If I Grow Up

by Todd Strasser

  “DeShawn, wake up.” Someone was shaking my shoulder. I opened my eyes. In the dim light, LaRue crouched over me. His long braids were bunched behind his head, held with a band.

  “S’up?” I yawned, rising to my elbows from my small mattress on the living room floor. Gramma lay under her blanket on the couch, her mouth open, snoring.

  “Something’s going on.” He pulled back the heavy green curtains. It was a wet March day, and a fine mist hung in the air. Parked along Abernathy Avenue were white vans with NEWS 8 and EYEWITNESS NEWS on their sides. Down in the yard, camera crews and reporters were interviewing people.

  “What is it?” I asked, pulling on some clothes.

  “Don’t know but it must be big,” said LaRue.

  On the couch, Gramma made a snorting noise and rolled over without opening her eyes. Nia came out of the bedroom with one baby on each hip, both of them sucking their thumbs. “You goin’ out?” she asked LaRue. Lately she almost always sounded annoyed with him.

  “Maybe.”

  “Then maybe you won’t forget the Pampers this time.”

  LaRue pulled on his jacket and didn’t answer. The more Nia nagged, the quieter he grew. She was always complaining that LaRue didn’t help enough and that she never had time to do anything for herself or see her friends. LaRue went to the door, and I followed.

  “You better not come back without those Pampers,” my sister warned.

  Down in the lobby, Terrell, Tyrone, and Marcus were talking in a corner by the broken elevator. Marcus waved LaRue over while I continued outside. Despite the cold, wet mist that left a silvery sheen on everyone’s clothes and hair, there were a lot of people out in the yard, mostly around the television cameras with their bright lights and well-dressed reporters.

  I ran into Precious, who kept a red umbrella over her head with one hand while she held her jacket closed with the other. She couldn’t zip the jacket because her belly stuck out too far. She’d been telling people it was Terrell’s baby.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Two shorties from Number Two shot a pregnant lady. They took her to the hospital. People say she’ll probably live, but the baby’s dead for sure.”

  So that explained the news crews. They were asking people if they knew the shorties or the lady who got shot. Most of the people who said they did probably didn’t. They just wanted to be on TV. Terrell and LaRue came through the crowd.

  “Gotta bounce,” LaRue said. He’d been promoted to runner. It was his job to deliver the money and pick up the drugs that souljas like Terrell sold on the street. In some ways it was the most dangerous job in the gang, because much of the time he was either carrying a lot of money or a lot of drugs.

  “What about the you-know-whats?” I said, careful not to embarrass him by mentioning the Pampers.

  LaRue reached into his pocket and pulled out some bills. “Ain’t got time. Do me a favor, okay?”

  He took off, leaving Terrell, Precious, and me. Precious gave Terrell a yearning glance. Now that she was going to have his baby, she wasn’t so haughty anymore. Other guys weren’t interested in pregnant girls.

  “Want to do something?” she asked Terrell.

  Terrell gave her a cold look. “No.”

  Precious pursed her lips and almost looked like she was going to cry, but then she set her jaw hard and walked away. Meanwhile Terrell turned to me. “S’up?”

  “Gotta go to the store,” I said.

  Terrell said he’d go with me, and we started walking through the chilly mist.

  “Sure it ain’t your kid?” I asked.

  “No, but I ain’t sure it is, either,” Terrell said.

  “Why would she say it was if it wasn’t?”

  “’Cause maybe that skank don’t know,” Terrell said. “Maybe she just thinks I’m the best choice.”

  “Girls usually know.”

  “Oh, yeah? Who made you the expert?”

  “What if it really is yours?” I asked.

  Terrell gave me a disdainful look. “She can’t prove it, okay? And I ain’t with her no more. Maybe I like Imani better.”

  Imani was a short, slight girl with long, wavy brown hair. She was soft-spoken and shy, almost the opposite of Precious.

  “Since when?” I asked.

  “Since whenever,” Terrell said, then smiled sheepishly. “And maybe if I’m any baby’s daddy, it’s hers.”

  “She’s pregnant, too?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh.” Terrell nodded and grinned. You could see he was proud.

