“My mom has an idea.”
“You told your mom?”
“She said to drop Phat Tony a note at the jail but don’t sign it.”
“Like in that movie.” Kambui was getting excited. “I know what you did last summer. Something like that.”
“Yeah.”
“Except he’s not in jail anymore. He’s back in school. They let him out,” Kambui said. “Take a look down the hall.”
I turned around and saw Phat Tony and two of the other Genius Gangstas bopping down the hall. There were a zillion kids around them, and I figured Phat Tony was talking up how he had gone to jail and stuff. Weird.
What bothered me was that I had wished the whole thing with Phat Tony would just go away, and now it looked as if it might. But if he and his crew were really gangsters and ended up hurting somebody, then it was going to be on Kambui, who took the picture, and me, because I knew about it, too.
I wished he hadn’t told me.
Sometimes I am smart and sometimes I am soooo smart it’s scary. Not weird smart like Bobbi with math or LaShonda with design, but smart enough to impress me, and that’s not easy.
“So what’s this brilliant idea?” LaShonda asked.
“Ashley is going to get articles from the Guardian in England and thinks everybody is going to fall out, right?”
“That’s pretty impressive to me,” Bobbi said.
“Okay, so how about we hook up with a school in London and have them contribute articles to The Cruiser?” I said. “I looked up a bunch of schools in and around London. One of them is Dulwich, where an Arctic explorer went. Another is Eton, whose big thing is that it’s always in crossword puzzles. But then I found Phoenix, which is in London. And when I saw the pictures of their students I got hooked right away. It’s, like, Diversity Digs.”
I flipped on the computer monitor and then called up the Phoenix website. It was really a good-looking site and the kids who went there looked a lot like the kids at Da Vinci.
“You e-mail them?” LaShonda asked.
“Yeah, and I sent them some digital copies of The Cruiser and asked them if we could have a Skype date,” I said. “They came back with a probable yes but they had to clear it with their school.”
Bobbi and LaShonda spent the next several minutes going over the Phoenix school website. It looked great and all the Cruisers were interested.
“This is going to send Ashley up the wall,” Kambui said.
“It’s a gifted and talented wall,” Bobbi said in a voice so soft I could hardly hear her.
“Do we have to clear it with Mrs. Maxwell?” LaShonda asked.
We all agreed that we should, and I wanted to run it by Ashley, too. I have a lot of respect for the editor of The Palette and she had a lot of respect for the Cruisers before the competition thing came around. I sent her an IM asking to meet with her, and she came back with a message saying a meeting would be cool.
Meanwhile, Phat Tony was running his mouth like he was campaigning for president or something. He was in school and every lunch period he was sitting with his crew talking about how the police had questioned him. Me and LaShonda wandered over to where he was holding court.
“They had me in this little room with a television camera in the corner.” Phat Tony was talking with a tuna salad sandwich in one hand. “They thought I didn’t notice the camera, but I was steady checking it out. I knew that everything I said could be used against me in a court of law.”
“They try the good cop, bad cop trick on you?” a freshman asked. I could tell the kid was a freshman because he wore his DV Academy medallion and only freshman wore those.
“They tried everything,” Phat Tony said. “They even had my mom on their side, saying how she had always told me to tell the truth.”
“So where’s the case now?” I asked.
“They had to let me go because they don’t have any evidence,” Phat Tony said. “They actually thought they had trapped François Villon in their petite trappe. But it don’t hardly go that way, mes amis. They got to come down longer and harder before they get the kid.”
“They take your DNA?” the freshman asked.
“They wanted to,” Phat Tony said. “But I asked them if they had a search warrant. They didn’t, so I told them to cop a walk!”
“They got any evidence at all?” LaShonda asked.
“They said they got a little something, but they wouldn’t tell me.” Phat Tony was looking smug. “This one detective kept covering up his notes so I couldn’t see them. Maybe he wants me to beg him to take a peek. Maybe, instead, I’ll just make him an offer he can’t refuse!”
