I’ve seen shows like this. White girl meets brown boy, lifts him up out of the gutter. I don’t need to be anyone’s social experiment. If she tries to uplift me, I’m gonna tell her to go work out her white guilt on someone else. Although maybe I’ll try to get a few dates with her first.
But none of that happens. She just kind of smiles and walks away.
And after another minute, so do I.
Why did she help me out? Why? I need to know.
FOUR
Sometimes I have to go home, even though I don’t want to.
But I need to check in and see that my sister, Daneeka, is okay.
I already know the answer to that. She’s not okay. She’ll never be okay. But I feel like I have to check in on her anyway.
Daneeka’s got my mom there with her, but my mom is not okay either. She’s what you call chronically depressed.
Notice a common theme here? Nobody in my life is okay.
Some people on this alien planet use chronic as a slang term for weed. They so dumb, they don’t even know what it really means.
Chronic comes from the ancient Greek word chronos, meaning “time.” It means “long-lasting or permanent.” You chronically depressed, you ain’t about to just pop a pill and start bouncing around the room. Chronically depressed means you got serious stuff on your mind. And it’s there to stay.
Moms is also a drug addict. If she was white, they would say she is “self-medicating.” But when you’re black, you just a pill-popper. She stays in her room most of the time. I don’t know what she does in there. I don’t like to go in. It smells bad.
Daneeka, my sister, is usually in one of two places, in front of the computer or the television. Today it’s the computer.
Now you may be wondering, how did this poor-ass ghetto kid get a TV and a computer? He made it sound like he practically lives in a box.
Insurance money. Government money. That’s how. Not mine. Daneeka’s.
She’s the one who got shot, after all. I guess you could say she earned it.
When I walk in the front door, she turns around in her wheelchair and gives me a big superhero welcome. Same thing every time, like she hasn’t seen me in ten years. Does she really feel that way about me? I wonder. Or is it all part of her bigger problem, the one that makes her see the world like she’s nine years old, even though she’s going on nineteen?
“Hey, Neeks,” I say to her. That’s my nickname for her.
“Baby brother!” she shrieks. “Oh my god! Look at you!”
“Yeah, look at me,” I say. “You just saw me this morning.”
“I still can’t believe how big and tall you are.”
“Really. Even though you been seeing me every day for sixteen years.”
“Such a fine, handsome boy!”
“You need anything, Neeks?”
“No, I’m good. Where you been?”
“School, Neeks. I been at school all day.”
“Uh-huh. Learn anything?”
“Yeah. A whole bunch.”
“Tell me something!” She claps her hands and opens her eyes real wide. I hate this playacting. But you can’t talk sense to Neeks anymore. Something inside her is broken. Something besides her spine, I mean.
I shrug.
“Recent discoveries have proven that gravity is made of particles called gravitons,” I say. I saw this on YouTube. I don’t really know what it means, but it sounds cool.
Gravity comes from the Latin gravis, meaning “heavy.” I love reading about the history of words. All this stuff is online. That’s how I know that if it wasn’t for those old Latin dudes, we would hardly have any words at all. We would just point at things and go ook, ook.
Neeks looks like she is going to cry.
“I am so proud of you,” she whispers.
“Yeah, thanks, Neeks.”
My sister is very pretty. If she wasn’t in a wheelchair, she’d have a dozen boyfriends. But she’s been stuck in that chair for the past ten years, and she’s never getting out. And for that reason, guys don’t come around here.
When she was nine years old, my sister was lying in bed, asleep, when a .45-caliber bullet came through the wall and struck her in the spine. It shattered two of her vertebrae, and it almost killed her. She was in the hospital for months. She survived, obviously, but she lost all the use of her legs. She has to go to the bathroom into a plastic bag, through a hole in her stomach. She won’t ever have children. She won’t ever walk again.
All of that is bad enough. But there are…other issues. It’s like her brain froze on the day she was shot, and she stopped developing. Mentally, she’s still a little girl. This is all what you call psychological. The bullet didn’t hit her brain. But it might as well have.
A doctor explained it to us once. When a very traumatic incident happens, sometimes people just can’t get past it. They stop changing then and there. It’s like they’re frozen on the day it happened, and they’re too scared to move beyond it. They need to stay where it’s safe. Even when it makes no sense, and even when it makes them look crazy. They’re not crazy. They’re just… scared. Permanently scared.
So that’s how you get a nineteen-year-old woman with the mind of a nine-year-old girl.
Trauma is a Greek word. It means “wound.” Between those Latins and Greeks giving us all their words, we basically don’t even speak English.
I sort of understand. I can’t imagine how scared she must have been. She claims she doesn’t even remember it happening. I believe that too. She must have wiped it out of her mind. Imagine that. You go to sleep one night like normal. In the middle of the night, you wake up with blood everywhere. You’re surrounded by paramedics and cops. There are sirens going off. Your mother is screaming. Somebody is probably saying something stupid like, Everything is going to be okay.
When someone is telling you everything is going to be okay, that’s a pretty sure sign that everything is going down the crapper.
