The Stars Beneath Our Feet

by David Barclay Moore

  “Making progress, Rosamund!” Ali yelled across the room. “Use your words instead of your fists.” He strolled into the room with his hands folded behind his back. “Rose! Lolly! Come here for a sec,” Ali shouted. “Casimiro, let us alone. I need to speak with your conspirators here.”

  Vega left the room. Before he did, he gave me a look that said Game over. By the frown cut into Mr. Ali’s face, it did seem like we were in trouble for something.

  He gathered me and Rose in the center of the city room and stared at us for a few seconds before opening his mouth again.

  “I got some terrible news,” Ali started.

  I had figured that. We’d been having our office chats less and less lately. I started to believe Ali was going to say we needed to have more of them again. Like I wasn’t making progress like he had wanted.

  But I had been….

  Ali said this: “I’m very proud of all you two’ve done over the past few months. You should be proud of yourselves—we all are in the center.”

  He paused. A sad smile crept across his expression.

  “A new fitness program is moving in,” Ali went on. “You’re gonna have to tear down your cities to make room for it.”

  What?

  “They’ll be using this room for health ed,” he said. “I’m sorry. This is an awful lot of work, but I guess you knew it couldn’t stay up here forever.”

  Rose didn’t react at all. My mouth hung open.

  “Rose, I am particularly proud of you with all of the progress you’ve made. You’ve really blossomed….”

  Without a word, Rose ran straight at her Lego city and began tearing it apart.

  “Rosamund!” Ali yelled. “You can wait, girl. They don’t have to come down this minute. I’ll let you know.”

  Across the room, Rose stopped and began rebuilding. Mr. Ali rolled his eyes. He turned back to me and started talking again.

  I stood there and watched Mr. Ali’s mouth move. He was talking, but I wasn’t hearing.

  I hid in my bedroom for most of Saturday.

  Vega had been messaging me every few minutes, but I had been ignoring him. I had turned down the volume on my phone because I hadn’t wanted to talk to nobody.

  I really felt like I didn’t have nothing to say. All those days I spent planning, building, dreaming up ideas…

  That city is me. It will be erased. Everybody in after-school said they loved Harmonee, but they didn’t really.

  What was the point in doing anything if it was all gonna be destroyed anyhow?

  The messed-up thing was that just when I felt like I had been getting all right with Jermaine being gone, him being dead, all this hostility had to happen.

  I sunk my head into my pillow and just cried.

  I figured I would wind up as bad as my rotten city.

  In the dark and middle of the night, I stumbled into Ma’s bedroom and crawled into her bed next to her. Her paperback of A Coffin for Dimitrios was jabbing me, so I set it on her nightstand.

  Ma kind of half woke up and grunted. I laid my head on her side and she reached over to hug me against her. She rubbed my head.

  I suddenly felt safe. I could feel myself getting drowsy already.

  I drifted off, thinking about me and my mother’s old story challenges and wishing we could play another one.

  I had been avoiding Mr. Ali the past few days, feeling like he had betrayed me. I guess I realized that he really hadn’t, but I couldn’t help feeling that way for a while.

  Tricked.

  He finally managed to drag me into his office.

  “Mr. Rachpaul, we hardly talk anymore!” Mr. Ali said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “That’s a good thing. It means you’ve improved. All the work you’ve done up till now I don’t want us to lose. I don’t want that. I know you don’t.”

  I really didn’t care anymore.

  He had said he was worried that us having to tear down Harmonee might affect me in a bad way. Might cause me to “backslide.” I wondered if he really knew what he was talking about.

  I felt I was already starting to go back to how I was.

  I was scared to ask him how much longer we had before Harmonee came down.

  That day he had pulled out a new sketchbook and handed it to me. His feeling was that I could start drawing my ideas and cities since I wouldn’t have the space anymore to build them in real life.

  Drawing cities?

  I sucked my teeth.

