She laughed out loud at this, kissed the back of my hand and let it go. “I just worry,” Ma said.
My phone’s screen flashed and chirped. Vega had just sent me another message, telling me he had got some new boots for Christmas. Earlier, his first message had read: “Welcome to the 21st century, sucka!”
Just now another message said that him and his family were trying to leave for the airport. They were all still upstairs, running late as usual, and his father had started screaming at his mother, blaming everything on her.
His little sister, Iris, had started to cry.
I shook my head, surprised that I couldn’t hear all of them yelling from down here. Just then, the door buzzer buzzed.
Ma smiled at me. “You ain’t going to answer that door? You never know, that might be Santa. He might have forgot something last night.”
“Unpossible. Santa don’t come to the PJs,” I said. “Even if this is named St. Nick.”
But Daddy comes to the PJs, I suddenly thought. I ran and swung open our front door.
Yvonne.
She held two big ol’ black trash bags.
I guess my face had seemed dejected, because after Yvonne took one look at me, she went, “Well, merry friggin’ Christmas to you too!”
I sucked my teeth and stepped aside to let her in. She slouched through our front door, dragging her sloppy trash bags behind her. They left wet trails on the floor. I frowned.
Yvonne, Ma’s girlfriend for years, was a custodian at Tuttle’s Toy Emporium at Rockefeller Center downtown. She swept up the store and hauled out the trash.
Like Mr. Jonathan, she acted like my auntie. She wore her hair dyed blond and in a Mohawk and loved to treat me, my mother and even Vega to dinners at Applebee’s.
“Um,” I started, “why’d you bring your trash over here?”
I noticed she was way out of breath. I guessed it was from dragging these two huge plastic bags up the seven flights to our place.
Ma came racing out of the kitchen. She stopped in front of me and Yvonne. Ma’s mouth was hanging open and she was staring at us, like she expected somebody to pull a rabbit out of a hat.
Yvonne said to me, “Lolly, I am not sure that you deserve me hauling all this yick-yack through the snow and up seven floors, but I love you like my own blood, so…” She laughed at Ma, then emptied up one of the trash bags, pouring it out all over our living room floor.
I hopped back, not wanting to let any of that crap attack my new house slippers. But then I noticed something strange. It really wasn’t trash at all.
“Merry Christmas, Lolly!” Yvonne yelled.
They were Legos!
Millions and millions of Legos.
“This other one is full of them too,” Yvonne shouted, pointing toward the second trash bag.
I was so stunned I couldn’t say nothing. I knelt down and poured my hands through the mountain of plastic pieces on our floor. This mountain was even bigger than the one I had made last night when I yanked apart all my Lego kits.
These bricks, added to the secret project I had started in my room last night, might really add up to something. There was lots I could do….
Ma smiled at me. “What you think, Lolly?”
“I got them all from my job,” Yvonne said. “They were gonna pitch ’em all out in the scrap, but I was like, ‘Wait a minute. I know somebody who could use these!’ ” She bent over laughing.
I waded my hands through all the Legos some more. There were so many. They made a sound like money, like quarters tumbling together.
“What do you think, Lolly?” Ma said again.
The thing was, I couldn’t!
Man, I just couldn’t!
Me and Vega inched down the icy front steps of our middle school. I still didn’t believe that winter break was already over and I was back in class again. The two weeks off sure seemed like nothing now.
It was brick cold out this January afternoon. Vega was wearing the new shiny black parka that his grandma in DR had given him for Three Kings.
Vega had told me that in the Dominican Republic, Three Kings’ Day was actually a bigger holiday than Christmas Day. Or at least as big.
Before the little kids in DR would go to bed the night before Three Kings, they would leave small boxes of grass underneath their beds. The grass was meant to feed the camels that the three wise men would be riding. The next morning the kids would wake up to find a bunch of presents loaded at the foot of their beds.
So for them, it was like having two Christmases every year. I remember thinking that wasn’t fair and I had asked my mother if they had Three Kings’ Day in Trinidad.
