De-Man was one of my monsters from the Swarm. He had gray, rocky skin.
The Swarm was an interstellar gang of crooks and thugs who harassed folks for no good reason. Except to be ugly.
They had been harassing King Blaze’s family for years. The Swarm was the one problem the House of Moneekrom had failed to crack.
So far I had made almost eighty different buildings here in the storage room, or my city room. I had divided Harmonee into three boroughs, or neighborhoods: the hero borough, the monster borough and the regular borough for all the regular people.
I heard a ka-klick behind me. It was the door to the room unlocking and cracking open. Big Rose stuck her big head in through the crack and met eyes with mine.
I froze, holding a few red Legos in my right hand.
Before I could say or do anything, Big Rose had stepped inside, grabbed an armful of Legos and plopped down on the other side of the room, about thirty feet away.
I must’a looked dumb as nuts, squatting there, watching her. She was sitting on the floor with her big fat back to me, building something.
With my Legos!
I couldn’t believe this girl. I was about to go over there and get a closer angle when she jumped up, flew over toward me again and grabbed another armful of my blocks out of one of the trash bags that Yvonne had gave me.
It went on like this for the next twenty minutes. Her stealing my Legos for whatever she was building over on her side of the room.
She was calm and quiet. I thought about stepping to her, but then I started wondering if she might get mad.
I wasn’t scared of her or nothing. We were the same age. I could box. You couldn’t grow up in my hood without learning how to defend yourself.
But also…Big Rose was kind of big. Way bigger than me. In fact, I started thinking about how in all of my brawls growing up, I had never really got into it with a girl. Or anybody as big as she was.
So I wasn’t scared, but I thought maybe I should think about this situation a little more before walking up on her.
The door ka-klicked again. Mr. Ali stuck his head in. His face looked worried, but then, after he saw what was going on, he smirked at me.
“You all cool?” he asked me and Big Head.
She, of course, didn’t say nothing.
I shouted across the room to Mr. Ali, “You let her in?”
“That cool with you?” he asked.
I didn’t wanna say what I was really thinking, so I just said, “Yeah. It’s cool.”
He started to close the door.
“She’s building with my blocks,” I told him. I was starting to feel kind of panicky.
“I see,” Mr. Ali said back to me. “Very excellent, troops. Stick to it!”
And that was that.
This was how Big Rose invaded Harmonee. I couldn’t really gripe to Ali too much. Yeah, they were all my Legos that Yvonne had brought me, but that room didn’t really belong to me. It wasn’t like Big Rose had broke into my bedroom and just started taking over. Ali had let her in.
The Moneekroms had been invaded by one of the Swarm monsters.
And I didn’t like it.
The days at after-school were kinda tense. Every day I would finish my homework like usual. Big Rose would read her tiny books. And then both of us would wind up building cities in the storage room.
Yeah, she had started building her own city on the opposite side of the room from mines. From what I could tell, hers wasn’t anywhere near as nice as Harmonee.
We never spoke and she never asked to use any of my Legos. She just took them. Every now and then Mr. Ali or Ms. Jenna or Sunny or Vega would peek their heads inside to check the progress. All this time, she wasn’t saying nothing or even looking at me. All she did was build. And that’s all that I did.
Build.
Except now I was feeling different about it. Building Legos wasn’t calming me or making me remember good times. I even started having trouble making up new space stories.
Like I said, everything felt hijacked.
Maybe if she had at least once brought in some of her own Legos, I wouldn’t have minded as much. Maybe if she had just asked at first. Or tried to act thankful.
Her corny buildings were taking away from my own creations. I was glad that Yvonne kept bringing me more Lego trash bags or my production would’a really been slowed down by Rose’s thieving.
But one day, I had been working on this new bell tower. It was in the hero borough, and I was almost about to finish it when big fathead Rose came over and tried to grab the last few Legos I had been saving in one of my trash bags.
I saw this and ran over and grabbed the other side of the trash bag.
And the two of us were standing there, both grabbing on to one old trash bag with the last few Legos inside. She would yank the bag toward her, trying to pull it away from me. I would yank back just as drastic.
The whole time, Big Rose was standing there, staring down into the bag. Drooling over those final few Legos, I guess. I pulled the bag back toward me, this time real forceful, and she finally jerked her head up and stared at me. Real nasty. Like she expected me to back down.
I didn’t.
I glared back at her. We stood there, eyeball to eyeball.
I loaded into my stare all the evilness, all the viciousness, I had felt since that night on Halloween. That rock that had been living inside my chest boiled so hot it melted and shot at her like lasers out of my eye sockets.
I guess Rose felt the burn. She dropped the trash bag like it was hot.
I watched her sit down with her back against the wall near her little city. Her face was tight. Her eyes had got red. Her chest was pumping. She stuck her head between her legs and stayed like that.
Just the two of us in this big room that felt too small. I had felt like a champ after staring her down. Now I didn’t feel as big as all that.
I dropped the Lego bag in front of her. But grabbed out one brick for myself, just to let her know what was up, and left the rest of them for Big Rose.
