I heard Harp tell Vega, “As long as Frito keeps holding out, this is what you get! Tell your cuz!”
Then Manny the bodega owner yelled, “Hey! Hey! You boys! Lárguense! Lárguense! Oooh!”
And next I heard footsteps sprint off. I sat up in time to see the backs of Harp and Gully making it down the block. Manny stood on the sidewalk with a wooden baseball bat, waving it after them.
Vega was sitting on the ground too, his back propped against the shop. His nose was bloody.
I felt my jeans, but I knew already that I wouldn’t find nothing. I knew that those punks had robbed me. My keys and pocket change were scattered across the sidewalk with Vega’s blood.
It started to rain harder.
I sat there on the wet ground watching Harp and Gully turn the corner. I pounded the concrete with my fist until I broke skin.
Cold as iced-over pavement.
That’s how I felt in the back of the police car. It was those same two cops—the white dude and Black woman that had shined their light on us—who showed up at the bodega after Manny had called them.
They asked Vega and me lots of questions, but me and him didn’t answer most of them. We didn’t know who had jumped us or why. We didn’t get a good look at them. We didn’t want no ride back to where we lived.
That was the last thing Vega and me had wanted—to get dropped off at St. Nick projects by two cops and have everybody see us and start wondering if we had snitched on somebody.
The only reason we were riding in the back of the cop car now was that Manny knew Vega’s ma and had made the police take us home. So we wouldn’t get jumped again. He even gave them the address.
Now here we were.
My head burned like it was full of Red Hot chips. It felt swole too. Ma wouldn’t like that. Vega looked worse.
When you ride in the back of a cop car, does that mean you’re arrested?
They were in the front and we were caught in the back. I felt like a crook, like I had done something wrong. This was our first time here. I wondered if we’d ever be riding in the backseat again.
I didn’t like it.
It was still raining. It had gotten harder. Nobody was saying nothing. Except for the squeak of the windshield wipers and the squawking police radios, all you could hear was the rain hitting the car roof.
We stopped at a red light at Frederick Douglass Boulevard and 125th and I glanced over at Vega. He was scrunched over on the other side of the seat, leaning against the window, looking out at the rain.
It was dark, but the red light from the stop signal lit up his face like a fire.
“You gonna tell your cousin?” I whispered.
Vega turned to me slow, tilting his head onto his shoulder. One of his eyes was swole. He almost looked like he was about to go to sleep. His eyes, though, the way they looked at me, his eyes weren’t sleepy.
They were hard. And something else.
He had changed.
The old Vega had been left behind on that sidewalk in front of Manny’s bodega. This new Vega in the back of the cop car with me, he was somebody I hadn’t met yet.
The tiniest ones made up my brother’s face.
It was all Legos. Tiny brown-skinned Legos.
And I remembered for the first time in a long time that scar Jermaine had. That tiny scar on his cheek he had got from tripping into the chain-link fence on the playground when he was a kid.
Years later, I asked Jermaine how exactly he had got that scar and he told me he had been in a fight with another playground kid and got shoved. One of the pieces of the metal fence had caught him.
The scar on his cheek, you could hardly see, but it had stayed with him.
His face was huge now. Built all out of Legos just like the Black pirate statue at Tuttle’s. But now Jermaine’s face was glowing too, the blocks turning from brown to glowing red and then growing out of a brick wall, like flowers budding in fast motion.
His face was stuck into a red-brick wall.
It was the wall outside Manny’s.
Jermaine’s rectangle block eyes stared at me from out of the bricks and I realized that this was crazy and that was also when my own eyes opened.
The ceiling.
I was lying flat on my back in my own bedroom.
For a minute, I felt like I couldn’t move. But when I finally did move, I suddenly wished I hadn’t. My whole body was stiff and sore. It took me a minute to remember why.
I remembered what happened last night in front of the bodega.
Jermaine’s face like a red-brick wall.
I reached up to feel my own face. The corners of my eyes were wet. I closed them again.
Tight.
My bones were still aching when I snuck into the kitchen for breakfast. Ma was already in there, making her special Lipton and lemon tea. She was wearing her security-guard uniform, about to head off to work at the courts.
I slid down behind the table and started in on the bowl of cornflakes she had waiting for me. Everything was going okay until she turned around from the stove and asked why I was wearing my African hat at her table.
I had it pulled down low over my forehead.
The night before, I had been lucky. Vega and me asked the two cops that had picked us up at Manny’s to drop us off near 130th and Seventh Av’, so we could walk across the street to our building.
That way, we avoided any attention from being seen socializing with cops. That was Vega’s smart idea.
And I was more lucky that Ma was back in her room when I came in, and I went straight to my own room. She didn’t see me last night and I was hoping that she wouldn’t get a good look at me this morning.
Boy, I was wrong.
“Jumped!” she yelled. “What you mean you got jumped?”
Ma ripped my hat off my head and covered her mouth when she saw my huge bump. She turned my head from side to side, I guess checking out the rest of my damage.
She stood staring at me for a minute, hand still covering her mouth.
