What's Mine and Yours

by Naima Coster

  He said the play was meant to be a refuge, for everybody; the rehearsals were a safe space. And if they all did their jobs, they might be able to spark a conversation and provide a service to their community through the arts. It was corny and went on for too long, but no one nodded their heads along more vehemently than Noelle and Adira, who sat together, their hands clasped. Noelle had joined Concerned Students for Justice and invited Gee to come. When he had asked what they were planning, Noelle said nobody knew yet; it was mostly a place to talk. He steered clear, but Noelle kept asking. Whenever he said no, she said, Why won’t you come? What’s wrong? and he knew she was fishing for an answer about what had happened that day in the hall. Just thinking of it, the terrible headline Ewing Street, made him feel as if the room were being swallowed up, a dark film slowly washing over his eyes.

  Noelle found him in the hall one day, between classes, and told him to meet her in the auditorium a half hour before rehearsal. “I’m not asking as your friend,” she said. “I’m asking as your stage manager.” Then she clomped away in her boots, her ponytail swinging behind her.

  When he arrived, she was onstage, kneeling over a long scroll of paper. She was painting prison bars in gray, the gaps between them. She had painted many of the sets mostly by herself, coming early and staying late. She worked as if she believed all the things Mr. Riley said were true and her efforts could make a difference to the school, the parents. She might have been naive, but he couldn’t help but admire her. He didn’t want to stay away.

  “You’ve been messing up your lines,” she said. “I want you to run them with me. There aren’t that many, and I know you know them by now.”

  “Maybe I don’t.”

  Noelle sighed. “You either do or you don’t, Gee. Which one is it?”

  Gee shrugged, and Noelle shook her head. It was the first time she had shown she was annoyed with him.

  “You want to know something?” she said. “I like you, Gee, but I’m not sure you like me.”

  Gee felt his heart thumping in his ears.

  “You don’t tell me anything, and I ask you questions, and you shrug, and you mumble, and that isn’t how you’re supposed to act with your friends.”

  He deflated at the mention of friendship, although he supposed it was true—they were friends.

  She asked what had happened that day in the hall, why he had been so upset, why he hardly spoke a word while they walked back out to the lot to wait for Linette.

  “I thought you wanted to run lines,” he said.

  “Fine.” Noelle snatched off the hot-pink scarf she had tied around her neck and retied it like a bandanna around her crown. “How about I tell you something first then. Sit down.”

  He sat beside her, and she told him about her father and his drugs, how he was there sometimes and sometimes he wasn’t, about the stupid leather jacket he had given her, the house he’d bought and stolen and sold.

  “I hate to say it, but I’m pretty sure he’s a bad person. So is my mother. I come from bad people.”

  “You say it like you’re proud.”

  “I’m not ashamed. I didn’t do any of that stuff.”

  “But once they know, people see you different.”

  “I don’t care how people see me.”

  “Come on,” Gee said.

  “I don’t. I really fucking don’t.”

  “Well, I’m not you.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to be.”

  She took his hand and pressed it to her chest, a flat spot at the center, below her throat. It surprised him, filled him with a warm gush of feeling.

  “Everybody’s got secrets,” she said. “Everybody. That’s what I love about music, plays. It’s everybody’s worst business all laid out.”

  “But you didn’t tell me your business—you told me your parents’.”

  Noelle told him about the abortion.

  “Why are you looking at me that way? What, do you think I’m bad now, too?”

  Gee shook his head. “My mother got pregnant in high school. If she’d had an abortion, I wouldn’t be here.”

  “Well, she didn’t.”

  “Was it Duke’s?”

  “It was mine.”

  “So you’re trying to trade or something? A secret for a secret?”

  Noelle said nothing, waiting on him. It made him want to tell her everything, as if to tell her here, in the auditorium, might keep the truth safe. He felt that they were somewhere else, far away from the town, as if the auditorium weren’t a part of the school at all. It wasn’t the place where he’d attended that first town hall. He was different here. He said things aloud he never would have said elsewhere, like, Death is a fearful thing and I am so out of love with life that I will sue to be rid of it. He could say these things here; they were bone-deep, real, even if someone else had written the lines.

  He told her about Ray. He didn’t say, It was an accident. He didn’t say, He passed on, because nothing about the way he’d gone was natural. He told her he had been killed.

  “He loved me,” Gee said. “Even if I don’t remember him much. That was his picture on the wall. Did you see it?”

  Noelle listened quietly, her arms wrapped around her legs, her chin on her knees.

  “You were five?”

  “Six.”

  Noelle reached for Gee and pressed him to her chest. She said nothing as she held him, and Gee felt himself wilt pleasantly, his body losing form against hers.

  When she pulled away from him, her face was serious.

  “I’m going to help you,” she said. “Now let’s run those lines.”

  It was Beckett who saw them together. He’d snuck into the auditorium through the rear to look for a pair of headphones he’d left at the last rehearsal. He knew Noelle and Gee were spending time together, but not alone, not like this. He saw them onstage, too close. He slipped into the wings to hear.