I snapped my one brick into place on the building I had been working on.
On the other side of the room, I heard those other bricks click and clack together, sounding like money. I knew she had reached her hand inside to pull out the last ones.
By the next day, I had a fresh supply of Legos, and I knew how to get rid of big-head Rose.
I had been watching her build. She was fast, but still learning. I’d been messing with Legos for years. A lot of the mistakes I had seen her make over the past days were mistakes I used to make when I first started.
I would take her down hard.
Me just thinking that made me feel good. Well, maybe not good, exactly. “Good” ain’t the right word.
It made me feel different.
Ever since Halloween, I’d noticed that taking my revenge on other people would do something to that rock I’d been feeling in my chest. Being evil wouldn’t make the rock disappear. But being that way did make me not mind the rock being there.
Just like when I heard the other after-schoolers make fun of Rose and call her names. Or when I called her names. Or when I told Heike there was a mouse.
All that made me not mind the rock. Making Rose feel bad made those feelings inside of me feel harder, less like a real person.
And there was something else inside of me that was afraid of that. Afraid of me becoming more and more…
Bad thoughts.
Big Head was on her side of the room building some lopsided wall.
“Rosamund!” I shouted.
She glanced at me over her shoulder.
“Come here,” I said.
She ignored me. I stomped over to her. I watched what the girl was doing for a minute, then squatted.
“Big Rose, this storage room ain’t big enough for the two of us,” I said all low, just in case Mr. Ali was eavesdropping outside the door. She just kept on stacking blocks. “I know you can hear me,” I told her. �
��You ain’t dumb like you like everybody to think.” She paused. “I see you reading your little books every day.”
Big Rose turned, but avoided my face.
“This is my storage room,” I whispered. “It was my idea to ask Ali if I could use it. These is my blocks.”
She blinked.
“But I can see you are the sort that won’t bail unless they’re forced out.” I leaned in toward her. “You ain’t the only gangsta up in here.”
I was feeling bad as Tupac.
She started stacking blocks again. I grabbed her hand to stop her. She jerked her hand away.
I looked toward the door for Mr. Ali, then went on, “Now, this is how it’s gonna go down, Biggie. You and me, we gonna have a contest. Got it? A contest.” I stood up because my knees were starting to hurt.
Big Rose surprised me by standing up too. I didn’t like this because now she towered over me. She must’a been at least half a foot taller. I folded my arms and tried to look tough. I had learned that this was the only way to deal with this one.
Big Rose folded her arms too and glared down at me.
“Um,” I said. “So this is how it goes: You know that big green dragon down at Tuttle’s Toys? Their Midtown store?”
Big Rose nodded and started staring at the floor.
“That dragon is maybe twenty feet high, at least, and it’s made all out of Legos. Probably a gazillion tiny Lego bricks. In fact, the dude who built that dragon is probably a Lego master. The way I see it, only a Lego master belongs here in my city room.”
I waved my hands around me, the way Mr. Jonathan would’a done. Big Rose just kept on staring at the floor. I guessed she was listening.
Now I said, not whispering no more, “You and me are gonna have a contest to see who can build the tallest tower here in my city room. A tower made out of Legos. We start tomorrow during after-school. The first one of us to stack a tower that is ten feet tall is the winner! The loser is banished from my city room forever.”
I stuck my hand out toward her. She waited a minute, then shook it. Big Rose had a sturdy grip. She still wasn’t looking me in the face.
But this girl did not know who she was dealing with.
Rookie, I thought. I am the true Lego master. I grinned at her as evilly as I could.
On the first day of our Ten-Foot Tower Contest, Big Rose was first into my city room. By the time I had finished the decimals that Ms. Ling had assigned, Big Rose had already laid the first story of her tower.
She didn’t even meet eyes with me when I stepped into the room.
I could tell that she was taking this contest serious. Didn’t want to get booted out of my Lego Universe, my Lego-verse.
I had borrowed Ma’s tape measurer from her closet so we could keep track of our towers’ heights. I knew Big Rose would never be able to make something go as tall as ten feet high. She didn’t have the skills.
She wasn’t no Lego master.
Dummy.
I got busy building.
We had a lot of blocks, but I had guessed each of us might have to start tearing apart bits of our cities in order to build our towers as high as we both needed to. We hadn’t reached that point yet, but we might.
I decided to call mine Blaze Tower. After King Blaze, the ruler of my kingdom. Blaze Tower was where the monarch went to be alone with his thoughts about the galaxy and when he wanted to deep-think.
Instead of ten feet, Blaze Tower was really ten miles high, I thought. I stared up at the storage-room ceiling and up through it. I imagined the clouds and stars up above. Something ten miles high might stick up into outer space.
It would be a miracle building that everybody would admire and get jealous of.
The second day of the contest I had decided that I would really go crazy. I had made progress with my tower, but it seemed like as fast as I piled bricks, Big Rose was always a little faster.
I wasn’t worried about her, really. She couldn’t keep up that pace. She was still a rookie. I was the starter.