Though my moms called herself Trini, for Trinidadian, she had never even been to Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean. Her parents had been born there. But ever since my grandma found out her daughter had started dating women, she didn’t speak to Ma too much.
“Mr. Ali wanna talk to you,” Vega said. “I ran into him before school. You do something?”
I supposed I knew what Mr. Ali wanted to talk about. But I wasn’t looking forward to it. Ali scared me sometimes.
“How’s your violin, Vega?” I asked, not wanting to talk about Mr. Ali.
Vega and I had to cut to the middle of the street. All the kids were hanging so deep in front of our school that we couldn’t move on the sidewalk.
“Ms. D. says I’m coming along,” Vega answered.
He had been playing since he was nine. He wasn’t that bad. I didn’t think anybody was expecting him to play violin in nobody’s orchestra anytime, but listening to him didn’t make your ears bleed.
“Watch out!” Vega called to me in the street. He held me back.
This girl Tisha shouted like somebody had cut her and ran in front of us. She stopped hard and grabbed the sleeve of Vega’s new coat to keep from falling. He jerked his sleeve away from her.
Another boy, Freddy, came chasing after Tisha. He bear-hugged her and they both slumped to the street, laughing.
Me and Vega stepped over them.
I almost kicked them instead. I had been so mean lately.
“I can’t believe she yanked my new coat,” Vega said, examining it for damage. “I was only gonna wear it around our place. Or on special occasions. But then I thought that’d be stupid.”
“Yeah. That would be stupid. How would you only wear a parka inside your apartment?”
“Shut up.”
We started back toward West 127th Street, toward after-school.
And Mr. Ali.
The funny thing about Mr. Ali was his face. His face was weird.
On one side of it, it just kind of got out of balance. The left side of his face was normal; his right side kind of seemed like somebody had smashed his skull with a hammer and put the pieces back together again. Only the pieces had not fit right.
Me and Vega walked quiet for a while until he asked me again about my castle. Besides my mother and Yvonne, he was the only one I had told about it. But I still hadn’t let him come down to our apartment to inspect it.
“Loll, man, why won’t you let me see this secret project you built?” he asked.
I shrugged.
“You must be embarrassed about it,” he said.
I didn’t respond because I knew Vega was only saying that to try to trick me into showing him. Ever since Yvonne had given me all those Legos for Christmas, I had been building.
I had started in my bedroom. Then that got too small. I moved what I had been building into the living room and it got even bigger.
Ma had loved my castle when it stayed in my bedroom. After I moved it, she started to grumble.
And Ma was losing patience with it taking up so much space. It was a good thing that ever since Jermaine had gone, she had let me get away with more stuff that I didn’t used to get away with. Lots of times, I only needed to serve up a sad face and she would back down.
Vega and me crossed over 125th Street.
“They following us
,” Vega said to me, dipping his head behind mine. I tracked where his skullcap had pointed, and I saw those same two older boys that had been following me on Christmas Eve.
“They from East 127th,” Vega said. “They been stressing my cousin to join they set.”
“That would make you and your cousin enemies.”
Vega used his gloves to wipe his nose. “Let’s move,” he said, and we took off running toward after-school before the two older boys could catch us.
“Shut your pothole face, nappy,” Sunnshyne said, whispering at Vega.
“Moonshyne!” Vega whispered back to Sunny. She glared at him.
Every afternoon at after-school these two went at it like this. Sunnshyne would make fun of Vega’s knotted-up hair, and he would tease about how dark-skinned she was. And I had to sit right in the middle of it.
Our after-school program was for St. Nick residents and those who lived in the hood. It was located in the community center, on the far side of the projects, about as far away from my building as you could get and still be in my development.
It was mostly about forcing us to do our homework, and getting help studying. But we sometimes did fun things like go on trips or learn to make things like homemade windmills or different types of recipes.
I had been coming to the St. Nick after-school for years. It was probably why Vega and me had become best friends.
