Mohammed tossed it a French fry.
“Don’t feed it, Mohammed!” Daryl whispered. “Are you crazy?”
The wolf-thing snapped up the fry and tilted its head at us like it wanted more. Mohammed launched his whole bag of French fries at it. While it was chomping on those, we slowly stood and tiptoed up the steps to the Hamilton Heights part of Harlem.
I felt safer, out of the dark trees in the park and back around streetlights with people strolling and car horns. We avoided the park and traveled down Amsterdam Av’ to 125th Street, then cut back over toward Central Harlem.
We didn’t want to take any chances of that wolf-thing hunting us.
At Morningside Avenue we saw these three beautiful women walking toward us. They were headed toward all the cafés and restaurants. All three of them were caramel-skinned and two of them was wearing white dress coats while the last one was wearing stripes. All six of us boys stopped at the corner to watch these ladies glide by.
They even smiled at us. “What’s happening, young brothers,” the prettiest one said.
“Hello,” we all said.
They kept on. I think I heard the one in stripes call us cute.
After they had passed, Daryl tried to act like he was about to follow them and try to rap to them. Those women were maybe two times his age. And I think he was serious about it too, until Kofi told him to come on and stop acting stupid.
While we walked, I used the free Wi-Fi to do a search. It turned out, what we had seen in the park must’a been a wild coyote. I told the other guys and they couldn’t believe it.
Over the past few years, the police had caught four coyotes in Harlem and delivered them to the Bronx Zoo. The article I read on my phone said the animals were coming down into Washington Heights and Harlem from Westchester, just north of New York City.
They were searching for food and a nice place to live since human beings had been taking over their territories and forests. Driving them out.
I guessed our coyote had picked St. Nicholas Park as his new home.
I wouldn’t report that animal to the police. The article said they hadn’t attacked nobody, but just wanted food. It also said that they were so scarce in the city, you shouldn’t feel scared if you met one; you should feel lucky.
We did feel lucky to have met that thing. It made us feel excited and extra alive.
There had been something beautiful and scary about it.
That Harlem coyote deserved to be free, just like everybody else. At least, he could be happy in the park, I thought.
I just wouldn’t be hanging out in St. Nick Park at night.
And I definitely wouldn’t be smoking.
Ka-klick!
Over the past week, that noise had become my most favorite sound in the world. The ka-klick of the unlocking door to the big storage room in the community center.
Mr. Ali stepped to my side so I could go in. “There you go, Wallace,” he said to me. I tried to move past him, but he blocked me with an arm. “You’re never gonna tell me?”
“Tell you what?” I asked. He just stared at me. I sighed and rolled my eyes back in my head. “Jermaine stopped talking to me just before he died, okay? We had had a argument.”
“Argument?”
“Okay, Mr. Ali? We used to argue all the time in that little room. Okay?”
He stood there quiet for a minute, still blocking my way. “That is progress,” Ali finally said. “Talking about it will make you feel better. Always does.”
“You talk to me about what your father did to your face,” I told him, “and I’ll tell you what me and Jermaine argued about.”
Ali pulled his arm back so I could pass and pointed his thumb into the storage room. “Your world awaits!”
Just as I strolled inside, I heard the heater begin to rumble. Warm air started to flow out of the wall vent. He was right, this was my world, I thought.
One of the tricky things about castles was getting your turrets lined up. When I had been creating my first version of the House of Moneekrom up in our apartment, that building had seemed big, but it wasn’t really.
Now with my new, expanded version of the House of Moneekrom, here in the storage room, it had become harder to know if my turrets facing each other were the same height. It was harder down here because the size of my castle had tripled.
I could no longer use only my eyes to guess heights and widths and all that. I had to count, measure, get more technical.
So far, none of the other after-schoolers knew what I had been up to in here. Nobody except Vega. Sunny acted like she was about to ’splode if her “detective agency” didn’t expose why I’d been coming into the storage room after homework.
Two days ago, when I let Vega in here for the first time, he couldn’t believe what I had done.
“Mira, Lolly,” Vega had said. “Your castle! It’s huge!”
I showed him my castle walls and how I had constructed new merlons along them. Instead of using the tiny Lego bricks, I had started building with larger ones since I now had so much more space—an entire, huge storage room to build my fantasy fortress.
And Yvonne kept dropping off more and more trash bags filled with Legos for me, so who knew how hugemongous I could go.
I was creating my own new world and getting lost in it.
Just being here with my Legos, building, I could almost feel my brother with me. Like he was actually in this room, watching over me. I could really feel someone.
Suddenly the heating vent across the room went quiet.
Standing there alone, I now heard another noise behind me, like somebody breathing heavy. Someone was standing there.
My neck got all prickly.
Jermaine? I wondered.
I swung around and peeped Big Rose’s face in the doorway. Ms. Jen had forgot to lock the door this time. Big Rose had opened it and stuck her big ugly head through the crack.
Big Rose stared at me, then at my castle, then back at me again.
I pointed at her to warn her back.
She frowned and gave me an evil look. I wondered if she blamed me for the jalapeño chocolate incident. This girl might’a thought me and Sunny had been in on it together.