  ANIMALS

  That night, the shooting of the pregnant woman was the first story on all the news shows. They said doctors had operated to remove the dead baby, and the mother was expected to recover. They didn’t show photographs of the nine-and ten-year-old shorties who’d shot her, but they did show an old photo of the victim, and we all agreed that we’d seen her around. The part Gramma and Nia liked the best was when they interviewed our neighbors about what had happened. They’d interview one person, but crowds of others would be around them, all trying to get their faces on TV. It was strangely exciting to see everyday people like us on the same screen that showed the most famous stars and rappers and athletes on earth.

  But the fun didn’t last. Next the mayor came on and spoke about the shooting as a tragedy, and how not one, but three lives had been destroyed—the woman’s unborn child, and the two boys as well. He asked what kind of world it was where children shot mothers-to-be.

  The camera moved to an important-looking police commander standing next to the mayor. He said they were investigating rumors that the boys were part of the Douglass Disciples.

  “That’s a damn lie,” LaRue spat. “I never saw those shorties before.”

  The camera went back to the mayor, who promised there’d be more police enforcement around Frederick Douglass. Then some commercials came on.

  “Good,” said Gramma. “Now go back to Cosby.”

  “No,” I said, getting up.

  Everyone looked surprised. Usually I was the last person to make a fuss about what was on the TV. I turned to a show where three women in dresses and two men in suits were sitting around a table discussing the shooting.

  “Ain’t we heard enough of this?” Gramma complained.

  “Just a little more,” I said.

  One of the women and one of the men was dark skinned. The black man wore a red bow tie.

  “That looks stupid,” said Nia uncomfortably, as if she sensed that, other than the color of his skin, the man on TV had nothing in common with us. One of the white men asked him how he thought something like the shooting could happen.

  “Hear that?” Nia said. “He’s making it sound like it’s something that could never happen in his white world.”

  “The projects are a forgotten place that most people don’t even know exists,” the black man said.

  “Or don’t want to know exists,” added the black woman. “It’s a hopeless cycle of broken families, illegitimate children, failed education, poverty, and lawlessness.”

  The twins sat on the floor sucking their thumbs, staring at the images on the TV. They couldn’t have understood, but the rest of us in that cramped, hot little room did. That was our world they were talking about. We were that broken family living on welfare and food stamps, with illegitimate children and school dropouts and gang members. We were the hopeless.

  “They may look black, but they talk white,” Gramma observed, as if that would somehow negate what had been said.

  “Not one of them ever set foot in the projects, that’s for sure,” muttered Nia.

  “Let’s face it,” said one of the white men on the TV. “It’s survival of the fittest. Those who survive do so by their wits and pure animal instincts. It’s the rule of the jungle. The asphalt jungle.”

  “Turn it off,” Nia said.

  LaRue got up and turned off the TV. The room went quiet. From outside came the distant sounds of traffic, rap music, and the scre
ech of train wheels in the rail yard.

  Animals…

  A forgotten place…

  Hopeless…

  “Turn it back to Cosby,” Gramma said. Soon the laugh track filled the room.

  But no one in the room laughed.

  LARUE

  By day, politicians and other important people made speeches in front of television cameras about how they were going to rehabilitate the Frederick Douglass Project. But as soon as the sun went down and the reporters went home for dinner, it was the same old thing. Gunfire, fear, isolation.

  “You believe that crap?” Terrell said on yet another night while we watched some white windbag in a suit talk about what he was going to do for our underprivileged, uneducated, uncivilized neighbors and friends. “They ain’t gonna do nothing.”

  Nia came into the room with Xavier on her hip, her cell phone against her ear, and a frown on her face. “I’ve been waiting all day for him to call back. If I leave a message, he always calls back. Always.”

  “Maybe his phone’s broke,” said Gramma, bouncing Jayda on her knee.

  Nia gave me and Terrell a worried look. “Any idea where he could be?” she asked.

  “I could check a few spots,” Terrell said.

  “Why don’t you do that?” Nia said. “And if you find him, tell him to call home right away.”

