“Oh, you’re just stupid…childish…,” Sunny shouted. “Dumb coconut.”
She squinted her eyes at me and then at Rose. Rose glared back at her and let out one big laugh. Sunny was out of there before I could even say anything.
I felt sorry for Sunny.
I didn’t know why.
Today was Yvonne’s day off.
While she was waiting for Ma to come home from work, Vega and me convinced her to walk us down to the game store on 125th Street. She agreed, and right when she had agreed, I knew that I would get her to buy me a video game for my new system.
Yvonne was easy to talk into stuff. I think she thought that doing me favors would make my mother love her more.
At the store, we browsed around a bit. Vega and me kept bringing Yvonne all of the brand-new games that had just come out. She would grab the box, flip it over, read the price tag and toss the box back onto the shelf.
After a while, though, she decided to buy me two games from the used bin. I let Vega pick them since he would be the one playing them the most. Just as we were leaving the shop, Yvonne got a message from my mother.
“Come on, boys,” she told us, reading her phone. “We meeting Sue-ellen at Applebee’s. I’m treating you to dinner.”
I loved Applebee’s.
And Yvonne loved taking us there. I liked it because it was like a real restaurant where a waiter would come to your table and ask you what you wanted. It was a special deal to go there for us.
Waiting in a booth at the restaurant, Yvonne, Vega and me ordered some sodas and French fries to pass the time until Ma came. I knew when she did finally get here, she would be starving from standing on her feet all day doing security.
“Your moms tell me you gonna hang out with that girl this weekend,” Yvonne said to me out of nowhere.
I shrugged and sipped on my orange soda. I tried not to look at Vega. I felt his eyes all over me. Instead, I inspected a paper leprechaun that was dangling from the ceiling on a string.
A chilly draft blew in through the open door. Though it was March, it had gotten crazy cold again outside.
“You mean Sunnshyne Dixon-Knight?” Vega asked Yvonne, all loud. “Or did you mean Big Rose? That one’s Lolly’s true novia. They going to get married in their storage closet and have big-head, special babies.”
Vega laughed. Pepsi spurted out his nostrils.
“Vega!” Yvonne shouted. She handed him a napkin. He kept laughing. Yvonne raised one of her thin eyebrows at me. “Is she your girl? Inquiring minds want to know,” she asked.
“Yeah, Loll!” Vega said, giggling.
I slapped him on the back of his neck and we started wrestling there in the booth.
It wasn’t as chilly as it had been.
I was glad because we’d probably be spending most of the morning and afternoon outside. I was still sleepy. I probably would’a overslept, but the sound of a chicken crowing had raised me up early.
I guessed that skinny red chicken was still running around St. Nick somewhere.
His crowing at the break of dawn had woke Ma up too. Like most Saturdays, she would be working the whole day in Brooklyn. I liked this because with her being gone all Saturday, I could usually do whatever I wanted without her telling me not to.
Her day at work was my day to be free.
Explore.
Somebody groaned behind me. I turned to watch this Spanish dude stand near a wall, with his knees bent, staring off into space. Every now and then he would act like he would need to sit down, but then he would just stay standing, dazed.
He was in his world. Built out of drugs. Who knew how long he’d be there like that, not knowing who he was.
I was on the corner at 125th and Lexington in Harlem. This place had to be the most psycho corner in all of New York City.
It had to be.
Daddy Rachpaul had told me that the reason this corner was so nuts was that all different types of people met here. Added on to the ex-cons living in halfway houses around the way, there were the addicts who used the drug clinics nearby. Also there were city buses that stopped at this corner to take people to homeless shelters.
So all these unlucky people mixed up together is what made this place kind of funky.
“Yo, youngblood!” somebody called. “I’m talking to you, brother!”
I met eyes with this old dude wearing only a stained blue windbreaker. Yeah, it was warmer today than it had been, but not warm enough to just be wearing an old dirty windbreaker. It must’a been about forty degrees.
