn’t wrong. But maybe it was. He didn’t know and that was the hard part. Or at least part of the hard part. About yesterday. Not just yesterday, but yesterday… too. Yesterday when everything was fine. Yesterday when he could just be… Ty.
Ty was cool enough to be cool with everybody, because most people looked at him like a human video game. Bright. Full of color and sound. Awkward movements. Dramatic moments. He lived in his own world, but it was a world full of windows that everyone could see into. A world full of bloops and bleeps, vrooms, and the occasional boom. It wasn’t strange to see him pretending to crawl up the lockers, or for him to perform tactical movements like barrel rolls in the middle of the hallway. The type of kid who wore his backpack on the front of his body—a chest pack—just so he could pretend it was some type of armor, and on any given day an umbrella could become either sword or shotgun. And to top it all off, Ty was one of the best gamers around. Nationally ranked. And everyone knew. He’d won tournaments and competitions and had been trying to get Ms. Wockley to convince Mr. Jarrett to start a gaming league at the school.
“We don’t need more distractions, Mr. Carson,” she’d say, biting down hard on her words.
“Bleep, bleep, bleep, bloop, Ms. Wockley,” he’d reply. He’d shake his head and she’d shake hers, and that would be that.
Because everyone knew Ty’s gaming skills, his classmates were always trying to convince him to play on their squads, but Ty only played with the best. Well, he was the best so… the second best. And at their school, the second best was Bryson Wills. A boy whose father made him grow out his hair, and instead of letting him get it braided or cornrowed, convinced him that an Afro was the best way to go. And Bryson owned it. He owned it so much that his screen name was AfroGamer. Ty’s was TYred, which he said was pronounced “tired” because he was so tired of beating everyone. But most gamers thought it was TY Red, which made sense too, because Ty saw red whenever he was playing. All instinct. All thumbs.
Bryson and Ty lived close enough to each other to get together on weekends and play. Sometimes, Bryson would come to Ty’s house, a small house over on Crossman—Bryson liked this because Ms. CeeCee, the world’s best candy lady, lived at the top of Ty’s street—and other times Ty would come over to Bryson’s house, a bigger house over on Burman. Ty preferred to play at Bryson’s. The snacks were better. The TV was bigger. And a tiny dog named Max Payne wasn’t running around barking and clawing at it.
The game of choice: Call of Duty, World War II, which really bothered his parents.
“Pac-Man… now, that’s a game. You just eat and run away from ghosts, which is what I like to call, life,” his father said, joking.
“Or Super Mario Bros,” his mother added. “I mean, other than fighting the big bosses, you’re basically just trying not to be eaten by the environment. Mushrooms and plants and…”
“Turtles!” his father yipped.
“It’s nothing like what you’re playing.”
Ty tried to convince his parents Call of Duty was educational. That it was basically like interactive social studies class. That there was no better way to learn about that particular war than to jump right into it.
“There is no way you can know war, son,” Ty’s mother scolded. “Not unless you’ve fought in one. And you haven’t. You’re talking about Nazis. That’s a lot more than some video game.”
Ty understood that he didn’t know the kind of war he was simulating in the game. That his controller wasn’t a rifle and his raggedy family-reunion T-shirt wasn’t a flak jacket. His headset wasn’t a helmet, and the sounds in his ears were, in fact, just sounds in his ears. But Ty also knew that there was some kind of war he was in. Some kind of battle he did know but couldn’t make sense of. That the other sounds in his head were more than just sounds, that they made his heart do weird things, made his stomach tighten. Ty knew the anxiety of a kind of war. He knew the adrenaline and the confusion of it all.
Because yesterday. Because yesterday. Because yesterday.
Ty had been kissed. By a boy. Slim.
At the water fountain after first period. PE.
On his cheek.
But close enough to his mouth to count.
They were fighting over the water.
We were fighting over the water, right?
It was weird.
He was surprised. But not mad. Which was more surprising.
It was so weird.
It wasn’t that weird.
It was a little weird. But not a whole lot weird.
It was seen. By someone no one saw see it.
And that someone told everyone. Everyone.
And by lunch, Slim—whose real name was Salem—had twisted the story, told everyone Ty kissed him. So when Ty walked into the cafeteria, he walked into a minefield. A war zone. Everyone locked and loaded, firing at him.
* * *
Bryson had heard the rumor. It snaked around, passed from mouth to ear, a hiss-whisper. It eventually came to Bryson through Remy Vaughn. If Remy didn’t try to act cool, he probably would’ve been the coolest kid in the school. But… nope.
“So?” Bryson shot back, slamming his locker door.
“So, that mean he gay.”
“No it don’t,” Bryson said, annoyed. “And even if it do, so what?” Bryson swung his backpack onto his shoulder watching Remy’s face, trying to work out why he cared so much about Ty and Slim. So Bryson asked him. “Why you care so much?”
“I don’t.”
“You do. I mean, here’s a better question. How many girls have you kissed?”
“I don’t know, a bunch,” Remy said, looking off. Bryson knew that was a lie and that he hadn’t kissed anyone. And Bryson didn’t hold that against him because he hadn’t kissed anyone either. But he never lied about it. It was no big deal. Plus, why lie to a person you know knows the truth? Remy’s best friend Candace was Bryson’s cousin, and she was always going on and on about how Remy was forever acting like some kind of lover boy that no one’s ever loved.
“Right. A bunch. I guess negative numbers are still numbers,” Bryson razzed. “I just think it might be best to mind your busin
ess.” He patted Remy on the shoulder and walked away.
In the cafeteria, instead of people leaving Ty alone, instead of them cracking their stupid jokes to each other, a bunch of them had decided they’d sit with him. Crowd around him at the lunch table. Tease him to his face. Including Slim.
By the time Bryson got there, they were calling Ty all kinds of names. Names that bite. Names that stick and mark. Names that catch fire and leave a burnt smell in the air. The boys mocked him, bending their wrists as if they’d just shot a basketball and were holding the follow-through. Holding. Holding.
“Yo, what’s goin’ on?” Bryson asked, coming up to the table. He stood behind Ty, his hair like an eclipsed sun. “Scoot over, Ty. Lemme slide in.” Ty inched to the left and Bryson sat next to him, set his tray of mozzarella sticks on the table. “What’s everyone talking about?”
“Oh, nothin’,” Slim said. “Just that Ty tried to kiss me because… he’s gay!” He said it like it was a your mama joke. Like he’d just chopped Ty down. Ty shook his head like it didn’t matter, but Bryson could tell it did. It for sure did.
“Hmm, interesting,” Bryson said, looking down at the fried cheese fingers on his tray. “Because I heard you kissed him.” He glanced up at Slim.
“Because that’s true,” Ty confirmed, relieved Bryson was there. His backup, just like in the game. Watch my back. Cover me, cover me!
“That ain’t true!” Slim barked, looking around to make sure everyone heard him. “I wouldn’t kiss no boy!”
Look Both Ways Page 5