  Terrell had to go upstairs first. In the stairwell on the fourteenth floor, a Disciple sat with a sawed-off rifle across his knees. His chin was propped in his hand, and he was writing in a battered spiral notebook. It was Darius, from Terrell’s baby gang, Soon To Shoot. Now he, too, was a Disciple.

  When he saw me, he straightened up and gripped the rifle. “No one but Disciples past this point.”

  “Marcus knows him,” Terrell said.

  Darius shook his head. “No exceptions. Orders is orders.”

  “It’s okay,” I said to Terrell. “You go.”

  Terrell continued up the stairs. Darius relaxed and laid the rifle across his knees again.

  “How long you been a Disciple?” I asked.

  “A few weeks.”

  “Didn’t used to have guards up here,” I said.

  Darius raised and dropped his shoulder and went back to scratching words into his notebook. Another wannabe rapper.

  Terrell came back. “Marcus says it’s okay.”

  Darius frowned uncertainly. “You sure?”

  “Do I have to go back and get him?” Terrell asked. It was a subtle threat. Marcus would be none too pleased to be bothered about something so trivial.

  Darius waved me past. There must have been half a dozen Disciples milling around on the fifteenth floor, including Bublz and Jules, who’d been jumped in the year before. Tension was thick, and gang members were speaking in hushed, hurried voices. More than one narrowed his eyes suspiciously when I passed with Terrell.

  We went into Marcus’s apartment and followed voices into the kitchen. Marcus, Jamar, and Tyrone were standing around the kitchen table, which was covered with guns and boxes of ammunition.

  “When’d you last see LaRue?” Marcus asked me.

  “This morning,” I said.

  “Was he strapped?”

  “Didn’t notice,” I said. “He usually is.”

  “We gotta squad up and spill some blood,” Jamar said to Marcus. “They want a war, they’ll get a war.”

  “We need to know for certain first,” Marcus said grimly. “He ain’t even late yet.”

  “Come on, man,” Jamar said. “LaRue ain’t here. He ain’t answered his phone all day. Where do you think he’s at?”

  “Somewhere else,” Marcus barked, clearly displeased that Jamar was doubting him. “Maybe he stopped to see a girlfriend. Maybe he got pinched. Maybe he got ambushed by a crew that ain’t Gentry. You want to start a war with the wrong enemy?”

  “Gentry’s the enemy no matter what,” Jamar grumbled.

  Marcus opened a flip phone and dialed. The room grew quiet. He let the phone ring five times, then snapped it shut.

  “You each take a man and go look for him,” he told Jamar and Tyrone. “Soon as you know anything, call me.”

  Jamar and Tyrone headed out.

  “You want me to look too?” Terrell asked eagerly.

  “I want you to sit on that bench like you’re supposed to,” Marcus snapped, annoyed.

  “But—”

  Marcus glared at him, and Terrell didn’t finish the sentence. We headed back downstairs. At the third floor, I turned toward Gramma’s, but Terrell grabbed my arm. “Come on. We’re gonna find LaRue.”

  “But Marcus said—”

  “Marcus wants me to grow old and die on that bench,” Terrell hissed. “I’m gonna show him I’m better than that.” He patted me on the shoulder. “We got each other’s backs, DeShawn. Long as we stick together, we’ll be okay.”

  I knew disobeying Marcus was a mistake, but Terrell was right about one thing—for Nia and Xavier and Jayda’s sake, I wanted to find LaRue. And I wanted to find him alive.

  Outside, the night air was chilly. Winter wasn’t quite ready to give up and let spring in. Terrell started walking west, toward the Flats.

  “Why this way?” I asked.

  “The hobby center,” Terrell said. “Sometimes he plays that Warhammer game and don’t want anyone to know, so he turns his phone off.”

  Suddenly I remembered that when LaRue left the apartment that morning, he had that black plastic case with him. Relief filtered through me. I’d been scared that my sister had lost her man, and, like so many of us, those babies would never know their father.

  We got to the hobby center. Inside, racks of comic books and shelves of action figures lined the walls. Terrell led me to the back where groups of teenagers were huddled over tables covered with Warhammer armies. Everything stopped when Terrell entered. They recognized his colors.