Today Ms. Jenna had just finished showing us how to make fresh hummus from scratch using olive oil and garlic and cans of chickpeas. Most of the time at after-school we studied and learned things, but sometimes they gave us classes on how to be more healthy.
To me, hummus in my mouth didn’t taste too healthy at all. None of the kids thought it did except for Darrell Buckney, who was crazy anyhow. He was a fat boy with a mustache and on some kind of meds.
Ms. Jenna thought her hummus tasted good. She was our main after-school instructor. For somebody white from Ohio, she had a big butt.
When she strolled up here every day along Frederick Douglass Boulevard from the A train, Ms. Jenna would get all kinds of shouts and whistles from dudes wanting to hit her up because of her big butt.
It disgusted her, she said.
“Vega, you smell like the subway,” Sunny whispered.
“Not every subway stinks, mammal,” he whispered back.
“Yeah, but we’re all mammals, dummy,” she said.
Sunnshyne Dixon-Knight, or Sunny, wasn’t bad-looking, but her attitude made her ugly. She was tall for a girl and usually wore her head in braids. She had dark, smooth skin that looked like it was carved out of midnight.
Vega pretended like he was about to pop her. Sunny dared him, lifting her chin.
“Nappy!” she whispered at him.
My best friend’s hair was like a bush of thick black wires.
It was almost like Vega’s body grew so much hair his head didn’t know what to do with it. I think he grew at least an inch of hair every night when he slept.
“You better not touch me, Vega,” Sunny warned. “Lolly’ll punch you in the neck if you do.” She smiled at me.
“Everyone, I have to step out for a moment,” Ms. Jen told us kids. “Start your homework. I’m just down the hall.” Before she left, she scowled at us as if to say there would be problems if we acted up while she was gone. We all got the message.
Well, most of us did.
After a couple of minutes of us studying in peace, Darrell Buckney said, “Ugh! It smells like balls in here.” We all laughed.
“I told you, you stank,” Sunny told Vega.
Then Quintesha Charles said, “Somebody farted.”
Why did Quintesha have to say that?
Darrell B. flew up out of his seat and started sniffing at everybody’s butts to see who had farted.
“Hey! Hey!” Vega shouted at him. “Leave my bumpay alone!”
Everybody laughed some more, but when Darrell B. had got to my seat and was standing behind me about to sniff my butt, I stood up and slung my pencil at him.
Of course, right when I threw my pencil was when Ms. Jenna had decided to stroll back inside the study room.
“Ms. Jen! He tried to smell my booty!” I shouted.
She stared at Darrell. Ms. Jen asked him, “Should I recommend they put you back on your medication, young man?” He looked ashamed after hearing this. I felt a little sorry for him.
Anyway, so she embarrassed him and I still got yelled at for hurling my pencil. Darrell B. just giggled in that weird kind of way he did. Like a wild hyena.
Ms. Jenna said, “Lolly, Mr. Ali wants to see you in his office.”
My stomach gurgled. Everybody in the room gave me a look. Darrell B. laughed.
“Cut it out,” Ms. Jenna told him. Then she said to me, “Mr. Ali wants…” She didn’t finish. “Well, let’s just go see him, hon.”
“So I hear you’re launching projectiles now,” he said.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“You shot your pencil at one of my after-schoolers, Mr. Rachpaul,” Mr. Ali went on. “That’s what Lady Bug just said.” Lady Bug is what Mr. Ali called Ms. Jenna.
I sighed. “Look, it wasn’t even like that, man—”
“Excuse you, young man?”
“I mean, mister, uh, sir. Darrell B. was being Darrell B. That’s all it was. I didn’t do nothing.”
Mr. Ali leaned back in his swivel chair. His bald brown head bounced against the wall behind him. He did that a lot. You could tell because the white wall had turned gray right where he had just tapped his head.
“He farted and tried to blame it on somebody else,” I told Ali. He stared at me. I glanced at one of the plaques hanging above him on the wall. This one read: AKIL S. ALI, LSW. LSW meant Licensed Social Worker, I knew.
