by Anne Schraff
“Jaris has told me what a good teacher his mom is,” Sereeta commented.
“Oh yeah, she’s good,” Pop exclaimed. “The kids love her. But, like I tell her, what does an elementary teacher do? I call her a crayon jockey. She doesn’t like that. But then she gets even with me. She calls me an engine ape.” Pop laughed heartily, then he glanced at Sereeta. “I hear you got a new little brother in your house. That must be some trip.”
“Yeah,” Sereeta sighed, “it’s different.”
Pop gave Jaris a questioning look, and Jaris shrugged. Pop dropped the subject. Pop already knew that Sereeta was having problems adjusting to her new stepfather. He didn’t yet know that the new family was beginning to crack and maybe come apart at the seams.
Later, at Jaris’s house, Sereeta was in the living room talking to Chelsea when Jaris joined his parents in the kitchen. Mom was tossing the salad. Jaris briefly and quietly told them about the argument he overheard at the Manley house. “Sereeta is dealing with that,” Jaris told them. “Now a couple kids at school had money stolen, and some freakin’ fools have decided to blame Sereeta because she happened to be nearby when it happened—along with half a dozen other kids.”
“High school can be a zoo,” Pop remarked bitterly. “Tell me one other time in our lives when we’re trapped in a place with a bunch of jerks who hate our guts. And we can’t get away from them. You got your bullies, and your snobs, your racists and your psychos, plus the regular kids just trying to survive. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, man. Amazing that kids don’t go directly from high school to the looney bin.”
“Oh Lorenzo,” Mom scolded. “It’s not that bad. I spent some of the happiest times of my life in high school. I had lots of wonderful friends, and we had great fun times.”
Pop rolled his eyes at Jaris. “Listen to Mary Poppins here,” Pop complained. “She went to high school with the Cosby kids. Fat Albert was the cutup of the class. Aunt Jemima taught home ec. Everything was beautiful. She don’t connect to the real world. She could land in a coven of witches, and she’d think they were sweet old ladies making fudge even as they load her into a cauldron of boiling water.”
“Lorenzo!” Mom scolded in a sharper voice. “I am not naïve. I just refuse to focus on the dark side of everything like you do. You’re going to scar our kids’ attitudes with that outlook.”
Jaris’s father began frying the chicken pieces and adding onions to the potatoes. He looked right at Jaris and said, “Level with me, boy. When you wake up in the morning, when you hear that old alarm go off and you remember it’s a school day, does your stomach drop or what?”
Jaris didn’t want to side with either parent, but at the moment he tended to agree with Pop, especially now with Sereeta under attack at school. He had fun times at Tubman High. But he also had a lot to worry about with tests, stress from people like Marko Lane, or just getting through another day and hoping nothing bad happened. “Maybe,” Jaris thought, “Pop doesn’t scar my mind with his dark thoughts. Maybe those dark thoughts are already in my DNA.”
“Well,” Jaris finally said out loud, “let’s just say I’m not one of those guys who fly out of bed in the morning with a big grin on my face.”
“Case closed,” Pop declared, watching the chicken turn golden brown and crispy.
Later, as Pop put out what looked like a sumptuous feast, they all gathered around the table. “This sure beats the carton express, eh Monie?” Pop asked. Mom glared at Pop. He was at it again. He loved to call attention to her lack of cooking skills and frozen dinners. He liked to needle her. Jaris knew that after Sereeta went home, they would have another argument about how he loved to needle her. Pop would laugh things off and grab his wife and waltz her around the room and nibble on her ear. All the while, she would laugh while trying not to.
“Some of the TV dinners are pretty good,” Jaris announced out of loyalty to his mother. “The shrimp casserole is okay.”
“Except for those little green pebbles they call peas,” Chelsea interjected.
Sereeta giggled. Jaris was glad to see that. He had not seen her giggle in a long time. He was glad she could forget all the bad things going on in her life for a little while and just giggle.
When they had finished dinner and were having dessert—sweet potato pie—Pop turned to Sereeta and said, “Jaris tells me some kids been rippin’ each other off at your school. That’s another thing you got to expect in high school. Lot of thieving going on. You lay something down, you kiss it good-bye.”
“It’s just that it’s happened twice in two days,” Sereeta replied. “This girl, Ryann Kern, she’s really smart and sort of a loner. Her parents gave her a hundred dollars to shop for summer clothes and it was stolen. She left her purse leaning on the base of Harriet Tubman’s statue, she said, and then looked away and it happened. Ryann was crying and everything. I felt so bad. And then some kids started looking at me as if I was the one who took the money—and I could have died.”
“Those little weasels,” Pop remarked. “They love to rat kids out. I remember being in this science class back in the Stone Age when I went to high school, and we were looking at slides with these microscopes. This teacher, he really loved his scopes. He said if any of us jerks damaged one of his scopes, we better run for our lives. You know, bumping the lens into the slides, stuff like that. Well, we got this poor doofus in the class and sure enough he cracks one of the lenses. He’s looking at this amoeba, and he twists it down too far and kar-unch, it breaks. Man, this kid is like having a stroke. Well, he darts away from the microscope, and he’s hoping nobody knows who busted it. But when the teacher comes in, there’s half a dozen jerks ratting him out. They all go, ‘Hey, teach, Hank busted your microscope.’”
“Yeah,” Sereeta agreed, “this one girl, Jasmine. She came right out and said I stole the money.”
