Big Rose was obliterated. Her face got real red. She shut her eyes.
“I win! I win!” I shouted from on top my ladder. I was so joyous I shot up into the air. When I landed back onto the ladder’s step, one of my feet slipped.
Seven feet in the air, I almost fell off my ladder. My right hand snatched the ladder. My left hand swung out into the air. It scraped Blaze Tower.
“Oh!” I yelled.
My Blaze Tower didn’t fall. I had caught it with my left hand and was holding it still. I carefully steadied both feet onto the ladder. Trying not to shake, I kept holding on to my tower.
“Lolly, let go and come down,” Ms. Jen said.
I didn’t wanna speak, out of fear that the sound might crumble my building. Though I was safe on the ladder again, I was afraid to let go of my tower. I didn’t want it to start wobbling. I heard somebody cackle.
It was Big Rose down below. She had run over to me and was standing down below with the gladdest face.
“Help!” I finally said. Nobody knew what to do. I kept holding on to my tower to keep it steady. “Help me, Vega!”
He scratched his head.
Big Rose grinned and shrugged.
There really was nothing they could do. There wasn’t any way they could help me. I must’a stood there for at least fifteen minutes, one hand grabbing my ladder, the other hand gripping the top of Blaze Tower.
My shoulders and arms ached.
Big Rose was now sitting on the floor, legs crossed, smiling up at me.
“Come down, Lolly,” Ms. Jen said again. “Your tower’s steady.”
I closed my eyes, tense. My left hand released my building. Blaze Tower seemed okay. I was relieved.
But then I noticed it was actually twitching the tiniest bit.
Side to side.
I kept reaching out to touch it, trying to make it steady. But every time I tapped its side, that made the tremble worse. It was swooping now, back and forth.
Back and forth. Back, back. Forth, forth.
The crumble started at the foot of the tower. The bottom skidded to one side like somebody had kicked its legs out from under it. Then the top of the tower leaned and tipped over and my dreams of becoming the Lego master of the city room came crashing down.
“No!” I yelled, and shut my eyes. “Blaze.”
Everybody hopped back some more. Once the tinkling of the last brick had stopped echoing in the room, I gazed around. It looked like a Lego giant had just thrown up in here.
“What is going on?” I heard Mr. Ali shout. He stood in the doorway, gawking at the mess.
I didn’t have nothing to say. In a funny way, my tower collapse seemed to ease me up a bit, soften my chest rock. I didn’t know why.
“Wallace,” Ali said, “I think it’s time we had another chat.”
After that, the only thing I could hear was Big Rose’s loud handclaps and giggles repeating across the room. Her face was lit up.
Delighted.
The next Saturday morning Vega and me ran over to the rec center on 134th to play some ball. I sometimes hated hooping with Vega because he always liked to check too hard, but when you checked him he would start whining.
Like a big baby.
And when he lost, he was too much. He would act like everything in the world had depended on him owning you in that game. He always took it too serious.
So I had let him win today.
After ball, while we were walking home, Vega started to ask me about Big Rose. It had been weeks since she had rushed into my space and started looting my Legos. Just this week, we had both watched our towers explode in our faces.
Even though Blaze Tower had stood a little longer than her Freedom Tower, neither one of us had reached ten feet high. I had probably won our contest because mine had stood a few minutes longer, but hers had been taller than mines before that air vent blew it down. I couldn’t tell if either one of us had won, really.
We were both still building in the city room.
The mood between us was not as nervous as it had been. In fact, she had actually started to mutter things at me every now and then.
Not full sentences. Just words that I could barely hear.
So she did speak!
“A mysterious mystery,” Vega said, all solemn.
We had traveled down to 130th Street and had started to cut over west across Harlem. Standing on the sidewalk was this dude in a navy-blue suit and holding a leather bag. His suit even had a vest, but that was dark gray. He checked his phone and smiled at me and Vega.
“Hey, now,” he said. We nodded.
Just then, this black sports car zoomed up. There was this fine female driving. He gave her a kiss and they sped off together.
I wondered where they were going.
Vega and me kept walking and talking. He dribbled my basketball between his legs and fumbled it every few steps. Once, the ball even bounced into the middle of the street. A big red Hummer swerved out of the way, though, and cursed at us before speeding off.
After Vega ran out and got my ball, I snatched it from him and shot him a grimy look. We strolled on, to another block, before he had something else to say.
“Why don’t you kick her out?” he asked me.
“Big Rose?” I said. “How am I gonna kick her out of somewhere that don’t even belong to me?”
“They’re your bricks.”
“Ali wouldn’t like that. It was him that sent her in there. I don’t know why. But if I piss Ali off, he might not let me build in the storage room no more.”
Vega rubbed his forehead and watched the sun. It was beaming, one of them freaky warm days in late winter.
“Why is it so hot?” he asked. “We just got out of February!”
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s cross.”
We sprinted across the avenue and hopped over the median. On the other side, there was a bodega on the corner with a crowd of older boys hanging out front. My eyeballs searched the mob for enemies, but didn’t find none.
