Beyond Poetry

by Nathan Jarelle

  She showed up wearing a gray security uniform and badge with her orange hair slicked into a neat bun. Her slacks were stuffed inside black military-style boots. Her gold nameplate shone, blinding Junior as she stood there with a subdued look.

  “Say hello to Officer Haughton, Junior,” Mr. Levy formally introduced the two.

  Life is difficult to explain.

  How can something so remarkably beautiful

  be so cruel and unfair to us all?

  —LEONARD G. ROBINSON JR.

  Seven

  With the two of them together in his office, Mr. Levy put out the official word: if he caught them interacting, Casey would be fired on the spot, and Junior would be suspended for ten days. It tore them in half, forcing Junior to save his skin at home and Casey to save her job. Before dismissing them, Mr. Levy ordered the two to shake hands in front of him. Casey extended first as Junior followed behind. As their palms met, Junior felt the folded note she had prepared beforehand. Shortly thereafter, Casey left and Junior shoved the note inside his coat pocket as Mr. Levy looked on, unaware of their transaction. “Remember, Junior – ” he opened his flaky hands “ – ten days. What would Mrs. Robinson think to see her boy sitting at home that long?”

  Out in the hallway, Junior removed Casey’s note from his pocket. Yo, meet me in 328 after this. There were tiny hearts written next to her signed name.

  Rushing, pushing through his peers, Junior raced down the hall toward the staircase. Juking, spinning, he whisked onto the third-floor before waiting for the perfect time to slip into 328. Less than a minute later, Casey showed up looking somber as Junior had expected.

  “J., I’m really sorry for all of this.” She began to cry. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. You seem like such a nice kid who’d gone through something so fucked up, and I just wanted to take you under my wing a bit. I didn’t mean to get you into trouble at home. Can you forgive me?”

  “Forgive you?” asked Junior. “You didn’t do anything, Casey! That was all Mr. Levy and that fuckin’ Mrs. Hawkins, man! She’s in on this shit, I bet!”

  “Yeah,” Casey sniffed. “So, look, maybe we just ought to cool off for a while, you know? I don’t want you to get suspended, and I can’t afford to get fired. Just for a little while?”

  “No, Casey! I don’t care if I get kicked out of Medgar – you’re my big sissy, remember? Th’hell with ‘em. We’re still family, right? We straight?”

  “Junior…”

  “Casey, c’mon,” he interrupted. “That’s just Levy flexing his power. He ain’t about nothin’.”

  “You don’t know Levy like I do. He’s a real asshole.”

  Together, they sat in silence as they tried to come up with a resolution to continue their friendship among Mr. Levy and his adjoining cronies. Junior paced throughout the tiny classroom, unable to settle down.

  “So, we good?” he asked. “We’re still family, right? Right, Casey?”

  “You’re right! Fuck ‘em!” she said. “Look, we have to be careful how we meet up. I’m not gonna get fired and you can’t get suspended. We just have to be smart, that’s all. I said it before, J. We’re beyond poetry at this point. What we have is divine and special. No one can take that away from us. We’ll get through this.”

  Junior exhaled a sigh of relief, laughing himself away from crying as he eyed Casey’s security uniform and touched her badge.

  “I got a new job!” She extended her arms, jokingly, as the two laughed.

  As the bell rang, signaling a start to the day, they booked to meet in room 328 every morning before the first bell and after school. For Junior, it was better than not having Casey in his world at all. As planned, Junior exited first, dipping into the nearest stairwell towards Mrs. Hawkins’s classroom. Casey left minutes thereafter. Junior barely made it in time before Mrs. Hawkins closed her classroom door. Once inside, he took a seat near the front row, relieved. Casey was still his big sissy.

  In the weeks following Casey’s involuntary promotion to Director of Security at Medgar, Junior had no choice but to watch from the side as Casey succumbed to Mr. Levy’s mind games and mental fuckery. With Thanksgiving fast approaching, the two relegated their friendship to meeting in vacant classrooms and exchanging notes. As always, Junior ended each note with a poem for Casey. In her response, she vented about Mr. Levy.

