“How could you, Nood?” I felt like I didn’t know him, because as far as I was concerned, I didn’t. Or maybe I did. Maybe I knew him all too well. Maybe I knew exactly who he was, but I never wanted to admit it to myself, because he was my only real friend. I pledged my friendship, and in our neighborhood your word is your bond and loyalty is everything. But Noodles hadn’t been loyal, had he? I mean, he turned his back on his own brother. What if it was me being jumped?
I glanced at the microwave: 9:27. I knew that was wrong. It figures that they wouldn’t set the clock. I patted my pockets for my cell phone to check the time. That’s when I realized my phone was missing. Damn. I must have lost it in the fight.
I stood up. It was time for me to go. I didn’t know exactly what time it was, but I knew it was late, and I could have just asked Noodles to check his phone and tell me, but I felt like if I opened my mouth to ask him anything, it would be followed up with my fist.
“Where you going?” Noodles asked, as if I didn’t have a home to go to. As if I owed him something. I didn’t answer. I just headed toward the door.
“Wait, Ali!”
I kept walking.
“Ali!”
The space between the raggedy chair and card table and the door seemed like the length of a football field, and I was running slowly toward the end zone trying not to let Noodles’s words run me down and tackle me. I couldn’t let them. Not tonight. Not after what happened.
“Ali!” he screamed, loud enough to startle me. I turned around and gave him a cold stare without saying a word.
“It’s because our father left when he heard that Needles had a syndrome.”
I was confused. “Nood, honestly, I don’t know what you’re talking about, and tonight I don’t think I care.”
“Ali—I ain’t seen him in years. He bounced way before we moved around here.” Noodles’s voice started cracking. “Everything was cool, but as soon as the syndrome started, he was out. He ain’t want no kid with no syndrome. He figured Needles was crazy, so eventually I might be too, and we would make him look bad. This is what my mother told me. She said, when the doctors said Needles had the syndrome, my father was so mad that he punched a hole in the wall. I don’t remember that, but the next morning he was gone.”
I still stood there, emotionless.
“That’s why—that’s why I’m so hard on him.” Noodles started looking glassy. “If he ain’t have that stupid syndrome, we’d still have a father. We’d still have a family. It changed everything. Ma got all depressed, and down, and started staying out all late with strangers, and coming in looking all beat-up and old. We had to move to this crappy apartment, with crackheads running around upstairs. Everything was ruined. And I know it ain’t Needles’s fault, Ali. I know it ain’t, but . . .”
His voice was cracking, and I could tell he was holding back his tears, literally shaking, trying not to cry. I stood there unable to give him any of the support I guess he expected me to give. But I appreciated him finally answering the question that I asked him earlier, and could even respect him for coming to grips with the fact that it’s not Needles’s fault that he has a syndrome, and that they don’t have a father. I still couldn’t find nothing nice to say to Noodles to make him feel better, though. There was no hug in me—he had emptied me out. I couldn’t do nothing else to try to help him. So I turned around, and left.
11
The moment I turned the knob to my front door, pain shot through my fingertips. I’d been so worried about Needles that I had forgotten that my hand was messed up! The pain was sharp, like little lightning bolts striking under my skin, hitting every nerve. I almost cried out, but I held it together. I couldn’t make too much noise. My mother and sister were asleep, and I needed to slip into bed as quietly and as cool as possible. Didn’t want to wake anyone and then have to explain my busted lip, or why I’m home so late. Funny thing is, I didn’t even know what time it was, but I knew it was definitely past curfew. I took my shoes off at the door. They were no longer clean and white. No longer perfect. In fact, they were a clear sign of how the night had gone—all wrong. Filthy. Little splats of blood on the left one. I wasn’t sure whose it was, but I hoped it wasn’t mine. The shoes were ruined, and I thought, darkly, that they would definitely be a reminder. A symbol of what protection and loyalty looks like. And in some screwed-up way, my first real victory. Hell, my first real fight! I would keep them, I thought. At least the left one. Definitely the left one.