“Did you do it?” another kid asked.
“If I answered that question I’d have to kill you,” Phat Tony said, looking at the kid with one eye half closed. “And that would probably ruin your whole day, wouldn’t it?”
When LaShonda and I split the lunchroom I asked her if she thought Phat Tony had stuck up the store in the mall. Her “no” was really strong.
“He’s talking too much,” she said. “And that line about making an offer that somebody can’t refuse is right from The Godfather.”
To my mind the idea that Phat Tony was quoting from The Godfather didn’t make him innocent. He could have been a guilty dude who happened to see a lot of movies.
THE CRUISER
THE BALLAD OF THE DEAD RAPPERS
By Phat Tony
Big L’s fallen, Grym Reaper’s history,
Tupac’s death is a mystery
For Old Dirty Bastard we shed a tear
Oh, where are the rappers of yesteryear?
Big Pun had heart, but it gave way
Buffy from the Fat Boys has seen his last day
Biggie caught some bullets, that’s what I hear
Oh, where are the rappers of yesteryear?
Mrs. Maxwell had started a program she called Operation Leapfrog. In the program some kids from Booker Elementary who were having trouble with their reading skills came over to Da Vinci and we helped them with their reading. Mostly girls are doing the mentoring, but Mrs. Maxwell had asked some boys to at least hang out in the media center while the mentoring was going on.
Booker was on 126th Street and St. Nicholas, down the street from the park. The kids looked a little rough and I expected our girls were going to have some trouble and it happened. Five minutes into the reading sessions we heard a big noise — it sounded just like a chair falling over or something — and then a commotion. I looked up from a magazine I was reading and saw Shirley Tolentino lying on the floor and a boy, fists clenched, standing over her.
Cody was the first one over and he pushed the boy away from Shirley. The boy, from Booker, was kind of tall and went to take a swing at Cody. Cody blocked the swing, grabbed the kid’s wrist, and spun him around, pinning him to the wall.
“I’m going to beat your ass, man!” the kid was sputtering.
I pushed his head against the wall and leaned against him as some of the other Da Vinci kids helped Shirley up.
“She said I can’t read!” the kid was going on. “She can’t read!”
“I just asked him if he could read a sentence,” Shirley said. Her face was red and puffy. “And he pushed me right out of the chair.”
The kid tried to struggle a little but saw he couldn’t move against me and Cody, and he let his body relax.
The kid wasn’t more than nine, and was a little overweight. I looked at his face to see if he was still mad and saw him start to tear up.
“Yo, push a chair to us,” I said to the small knot of Da Vinci kids gathering around.
We put the kid into the chair just as the door opened and Mrs. Maxwell and Mr. Culpepper came rushing in.
Okay, so this is what happened. The kid who pushed Shirley, Syed Nolan, was put out of the program immediately and Mrs. Maxwell asked me and Cody to go home with him.
“You don’t have to go inside or anything,” she said. “Just make sure he gets home safel
y. I’ll call his school.”
Syed said he could go home by himself, but me and Cody went with him, anyway.
Syed was sad on the way and kept saying that Shirley should not have said he couldn’t read.
“She didn’t mean anything bad,” I told Syed. “She was trying to help you, man.”
“I don’t need any help,” he said.
Syed stopped in front of a building that looked deserted. Cody asked him if he lived there, and Syed puffed up as if he was going to fight again.
“If we ask our principal to let you back in the program, will you come back?” I asked.
“No.”
On the way back to school Cody asked me if I thought that Syed actually lived in that building.
“It was the pits,” Cody said.
“Yeah,” I said. “It was, but if he doesn’t want us to try to help him, there’s nothing to do but let it be.”
“We could tell Mrs. Maxwell,” Cody said. “She’ll come up with something.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know. You remember when we were trying to help LaShonda get over and found out that what we saw as being good wasn’t that good for her because of her brother?”
“Anything has to be better than living in a dump like that,” Cody said.