“What’s up,” I said to the dude. My eyes started scanning the crowds of people rushing past. Most of them were racing down into the subway station, trying to get somewhere else.
“Spare a dollar?” Windbreaker asked me. “I’m trying to buy a coffee.”
I handed him the change in my pocket with: “That’s all I got.”
“Youngblood, God bless you,” he mumbled, then bowed and skidded off.
Again I peeped at the time on my phone. It was way past ten a.m. I was getting tired of waiting. I stashed my phone in the back pocket of my jeans.
“Youngblood!” somebody called out.
For a second I thought it was old Windbreaker, back for more coffee money. But after thinking for that second, my brain realized it couldn’t have been him back. This new voice was different.
Young.
I turned toward the voice and that heavy stone plopped right back onto my heart. I was staring that dude Harp right in the face. One of the older boys who had been following me since Christmas Eve.
I didn’t say nothing, but turned to run.
Gully was standing right in my way, though. Out of nowhere. He mean-mugged me, then glanced at the people all around us.
“Come here, little man,” Gully said to me, almost whispering. His stank breath was all up in my face. He had had an egg sandwich for breakfast, I could tell.
The two boys grabbed an arm each and toted me around the corner to 124th Street. I started kicking. There weren’t as many people here. Almost nobody this Saturday morning.
“You look skeered, little man,” Gully told me. He shoved me over to Harp, who grabbed me by my backpack before I could take off. “What’s your name?”
I didn’t say nothing.
“We know who you is, Lollypop,” Harp said into my ear. He made a popping sound with his lips. “You hang with them Dominicans over in St. Nick. What you doing over on the East Side this morning?”
“On 125th?” Gully said.
“He a quiet little mouse,” Harp said.
Gully cracked a smile. “You wander down to this part of East 125th, you got to pay the fare, Lollypop,” he said. “You know the rules.” He stepped closer. “Gimme that phone.”
I didn’t move, and Gully’s eyes got all narrow. He wasn’t mad. It seemed like he wasn’t sure if I had understood.
“That phone in your back pocket,” Gully said. “Harper and me could just grab it, but we want you to give it to us. As a gift. We don’t want there to be no misunderstanding about it. It’s just like you giving us your phone because we are really, really tight.”
“Best friends,” Harp whispered.
I could feel my heartbeat in my ears. I knew they was going to have my phone. That wasn’t really what made me sizzle. The sad, angry thing was that there was nothing I could do to stop them.
There were two of them. They were both bigger. Like Ma always said, I had skinny-boy muscles.
Gully stuck his finger in my face. “Give it up, Lollypop.”
I turned away.
And saw Big Rose stomp around the corner.
Lips tucked, she was skipping in that way that she always did. Real fast, so that her big head bobbed up into the air every time she took a step. With both hands, she was clutching a plastic lunch box against her chest.
I heard her say, “When you die, they bury you.”
Looking confused, Harp glanced at her. Rose was moving so fast toward
me and the boys that I didn’t even have time to warn her to hold back. I didn’t want her to get hurt.
Right after that thought flew through my brain cells, I watched Rose raise her lunch box above her head and then—blaap!
She had whopped Gully so hard on the back of his head that her lunch box broke in two. Food went flying out. Gully stumbled forward onto me, drooling, and we both tumbled to the cement. I scraped my hand trying to keep from falling.
By the time I looked up at Rose and Harp, I saw him ducking away from her, trying to get some distance between his head and her heavy fists. She was pummeling Harp’s head like a jackhammer breaking concrete.
One fist after another fist flew out and landed on Harp’s head, eye, nose or neck before he had any chance to react. Not only was Big Rose taller than both Harp and Gully, but she carried more weight on her than those boys, who were probably two years older.
I jumped up and lunged toward Harp.
Leaving his friend Gully still dazed on the sidewalk, Harp took off running east on 124th Street. Rose threw her Red Delicious apple after him as he ran. It just missed his head.