  The next day Gee was walking to class when an anonymous white boy shoved him against the lockers. There were two others with him, neither of whom Gee recognized, and they took turns slamming him against the wall. He spoke without thinking, the words spewing out of him. What the hell are you doing? and Get off me. It was a reflex, too, when he pushed one of the white boys back.

  He couldn’t see the span of the hallway, the figures of the other students. There were only these three before him: their cursing faces, their collared shirts. They called him a thug and said he didn’t belong at their school, his father was a gangbanger and that’s why he was dead. They said he ought to stay away from other people’s girls. One of them pushed him so hard Gee’s head snapped back, made contact with the steel locker. There was a ringing in his ears.

  He swung at one of the boys, landed a punch on his cheek. Gee had scuffled with other kids when he was young, but they had been play fights, and you could quit, complain if someone hit you too hard. You were never in a corner. This was different—clumsy, rough. No way out. They pinned him to the wall. They shook him by the collar, grabbed him by the straps of his backpack, swung him to the ground. Gee collapsed on himself defensively, felt himself being kicked, stomped. They pummeled any part of him they could reach. He heard a girl scream, someone call for a teacher, but Gee couldn’t imagine that help would arrive, that anyone would intervene. There was only this moment, the feeling of pressure in his stomach, blows to the side of his face, his shoulder, his groin. The sensation of air being pushed out of him. One eye closing and then another. The boys above him blotting out the light. He tried to get up, but they held him down. He was drowning, and they were water. He struggled, until all went dark.

  At the hospital, Jade asked every nurse who came to check on Gee when she could expect an officer to arrive to take down a report. It shouldn’t be taking so long; it was protocol. There had been a crime, and they’d better be ready to treat it like one.

  They had Gee in the ER, a room sectioned off with hanging sheets. He sat up in the bed, his cheeks swollen, one finger set in a s
plint, his speech slurred at first from the painkillers. There was a cut over his eye, another on his hand that had been stitched up. Jade had seen a hundred patients, more, receive sutures in places more tender than their hands, but she had still gagged as she watched the doctor seal his flesh with wire.

  You’re a lucky young man, the doctor had said because all of Gee’s X-rays had come back fine. Jade had started yelling and requested a different doctor. They were waiting now for someone new.

  Through the haze of the medication, Gee watched her. She was agitated, pacing the small stall. She hardly looked up when another doctor swept aside the privacy curtain and came in. He had gray hair and light eyes, round spectacles. He introduced himself as Dr. Henriquez.

  “I used to work with your mother.” He offered his hand. “I’ve always wanted to meet you. I’m sorry it’s like this. How are you feeling?”

  “I’m all right,” Gee said. “When can we go home?”

  Jade asked to speak to the doctor privately in the hall, and they stepped beyond the curtain. Gee couldn’t make out their back-and-forth, and when they came back in, Jade was wiping her eyes. Dr. Henriquez said he’d find out as soon as he could when Gee could be released. He promised Jell-O and a fresh round of painkillers in the meantime. He winked good-bye and let the curtain fall.

  Jade sat in the lone chair next to Gee’s bed. “I’m going to kill whoever did this to you,” she said.

  Gee wanted to warn her she shouldn’t be saying that kind of thing—maybe someone was listening, maybe, after everything, she would be the one who wound up in trouble—but he let her rant and rant. He was numb, his head foggy. He knew lots of people who had been beaten up before, but he’d never been one of them. He had survived it; it was over; he was on the other side of it now. What had stuck with him was the feeling of being overpowered. He had been feeble, trapped. There was nothing he could do but give in. He remembered that.

  He wasn’t expecting to see Noelle when she appeared in the makeshift room, parting the curtains suddenly and thrusting herself among them. She was crying and started crying harder when she saw his face. Gee wondered how beat-up he looked; he hadn’t wanted a mirror.

  Noelle latched her arms around his neck, and Gee let himself be held. When she pulled away, she turned to Jade and said, “I know who did it. I know who did this to Gee.”

  She looked familiar, but Jade couldn’t place the girl. She wore a pair of battered, mammoth-sized boots, a black vest pierced by a half-dozen safety pins.

  The girl explained it had been three boys from the church where Duke Redfield’s parents were deacons. They were friends with Duke, knuckleheads acting on his behalf. They’d taken it upon themselves to send a message, although what the message was she couldn’t be sure.

  “I have an idea,” Jade said, but the children didn’t seem to be listening. Noelle was holding Gee’s hand in hers, and Jade quickly grasped what was going on between them. She staggered out to find León.

  Jade lurched through the halls wearily. She felt dizzy, light boned. When they had called her from the school and mentioned the assault, she had braced herself and thought, My baby is dead. She flew out of the clinic and did eighty-five, ninety, as she maneuvered down the highway. Ray, she prayed as she drove. Come and help your son. After all these years, it was still the most natural thing to do, to call on Ray to help her, help them. There was no one else she needed close, to hold her up, so that she could face Gee, survive what those boys had done to him.