  Casey’s fancy title as director didn’t endear her with her security colleagues. To show their disdain, they allowed Casey to earn her stripes. In a note to Junior, she wrote how they’d purposely show up late to roll calls and take forever to answer her back on the radio. When a fight broke out inside the school, Casey said she was always the first officer on the scene and that her colleagues would be slow to help her. One kid popped a razor from underneath his tongue, Casey wrote. I was like ‘fuck!’ she scribed to Junior with a smiley face. Junior couldn’t believe her bravery. If it was him who had been forced into accepting such a promotion, he told Casey he would’ve quit. Mr. Levy spared no expense at finding new ways to fuck with her. For instance, he had Casey’s cubicle moved down to the basement level and revoked her staff card to use the elevator. One morning, he put out an emergency page onto the fourth-floor. When Casey got there, sweat glazing across her forehead, she was the only officer to show up. Mr. Levy then told her he was only checking to see if her radio worked correctly. It was the first in a series of mind games to force her out.

  “I don’t get it,” Junior said to her one morning. “If he hates you that badly, why doesn’t he just fire you? Why all this?”

  “J., you’re so intelligent, but still so young,” Casey explained to him. “That’s some people for you. That’s the evil of the world trying to disseminate the good in people like us. Levy could fire me any day, but seeing me suffer gives him greater satisfaction. You’ll understand when you get older.”

  Enforcement, as it turned out, was Casey’s kryptonite. Gullible and kind, the students ran over her as Mr. Levy gave her every shit detail he could find. One morning, after Junior got dropped off, he saw Casey standing outside attempting to make peace with the dice shooters at the front of the school. He watched as the boys humiliated her, laughing in Casey’s face and belittling her authority. They called her “fat yellow-girl” and other mean names she had heard all her life because of her albinism.

  “C’mon y’all, gimme a break,” Casey pleaded, smiling warmly at the boys as they surrounded and mocked her. “Look, I’m just tryin’ to do my job; help a sista out.”

  “Bitch, you ain’t no sista of mine,” one of the boys yelled.

  Junior then watched as one of the boys threw a soft drink into Casey’s face. Another boy then rushed Casey and ripped the aluminum badge right off her shirt and chucked it onto the roof of the school. Mortified, with Coca-Cola dripping from her hair, Casey slogged back into the school. The story spread around the school by lunchtime.

  During lunch, Junior saw a group of girls playing with a strand of orange hair that looked like Casey’s. Out in the hallway, he saw a row of red bloody droplets and followed it down to the nurse’s station to find Casey there. With her head tilted toward the ceiling, the school nurse was attempting to stop her nose from bleeding. Her shirt was badly torn, eye puffy and a shoe impression was left on her shoulder as she winced in pain.

  “They jumped me in the girls’ bathroom on the third-floor.” Casey spat blood down into the sink “I’m OK. I got beaten up worse in Jersey.”

  Enraged, Junior barged into Mr. Levy’s office.

  “You win!” said Junior. “OK? You win, Mr. Levy. Suspend me. Expel me. Whatever you have to do. Just stop messin’ with Casey. She doesn’t deserve any of this!”

  “Ohhh, you mean that?” he laughed. “Well, it’s part of the job, son. Too bad.”

  “They’re kickin’ her ass in here. She ain’t no security guard. She’s your secretary!”

  “Th’hell if she is!” he yelled. “She’s Director of School Security! It’s her job to ge
t her ass kicked as long as I say it’s her job. Now, get the hell out of my office!”

  By the afternoon when Junior had met with Casey, her eye was purple and there was a hematoma near her temple. She showed Junior where a student had cut a lock of her hair with a pair of scissors and said that Mr. Levy had provided her with a list of truant names and ordered her to call their parents. He then demanded she cite staff for the smallest of infractions like forgetting to close the windows in their classrooms or parking on the lines in the school’s lot. In less than a week, Casey became the most hated faculty member amongst students and staff members. By the end of her second week as Director, a group of students had stolen the hubcaps from her car and spray-painted “FAT BITCH” across the windshield of her Toyota. Beaten, bloodied, and purple, she had had enough. One morning in room 328, she met with Junior with her right eye swollen shut and told him she was leaving.

  “I have to leave,” she told him with her good eye welling in tears. “I can’t stay here another minute, J., it’s just… not… safe for me, anymore. I’m sorry.”

