The thing that really scared me and had brought me around was the night Yvonne got arrested. After she had called Ma on the phone, and we had walked over to the police station where they had her.
Ma’s face had made something true for me. From that whole Yvonne experience and looking back at Jermaine too, my rock was gone.
I wouldn’t let it grow back.
I think I was able to help Vega when I told him he had a choice to make too: Frito and the gun, or me and his violin.
I reminded him about Steve and Jermaine, growing up together, but parting ways. If he chose wrong, he’d definitely end up screwed. But if he made decent choices, there was a chance he might make it out all right.
Like Steve did.
We both could.
“Vega,” I said, “I guarantee I’ll be here to protect your neck and help you make the right moves.”
“We should ask Steve,” Vega said.
“Ask him what?”
“You know, about what he did to survive, get where he is. Maybe he has a blueprint—like the ones inside your Lego kits—but his blueprint is on how to survive St. Nick projects.”
I laughed.
But we agreed to talk to Steve. Especially if he had any ideas about dealing with Harp and Gully.
I scoped across the water and remembered again that we lived on an actual island. But there was something else too. Kids like us, me and Vega and Rose, were our own islands, living in a mad river.
We had to look out for ourselves.
“Thanks, man,” Vega told me. “You manned up.”
And then Vega just started sobbing his eyes out. Real hard, long sobs like I had done in the Bronx at that club. Like you cry when you’re a rug rat. The kind of crying that makes you breathe all messed up and you feel like you’re about to die of suffocation.
He almost did die, carrying that gun.
All I could do was stand there beside him, with my hand on his shoulder, until he slowed down and started breathing regular.
Breathing was about the only thing regular about how we lived.
“What you mean, she left?” I said.
Ali swiveled away in his office chair to face his desktop computer. He jiggled the mouse beside his keyboard to get rid of the screen saver. He pivoted back toward me.
“Like I said, Rosamund Major is gone,” Mr. Ali repeated.
“But,” I started, “she was here last week.”
Ali nodded. “Child services got her over the weekend.” He stood up to shut the door to his office. “Look here, Lolly, I’m not supposed to be telling you all of Big Rose’s business—”
“Rose,” I corrected. “She don’t like to be called Big Rose.”
Ali nodded again. He sat down. His crooked face was tense. “I’m only telling you this because I know that you and Rosamund developed something special—”
“She’s my friend,” I said.
“Yeah, I know. Okay, man. Rose is different from the rest of you. She wasn’t even supposed to be here, but we took her into this after-school because she’d been kicked out of several other programs. Got into clashes with other kids.”
“They tease her,” I said.
He nodded. “We took her here because her grandmother said she had no other alternatives. Betty had been homeschooling her for years. Got special permission from the city. But Betty was also able to prevent them from officially testing whether her granddaughter was a special-needs child. So Rose didn’t really get the kind of attention that was necessary. She fell through the cracks.”
“Rose ain’t autistic.”
Ali shook his head. “Turns out that after testing her, child services said she does fall on the spectrum for autism. For years, her grandmother had been denying it, telling Rose she was just like everybody else, but a couple weeks ago we were finally able to get Rose tested. Child services relocated her to Mount Vernon, just north of the city. There’s a good school up there, near some relatives.”
“Mr. Ali, you got Rose taken from her gran?”
Now he was talking to his computer screen, though it was meant for me: “Rose had to go, Lolly. Her grandmother wasn’t up to raising her here. As much as Betty wanted to, she just couldn’t handle it. How they lived wasn’t good. Rose needed help. She’s got some cousins up in Mount Vernon. They can take better care of her, at least until her grandmother gets things sorted out.”
He stared at me.
“Rose is different,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Ali. “In fact, they say she can probably go to college someday.”
“I think she should go to college,” I said. “Become an engineer.”
“Well, we’ll see,” he said.
The weird thing, he told me, was that Rose’s gran keeping her out of the system for so long had actually helped Rose learn to relate to other people. Kids with Rose’s type of autism, he said, sometimes have trouble communicating. They can be cut off from the world because they don’t know how to talk to it.
Ali said, “Without Betty homeschooling her, putting her in after-school programs with regular kids, Rose might not’ve been as developed socially as she is today. She learned how to talk to others, how to read their body language….”
“She doesn’t like it when you point.”
Ali nodded. “That’s a trigger for her. But she’s learning. Being out of the system forced her to refine those social skills on her own.”
“And now you just plugged her into that system, Mr. Ali.”
“It’s better, Lolly,” he said. “Because of my condition, when I was her age my parents tried to hide me away. I didn’t get the medical help I needed until I was grown and the damage was difficult to reverse.”
Was that why Ali had been mad at his father? I wondered.
“It’s not too late for Rose,” Ali said. “She’s young. And you helped her a lot, you know. You helped her find a way to express herself, to touch the world around her in a different sort of way. Trust me, Lolly. It’s her time.”
I wasn’t sure.
It was a nice-looking, clean building on a nice, clean block.
Lots of trees on this block.