  Jade found León at the nurse’s station surrounded by a cadre of women in scrubs. They were idly chatting, the women smiling, and Jade wanted to shake him for being so at ease, so calm, while her son was beaten, bloodied. Jade waited for him to finish with the nurses. When he turned to her, he spoke officially, medically about Gee. They’d be released within the hour.

  “An officer hasn’t been by to collect his testimony. We can’t leave until that’s done.”

  León spoke delicately, in a tone Jade recognized as the one he used for volatile patients. “I spoke to the attending. Gee told the officer he didn’t have anything to report. It was before you arrived. They can’t make him talk.”

  “I bet I can.”

  “Jade, I’m sure he has his reasons for keeping quiet. Maybe you should listen to him.”

  “And let those boys get away with what they did? If it had been the other way around—if Gee had jumped one of them—he’d already be behind bars. Maybe he’d be dead.”

  “Let’s just thank God he’s fine. And let him make his own decisions. That’s a part of his recovery, too.”

  “This has nothing to do with you,” Jade scoffed. “You have zero say in this.”

  León reached for her shoulders, although they had an agreement against touching in public. “Technically, I’m his doctor.”

  “Technically, you’re no one to him.”

  León dropped his hands, and she could see that she’d wounded him.

  “Why do you have to push? Why are you trying to get in the middle of this? You’re not his father. He had a father. His name was Ray.”

  “I’m not trying to replace anyone. I’m just trying to help.”

  “So send an officer.”

  León shook his head. “You can’t always protect him, Jade.”

  “Are you kidding? That’s the main thing I’m supposed to do. And I’m failing.”

  León reached for her again, drew her toward him.

  “What are you doing? They can see us.”

  “I don’t care.”

  She pushed him away. “You’re not listening. If you won’t send an officer, then we’re done here. There’s nothing else that I need you for.”

  Back in the room, Jade found Gee with a worried expression, his mouth twisted to the side, as if he were waiting for a pain to subside. She asked him if he was all right, but before he answered, she heard his friend on the other side of the curtain. She was talking to an older woman, the two of them standing just beyond the curtain. It rippled with their movements. Jade listened and realized quickly why her son was so upset.

  “I thought you knew better than to get tied up with boys like that.”

  “It was Duke and his friends. They’re the ones I should avoid.”

  “This is exactly why I didn’t want things at the school to change, but you didn’t listen. All you wanted to do was criticize me when I’ve been trying to help you.”

  “Gee didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Gee! What kind of name is that? Noelle, I thought you were smarter than this, smarter than me.”

  Jade pushed past the curtain and found Noelle beside a woman she could only assume was her mother. She had her hair tied up with a large clip, the ends splayed like the spokes of a wheel. She was lean with a mean, pretty face. She wore a yellow vest Jade recognized from the grocery store. She wore a pin that read TEAM LEADER.

  “Would you mind moving your conversation somewhere that my son can’t hear? And, to be honest, I don’t want to hear it either.”

  Noelle apologized quickly, and the woman sneered defiantly at Jade. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Gee’s mother—you know, the young man with the funny name. Who the hell are you?”

  “I remember you. From the town hall.” The woman narrowed her eyes at Jade. “Tell your son to keep away from my daughter.”

  “Mama, I came to see him,” pleaded Noelle. “He’s my friend.”

  “You don’t need friends who will only bring you trouble. You don’t need friends who will derail your life.”

  Jade was stunned at how frankly this white woman was talking in front of her, how unafraid she seemed to offend. It was as if she thought her words were unimpeachable truth, and it was a service to say them. She was an ignorant woman, dangerous. Another woman’s child was laid up in the hospital, and all she could see was the imagined threat to her own.

  “Noelle, I think you better leave. Take your mother with you.”

  “This is a free c
ountry, and I’ll go wherever I like.”

  “Don’t you have any decency?” Jade said. “My son was just assaulted, and you’re out here calling him names. Some example you’re setting for your daughter.”

  Lacey May looked stunned. She hitched a hand onto one hip and went to snap back, but Noelle seized her hand and yelled, “Leave it, Mama.” She started dragging her down the hall, and Lacey May followed reluctantly. She turned around more than once to glare at Jade, but she said nothing. Noelle was sobbing again.

  Fury surged through Jade. She wondered whether she should have done more to put that woman in her place, to defend her son. She heard Gee calling her, and she came back to her senses. He was the one who needed her. Chances were, they’d never see that awful woman and her daughter again.

  Noelle announced she was moving out that night. She wasted no time packing up a bag with her clothes, a cardboard box with her shoes and schoolbooks. Then she called Ruth and asked her to come and get her.

  “Now, you know I can’t do that,” Ruth said.

  “Either you come and get me and I’m staying with you, or I’m leaving this house and looking for somewhere else to stay, starting with the bus station.”

  “All right. Bailey and I are coming.”

  Lacey May didn’t stop screaming the whole time Noelle was putting her things together. Hank shut himself in the bedroom so he wouldn’t have to watch. Margarita sat impassively at the TV, mostly watching her show but occasionally interjecting to point out how both Lacey May and Noelle were wrong, that they were two peas in a pod and they deserved each other. Diane followed her eldest sister around, tugging at her knees and weeping.