  I had been wondering about Rose and how she was going to react to everything we had created getting demolished. I asked Mr. Ali if he was having these convos with Rose, like he had been having with me. He said no, that he wasn’t really trained on that level.

  “Big Rose is a whole nother bag of groceries,” Ali told me, raising his eyebrows.

  Rose’s grandmother finally managed to unlock their front door after spending five minutes fumbling with the locks. She cracked the door and I spotted her face, round and yellow, with rounder eyeglasses that made her eyeballs look bulging.

  “I got it!” Gran said with a wheezy smile. “These locks are rusty. Come inside, Mr. Lolly. Rose is almost ready. I’m Dr. Betty Green.”

  Dr. Betty was old.

  She was really heavy and moved around her place really slow, hunched over a plain black cane made of wood. Though Gran’s face and my face were at the same height, if she had stood up straight, she would’a been way taller than me.

  Inside, their apartment was full of books. Magazines and old newspapers were stacked in heaps everywhere. There were so many piles, you had to wriggle through their apartment in little pathways between the clutter, like you were stumbling through a tight maze.

  It smelled funny in here.

  A big wooden table sat in the middle of their living room. There were a few books and notebooks on it. I guessed that was where old Gran homeschooled Rose. I also saw a pack of those gold star stickers Rose had stuck on her buildings.

  “Have a seat,” Gran said. “Would you like some lemonade?”

  “No, ma’am,” I said. I gazed around at all of the books lining their walls’ bookshelves. There were a few framed diplomas on the walls too. They looked like Rose’s grandmother had earned them a long time ago.

  I sneezed.

  “You’re admiring my collection,” Gran said. “We’re partial to poetry here. Nothing after the nineteenth century. The greatest poets worked then. I got something for you.”

  Wheezing, she shuffled over to a bookcase and handed me one of the old, dusty books. It was a small one, like the kind Rose always read during after-school.

  “Ms. Phillis Wheatley,” Gran said, grinning. “One of our most illustrious Black poets! There is no true poetry any longer. No Blake, Keats, Pope….”

  I didn’t know what she was talking about. The cover of the poetry book read The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley.

  “You may have it,” Gran told me.

  Poetry?

  I knew that I would never, ever read this book.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Just then, I heard a toilet flush and Rose stepped into the living room, tugging on her hair.

  Rose and me caught the subway to Rock Center. I had decided to try to sketch some of the buildings there like Mr. Ali had recommended.

  We hadn’t talked at all about what Mr. Ali had said the other week, about us having to destroy all our work. He hadn’t said when he was expecting us to start deconstruction.

  I think both me and Rose were hoping that if we didn’t bring it up, then it wouldn’t happen. That didn’t make any sense, I know. It probably made as much sense as us thinking that our cities would’a stayed there forever.

  Rockefeller Center was filled with busy people.

  Both Rose and me had been to this part of Midtown before. She said her gran had brought her here for the Christmas tree lighting once. My parents had been taking me here to Tuttle’s Toy Emporium since I was little.

 
Coming to Tuttle’s was like visiting someplace magic.

  Like the rest of the buildings at Rock Center, Tuttle’s had a kind of boring tan Art Deco facade. But on the inside? On the inside there was so much color and so many different kinds of toys that if you tried to pack it all into one first glance, your head would explode.

  As soon as you blew through the entrance of Tuttle’s, there were two people dressed in giant teddy bear costumes holding the doors open for you. Inside was a room with tall, tall ceilings, three stories high. Escalators took you up to the other toy levels. But in this first, large room there was all kinds of cool stuff to see.

  My favorites were the Legos, of course.

  They had life-size Lego statues of George Washington, Batman and a Black pirate with a green bird on his shoulder. Of course, my favorite Lego creation in the main room was that enormous green-and-gold dragon that stood twenty feet tall against the back wall.

  Dopeness.