Both of us turned to glare down at Gully, who was trying to stand.
Before I could say anything, Rose ran at him with the hard metal thermos that had also been flung out of her broken lunch box. She didn’t smack him with it, but stood there, waiting.
Gully stumbled backward out of her reach. His eyes narrowed again, just like they had narrowed at me before, right after I’d refused to hand him my phone.
He looked like he didn’t understand how this had happened to him. How this girl had smashed out him and his roughneck partner. For a second, I thought he’d forgot how to speak, until he unloaded the longest stretch of curse words at Rose that I’d ever heard anybody gush out.
Rose let out a scream and raised her thermos higher above her head.
Like she was about to dunk it against Gully’s brains.
Still cursing, Gully tore off in the opposite direction. When Rose tried to follow, I was just able to hold her back. After she had finished puffing, we picked up what was left of her lunch off the street and made it back to the subway at 125th and Lex.
The McDonald’s restaurant we went to in Midtown Manhattan for lunch was so crowded we had to locate a corner booth on the second floor upstairs. I was glad because from the second floor you could watch all the people racing and rushing down below.
Rose wasn’t tired, but I was. We had spent most of the afternoon hunting all around Midtown for famous buildings that were in my architects book.
I treated Rose to lunch. All she had wanted was chicken nuggets and apple slices. I guessed it was my fault that she had had to wreck her own lunch by pounding Gully upside his ugly head with it.
“That boy pointed in your face,” she told me. “He shouldn’t do that.”
I decided to never stick my finger in her face.
This Rose was okay, I thought.
We both sat up there eating and looking out. I took a chew out of my double cheeseburger and reached for my phone. I had bagged pictures of all the different buildings Rose and me had spotted.
“Here’s the Chippendale Building,” I said, showing her. “That was the first one we found. Designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee.”
She nodded, and spoke with mashed-up chicken in her mouth. “Fifty-Fifth and Madison.”
I thumbed a page in my book. “It says it’s nicknamed the Chippendale Building because it looks like a piece of furniture. Huh!”
“What?” Rose asked.
“That’s what it says. The top of the building is built like the top of a old cabinet.”
We went on like that for a while, eating and talking about what we had seen that day. My favorite was the Chrysler Building. To me, it was a building from another planet. Rose’s was some building we had explored at 300 West 57th Street. It took a minute for me to figure out that she had meant that Hearst building.
It was weird and shiny. Well, the top was. The bottom was old stone.
Rose was always so exact in how she talked. When she talked about a building, she didn’t say, “You know, the big one shaped like a tube of lipstick.” Instead, she would say, “The oval-shaped reddish orange one at Fifty-Third and Third Avenue.”
This girl was different, but that’s nothing new. I was a little different too, I had come to realize over the past few months. I mean, how many grown kids spend all their free time building Lego cities in dusty old storage rooms?
“Hey, Rose,” I started, “what makes you so different?”
She shrugged and slid my book across the table toward herself.
“You know,” I said. “I mean, you like to be by yourself so much. You got a solid memory too. Real solid. Is that because you’re homeschooled? You gonna build all the buildings we saw today? In our city room?”
She nodded, eyes down in the book.
“All that, from memory?” I asked.
She nodded again, flipping a page.
I whistled. “I couldn’t do that, man. That’s why I took pictures.” I sipped the last of my orange drink. I noticed the sound of the straw slurping made her frown, so I cut it out.
Rose said, still frowning, “I’m not autistic.”
Her head jerked toward the sound of a chair leg screeching across the floor. An Asian family that had been sitting next to us was leaving.
“I’m not autistic,” she said again.
“I know. You ain’t got no definition,” I said.
She nodded and turned a page without meeting eyes with me.
“Well, I always feel different from everybody else,” I said. “It gets worse the more old I get, I think. Just between you and me, I wasn’t doing too good over the holidays. I hated the holidays. I felt like I was gonna die.”