Two of the boys out front were selling. One of them sat on a fire hydrant spitting lyrics:
If they bury me, no need to worry
I expect retaliation in a hurry
Old-school Tupac Shakur, I thought, listening to that dude. Jermaine used to say that listening to Tupac was like listening in on the mind of every young Black man in the ghetto. I didn’t used to believe that.
“You think you’d ever join a gang?” I asked my friend after we’d left those dudes behind.
“Me? And get shot? What good is that? Mami would be so sad. But probably not my cousin Frito. I don’t even like guns. Would you join?”
“I like doing stuff my own way too much to join up. If you’re in a crew, you got to do what the crew say, and I don’t do what other people say. Unless it’s Ma. Or Daddy. Or Yvonne.”
Vega laughed at me. “Or your shrink, Mr. Ali,” he said. “With that face, he’s more scary than Yvonne. Yo, I wish my mami had a dope girlfriend that brought me gifts all the time!”
“What?!” I asked. “You wish your ma was gay?”
Vega laughed.
I remembered something all of a sudden. “Vega, I know what she’s up to.”
“My mami?”
“Nah, dummy. Big Rose.”
“You think she’s cutting up body parts?”
“I know what she’s building. What is wrong with you, man? She is building an exact copy, a small Lego version of St. Nick Houses. Where we live.”
His eyes grew wide.
“Yep,” I went on.
“It’s probably a map of where she buried the bodies,” he said.
I ignored this. “She ain’t done yet, but so far she has copied every little detail of the development and built it into her city.”
“You mean your city, man,” Vega said. “They’re still your blocks. Yvonne brings them for you, not that big-head girl.”
“I know. But I gotta admit, I am a little impressed with her construc
tion skills. She ain’t no joke. And it’s different having somebody else in there with me, even though she stays on the other side of the room working on her stuff. I kinda feel like we’re working on something together.”
We had been just about to tromp onto St. Nick Houses property, but Vega froze on the sidewalk. I kept on and glanced behind at him.
I saw Concrete hovering in the courtyard. A dozen cops had rolled up on Concrete and he was trying to talk his way out of there. I decided to avoid them.
Vega caught up with me. He was grinning like a idiot.
“You’re in love with a ugly girl,” he told me. He busted out laughing. “I just realized.”
“It ain’t even like that, man,” I said. “You ain’t got no sense. I don’t even like that Frankenstein. She is a monster.”
I couldn’t believe how clueless Vega could get.
“Wait,” he said. “Ain’t that your other girlfriend, Sunny? And April E.?”
I looked where he was pointing and saw the two girls hiding behind a big tree on one of the grassy parts of St. Nick. It was hard to tell who they was hiding from, but it wasn’t me and Vega. They hadn’t seen us yet.
Before we could yell at them, they both ran off in the other direction, and disappeared around a corner.
“You see that?” Vega said.
After we went over to where they had been hiding, we didn’t uncover nothing there. But Vega found an old cardboard box, sitting upside down, about twenty feet away.
This box was actually moving. It slid across the grass from the left to the right and then back to the left. It was hard to tell if the wind had been moving it or if it had been moving by itself.
Vega punted the cardboard box. A skinny red chicken flapped out from under it. The chicken flipped around. Pecked at us. And blasted off when Vega tried to grab it. The angry red bird was too fast and ducked beneath some bushes beside building 9400.
We gave up and headed toward our building’s lobby.
In the elevator up, both of us were quiet, trying to figure out what we had just seen. Finally, just before we got off on the seventh floor, Vega said, “I guess those girls weren’t joking about being detectives.”
He busted out laughing again before we dipped inside my crib for some fruit pops and video games.
Here in our city room over the past few weeks, one of the cities had been copied and another city had evolved.
I say “evolved” because that’s the only way to describe mine. My buildings and city plans sprang out of my head. I just built this stuff and tried not to think about where it came from. Like I was actually making up hip-hop lyrics or something.
My city was about twenty feet around its borders and growing. Rose’s was way smaller than mine, but she spent more time adding real-life details to hers.
I guess Rose and me had evolved too. We had started to communicate.
Over the weeks, we had started to share with each other what we were doing. Share ideas.
She would sometimes quit what she was doing and stroll over to watch what I was building. I sometimes did the same.
The week after our contest bombed, Mr. Ali and me had gone outside to the St. Nick courtyard. It was a wide round space surrounded by benches and sprinkled with trees.
The weather wasn’t so bad that day, so we ate our snack out there and talked. I tore apart the bread from my cheese sandwich to feed the black and gray squirrels.
Ali asked me a question. “So you don’t mind it? Her building in the storage room with you?”
“Does it make a difference?” I asked.
“Everything makes a difference,” he said. “Life’s all about differences and choices. I’m just glad you two haven’t killed each other in there.”
I grinned at that. “It ain’t terrible. I still want back my space.”
“You know, Rose needs space too.” He didn’t say nothing for a while. “When you deal with her, be patient. Girls like Big Rose, you know, just because they don’t smile at first, that doesn’t mean they aren’t friendly.” I squinted at Mr. Ali. “Be patient and keep trying to connect because it takes her a little longer to pick up on what you’re meaning to say…socially and body language and all that. Understand?”