  In the Lego department on the ground floor there was a gigantic plastic tube filled with blocks. This tube ran all the way up to the second-story balcony, where the people that worked there would keep filling it up with loose Legos, all shapes, sizes and colors. At the bottom of this tube, kids could scoop out blocks and pay for them by the pound like you would grapes or nuts. I guessed that this was where all of my leftover bricks was coming from.

  Across from that, there was a funny man in a booth doing magic tricks with cards for the kids. He pulled a bunch of playing cards from out of Rose’s sleeve. She was stunned stupid.

  Later on, Rose fell in love with a white horse with silver wings. It was a big doll that was large enough for two people to ride on its back.

  Then this man on stilts and dressed like a giraffe stole my African hat. He swooped it right off my head and ran away with it. Yelling, I had to chase after him until he gave it back to me. I could tell he hadn’t expected me to get as mad as I had.

  I watched him glide off with swooshing steps to the other side of the room to bother some other kids.

  “Why didn’t you help me, Rose!” I said, glaring at her.

  Rose glanced at the floor like she had got extra shy all of a sudden.

  She got on my nerves sometimes.

  One of the people who worked at Tuttle’s was able to find Yvonne and lead her to me and Rose. Yvonne was surprised to see me there, where she worked. It was interesting to be in the same place as where all of our Legos were coming from.

  Yvonne took a work break and led us outside to the plaza in the middle of Rock Center. We sat outside and talked for a minute, but Yvonne kept twitching around, like she was anxious to get back to work.

  She gave me a hug and told me to stop looking so mean.

  I didn’t care.

  Me and Rose wandered around Midtown for a while. Rose was quiet. I tried sketching some of the buildings there.

  We paused on East 53rd Street, where a new building was being built. Well, actually, they were adding on more floors to the top of an older building.

  I made a quick sketch of the construction, all these tiny people up there crawling around the girders like ants on a big tree. Rose seemed to be looking at them too, but not really looking at them.

  Afterward we caught the D train up to 1-2-5 and back home to St. Nick. On the subway, I read one of the poems in that book Rose’s gran had given me. It was different from what I thought it would be.

  Not as dumb.

  I read the poem again.

  And then began another one.

  Imagination! who can sing thy force?

  Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?

  I started to feel like they were talking to me.

  It was dusky outside, but people were out. The Harlem streets were full. Kids and adults, hanging, enjoying the nice weather.

  Vega and me walked under a tree that was so fragrant-oozing. I guessed its pink flowers had blossomed and formed the smell. Like a female’s strong perfume.

  Soothing.

  It reminded me of something in one of those Phillis Wheatley poems I’d read. And in the distance, I could hear motorcycle engines roaring just like in a Tupac Shakur video I had seen online.

  As we walked east on the sidewalk, I turned to Vega beside me. Though it was dark, the street lampposts made a lot of light. Vega shoved his hands in his pockets, his face turned down toward the ground.

  As horrible as I was feeling about having to destroy Harmonee, it relieved me for a minute, just seeing him there.

  “Ali tell you when he wants your stuff down?” Vega asked, like he was reading my mind.

  He was a true friend, I realized.

  “Nah,” I said. “I bet it’s soon, though. I think that new corny health program is starting up.”

  “That’s messed up, them making you demolish everything,” Vega said. “I think it must be hard to be a real artist.”

  “What you mean?”

  “Well, if we was different, you know, been born with money…It’s just…making good art and music ain’t really expected of us. That type of work is unexpected.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It wasn’t meant for us. But I still think you’ll be a good violinist. You are now!”

  It smelled like rain. I turned up toward the sky and could see heavy clouds.

  “Lolly, I think you’ll be a good architect. Or whatever you wanna do.”

  “Thanks, Vega. We both know I won’t ever be nothing.”

  We crossed over Fifth Av’ and headed downtown.

  In Manhattan, where we lived, Fifth Av’ was the divider between the West Side and the East Side. Now, on the East Side, we passed in front of a busy bodega. There was a crowd of kids out front, laughing and dancing to a boom box.