In fact, the trees lining both sides of the street bent over toward one another so that when you glanced down the way, it looked like you were staring into a green cave made of tree branches.
The small sign above the buzzer said PLEASE RING BELL AND PRESS 9 AND #.
I did that.
Pretty soon somebody opened the front door and cracked the screen. It was a tall, dark-skinned Black dude. He stared down at me. He looked like I had just woke him up.
“Rosamund Major? She ain’t here,” he said after I had told him why I was there. “They went to the movies.”
“Not here?” I asked him. I looked behind him and saw a small living room, with classroom desks farther back in another room. “She was supposed to be here. I spoke to Rodney this morning. He said she would be here.”
“That was you?” he said. “I’m Rodney. I’m sorry, man. I forgot her class had a day trip this afternoon.”
“I came all the way from Harlem.”
“Harlem to Mount Vernon, huh?” He scrunched his face and yawned. “Sorry about that, man. Rosamund ain’t here, though.”
I probably sat on the front steps of that building for an hour waiting on Rose. She never showed.
This place in Mount Vernon was where Rose was now spending her afternoons in classes and learning. It was called her day school.
In the evenings she was staying with cousins who lived nearby.
It seemed nice up here.
Sitting on the steps there, I watched a green leaf drop down from one of the tree branches above me. I wondered if she was happy here.
Daddy honked the horn of his blue van, parked across the street. I sighed, grabbed the little gift I had brought for Rose and stood.
He had a clown gig today, I knew, and had to drive us back into New York or he’d be late.
He took his
time driving down Rose’s block, even though I knew he was in a hurry to get back to the city. As Daddy’s van crept along the quiet street, we both crooked our necks up to stare at the ceiling of the tree cave.
His girlfriend, Heike, was stretched out across the backseat of the van, eyes shut. If you looked close at her eyelids you could see little blue veins on them, which I thought was weird.
“I’m sorry about your friend, Wallace,” Daddy said, still staring up at all the green.
I shrugged.
“It’s tough when a trueheart moves away,” he said. “I recollect years ago, when I was younger than your age now, living in Trinidad, and my good friend Tommy and his family left the island to come here to the U.S. Little Thomas Crawley! Ah, I cried and cried like a baby. I never will forget that.”
I thought about my father crying like a baby. “Did you ever see him again?”
Daddy shook his head. “I was a child! How was I supposed to travel thousands of miles from Trinidad to here to visit my buddy?” He laughed.
In the backseat, Heike groaned and turned over on her side.
“Mount Vernon’s only fifteen miles from Harlem,” I said. “But with no subways running here, it might as well be Trinidad, Daddy.”
He grunted. “What you think this is? Sir Wallace, my van is your van! We will come back so you can meet your friend. Word is born.”
Daddy Rachpaul grabbed my head and shook it. I smiled and thought about what Mr. Ali had said about starting over fresh with my father.
Right then, it seemed like it could happen. I felt like Prince Stellar of the Star Drivers, reunited with his alien dad after years and years. Maybe my space stories weren’t just a bunch of stories after all.
Maybe I could predict the future.
Or help create it.
Our van stalled at a stop sign on the next block. A line of about eight young people marched in front of us on the crosswalk.
At first they caught my attention because one of them was wearing a long red cape with a yellow bandanna covering his head, with eyeholes cut into it so he could see. He looked like a superhero, walking in these long, awkward strides. Dude must’a been twenty years old, dressed like that, and it wasn’t nowhere near Halloween.
I got tense and started to scan the crowd.
All of them crossing in front of us was unusual. Some of them had older people walking beside them, guiding them along. Others paced by themselves.
And then I saw Rose’s big head at the end of the line.
That was her, stomping along the crosswalk in front of our van, looking like she was skipping rope on the moon. Her upper lip tucked into her bottom one.
“Rose!” I yelled, and jumped out of the van.
I ran up to her on the other side of the street. I stopped just before I reached her and just stood there, staring at her. She looked back at me and blinked. Then looked down the block both ways, like she was trying to figure out where she was.
“Rose!” I said again. “We drove up here! I thought I missed you!”
One of the older people walked up toward us. The rest of the group had paused on the sidewalk.
“Rosamund, do you know this boy?” the older person asked.
Rose didn’t say nothing. She stared at the ground, but kept glancing up at me.
“Yes,” she said, and grinned. “That’s Lolly. We build cities.”
“Oh, yes!” the older person said. “You talk about him.”
I only had a couple of minutes to chat with Rose before they said she had to go. We were holding up the whole group. And some of them were starting to get anxious. My father honking the horn didn’t help that situation either.
Before climbing back in the van, I gave Rose a quick hug and handed her the gift I brought for her. It was a little book of poems by this poet named Safia Elhillo. Sunny’s moms had helped me pick it out because the poet was positive for Black women.
She was a new poet. I hoped Rose would like her.
Rose squeezed my present in front of her chest and watched us drive off.
I was glad to see her again.
All those talks I had had with Mr. Ali had been good. They had helped me, I guess.