“How about having your family separated and living in shelters?” I asked. “That might be better for us, so we can say that we did something for that kid. But would it be better for him or his family?”
Cody half shrugged and half shook his head. He didn’t know, and neither did I.
Dear Cruisers,
Thank you for your interest in our school. We are sending along an attachment explaining who we are and what we are about. Although we do admire your digital paper, we’re not sure what your intentions are and feel hesitant in offering a partnership. Moreover, your Cruising philosophy seems counter to Phoenix policy and the aims of our student population. Can you inform us of why you think we should form an alliance with you, and also how you see such an alliance? Perhaps we would have a clearer idea of exactly who you are if you told us of your present concerns and editorial policies.
Edward Mahfouz, general editor, the Phoenix Voice
“So who do they think they are?” Bobbi asked. “Why do they need a clearer idea of exactly who we are? Write them back and tell them that our editorial policies depend on which way the wind is blowing!”
“Suppose they contacted us,” I said, “and decided they wanted to do a hookup. Would you go for it or would you say something like ‘Who are you?’ or ‘What’s your thing?’ I mean, we could be racists or something.”
“You think the Guardian asked Ashley what The Palette was about?” Kambui asked.
“No, but the Guardian doesn’t have to worry about their articles being printed,” I said. “If Mrs. Maxwell saw that we were printing articles from some creepy magazine or some radical Nazi paper she’d probably be a little upset. Let’s tell them what issues we’re dealing with and see what they say.”
“Okay, but let’s keep it light so they don’t think we’re sucking up!” Bobbi added.
I understood Bobbi not wanting to suck up to the British school, but I was kind of excited about it. It was a different experience and I thought it might be fun.
I asked Bobbi to write up how we got to be the Cruisers, and what that meant to us. She said she would and then I asked LaShonda to do something about the neighborhood and how we wanted to improve it.
“I bet they have a whacked-out opinion of what Harlem is all about,” she said. “But I will definitely set them straight!”
I asked Kambui to write something about the Genius Gangstas. He refused.
“I think they’re jive,” he said. “That’s not, like, putting our best foot forward, or something.”
“No, but it runs down who we are in accepting people,” I said. “And if they can’t feel that then maybe we don’t want to be part of their program.”
“I hear you,” Kambui said. “Why don’t you do it?”
I could dig where Kambui was coming from. He was creating a distance between himself and the Genius Gangstas just in case something did pop off.
Home. Mom left a note for me to check the computer.
Look at Word under the file Movie.
I made myself a grilled cheese sandwich with relish and mayonnaise, then clicked on the file she had made. It was empty except for a link line. I clicked on that and an ad came up for a movie. The movie was called The Debt. It starred Eleanor Sykes and Donald Scott! It was the one my father was going to be in and the date on it was from last year.
I got the whole thing in a flash. The dude had made the movie last year but he hadn’t told Mom until he found out they were actually going to air it. Foul.
And it couldn’t be that good if it never made the theaters. Still, I knew it was going to mean more boo-hoos and depression and there was nothing I could do about it.
I head-switched to the English kids at Phoenix and started writing about the Genius Gangstas.
The Genius Gangstas of Da Vinci are a group of guys who are soft-core rappers and who do really well with their academics even though they appear not to try very hard. Sometimes they do things that border on bullying and so I don’t really feel them in any deep way. Recently there was an armed robbery at the local mall and one of the Genius Gangstas, Phat Tony, was arrested. He claimed he wasn’t there, but one of our staff members actually photographed him and his crew at the mall shortly before the robbery, which proves he lied about not being there, but I still don’t think he did the robbery. Anyway, I’ve never seen him with a gun so we’re more or less letting the matter drop as far as the robbery is concerned but The Cruiser is considering the role of the Genius Gangstas and wondering if it’s good for the school or not.
I sent the e-mail off to London, imagining my message flying across the ocean, traveling over Buckingham Palace, and landing in the school in the evening after everyone had gone home. I was wondering how the kids at Phoenix were going to answer when Mrs. Maxwell caught up with me in the hallway.