“Wallace, are you okay?”
“I feel fine, Ma,” I lied. “Believe me.”
“Who did this?”
I shrugged. It even hurt to do that. “Some dudes. We don’t know who. Outside a bodega on the East Side.”
“You don’t know?” Ma asked. “You did not see them?”
“It was dark and rainy,” I said, stirring my cornflakes. I let my eyeballs fall to the floor.
“Why wasn’t I told about this?” she asked. “You said the police dropped you off last night? They should have said something!”
“They did what we asked,” I said. “We didn’t want no excitement—”
Ma hissed.
I never heard her straight-up hiss before. This was new. My mother was a snake now.
“What did I tell you about that phone?” she yelled. “Huh? What did I tell you!”
“You blaming me?”
“It’s all your fault!”
“Huh? My fault?”
“Yes!” she said. “First you bug me to get you that damn phone and then you let yourself get jumped, flashing it about!”
I didn’t like that. “I wasn’t flashing it,” I said.
Ma shook her finger in my face. “I warned you. I warned you. And now look at you, beaten and bruises.” She spun around, paced toward the window.
With her back turned, I decided to snap my hat back on my head. My arms burned to lift them. My feelings on the inside were beginning to feel hurt too.
“You could’a been killed,” I heard her say, all low. Looking tired, she turned back around to me. “Finish up and get showered, okay? We’re going to the clinic.”
“The health clinic?”
“No!” Ma barked. “The animal clinic, fool. What you think?”
“But you got work,” I said. “You’re late.”
Ma exhaled. “Not today. Now hurry up, Lolly. Get ready. You know how long they make you wait down there.”
I stood up to
head to the bathroom. I had only ate a little bit, but I wasn’t really hungry anymore. I turned to leave.
“You shouldn’t blame me,” I said.
She answered with the biggest sigh.
That Monday at after-school Rose and me worked in quiet.
And side by side, sometimes us crisscrossing bodies when we had to lean across one another to stick a Lego into place.
I didn’t bother telling her about me getting jumped. For a minute, I was afraid that she might get hurt herself, going out to seek revenge for me. But by the way she looked at me in our city room, it seemed like she had already known.
She looked at me kinda sorry.
Either way, I don’t know why I had been worried that Rose might get hurt going after Harp and Gully—she had already beat the two of them dudes, practically by herself.
But me and Vega couldn’t do nothing against them.
Ma always said not to underestimate a woman.
I decided to take a break from building. I took a step back from our latest creation to get a good look at it.
This new thing was different. We’d never built anything exactly like this before. I was proud. And sad too.
“What’s that?” Vega asked.
I turned and watched him shuffle into the city room. His swole eye looked a lot better.
“Where was you?” I asked him. “You missed most of the day.”
Vega kept walking over to what we were building. Rose stopped for a moment to stare at Vega’s eye. He watched her do this and frowned.
“Still on punishment?” I asked Vega. He didn’t say nothing, but walked around to the other side of our new project. He squinted at something on the other side.
“This is crooked” was all he said.
I scrunched my face. I told him, “It’s a bridge, man. We know it’s crooked, Vega. We’re going to swap in some other bricks on that side later. Ones from…”
Vega had stooped down to make an adjustment that nobody had asked him to make. He tried to push up one of the brick walls on our bridge and wound up collapsing the whole side.
Rose and me stared at him like he was crazy.
But instead of apologizing, Vega kinda smirked and then just shook his head and started walking backward toward the door. He had a mean half smile on his face.
I was pissed.
Pointing at Vega, I started after him, but got jerked back. Rose had reached out and grabbed my shoulder. I grimaced.
“Rose!” I said. “Are you crazy?” My back was still sore, on fire.
She just glared at me, then walked to the other side of our bridge, where Vega had done his damage, and she started to rebuild.
It took me a while to help.
It took even longer for me to cool off. I had been feeling irritated lately, but Vega had really tried it with me.
Like he sunk me lower.
I crouched down some more to get a closer peek inside one of our girder grids. The columns were okay, but I still thought we could’a made a simpler foundation. We had wasted too many blocks.
But, I remembered, none of that really mattered anymore. For the past week, Rose and me had been working on this last Lego piece together.
We’d run out of time.
In a few minutes, they would come in here to move our bridge out of the city room and into the courtyard. The two big doors that opened to the outside were standing wide open, and every now and then, I could hear beats booming from the DJ setting up out there.
“Lolly, you ready to move this stuff to the court?” Mr. Ali asked.
He had entered the city room through the double doors. Sparkling sunlight jetted from behind him, leaving his face in the dark.
The black shape of Rose’s husky body wandered in through the doors. She waited beside Ali, rubbing one of her elbows.
“When you die, they bury you,” I heard Rose say. “But your soul flies to the stars.”
I stood up and frowned; my back was still a little sore from Gully slamming me to the concrete last week. The doctor at the clinic thought I’d be fine. Ma and Daddy were relieved to hear there was no real damage.