I hadn’t told nobody about me and Big Rose’s bet. I had thought about telling, but then I had thought about how it might form a crowd in here. This thing made me anxious enough without having all of after-school ogling over my shoulders.
At the end of the second contest day, I took out Ma’s tape measurer and recorded what we had done so far. Big Rose’s construction was almost four feet tall. Blaze Tower was just under three feet.
She didn’t react to this news. Just grabbed her stack of tiny books and flew.
I was hoping now that I could catch up to her. Big Rose’s tower was about two feet taller than mine was. I could not let her whup me. This was my city room.
King Blaze was the ruler.
Today, the third day of the Ten-Foot Tower Contest, I was feeling edgy. Vega and Sunnshyne sat on the floor, munching granola bars, watching us build.
Big Rose had got to the point where she had to use one of the ladders in here to reach the top of her tower. And she had started cannibalizing parts of her city to add on to its height.
My Blaze Tower had made progress, but it was still behind hers.
I had started to get a little worried.
I would not let this dumb girl succeed, I thought.
I usually liked a good test. I think Ma had got me hooked growing up because we used to compete with each other on a lot of things. She was always pinning me down and wrestling me….
My favorite was our story challenges. Those things were fun.
How you played it was easy. Ma and me would lie on her bed and she would start reading out loud from one of her mystery books. Usually Sherlock Holmes, but sometimes other ones.
At a certain part of the book, she would stop reading and she would turn to me. “What you think, Lolly?” Ma’d say. “What do you think?”
Then I would take over the story from out of my head. I would just make up what happened next and tell her out loud. After a while, she would take her turn, picking up where I’d left off, and she’d make up some new part of the story.
We’d go back and forth like that, adding on, until Ma would say it was time for bed.
I would always get the chance to end the story. I loved that. Those story challenges were fun. We needed to start playing them again.
On her side of the room, Biggie was still working real fast. I didn’t think she ever got tired. I didn’t know you could stack Legos as quick as she was doing.
I needed to hurry.
The fourth day smelled like death.
Defeat.
The night before, I had measured the heights. Hers was almost nine feet. Mine was almost seven.
We were both standing on ladders now. On opposite sides of the room. Big Rose was still laying bricks as fast as she could. I was too.
And the vultures were dangling around. For some wacko reason, Ms. Jenna had started to let our after-school class come to the storage room after they had finished their homework.
Everybody was lying around, watching me compete with Big Rose and adding comments about who they thought would win. They even ate their snacks in here. It was like a dang party.
The chance of Big Rose winning scared me. I really didn’t want to let her win and for me to get banished from my own city room in front of everybody. It might could happen.
I started wondering if Big Rose would want to call off this game. Maybe come to a truce or something.
Nah.
I wouldn’t give up, I decided. If this girl was better than me, she was gonna have to prove it. Run the clock down all the way to the end.
Ten miles into the sky!
We had both used up Legos from whole sections of our cities. I had torn apart and recycled some of the blocks from Victarea and Hypozmia, two of my neighborhoods. I really hadn’t wanted to do that.
And my shoulders had started hurting. Real bad. I climbed up to the next step of my ladder so I could reach the top of Blaze Tower. And started layering on another story of bricks.
I chewed on a chocolate Sunny gave me for energy.
Ms. Jen, gnawing on one of her pink fingernails, watched me.
Across the room I saw Big Rose shuffle down to the floor from the top of her ladder. She rushed toward her own city and started pulling apart more blocks to use on her tower.
I got to say I was impressed. Even if I thought she was using too many larger Legos on top of her tower and lots of small ones on the bottom. It had held up good.
Yesterday I was watching her creation and I thought that it looked familiar. I had seen it somewhere before, but couldn’t remember where.
Big Rose was constructing an actual building from real life, I realized. I searched, and shook my head after I had found a pic of the building on my phone.
One World Trade Center. The tallest building in America. I could only shake my head again.
Now I watched her gather up more bricks and stomp back toward her ladder. I really was starting to feel defeated….I wondered if…
Just then, that loud familiar sound began to rumble the room. It had been making that same noise since the first day I had started building my castle in here.
The big heating vent on the wall was starting to shoot out warm air. But the huge vent was blowing right at the top of Big Rose’s Freedom Tower. Today was the first day that her building had been tall enough to reach the vent.
The whole room watched her tower for a minute.
It was starting to twitch.
Back and forth. Back, back. Forth, forth.
From on top my ladder, I stared down at Big Rose. Her mouth hung open. She watched her tower wobble more and more and more and more!
“It’s wiggling!” Darrell B. shouted.
“Oh no,” Ms. Jen said. She covered her eyes.
It wouldn’t be long now.
And sure enough, her creation tilted just a little too much to one side and sailed downward in a fabuloso explosion of Legos. Everybody jumped back. Not only had her Freedom Tower collapsed, but when it did fall, it fell right on top of the rest of her city.
Lego bricks skittered across the floor.
The Stars Beneath Our Feet Page 8