I slid my feet across the floor, like a forward moonwalk, past the couch and television and down the hall into my room. I put my shoes as far under the bed as I could, then took off the rest of my clothes. Only then did I go to the bathroom to see how bad my face was. I was only hit a few times, so I didn’t think there would be too much damage. I flipped the light switch in the bathroom. The buzzing fan kicked in, and I stared in the mirror. The one sign of me being tagged was my lip, which was a little swollen, mainly on the inside. That would go down by the morning. My jaw felt stiff, so I opened and closed my mouth like I was chewing on Silly Putty or cheap bodega candy. Lemonheads, Laffy Taffy. I could hear the hinge of my jaw clicking every time I opened my mouth, but I knew it would be fine. Wasn’t the first time. I had taken one to the jaw a few times before, messing around with Malloy, enough that it’s gotten pretty sturdy over the last few years.
I washed my hands, splashed water on my face, and slipped back into my bedroom. My mattress, old and lumpy, was now a small piece of paradise, right there in my room. It never felt so good to be home. Crazy as it sounds, I had never been so excited to go to bed. I lay there for a moment and thought about all that had happened.
Suddenly it all came crashing down on me. The pain. My jaw. My hand. My mom’s advice, now ringing in my head, about when I can’t do it anymore, when I can’t put up with Noodles and his crap, I’ll know it. And I knew it. I mean, I was his friend, but was he mine? Did he even know how to be a friend? How to be a brother? Maybe he didn’t mean any harm, and couldn’t control himself—like a different kind of syndrome. Or better yet, maybe he was just a selfish poseur, using his daddy as an excuse to be wack. Just thinking about it started pissing me off all over again, so I decided to try to go to sleep.
I couldn’t have had my eyes closed for more than five minutes before I heard a noise coming from the living room. At first I thought it was a mouse, which was no big deal. Mice might as well pay rent around here. That’s what the old folks always say. But then I heard the noise again. It was louder. It sounded like someone scratching at the door, fidgeting with something they shouldn’t have been fidgeting with—the lock. Now, unless this was a mouse the size of a bear, someone was trying to break into our apartment! I sat straight up in the bed so I could hear better. My mouth instantly got dry, and my heart started pounding hard enough to bust. Break-ins don’t really happen much around here, because it’s too hard to get into a brownstone. Way too many doors and steps just to get a TV and a couple pieces of jewelry. So usually when someone’s house gets broken into, it’s not to steal. It’s to get someone.
And then it hit me. Could it be the dudes from MoMo’s party? Naw. I mean, nobody knows where I live. At least I don’t think so. Except MoMo. But he didn’t see me. Or did he? But he wouldn’t tell those goons where I stay, and put me and my family in danger, right? Right?
The lumps in the mattress seemed to get harder, and my pillow all of a sudden felt like a concrete slab. Everything was uncomfortable again as my nerves shook off the sleep. Part of me wanted to close my eyes and become Noodles, scared and disconnected, hiding in a corner hoping a superhero would come save me. But just like at the party, I didn’t have time to be scared. Well, I take that back. I was scared, but I still had to do something. Especially since my mom and my little sister were right across the hall, asleep. All I could do is hope that whoever was coming to get me didn’t have a gun. Please don’t have a gun!
I reached under my bed and got the baseball bat my fath
er gave me years ago. He was a big believer of having a bat under the bed to protect the family, just in case. Now just in case was happening. I slipped out of bed again, this time being extra sure to make no sound at all. I started creeping through the hall, the bat clinched tight in my right hand, my left hand sliding softly along the wall to guide me. Yeah, my heart was pounding hard enough to explode, but I forced myself to be a ninja.
I could still hear the lock being picked. Whoever was out there was trying to open it as slowly and carefully as possible, and was taking their time, trying not to wake anyone. Well, I was awake—I’d never actually felt more awake—and ready to put whoever was behind the door straight to sleep. Well, not really. All I was expecting to do was just smash his hand whenever he tried to undo the chain lock. But then I realized, I forgot to put the stupid chain on the door! Stupid, stupid, STUPID!