  “Anyone seen LaRue?” Terrell asked.

  “Who?” someone said.

  “Medium size, long braids, diamond stud in his right ear,” I said.

  “He was here,” a guy said. “Probably left ten minutes ago.”

  Terrell and I shared a puzzled look. If LaRue left, why hadn’t we run into him on the street?

  “Was he with anyone?” I asked.

  The guys exchanged glances and shook their heads. Terrell jerked his thumb toward the door, and we left.

  Pop! At the sound of the gunshot, we both ducked. Car doors slammed, and a low gray sedan shot out of an alley next to the hobby center and sped away. Terrell and I ran into the alley. In the shadows a body lay on the ground. My heart started racing, and I slowed down as if part of me didn’t want to know. But I knew.

  LaRue’s hands were tied behind him, and he lay curled up as if he’d been kneeling when they shot him. A single bullet through the back of his head. I felt something under my foot. Black-and-white beads were scattered on the ground. They’d broken the string on purpose. It was the Gentry Gangstas’ way of letting us know who had pulled the trigger.

  Terrell cursed, and I heard beeps as he dialed a number. Part of LaRue’s forehead was gone. Even in death his eyes were squeezed shut. My head started throbbing.

  “He knew what was coming,” I muttered.

  “Huh?” Terrell didn’t understand.

  “Look at his eyes. He knew they were gonna kill him. They made him kneel.”

  In the dim light, something glistened on LaRue’s cheek. I reached down and touched the moisture. Tears. He’d been crying when they shot him. The throbbing in my head grew into pounding. I saw Xavier’s and Jayda’s expectant faces. And Nia’s fretful eyes…

  A car pulled into the alley. “Crap!” Terrell grunted. Thinking it might be Gentry, he pulled his gun and shielded his eyes. Car doors opened. The headlights stayed on. I couldn’t see anything except the glare.

  There were footsteps. Terrell backed away, and I felt a shadow as Marcus stood over me and LaRue. The pain made my head feel like it was going to explode. I f
elt my hands clench and everything went black. “You killed him!” I launched myself at Marcus.

  The scuffle was short. In no time Marcus had me tied up in his strong arms and hands. But I was still fighting, squirming and cursing. “You made him a runner! You got him killed!”

  Marcus increased his grip, pinning my arms to my sides. I heard him say, “Put those guns away.”

  I opened my eyes. Jules and two other gangbangers had their guns out, ready to kill me if I did anything to Marcus. They hesitated, then did as they were told. I tried to twist out of Marcus’s grip, but his hands were like steel clamps.

  “What do you want us to do?” Jules asked.

  Marcus nodded at LaRue’s body. “Search his pockets.”

  “Don’t touch him!” I started to struggle anew. “Leave him alone!”

  Marcus clamped a hand over my mouth. I twisted and tried to get free, but he put an arm around my chest and squeezed until it was hard to breathe, forcing me to stop fighting. Jules went through LaRue’s pockets and came up with a couple of crumpled dollar bills and a cell phone.

  “Give it here.” Still holding me with one arm, Marcus took the phone. For a split second his gaze settled on Terrell, and a frown formed on his face. “All of you, bounce. Now!”

  Jules nodded at me. “What about him?”

  “He’s goin’ with me,” Marcus said.

  “The hell I am!” Once again I tried to fight, but Marcus pushed me down face-first on the cold, wet pavement and twisted my arm behind my back. “That’s enough,” he grunted, and held me until the others had gone. I felt his warm breath close to my ear. “I’m gonna let you go, and you ain’t gonna do nothin’ stupid, understand?”

  When I didn’t answer, he twisted my arm harder, and I felt the pain shoot up through my shoulder, like it was going to pop out of its joint. “You feel me?” he growled. Only this time it sounded more like a threat.

  Trembling and seized with pain, I nodded. “Yes.”

  Marcus let go. “Get in the car.”

  I pushed myself up from the ground and looked at LaRue’s body. “You’re just gonna leave him like that?”

  Marcus gritted his teeth. “I said, get in the car.”