Rose glanced at me and asked, “Why were you going to die?”
She grinned and dove back down into my book. I peeked around to see if anybody was listening. Everybody else was all in their own other worlds. Two Black women dressed in short skirts sat down where the Asians had sat.
“I had started to think about doing bad stuff. Like how I treated you. Last October, on Halloween, my brother Jermaine died,” I told Rose. “Actually, he didn’t just die. Some thug shot him at a nightclub up in the Bronx. They haven’t found him yet—the dude that shot my brother—but I know he’s still out there.”
On the street below, some fat cop was giving some delivery van a ticket. The driver was trying to talk his way out of it. The cop just walked away.
I sighed. “The storage room, Harmonee, working on our two cities…it helps. I still think about doing bad things sometimes. I’m not completely better, but I feel like I could be better.”
“I’m better,” Rose said. Without taking her eyes out of A Pattern of Architecture, she said, “August sixteenth my mother jumped from the top of building number 9900.”
“Oh, man!” I said. All the buildings in St. Nick were fourteen stories tall. I knew firsthand from sitting on top of mine flying paper planes. “Rose, man, I’m sorry.”
“I’m better,” she said again.
I thought back to last summer and remembered what she was talking about. At first, the cops had tried to keep the jumper’s name quiet, but soon everybody was talking about the lady who jumped. I couldn’t remember her name….
“Desirée Green,” Rose said.
“Yeah, I remember, Rose,” I said. “Oh, man!”
Rose’s last name was different, probably her father’s last name. And mostly her grandmother had raised her, she told me, since her own mother had never been around.
I remembered all that and everybody in St. Nick being so sad about it, that woman killing herself like that right in our home. Rose said her mother didn’t grow up in St. Nick and never really visited Rose’s grandma Betty much.
Man!
Then, out of nowhere, she started to kick her leg back and forth. With her eyes on the floor, she told me, �
� ‘Rosamund, when you die, they bury you, but your soul flies to the stars.’ ”
Her leg stopped. She stared back into my book.
I didn’t know what she had meant. What she had said wasn’t in the book. She had said the same stuff to Harp and Gully this morning.
I sat there watching her read until she said she had to go home. Her gran would get worried.
As we headed toward the subway to go back up to Harlem, I scoped out the tall Midtown skyscrapers one last time. The idea of falling from, or jumping from, the roof of my own building used to scare me. I couldn’t help but think about what it would be like to fall from the top of one of these mile-high skyscrapers here, down toward these hard concrete sidewalks below.
I wondered if that was what Rose was thinking about when she had built her own tiny version of the same building her mother had dove off of. Rose’s Lego buildings were like tombstones, I realized.
A plastic cemetery of tiny skyscrapers.
Saturday evening I hopped up the stairwell steps, trying to get to Vega’s apartment as fast as I could. On the way up I almost bumped into Chivonne and Erika, who was walking down.
“Watch out, Lolly!” Chivonne shouted. “You almost knocked us over!”
I said sorry on my way by. Erika was pregnant again, I had noticed, with a big scarf wrapped around her neck. That girl stayed with child, like Ma would’a said.
Vega’s ma, Mrs. Vega, answered their door. For a minute she just stood there, though, blocking my way and squinting at me. Mrs. Vega was short and round. There was no squeezing past her. After a second, she just exhaled all heavy and stepped aside so I could come into their apartment.
He must’a really been in trouble this time, like his message had said. Vega’s ma had never slowed me down before. The Vegas’ place was like my second crib.
It was always so neat in Vega’s apartment. Especially compared to our unit on the seventh floor. I mean, me and Jermaine had always kept our room picked up, but our mother was a slob; she hated to clean.
I started to head back toward Vega’s room. It was chilly in here, like their heat was broke.
Mrs. Vega shouted something after me in Spanish, but I didn’t know what she had said because she had said it so fast.
The Stars Beneath Our Feet Page 10