“How are you doing, Zander?” she asked.
“Good,” I said.
“I’m not so good today,” our principal answered. “I have some doubts about our Leapfrog program. And thank you and Cody for helping out the other day with that little boy. He reminded me that there aren’t always easy answers to our problems.”
“No problem,” I said.
“And I’m still concerned about Anthony Williams,” she went on. “I called the police today and they weren’t very forthcoming. They just kept telling me that I needn’t worry. There’s not a chance of that when one of my pupils might be in trouble.”
“You think he did the robbery?” I asked.
“No, I’m just concerned,” she said. “Just concerned.”
She smiled one of her quick little smiles and then walked toward her office. My first thought was that I wished I hadn’t mentioned anything about the robbery in my e-mail.
RAPPERS WANTED
MUST HAVE STREET CREDS,
SWEET DREADS,
FOR INCREDIBLE RAPPENINGS,
DREADABLE HAPPENINGS,
ROLLIN’ ROUGHER THAN ROUGH
ROLLIN’ TOUGHER THAN TOUGH
DONE SEEN ENOUGH STUFF
TO HANG WITH
AND BANG WITH
THE EINSTEINS WITH THE SWEET MINDS
SPITTING TRUTH LIKE SWEET VERMOUTH
STYLING PAIN LIKE OLD CHAMPAGNE
WITH THE ORIGINAL FANGSTERS
THE GENIUS GANGSTAS
IF YOU AIN’T NO PHONY
CONTACT PHAT TONY
Phat Tony was playing it to the hilt. He was looking to put together a crew of rappers and had pasted flyers all over the school bulletin boards and in the boys’ bathrooms. The word was that some kids were looking to hook up with him, and I heard a few trying out their rapping skills in the hallways.
So now my head was multitasking
. On one side of my brain was Phat Tony styling his gangster role and using his high IQ and good grades as a backup. And I knew I was trying to move away from thinking that maybe he really was a gangster and had done the stickup. Pushing stuff out of my mind was lame, but I was trying to do it. I was even sorry that I had run my e-mouth to the British kids.
Then I thought about Syed. I didn’t know if I should have gotten myself more involved with him or not. He needed help, but I didn’t want to open up something I couldn’t close up. With LaShonda, when they wanted to give her a scholarship that would have separated her and her brother who has autism syndrome, we were pushing back from something good because there was something better, LaShonda and her brother staying together. With Syed I didn’t know what we were pushing back from. If things were really bad and somebody tried to break up his family I didn’t know what I could do.
And then there was Bobbi’s poem in The Cruiser. We ran with the poem but we really didn’t discuss it much. I wanted to ask Bobbi why she wanted to back off being gifted, if that was what the poem really meant. I hadn’t mentioned anything to her because I didn’t know where she was coming from.
The truth was that there seemed to be a logical way of living life, and everybody could see that, but it didn’t work full-time on anybody. I started thinking about Bobbi’s math problem again. Well, it wasn’t really a math problem so much as it was a math/philosophy problem. And I didn’t know the answer to that one, either.
I ran the equation and came up with Fibonacci, so I knew I was on the right track. Then the math outran me and the ratios sneaked between my legs and left me lost.
THE PALETTE
Selling Rags
by ASHLEY SCHMIDT
Various the papers various wants produce, The wants of fashion, elegance, and use. Men are as various: and, if right I scan, Each sort of paper represents some man.
Benjamin Franklin
Apparently the staff of The Cruiser feels the need to have a publicist to promote its journalistic efforts. All over the school we are seeing flyers appear praising the self-labeled “alternative” paper. The Palette wonders what standards make a paper alternative? Is it a casual attitude? Perhaps skipping the larger issues? Or is “alternative” merely a code word to cover a multitude of sins, all of which have to do with not having a core responsibility?
Oh, Snap! Page 3