Suddenly the knob turned. Now, like I said, I was scared, but I felt kinda pumped up too, like at the party. No one was getting into my house. I would wait for whoever it was to come in, and then try to take his head off.
The person pushed the door open, slowly, just enough for his slim, slimy self to creep in. I stood just to the right of the door. He couldn’t see me because he slid in on the left, of course.
On three, aim for his face. One. Two. Three. Right when I started swinging the bat, the light flipped on. I was blinded by the sudden flash in the room, but I knew I connected.
“Jesus Christ!” he screamed. “Are you crazy, Ali!”
The voice was instantly familiar.
It was my father.
I gasped, and blinked madly, trying to see in the light. He was holding the side of his mouth. “What the hell are you doing?” he shouted, yanking the bat from me. And then he said, “And what are you doing, Doris?”
I turned around, and there she was, my mother, standing in the hall with a faded pink, oversize T-shirt, QUEENS SLEEP ALONE across the front in a corny cursive. She was holding the biggest knife I had ever seen. It definitely wasn’t the one Jazz chops onions with, that’s for sure.
“I heard something,” she said. She stood there shocked and scared, but ready nonetheless. I guess she was going to protect me while I was protecting her. The whole thing was kinda absurd, and my heartbeat started getting back to normal.
“What are you doing, John?” Doris said back to my father. Then she added with her familiar bite, “Why you breaking in this time of night?” As if there was a better time to be “breaking in.”
“Breaking in? I have a key, remember? I was trying to be quiet. Was just gonna come in, check on this fool, then leave.” John shot me a look. He was opening and closing his mouth like I had been earlier. I wondered if his jaw was clicking. The bat must’ve caught him pretty clean.
“Check on him for what?” Now Doris shot me a look.
Shoot. I totally forgot, I was supposed to text him when I got in. But I wouldn’t have been able to do it anyway because I didn’t have my phone. Damn! Damn, damn, damn! I looked at John, hoping that he could see in my eyes that I needed him to cover for me.
He shifted his eyes from mine, and I already knew what was coming, but I still tried to stall.
“Yeah, check on me for what?” I asked nervously.
“Ali, please. You broke the rules. We had a deal,” he said, pushing past me. He took a seat on the couch and massaged his jaw.
“What is going on?” my mother demanded. I couldn’t tell if she was worried, or if she was just wondering why my father had plopped down on the sofa like he was planning to stay awhile.
“You want me to tell her, or will you do the honors like a man, son?” My father looked at me with a butthole look on his face. The kind of look that burns me up on the inside. He used that “like a man” all the time to trick me into telling on myself, but it was okay, because I did believe that a man stands up and admits what he’s done. A man takes the heat coming to him. But I just wasn’t ready for it yet.
“She already knew,” I said. I figured it was worth a shot.
“Knew what?” my mother asked.
“That I was hanging out with Needles and Noodles.”
Doris nodded her head. John shook his.
“Oh, so your mother knew you and Needles and Noodles—”
“Okay, okay, I’ll tell her!” I cut him off, talking in a much higher pitch than normal.
“Tell me what? What’s going on!” Doris yelped, frustrated. I could tell she was getting nervous. She took a seat on the couch next to John. He scootched over just a little, just enough to keep their legs touching. She didn’t look uncomfortable but not really comfortable, either. Somewhere right in the middle. Well, mainly she looked pissed. She probably wasn’t even thinking about John.
“I went out tonight.”
“Ali!” John barked. That’s all. Just “Ali!” I knew what that meant. That meant, get to the point before he got to the point for me. It’s funny how his fatherhood kicked in at the most inconvenient times.
“Okay, okay!” I snapped. “Ma, I went to a party.” I paused, and my father glared at me. “A MoMo party,” I added.
My mother looked at John, confused.
“What the hell is a MoMo?” she asked. I wanted to laugh, but I knew that would’ve got me popped.