I nodded.
“Emotions can be tricky for somebody like her,” he said. One of the squirrels grabbed a edge of bread and ran under a bench with it. “How you and your emotions getting along?” Mr. Ali asked. “Those bad thoughts you always talk about?”
I didn’t say nothing. Ali stared up at the tall development buildings surrounding us on all sides. He squinted at the top of one of them, like he was remembering something.
“You aren’t the only one with bad thoughts, young man,” Mr. Ali said. “Be grateful you got what you got.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about. Up until now my life hadn’t seemed like anything to be grateful for.
My eyes followed his to the building he was staring at. It was just one of the regular old thirteen project buildings that made up St. Nick.
They were all just bricks and blocks.
Today, watching Rose finish up her Lego model of where we lived, I was still wondering what Ali had meant. Sometimes he didn’t make any sense.
Now that Rose had completed her little version of our housing development, she had moved on to copying some of the other buildings that surrounded it. I didn’t know how she remembered how all of them looked and how she got them so exact.
It was like a touchable map of our neighborhood. She had built miniature versions of the Schomburg Center, Harlem YMCA and other stuff.
This afternoon Mr. Ali and Ms. Jenna brought our after-school group into the storage room so everybody could snoop at our progress. Rose and me had done a lot of repair work after the great tower quakes.
I had also asked Ali if I could try out my Maestro game on them. It was something I had invented, a game you could play by using my Harmonee city like a 3-D board game.
Our after-school class came shuffling in.
They walked around the edges of Harmonee. I explained the hero and monster boroughs to them all. I also told them the story behind the Moneekrom family I had made up.
They listened, mostly.
It was cool.
Most of them liked my city the best, I think, but Quintesha and Darrell B. hung out around Rose’s little St. Nick PJs. They couldn’t believe she had built it. They kept asking her questions. She would answer with one or two words, not looking them in the eye. She even managed to smile once, just for a half a second. You did have to be patient with Rose. And it helped to not ask too many questions. Asking her too many questions—even if they were like, “How you doing?”—would shut her down.
All my afterschool seemed to love my Maestro game.
Maestro was something I had come up with when I had started rebuilding my city again. The game was named after this space dude that I had created called the Maestro. He had lightning eyes, and was not a hero or monster but lived on an island off the coast of Victarea, the hero borough.
Way before, Ms. Jen and me had written all of these word and math problems down on a deck of index cards. To play, you had to roll your dice and move your big game piece across these grids I had built all across Harmonee.
For the game pieces, I used a bunch of old action figures I had found in the after-school toy basket.
I divided the kids up into either heroes or monsters. They all took turns rolling the dice and moving their pieces through the squares in different parts of Harmonee.
If you landed on a Lego grid that had a trap on it—quicksand, falling rocks or lava—you had to pull one of the index cards and correctly answer that question for points or you died.
The team with the most points, or who reached Maestro Island first, won. But if you reached Maestro Island first, you had a whole new, tougher set of questions to answer before you’d defeat the Maestro.
Sunny screeched after she first moved her piece.
I had gave her the monster Worsa the War Witch. In my head, Worsa had green skin and wore a cool red hood, but for my game here I had picked out an old Black Barbie doll—the best I could do.
Sunny rolled her dice and landed in a pool of lava. After doing that, she had five minutes to solve a math problem or her character would die.
She died.
Poor Worsa.
Ms. Jen said maybe I should give the kids ten minutes to solve a math problem instead of just five. I told her I’d consider it.
These kids needed to learn more.
While most of the after-school was huddled around the borders of Harmonee, playing Maestro, I stepped over to Rose, who had leaned against the far wall with her arms folded.
“They like our cities,” I told her.
“Yes,” Rose said.
“We gotta keep constructing, then,” I said.
She nodded up and down super fast. “They like your game,” she said. Rose wiped her nose with the back of her hand and watched me grab a book out of my orange backpack.
“I never showed you this before, but we talked about it,” I said, handing her the heavy hardback. She took it gently in her hands, staring down at the cover.
“ ‘A Pattern of Architecture,’ ” she read out loud. “ ‘World’s Greatest Marvels.’ ”
“Yeah, that’s the Christmas present my man Steve gave me.”
She nodded fast. “I know,” she said. “It looks good.”
“Yeah. I’m catching the train down to Midtown this Saturday. To try and find some of those buildings in there. I’m gonna explore buildings. Since you like ’em too, you wanna come? You could help me find ’em.”
Rose studied the book’s photo of the Lipstick Building for a long time, then just nodded her head real fast again without looking up.
“Oh, cool. I didn’t think you’d want to. Okay, we’ll meet at the four train on Saturday.”
But before I could speak anything else, another girl’s voice said something from behind me. “You never ask me to do nothing outside of after-school, Lolly,” the voice said.
I turned around. It was Sunny standing there with April E. right behind her.
“Huh?” I said.
The Stars Beneath Our Feet Page 9