I don’t remember much of that night. Neeks is three years older than I am, which means I was only six years old at the time. All I know is, my big sister has become my little sister. And it’s weird.
I head back to my room.
I say this room is mine, but it doesn’t feel like mine. We don’t own this house. We rent it. I don’t eat here, because no one ever cooks. A service brings my sister her meals. My mother doesn’t seem to eat anything but my sister’s pain medication. My sister doesn’t need it, but she says she does so she can get more pills. So she can give them to our mother. Around and around it goes.
“Baby, that you?” comes my mother’s voice from her room.
“Would you please stop calling me that?” I yell back.
“How was school?”
“Who cares how school was? Just a bunch of boring old crap anyway.”
“Can you bring me some tea?”
“Get your own damn tea, junkie,” I mumble. But I don’t say it loud enough for her to hear me. I don’t actually want to hurt her.
I just want her to stop hurting the rest of us.
I make her some tea and leave it outside her door. I just knock to tell her it’s there. I don’t want to see her. She looks half-dead.
I go into my room and look around. I feel less and less like I belong here. I don’t own much. Just a few clothes, an old radio, a turntable and a mic I scrounged from the garbage back when I thought I was gonna become a rapper or maybe a DJ. But the turntable arm is broken, and the mic doesn’t work either. Posters on the wall from when I was twelve—Kendrick Lamar, Nas, Lil Wayne. I still like these guys. K-Dot gets deeper all the time.
I stole myself some dinner from a convenience store on the way home—a sandwich wrapped in plastic, and a bag of chips. I kick back and watch more shows while I eat. The warm cozy lie creeps over me again. Everything is okay. Everything is great.
Thank God for old TV.
As I lie there falling asleep, I find myself thinking about that girl again. Lanaia.
Why did she stick up for me? I need to find her again and ask her out. Maybe she’s a few years older than me. Maybe she’s too smart. Too white. Whatever. If I’m ever going to understand the beings on this planet, I need to investigate further. Get closer. Dig deeper. Find out what makes them do the things they do.
FIVE
Alien-scientist expedition number 9,002: Return to university campus.
Mission: Locate Lanaia, hot human girl who helped me. Possibly get phone number, so I can call her and ask her out.
Maybe steal another one of them muffins. Man, it was good. It had chocolate chips in it.
How am I going to call her? I have a phone, but no phone plan.
Never mind. I’ll figure that out later.
I leave the house early in the morning. On the way back to campus, I pass two crackheads screaming at each other on the corner. One very old black man lying on a bench. He might be dead. I don’t stop to check. If I see a problem, I do not get involved.
That is rule number one of the hood. Keep moving. Just keep moving.
One car full of four thugs, who pass me like a shark cruising a swimmer.
In this hood, you get real good real fast at telling from a distance what color of clothing people are wearing. I can see from a thousand miles away that these guys are wearing the white T-shirts and black do-rags of the Locals.
And I can see that Boss himself is sitting in the passenger seat.
My blood turns cold. I get ready to run or fight. Not sure why I think fighting is an option. If it comes down to that, I’m dead. I won’t give up, but I don’t stand a chance either.
Boss and I lock eyes for a minute. Or maybe just a second. Or maybe our eyes don’t meet at all, but I think they do.
He turns and says something to the guy who’s driving.
The car comes screeching to a halt. Stereo so loud it upsets my stomach. Or maybe that’s my fear. The music gets quieter.
Boss sticks his arm out the window and points at me. Then he beckons.
I stare at him, wishing very hard that this wasn’t happening. Time stretches out, and moments become hours. I can feel my feet moving me toward him, even though I don’t want to go.
I stop about ten feet away. I don’t want Boss to be able to grab me. I’ve seen him do cruel things to people before, like drag them down the street with his car when they ain’t paid what they owe. Or when they don’t show the proper respect.
Boss has killed people. I’m sure of it. But the cops don’t care, and no one will rat him out anyway.
I don’t say anything. I just wait.
Boss is about thirty-five years old, I guess. That’s old for a free gangster. Most of them are dead or doing hard time by that age. He wears a black do-rag on his bald head, and a white muscle shirt. He’s got really ripped arms from working out in the prison yard, where he’s spent most of his life. A scar on his forehead. Not sure I want to know how he got that.
“Sup with you, man?” says Boss. He has a real deep voice, like the rumbling of a truck.
“Sup, Boss,” I say.
He gives me a long, critical look.
“Your name Rasheed, ain’t it?”
“Yeah, Boss.”
“Yeah, I thought so. I knowed your daddy. Who you runnin’ with these days?”
I shrug. “Nobody,” I say.
“What? Speak up, fool. Can’t hear you.”
“Nobody, Boss.”
He looks at me for a long while.
“How come I don’t see you around here much?”
I shrug again. “I like to lie low,” I say. “Not bother nobody.”
“You like to lie low. How you gonna feed your family, man?”
“Get a job.”
“What kinda job?”
“I dunno,” I say.
“You ain’t goin’ to school, I hear.”
Now how did he hear that? Boss knows everything. That’s scary.