Though he was the center director, or boss, here, he didn’t have no big office or nothing. I didn’t like that it was so tight in here.
Mr. Ali was all right, I guess, but he nerve-wracked me sometimes. He was always trying to get into everybody’s business.
“That’s not the only thing with you,” he said. “I’ve noticed a change. Lady Bug also said you’ve been sulky in class the past couple months, despondent.”
“Ms. Jenna said what?”
Ali nodded. “ ‘Despondent’ only means—”
“Sad,” I said.
“Yeah,” Ali said. “Sad. Look, Lolly, I realize what happened to Jermaine is fairly recent. Just this past fall…”
I stopped listening.
In my mind, I saw Jermaine’s bed. It looked like he was laying beneath the white covers. Only, the vision I saw was made out of Legos. I could see his hand peeking out from beneath the sheets. It was a brown hand, all blocky from being made out of Lego bricks.
I shook my head to wake from my daydream.
Mr. Ali had just finished saying a bunch of stuff I hadn’t even heard.
He looked like he wanted me to respond.
“Every time I come home,” I said out of nowhere, “and see his bed in the corner, I expect to see him lying there. With his back facing me. And him grumbling for me to shut our door so Ma won’t come in.”
I looked down.
“It may be time to move out his bed,” Ali said.
“I don’t want that,” I said, glaring at him. “Ma don’t want that neither! It’s his bed!”
“His bed?”
I felt stupid all of a sudden.
He leaned toward me. “Wallace, Jermaine doesn’t need that bed any longer. He’s dead—”
Hearing this made my knee jerk. I kicked the metal front of Ali’s olive-green desk so hard that I left a dent in it. The desk shook and some manila folders fell to the floor. Ali sighed and leaned over to pick them up.
We didn’t say nothing for a while.
“I’m sorry,” I finally said.
He shrugged. “Let’s have another talk next week.”
I stood up, snatching my backpack off the floor.
“He’s
not coming back, Lolly,” Mr. Ali said before I could leave. He spoke very quiet. “You need to accept it. It may sound callous, cold-blooded, but you will never see Jermaine again. At least, not in this life.”
Ma had picked the coldest day in January for us to go skating, I swore.
I wasn’t in a good mood because me and my moms had been arguing lately about my Lego castle. She had been complaining about it taking up so much room.
Right now I really wanted to be back at the crib, working on it, instead of tromping through the middle of Central Park in the wet snow.
I kicked a ball of ice against one of the gazillions of trees here. This park had more trees, streams, hills, bridges and footpaths than it knew what to do with.
Central Park was okay, but building my castle soothed my nerves. I really hadn’t liked talking to Mr. Ali the other day in his office. I didn’t like thinking about the stuff he was trying to make me think about. It dug up too much dirt.
And made me remember about how I had let Jermaine down.
I watched Ma and Yvonne walk ahead of me in the park, holding hands. Ma was dressed in a big puffy coat with work boots. Pieces of Yvonne’s bright Mohawk stuck out from under her skullcap.
I wished I could lose both them and Mr. Ali from out of my life.
At Wollman Rink Ma got us all inside for only five dollars apiece with a special coupon she had.
I didn’t think that I would want to at first, but I really did ice-skate a lot. Maybe this had been an okay idea after all. It reminded me of when we used to come here as a family around the holidays.
While I took a break off the ice and ate a hot dog from the food hut, I leaned against the rail and watched Ma and Yvonne out there, skating around the rink. Ma was steady on her feet, but Yvonne was miserable.
She had never even been on the ice.
Yvonne had to hold on to Ma or the side rails or she would’a fell flat on her butt. She did a lot of that too. My mother was trying to teach Yvonne how to skate on her own when Yvonne lost her balance and yanked Ma down onto the ice with her.
The two of them sat there, laughing, trying to stand back up.
I tried to grin, but couldn’t.
Even if it was funny to watch, seeing them two out there, trying to stand up together on that ice.
The Stars Beneath Our Feet Page 3