“MoMo, Doris. Maurice Williams, from down the other side of Lewis. Thomas and Greta’s boy. He has these parties and—” John stopped. Looked at me. “Matter fact, I’m just gonna let Ali here tell you about the parties.”
My mother looked up at me, her eyes big but tired, waiting for whatever disappointing blow was about to come through my lips. I took a deep breath. Who would’ve thought it’d be so hard to swallow air?
“MoMo has these parties. And usually no one is allowed unless you are eighteen or older. But I got invited.”
Doris cut me off. “By who?” She sat ramrod straight and looked like she was either correcting bad posture or avoiding getting too comfortable next to John.
My mind was racing. I knew I couldn’t snitch on Tasha. If I said Tasha invited me, then my mother would’ve asked what a young girl like Tasha was doing there, and if MoMo and Tasha’s parents knew, and that if they didn’t, she would, of course, have to tell them because she’s a parent and she knows what it’s like to try to keep kids out of trouble, and then Tasha would be angry with me and surely never talk to me again, even though that was already a possibility because I beat the brakes off her brother’s friends.
“By MoMo,” I heard myself say. I sucked as a liar.
“By MoMo? Why would he invite you, a minor, to his party, Ali?” She looked at me sideways. I mean, she literally turned her head to the side and looked me up and down, as if seeing me from the sideways angle would help her better see the lie. Or maybe she knew that it would help me to better see that I was caught, and that the lying better stop instantly.
I tried to catch John’s eye. I knew he knew why I had to lie. I silently begged him for a little help, just to throw me one more bone to not get this girl, my friend Tasha, who I already let down, in trouble.
“What you scared of, Ali?” John asked. He could tell I was holding back for a reason.
“Man, I can’t snitch,” I said, tough. Well, that got my mother all worked up, antsy like the cushion she was sitting on got hot. She started shaking her head and rocking back and forth like the junkies do on Fulton.
John sat there for a second. He wiped some of the tired off his face.
“I understand,” he said. “Word is bond. I ain’t no snitch neither.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Doris demanded.
“That means that what he tells me—us—stays right here in this room, got me?” He nodded his head at Doris to make sure she understood.
It felt good to know that John had come back to cool. All that foot-putting-down wasn’t hitting on nothing.
“Okay,” I said, feeling like maybe I could breathe again. “Tasha invited us.”
“Who exactly is u
s?” my mother asked. Then she thought about it. “No, wait, let me guess. That Noodles went too, didn’t he?” Whenever something went wrong, he was that Noodles.
“Yeah, but Needles was with us too,” I said quickly, hoping that Needles’s name would soften the blow, since she had a soft spot for him.
“Needles! Lord! Y’all dragged that sweet child into y’all’s mess? Y’all really are something,” she fumed, looking at John, shaking her head. “And exactly what happened at this party, Ali?” I swear, my mother was getting her TV lawyer on.
“Nothing. We partied,” I said. Short and to the point.
“Nothing?” Doris said, once again looking at me sideways.
“Nothing?” John followed up like a bratty little sister playing copycat.
“I mean, not nothing. Something happened. But nothing to be worried about. Everything is cool,” I quickly assured them.
My father, his eyes squinting, was now taking in my split lip, I could tell. But instead he asked, “What happened to your hand?”
I looked down, and I couldn’t believe it—it was swollen twice its normal size. It had blown up like a balloon animal.
“Jesus Christ, what happened!” my mother shrieked, jumping to her feet. She took up my hurt hand and compared it with the other one.
“What happened?” she asked again, this time her voice gentler, more worried. “And I want the truth, Ali! No more beating around the bush!”
So, I laid it out.
“Okay, the truth,” I started. I winced as my mother softly pressed at each finger, which, believe me, did not feel good. My father leaned forward just to make it clear that he was listening as well. I knew part of him wanted to hear this story for no other reason than the fact that it was juicy. He was funny in that way. Immature sometimes but cool about it.
When I Was the Greatest Page 13