I took a step toward Big Rose, but I heard Ms. Jen calling her. The girl disappeared back into the hall, ka-klicking the door behind her. Alone in the dim, dusty room, I could still see her dumb round eyes, rubbernecking.
My world felt hijacked.
Ding!
The doors opened to the elevator just outside our front door. I walked behind our next-door neighbor, old Mrs. Jenkins, and we both stepped between the elevator doors. Mr. Williams from the tenth floor was already in the elevator, and another boy my age I hadn’t seen before. After the doors shut, Mrs. Jenkins turned to me again, her eyes shining.
“My Lord, Lolly,” she said. “You sure are getting grown.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” I said, shifting my weight. The other kid didn’t look at me.
Just then, my phone chirped. I knew it had to be Vega. He had been waiting on me downstairs for a minute.
“They finally got around to fixing this elevator,” Mrs. Jenkins said to me. “How’s Sue-ellen?”
“Fiiine,” I kinda sang. “They got her working too hard down at the courts.”
“Tell her I said she’s blessed to have that job. Thank the Lord.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I was glad that for the rest of the elevator ride, she didn’t say nothing. Old folks are okay, but I never know what to speak to them. We flew straight from the seventh floor down to the first, with only the pissy elevator smell to focus on.
When the doors opened, Vega was waiting there. I could only see the back of his shiny black parka until he spun around, rolling his eyes.
“Mira, Lolly!” he said. “I been waiting on you forever!”
“You’re dramatic,” I said.
I watched the boy from the elevator step outside. Before he left, he had passed Veg
a a look like he had wanted to stick him. Vega just glared at him until he disappeared outside the doors of the lobby. Then Vega frowned at me.
“You got me waiting on you in my new coat,” he said, complaining some more.
“Shut up, applehead. Let’s go do this.”
The D train rumbled along underground with me and Vega sitting inside. It wasn’t crowded. We had one of its ugly plastic orange seats between us. Vega was thumbing through stuff on his phone.
I got bored. I pulled out my tablet from my parka and started doodling. I glanced at the subway map again. It was posted just above the pom-pom hat of this old dude, sitting beside me.
On the map I could see the number of stops we had to go before we would be getting off. I squinted at the tiny blue line on the map that was supposed to be the Harlem River.
My eyes raced over the ceiling of the subway car, and I imagined the icy river water that was running way up above us.
The Harlem River divided Manhattan from the Bronx. And the D train ran in a tunnel from Manhattan to the Bronx, but I had never really thought too much about all that river water above my head.
You didn’t see the river, so you didn’t think about it.
New York City was surrounded by water that nobody ever thought about. I lived on an island, really. An island inside an island inside an island.
Stranded.
I sighed and wondered how many people had died in these waters. Either by jumping into them themselves, or by somebody pushing them.
How many people had even died in New York City since it’d been around?
A lot of dead, buried bodies, man.
I started sketching a river with bodies beneath it on my tablet.
We rose up out the Fordham subway station in the Boogie Down Bronx. I didn’t know why the old folks called it that, the Boogie Down.
What was a “boogie,” anyhow? Was it like a booger?
That would be nauseating.
I hung the hood of my blue parka over my head and let the rest of my coat float behind me. It was cold today, but I was feeling hot inside.
It took me a minute to figure out which direction to head down Fordham Road, but Vega had found it already on his map. I scrunched up my face and we started walking. My stomach started to flutter a little, from me being so nervous, I guess.
This was a bad day.
A bad day to be in the Bronx.
Lately, my days were bad days to be anywhere. The badness usually started in the mornings right after I woke. Sometimes I would wake up carefree, and then it would hit me.
Jermaine.
And I would feel that heavy rock grow weightier on my chest, while I was lying there on my back, still in bed.
The rock would just sink dead into the center of my chest, right into my heart. Like it was sinking into mud.
“Yo, is Big Rose still eyeballing you in your storage room?” Vega asked.
“She tries to, but Lady Bug keeps calling her away.”
“That is weird,” he said. “That is a weird girl, manin.”
Fordham Road was crazy crowded. This street had all kinds of stores and places to eat. It was like the 125th Street of the Bronx. I kept trying to pay attention to everybody around me, just in case some thug tried to start something.
This wasn’t our hood.
“Yo, man,” Vega said, “I hope that girl don’t go bonkers on you up in the center, man.”
“Bonkers?”
“Bonkers! Yeah. You know she ain’t right.” He tapped the side of his head. “She be spying on you hard every day you leave for the storage room to work on Harmonee….”
I shrugged. Vega was getting dramatic again.
Harmonee was the name I had gave my new city. I had been adding on more and more towers and buildings. A little city had grown around the House of Moneekrom. Man, everything had expanded.
I had figured that I might as well give this new city a proper name. So I had picked Harmonee.
The alien metropolis of Harmonee.
And I liked it.
As we hiked along Fordham Road, I kept looking at the addresses and signs on the shops. They had a lot of pizzerias along this street.