“Naw,” I say.
“So what kinda job you gonna get, you ain’t been to school?”
“I dunno, Boss.”
“I hear you like to read books.”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me what this mean. No man is an island.”
Another shrug. “I dunno, Boss.”
“Don’t be tellin’ me you dunno. Think about it. Tell me what it mean.”
“It means…you gotta run with somebody,” I say.
“Whassat you say?”
“You gotta run with somebody,” I say again.
“That’s right. Gotta run with somebody. Why you don’t wanna run with us?”
I look down at my shoes.
“Ain’t my life, that’s all,” I say.
What I really want to say is, ’Cause you’re the sons of bitches who shot my sister. And you’re ruining the world for everyone who lives anywhere near you.
But I don’t have that kind of courage in real life. Only in my daydreams.
“Your daddy was my boy,” Boss says. “You know that?”
What he means is that he and my father were good friends. I did not know that. I wasn’t going to look up at him, but I can’t help myself. I stare at him in surprise.
“Really?”
“Yeah, me and him was tight. He was all right. Tough. Solid. Respect.”
“Word,” I say. I want to ask him if he knows where my father is. But I’m afraid of what the answer might be.
“You look just like him,” he says.
I didn’t know that either. My mother would never say such a thing to me. She never talks about my father.
“You gonna need a job,” Boss says. “And you gonna need people too. Who you gonna hang with? Those white kids at the college you like to go to? What you think, you some kinda frat boy or something?”
He knows that too?
“You wanna be a man, you gotta be productive,” says Boss. “And you wanna be productive, you gotta line yourself up with the people who make things happen around here. You understand? Otherwise, you produce nothing. And you might end up helping the wrong people.”
I can feel him staring at me. I don’t want to meet his eyes.
“Remember what I say,” says Boss. “No man is an island.”
“No man is an island, Boss,” I say.
He turns to his driver. “Bounce,” he says.
The stereo starts blasting again, and the car rolls down the street.
I have to check to make sure I didn’t wet my pants. I just survived an encounter with the leader of the Locals.
Maybe that’s enough for one day. Maybe I should just go back to bed. It’s gonna be all downhill from here.
But if I go back to the university, I might get to see Lanaia again.
And no matter what happens now, it won’t scare me near as much as what just happened.
SIX
It’s Friday morning, about eight thirty.
Campus is a busy place. Lots of people walking to class or just sitting and talking. Everyone has a coffee in his or her hand. I figure I should get one too, but I don’t want to spend the money, and you can’t really steal coffee. I specialize in things that fit into my pockets. I always wear cargo pants. So many pockets, even I lose track.
I spend a lot of time looking around, waiting to see who might be spying on me. But I don’t see any gangsters in black do-rags.
I don’t see Lanaia anywhere either.
So I just hang. It’s fun watching all these people. I check out some kids skateboarding, grinding down the steps. They don’t have a care in the world. They’ll go to classes. Graduate. Get good jobs. Nice houses. Their lives are like an old TV show. Not real. Just pretend.
My life is real. Theirs is just a TV script.
I feel a tap on my shoulder. I turn around.
Aw, man. It’s old Officer Friendly. The same cop who tried to kick me out of the library yesterday.
“Hey there,” he says. “Remember me?”
“Sup,” I say.
“Darius Higgenbo
tham, right?”
I try not to laugh at that.
“The one and only,” I say.
“How are things in Meem?”
“Great. Just perfect.”
“On your way to class?”
“Yeah, I was just headed that way now.”
“You said criminal justice, right?”
“Yep.”
“Well, the CJ building is on the other side of campus, you know.”
“Oh, well, I’m going to a special presentation this morning,” I say.
“Really?”
“Yeah. It’s called How to Hassle Brown Kids for No Reason. All cops have to take it.”
“Funny,” says Officer Friendly.
He and I eye each other up for a few seconds.
“What you messing with me for?” I ask.
“I’m not messing with you. I’m just doing my job,” he says.
“A robot could do your job,” I say. “Why don’t you go find some criminals to arrest? My neighborhood is full of them.” Oops, I just gave myself away. “My old neighborhood, I mean, before I became a college student. If you were a real cop, that’s what you’d be doing. If there were any real cops anywhere, they’d be arresting the ones who need it. The dealers and the punks and the gangbangers. Not people who ain’t buggin’ anyone.”
Man, I hate this dude. His prickly hair, his sunglasses, his big arms, his cocky attitude. Cops think they protect people, but all they do is strut around acting like they own the place. Make themselves feel better for having tiny dicks. He probably grew up watching NASCAR and yelling shit at black people out car windows for fun. Maybe he was in the Klan. I bet he’s got a Nazi tattoo somewhere under that uniform.
“My job is to protect this campus,” he says.
“If your job was being a racist, you’d be getting a medal,” I say.
“What’d you say?”
“You heard me.”
“You think because I’m asking you questions, I’m a racist?”
“Well, I don’t see you bugging any of the other people around here.”
“That’s because they all belong here. They go to school here. What’s your story?”
“I told you. Criminal justice.”
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