I thought about how Vega and me had told our parents that we had got curb-stomped in front of the bodega and that some random thieves had snatched our phones. I guess it was okay that we’d lied and told them that we didn’t know who had jumped us.
I was afraid of somebody calling me a snitch.
My lump above my right eye still stung a little. And my butt stung from falling on the concrete. I hadn’t told anybody that part, though.
For almost the whole week, every time I moved, I hurt. It was like a little reminder of getting beat down a zillion times a day.
I couldn’t forget it.
What might’a hurt the most was the fact that all the photos that I had taken on Rose and me’s architecture tours were gone.
I hadn’t even backed them up.
“I guess I’m ready,” I finally answered back to Mr. Ali. “Might as well get this done.”
Standing outside this morning in the courtyard between the buildings at St. Nick, I shoved half of a hot dog in my mouth.
The DJ started playing the clean version of one of my favorite songs. It didn’t sound as real with all the cursing taken out. At these types of center events, Mr. Ali wouldn’t let anybody play any music that he said had a harmful message, or grimy lyrics.
Ma couldn’t come because she was making up that day she missed work.
I wondered where stupid Vega was. I hadn’t seen him since he pulled apart our Legos days ago.
I kept thinking that I should message him, but then remembered that my phone got boosted. And so had his. Remembering this pissed me off. It was funny how in just a couple of months I had got so used to doing everything on my phone.
I peeped a few of the people that had showed up so far to the health fair and cookout. I held a cold can of soda to my head to numb my forehead.
It felt good. It had become a habit.
“Nah! Lolly!” little Jasmine David yelled. She ducked and spun and dodged around me in a circle. I gulped the last of my dog. “I bet you can’t catch me!” she went on.
I leaped toward her and plucked one of her braids. She screamed and sped off, grinning. She was only seven.
I chased after a lot of the youngsters in the courtyard, their parents watching from the ring of park benches that circled it. Mr. Ali called for me to come over to the middle, where the DJ was set up and where parts of our cities had been moved.
“Lolly,” Ali said. He crinkled his face at me. “Where’s Rose? You two should stand closer to your creations. In case somebody wants to ask.”
I frowned at him. “What are they gonna ask?”
“Questions!” he said. “Just stay close, brother. And go find Rose.”
How was I supposed to do both at the same time?
Ali started talking to the DJ about something.
Two sections of my city and two sections of Rose’s had been moved outside this morning. It was odd to see them out here shining in the sunlight instead of under the dim lights of the storage room. Being on show like this, outside in the middle of the hood, made Harmonee even more like a fantasy city, all bright and bizarre.
Mr. Ali’s idea to do this had been a legitimate idea, though at first I hadn’t been too sure. Rose and me had collaborated on something fresh, just for today. We had built a oversize Lego bridge that connected one of her city sections to one of mines.
On Rose’s side of the bridge, the design was pretty everyday—just like her city was like real life. But toward the middle of our bridge, the layout started to change. It kind of blended more into my own fantasy style so that by the time the structure reached my city section, it was made up of everything straight out of my head and all dream-kissed.
It was kind of hot, really.
And the bridge sat up high enough in the air that little kids or short people could actually bow under it, if they wanted.
Building the new bridge had kinda helped me not think so much about what had happened with Harp and Gully. Vega needed something like that—so he wouldn’t think on it too much.
I guess playing his violin was like that, but I had barely seen Vega at all. He had stopped coming to after-school. He should’a been here today.
I took in the people in the courtyard. It was more full than before. I didn’t see Rose anywhere. She was probably still sulking too.
I felt deserted.
I bobbed my head and looked over at the Madtown section of Harmonee that we had moved out here. Madtown was where all the monsters lived.
A lady and her little boy had walked up to it. Her son, about four, kept trying to touch my buildings, but the woman kept jerking him back.
The mother smiled at me. She had some long fake eyelashes. “You Lolly, right?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“You and Big Rose are the straight-up artistes!” she said. “We met before. Years ago, over at Janine’s. You were about his age, basically.” She pointed to her boy. “I’m Sadie.”
“Nice to meet you. Or remeet you.”
“You and Rose need to be very, very proud of this,” Sadie said.
I grinned.
“Say cheese!”
I beamed again and this ancient dude snapped a pic with his phone.
“There we go,” he said, viewing how the photo turned out. “The master architect! Thanks for the picture, brother.”
“Thank you,” I said.
He and his old wife cheesed at me one more time and wandered over to a purple health-department booth where the staff were taking people’s blood pressure.
The whole afternoon had been like that. All these people I didn’t know, and a lot of people I did know, had rushed up to me and told me how much they loved my art.
I hadn’t seen Rose since we’d moved the Legos this morning. It was almost four o’clock now. And Vega hadn’t showed up yet either. I really didn’t want him to miss this.
I guess he was mad at me.
Even Freddy’s friend, that boy Butteray Jones, had showed.
He was a weird sort of kid. Really dressed all-out with a country way of talking and a old-style hat made out of purple plaid. Butteray said he didn’t stay in the PJs, but him and his parents stayed up on Sugar Hill.
The Stars Beneath Our Feet Page 13