“I’m just saying, Lolly,” Vega said. “I don’t wanna walk in there one day and you dead, lying in a big gunky pool of your own blood.”
Vega was the crazy one, I thought. Then I saw it across the street. That must’a been it. Vega had stopped blabbering because he had seen it too.
We crossed Fordham Road and stood underneath the big yellow-and-red sign that said BLOCK.
The nightclub beneath the sign hadn’t opened yet. It probably wouldn’t be open for a few more hours, later tonight. When people would flock in here to drink up and party up. Like Jermaine had done in October.
Block was an ugly place. It wasn’t nowhere I would wanna hang out at. I stood there in the cold, inspecting the building for a while. Vega went and fell down on the curb. I sat down beside him and shoved my arms through the sleeves of my parka, zipping it up.
I had got cold all of a sudden.
“This is it, manin,” I told Vega.
“Yeah, Loll,” he said. “I would’a thought they’d shut it down or something. After somebody was murdered up in there.”
“I bet if they shut down everywhere in New York where somebody had got smoked, there wouldn’t be nowhere left open.”
“I’m sorry, Lolly, man.”
“Yeah,” I said. I felt that rock in my chest grow harder and heavier. “This is it, man. Right here. This is the exact spot!”
The rock got so heavy I couldn’t stand it no more. I busted out crying, sitting there on the curb beside Vega.
I didn’t know how long I had sat there crying, but after I was done, the rock was gone.
Still, I knew it’d come back.
“Another Lego delivery! Compliments of Yvonne Grayson, Inc.!”
Yvonne shouted almost everything. She was just like Vega when it came to that. She stepped into my bedroom on Saturday and plonked the heavy bag of Legos onto my rug.
“I ought to start charging,” Yvonne told me, and flicked the top of my head. It hurt.
“Yo, thanks, Yvonne,” I said, rubbing my dome.
“You know it’s my pleasure, sugar,” she said. “You can use these bricks, do something beneficial with them. Besides, Tuttle’s would only be trashing them anyways.”
“Why they always tossing out so many Legos?” I asked. “It’s a lot.”
Yvonne shrugged. “I guess some of these go out of style and they think it’d be too hard to sell the old ones.”
Getting new Legos was a good end to a bad day.
I needed more nights like this.
“So let’s deconstruct this Bronx trip,” Mr. Ali announced all of a sudden. “How did going there make you feel?”
I hesitated. “Sad. Despondent.”
Ali nodded. “It was very brave to go there. Knowing how it might affect you.”
“I almost expected to see Jermaine standing there in front of Block,” I said. “And him telling me and Vega it was all a big joke. I still can’t believe he’s really gone. It’s crazy.” I shook my head.
“Did you-all get rid of Jermaine’s bed?”
“It’s still there. We don’t talk about it.” I played with one of my shoestrings, twisting it around my little finger.
“Would you like me to talk with your mama about it?” Mr. Ali asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t think so….”
“But she knows it’s problematic for you, having Jermaine’s bed in your room?”
I tilted my head back and opened my mouth toward the ceiling. Mr. Ali was wearing me out.
“It’s not problematic, Mr. Ali. I like having his bed in there.”
“Lolly, I’m not suggesting that you and your mama forget Jermaine, or leave your memories of him behind. You will always remember him and love him in your heart. But I think you both need to establish a more healthy connection with
his memories.”
“Building Legos reminds me of him. And, I think, reminds me of my father.”
“Your dad’s still alive,” Ali said, like I didn’t know that.
“Yeah, but you know…” I had told Ali that Daddy never came around much. Always working, clowning and with his girlfriends. “I was starting to think that building Legos makes me feel like he’s still around, still together with my mother. Takes me to that spot a long time ago, you know. When I was little, playing with my Legos in the living room with Daddy and Ma watching over me.”
Ali squinted. “Makes sense.”
“I feel like Jermaine’s there too when I’m building.”
“Hold on to those good memories,” Mr. Ali said. “Especially those good memories of your brother, Lolly. But you’ve got to move ahead. Your life is young. Move ahead, brother.”
“If I do move ahead, how am I supposed to remember Jermaine?”
Ali thought on this for a minute. “There are ways. Maybe a special possession of his that you can frame and hang on the wall to remember. Or keep a journal of some of his favorite quotes, things he used to say. Understand?”
“I think so,” I said.
“Separate the bad emotions from the good memories.”
I thought about those thugs at the old barbershop and how they had changed Jermaine. It was hard for me to remember him without including that shop. Like it was tied to him.
Ali smiled at me crooked. Then gave me a corny high five. He glanced at his phone. “It’s snack time.”
“I’m hungry.”
“Me too. Let’s break.”
The alien world of Harmonee was cruising along nicely.
The rest of the after-school kids had finally found out about it. Some way, Sunny had got Ms. Jen to confess. I think she tricked our teacher into it. Maybe that girl would grow up to be a master investigator, or at least a cop.
Today I had done my homework early again and now was adding on another new Harmonee building, this one created from only red rectangle Legos. This new house was the secret hideout for De-Man.
The Stars Beneath Our Feet Page 7