But what me and Rose had gone through together over the past few months had been the main cure for me. She had helped heal me the most.
That and wanting to do right for my mother.
Seeing Rose there in our van’s rearview mirror, standing underneath those green tree limbs, didn’t seem right to me, though. Sure, it was pretty up here on her block, but it wasn’t Harlem; it wasn’t St. Nick Houses.
It wasn’t home.
Lying flat on my back on the beady quilt in my bedroom, I was listening through the walls. Ma and Yvonne had been out there in the living room screaming at each other for a bit.
When Yvonne had first come over, thirty minutes ago, they had started going at it so loud that I knew the whole building must’a overheard. That dude Concrete down in the courtyard seven stories below had probably understood them.
Now they had calmed down a little. No more shouting, just stressed voices. After it had got completely quiet on the other side of the wall, I got scared thinking they might’a strangled each other.
Until I heard a knock on my door. It was Yvonne. She strolled into my room with a funny expression on her face. She looked kind of guilty.
Yvonne glanced to the opposite corner of my bedroom, where Jermaine’s old bed used to sit. We had got rid of it the other day. It had been tough, but I finally told Ma that I needed it out.
I felt better after we had moved it to storage.
My room felt lighter.
Red-faced, Yvonne plopped down on the edge of my bed.
I laid there with my hands folded behind my head, listening to her talk and explain herself and tell me why she had done what she had done. I had kind of known, but it was helpful to hear it direct from her own mouth.
“I’m sorry, Loll,” Yvonne said. “I did the wrong thing. Almost got you in trouble too. They were never trashing those Legos. I took them because of how you were back then. Right after your brother had passed. I shouldn’t’a done it. But you were so dejected, I thought they would make you feel better.”
“They did. They did make me feel a whole lot better.”
She nodded. “Even after your depression had started to lift, I just couldn’t stop bringing you more Legos. Back then, seeing you happier—and your ma worry less about you—gave me joy.” She scratched her yellow Mohawk. “So…I guess, after a while, I was sneaking them to make me feel good too. Like I was really doing something. I couldn’t stop giving you more.”
“I understand, Yvonne. I ain’t mad at you. It’s one of the coolest things anybody ever did for me.”
Yvonne laughed.
“And I need to thank you,” I said, sitting up. “Not for you stealing. But just before I found out what you had done, I was about to make a decision. And I think it would’a been a bad one. One that might’a changed me for good. But you getting caught, and all the upset and drama it caused, helped me to deep-think. Made me see things clear like they were.”
“So you forgive me?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I ain’t got nothing to forgive.”
She smiled. We bumped fists and that was that.
After Yvonne had left me alone in my room, I sat on the floor admiring some of the pieces of Harmonee that I had saved. The leftovers.
Next time, I thought, I’m gonna do it bigger.
I started to reach for my sketchbook, but instead slid out the tablet Daddy Rachpaul had bought me for Late Christmas. There was an interesting graphics app I had downloaded and installed. This program let you draw and design things in your tablet like you were really building stuff in the real world.
Sitting there on my rug in my bedroom, I started designing blueprints for a brand-new city, with brand-new buildings and totally new stories.
What would I call it?
I got into it, fe
eling pretty much like I had felt that night when I had decided to break apart all of my old Lego kits and start telling the House of Moneekrom story.
Excited.
Hopeful.
I had ideas.
Man, did I have ideas.
It was one of those crazy warm May spring days that reminds you that summer is coming and about everything that comes along with summer. 125th Street was full of folks, crowded all together, moving, shaking, shouting and rushing everywhere.
Vega and me was walking the sidewalk toward Applebee’s. Ma and Yvonne was strolling real sluggish behind us. They were both moving too slow, their cargo shorts and T-shirts sticking to them.
My mother had agreed to treat all of us to dinner this time, even Vega, which had made both Yvonne and Vega very joyful.
And Vega was back to his old self again after our experience beside the Harlem River. I guess, sometimes, all it really takes is a real proper cry to solve all of your problems. Or at least make you forget all of the problems you still got.
He hadn’t mentioned Harp and Gully lately, but I knew, sooner or later, just like that miserable winter weather, them boys would return.
I did still have Rockit’s phone number. He had said to call him if I ever needed help. But I decided against that, thinking that if anybody needed help, it would be Rockit. He was doing the same old stuff as everybody else like him; he would wind up in the same spot.
We’d both asked to talk to Steve about how to deal with Harp and Gully. He would know what to do. Out of everybody we knew growing up in the projects, Steve had survived it. For himself, he had made a bad situation better.
“Ms. Sue!” Vega yelled, even though Ma was right beside him.
“Vega, Vega,” Ma said. “Cool the noise, baby. Don’t speak in decibels.”
“Lolly said I missed you in your dress,” he told her. “How come I never see you in one?”
Ma thought on this a minute, then said, “I ain’t that type of mom.”
All of a sudden I spun around and started walking backward, so I could laser Ma and Yvonne in their eyeballs.
The Stars Beneath Our Feet Page 18