  On the next block, a cop car slowed down and eyed us. A white cop dude and his Black female partner shined a light on us, but kept on rolling. Like they was looking for somebody.

  Their light burned my eyes. I was glad they didn’t bother us. If they had, I might’a done something crazy because of how I was feeling now.

  We kept on.

  Vega’s mami had sent him out to get some rice and green plantains. But she didn’t have no money right then to pay for the food, so we were walking to Manny’s far-off bodega that would let her have groceries now, but pay for them later.

  “Look!” Vega shouted.

  Coming up the sidewalk toward us were Sunny and April E. Those girls saw us, but shot right past, ignoring us.

  They looked embarrassed and were stepping as fast as they could back toward St. Nick. The crazy thing was April was tugging a small animal on a leash behind her. The leash was attached to a tiny harness snapped around the body of a chicken.

  A skinny white chicken.

  On a leash.

  Vega stared at me wide-eyed. I couldn’t believe it either. He yelled after them, “How’s that detective biz, girls!”

  “EDK Investigators and chicken walkers!” I shouted.

  I could see Sunny’s shoulders shrink. Vega laughed until he cried. Finally, we continued toward Manny’s bodega.

  “That was surreal,” I said. “Walking a chicken.”

  “What’s that word mean?” Vega asked. “Surreal?”

  “I don’t know exactly, manin, but I think we just saw it.”

  There was about a dozen people hanging out in front of the store by the time we got there. One of them was wild Darrell B. from after-school and his friend Dulé from Senegal. Dulé was a giant.

  We slapped hands.

  Inside the cramped bodega, I took my time searching for a snack that would satisfy how I felt. In the end, I decided to grab a big bag of Utz Red Hot chips and handed Manny, the owner, four quarters. Manny put the chips in a black plastic bag and handed it to me.

  “I’ll wait on you out front,” I told Vega. He was still fumbling through the plantains, trying to find one that wasn’t too ripe.

  Outside in front of the bodega, everybody had left. It had started to shower and people h
ad scattered like cockroaches do when you switch on a light. I heard a motorcycle engine moaning far off.

  I was ready to head back to St. Nick.

  Little drops of rain was sprinkling from the atmosphere. I sighed and turned my face up toward the sky, letting my forehead get sprinkled. It tickled.

  I closed my eyes and wondered how far these drip-drops of water had fallen just to wind up on my face. The word “facade” popped into my head for some reason. I had just learned about it in that book.

  “This how you St. Niggas take showers?” somebody said. I opened my eyes and right off got jerked up into the air and slammed down hard onto the sidewalk.

  From down on the ground, I frowned up at Harp and Gully, standing over me. Gully was bent over, his face sneering into mine. Harp was standing behind him, hooting.

  “This the East Side,” Gully said. “Your big-head gorilla ain’t here to protect you.”

  Just then, the door to the bodega flung open. They both glanced over at Vega. He was standing there with his mouth open, holding a black plastic bag in one hand and his phone in the other.

  Harp stepped to him and snatched them both.

  “Oh!” Vega shouted. He swung at Harp, who dodged and sent his fist flying against Vega’s dome. Vega fell back against the door.

  “Get his,” Harp ordered Gully, who tried to grope into my pockets.

  Lying on my back, I stuck Gully in his jaw, but he acted like he scarcely felt it. I kept whaling punches. He blocked some, then clocked me upside my head. The back of my skull bounced off the sidewalk’s rocky concrete.

  Everything switched fuzzy.

  I could hear Vega holler and struggle with Harp.

  I kept trying to smack Gully, who had straddled me, but everything I did was in slow motion; my fists dragged through water. I felt his hands jam into my jean pockets again.

  Gully emptied everything onto the ground, jerking my pockets inside out before he found my phone. I managed to crack him one last time on his chin before he stood up and kicked me.

  “Cool! You gave us your phone anyway, Lollypop!” Gully said. “Good looking out!” He made a popping sound with his lips.