  Sitting next to her on the floor, Junior then placed his arm around Casey as she leaned onto his shoulder and wept. Junior held his own.

  “I get it,” he said. “Don’t worry, you’ll always be my big sissy. No matter what.”

  As they parted ways, Junior watched as Casey vanished down the stairway towards Mr. Levy’s office with her bag in one hand and her security badge in the other. He returned to Mrs. Hawkins’s class on the fourth-floor, believing he had seen the last of Casey Haughton.

  Family Forever

  Later that same morning, a brawl broke out inside Mrs. Hawkins’s classroom when one of the boys slashed a kid across the jaw with a butterfly knife. The boy’s wound turned white before a river of blood began streaming down his face and onto his desk. Soon after, the fight was on between four boys who were opposing gang members. Desks were strewn throughout the class as the boys tussled, bouncing from wall-to-wall and rolling across the floor. At one point during the brawl, Mrs. Hawkins tried to separate the boys and was knocked to the floor. Her frail body hit the floor like a wet pancake as Junior’s peers cheered on the barbarity. Acting instinctively, Junior rushed out into the hallway.

  “Yo, we need help in here!” he yelled.

  Within seconds, nearly half the school was gathered outside of Junior’s classroom. Pushing, shoving, security swamed through a sea of curious onlookers hoping to disperse the melee. Smartly, Junior waited outside of the room – Senior and Sandy had once taught him to get out of the way if ever a fight broke out. “Don’t stand and watch,” Senior told him. “It’ll be your luck somebody pulls out somethin’ and then you get hit.”

  Out in the hallway, Junior watched from the background as a voice called to him from the stairwell. Turning to look, he noticed Casey waving him over. Three-Two-Eight she motioned to Junior using her fingers. Nodding, Junior crept down the back stairwell.

  At their secret hideout on the third-floor, Casey checked on him.

  “You OK?” She looked him over. “What the hell happened up there?”

  “I don’t know!” he said. “It happened so fast, man! I thought you were leaving?”

  With her eye still engulfed, Casey grabbed him by the hand. “I just couldn’t leave you here by yourself, J.,” she told him. “Not with that kind of shit happenin’ upstairs. One way or another, we’ll get through this together, OK?”

  With their friendship under the radar, the two remained close from afar. They spoke in passing, swapped notes, and met in room 328 whenever they could. In a note dated Monday, November 13, 1995, Junior wrote to Casey, thanking her for staying at Medgar, calling her his godsister. He followed with a magnificent poem to convey his heart for their genuine friendship. Her heart melted as she read through Junior’s poem with one and a half eyes.

  It feels good to have a friend in you.

  To go through it all, in you.

  To experience the world, in you.

  To talk, laugh, cry and share things in you,

  Thank you

  for the friend in you.

  LEONARD G. ROBINSON JR.

  That same Monday, Junior saw a kid at Medgar get pummeled by another student in the hallway for stepping on a kid’s sneakers and failing to say ‘excuse me’. The victim was an Indian kid named Aadrik. He was new to Medgar. His parents had just moved from Philly’s west side after his father lost his job as a salesman and could no longer afford Aadrik’s private tuition. His adversary was a kid named Donovan. It happened during the break. Aadrik had attempted to pass by Donovan and smudged his new shoe by accident. When Donovan asked him to wipe it off and Aadrik smiled back at him, the annihilation ensued. Donovan grabbed Aadrik by the throat and proceeded to bash the boy’s head into the locker repeatedly. Aadrik, no taller than 5’1 and 125 pounds, crumbled to the floor instantly, bleeding from both ears, seizing violently. It wasn’t until later that students and faculty learned Aadrik didn’t speak great English. His smile wasn’t meant to be harmful. Unfortunately for him, he couldn’t comprehend the value his peers in the United States put on tennis shoes. Donovan was expelled initially. But later when it was learned that Aadrik was now blind in one eye, the police arrested Donovan at his home and charged him with aggravated assault. It took Junior months to rid the sight of seeing Aadrik seizing on the tile floor with blood draining from both his ears.

  In the aftermath following the brawl in Mrs. Hawkins’s classroom, Junior became the most loathed student at Medgar. His peers detested him for summoning for help and not allowing the fight to continue. They called horrible names and within days, Junior had developed what was known as a “snitch jacket” for interfering in what was considered official business. Concerned for his safety, Casey offered Junior a small Swiss army knife for personal protection.

  “Man, shit is crazy. Take this.” She handed the knife to him. “Just don’t do nothin’ stupid.”

  Junior looked over the small, concealable weapon and tucked it into his pocket.

  “Thanks, Casey.”

  As the mindlessness at Medgar continued, the chaos happening around Brooke’s Rowe was equally as devastating. On the street over from where Junior lived, twelve-year-old Baylor Mack was shot dead by police when officers mistook his black pager for a weapon. In the days following the fatal shooting, an attorney assigned to the case determined there was not enough evidence to indict the officers responsible for shooting the boy. Junior was sitting between his parents when the announcement was read from a podium down at City Hall. Senior leaped to his feet, disgusted with the decision. It triggered a war inside the Robinson castle as both Senior and Sandy had it out for each other. Fed up with city living, Sandy had given all of her forty-one years to Philly and wanted out. Senior countered that what happened in Brooke’s Rowe happened everywhere else in the world. But in the back of Sandy’s mind was Medgar. In just two months, Junior’s school had seen more than its fair share of violence. Kids were being assaulted and staff members were being beaten for interfering. Most recently, a teacher was taken out on a stretcher after being sucker-punched with brass knuckles. Letters were sent home to parents by Mr. Levy, ensuring that he’d get a handle on things. With no available school willing to take Junior so late into the year, Sandy had no choice but to leave Junior enrolled.

  “You can still be the first man in our family to graduate high school,” she told him before bed that night. Yet, later that same evening, Junior overheard his mother crying in the kitchen as she worried about her son. As if losing Lawrence the year before wasn’t enough, she now had to contend with sacrificing Junior for the sake of breaking a generational curse. Sandy had spent her entire life living in the ghetto and wanted better for her surviving son.

  The more violence that happened inside Medgar and throughout Brooke’s Rowe, the more Sandy worried, and the more Junior felt the weight of his mother’s worry. Soon, she was back at the kitchen table looking at houses in places far away from
Brooke’s Rowe. Cities like Autumn Hills, Maryland were a two-hour drive south from where the Robinsons lived, and with a populace of 6,400 residents, it seemed like the perfect escape. Yet, still, the war over money raged on.

  “So, where you runnin’ off to now?” Senior asked Sandy one night after finding news clippings of cities scattered atop the kitchen table. “Woman, you know good-and-goddamn-well we can’t afford to move out of here. It’s just a shitty pipe dream. Might as well give it up! Junior ain’t goin’ nowhere and neither are we! Philly is our home!”

  At the door of Medgar one morning, Sandy held Junior’s face with her hands.

  “Junior, I need you to take this school thing seriously,” she told him. “I need you to work hard so that you can have choices in life and don’t end up stuck in Brooke’s Rowe or some damned place like Crawford like your momma did. Do you understand?” Then, before Junior could answer, Sandy kissed him and left. That kiss added more pressure on Junior than any other kiss Sandy had given him any other morning.

  Everyone is not your friend.

  Your enemies will dress in disguise

  right before your very eyes

  if you don’t soon realize.

  Everyone is not your friend.

  LEONARD G. ROBINSON JR.

  Normal Sin

  On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, Junior could barely stay awake in Mrs. Hawkins’s class. That morning, Mrs. Hawkins, with her wrist in a cast from the melee the previous week, introduced a guest speaker to Junior’s class. The man’s name was Oswald Darrius. He claimed to be from North Philly before migrating to the NFL during the 1970s. Hobbling on a cane, he boasted about his career as a starting lineman for the New York Giants and the Buffalo Bills. As he moved throughout the classroom, he spoke with both hands in flight like Donald Trump. At one point, Mr. Darrius stopped at the front of the room, allowing Junior to get a closer look at the guest speaker. His crooked fingers were covered in championship rings and one of his legs appeared longer than the other. He wore an orthopedic shoe on his right foot and walked with a deep limp which the kids all later mocked him for. He claimed that football had saved him from living on the streets.