“She’s the little witch who hangs out with that weirdo Marko Lane, right?” Pop asked. “Jaris tells me about what a bully he is. Well, birds of a feather . . .”
Mom had been quietly eating, but now she joined the conversation. “Sereeta, you have to ignore people like that Jasmine. You know you didn’t do anything wrong, and if people like her are saying cruel and nasty things about you, just ignore them. That’s their problem,” Mom asserted.
Chelsea shook her head violently. “No, Mom, it’s Sereeta’s problem. Last year a girl in my class brought in this old book from her grandfather, and she said it was like an heirloom or something. It got stolen and everybody blamed poor Bernice Jones, and it got so bad Bernice’s parents had to pull her out of school.”
“Well, it won’t come to that with Sereeta,” Mom declared, turning to Sereeta. “You have so many wonderful friends at school, sweetie. You don’t have to worry about a few bad apples gossiping about you.”
Pop looked at Jaris and suggested, “Be good if you could figure out who’s doing the stealing. You say a couple of kids have lost money, pretty quick, one after another? That means some kid is anxious for money—real anxious—willing to dip into other kids’ stuff, you hear what I’m saying? Maybe somebody is feeding a drug problem or something.”
Jaris had already gone over all the students who were in the area of the thefts. He had thought about each one and ruled most of them out at once. Alonee and Sami he trusted completely. He wasn’t sure about Quincy, and he had his suspicions about Jasmine. Jaris tended to think Jasmine didn’t need money, though. That left Quincy, but he seemed like such a nice guy.
After dinner, Pop drove Sereeta home, and Jaris came along. But when they got to the Manley house, no lights were on.
“That’s funny,” Sereeta commented. “Everybody is supposed to be home. They were planning to watch a TV show they liked tonight.”
Jaris, Pop, and Sereeta walked up the flagstone path to the large porch that fronted the house. Although it had been remodeled, the house had been built many years earlier when large front porches were common.
When they reached the porch,
they heard the soft whimper of a baby. It came from the darkness of the porch. They also heard the faint whine of the swing going back and forth. When Sereeta was a little girl, she and her friends loved to sit in the swing, especially on warm nights.
Jaris made out the form of someone sitting in the swing. As he got closer, he recognized Olivia Manley with her baby in her lap. “Hello, Mrs. Manley,” Jaris said nervously. “We brought Sereeta home . . . she had dinner at my house . . . and now we’re . . . home.”
Jaris’s father went up on the porch. He asked Mrs. Manley if she was all right.
“I’m fine,” the woman replied. “Thank you for having my daughter to dinner. That was very nice.”
“Where’s Perry, Mom?” Sereeta asked. Her stepfather’s car was not in the driveway, where he usually parked.
“Oh, my husband is on a business trip,” Mrs. Manley answered in a strange, light voice.
“When is he coming back?” Sereeta asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said. She turned her attention to Jaris’s father. “You’re Olivia’s husband, aren’t you? My, you’re very handsome. I haven’t seen you in a long time. How are you?”
“Okay,” Pop answered. He looked at Jaris with a funny expression on his face. He raised his eyebrows. There was a bottle of alcohol—partly full—on the floor near Olivia Manley’s feet.
“My goodness, what a handsome man you are,” Mrs. Manley said again. “Olivia knew how to pick them. Remember when we were all first married? I was married to Tom then. Oh, how young and foolish we all were. How time flies . . . and now . . . and now . . . One day we are young like those two, like your son and my daughter . . . “ Mrs. Manley waved her hand in the air like a bird.
Jaris looked at Sereeta. Sereeta announced tersely, “She’s drunk.”
“And the next thing you know, you’re not young anymore,” Mrs. Manley went on, not hearing Sereeta. “You look in the mirror, and there’s a stranger there with lines in her face and horrid little crow’s feet around her eyes and you ask, ‘Who are you?’”
“Mom, I’ll put the baby to bed, okay?” Sereeta suggested.
“Would you, dear? I’m rather tired.” Mrs. Manley turned to Pop: “Oh, Lorenzo, say hello to Livy. Tell her we need to go shopping together again. It’s been much too long.”
Sereeta took the baby and went in the house. Jaris followed her. When they were alone in the baby’s room, he asked softly, “Is there anything I can do?”
“I’ll just put him in his crib,” Sereeta said. “It looks like he’s had his bottle. I’ll put him on his back and he’ll sleep. You’re supposed to put them on their backs.”
“Are you going to be okay here, Sereeta?” Jaris asked her.
“Yes,” Sereeta said, putting the baby down and tucking him in. “My mother’ll be all right in the morning. And Perry will be home. He didn’t go on a business trip. They must have had another fight and he just left for a while.” As she spoke, Jaris noticed all the mobiles hanging from the ceiling. He had never seen such a beautiful baby’s room. The little toy baseballs and basketballs were everywhere. The balloons clung to the ceiling, shrunken now. They still said, “Welcome Home, Jake.”
Then Sereeta turned toward Jaris with a terrible expression on her face. “You don’t know how much I hated him—the baby. I blamed him for taking all my mother’s attention away from me. I thought she didn’t even care enough for me to come see me in that play I was so proud of. And it was all the baby’s fault. They made this wonderland for him. All the decorations, the mobiles, the toys. It was like the little prince was coming, their true child. And I was the hated stepdaughter that nobody cared about. But I was all wrong, Jaris. They don’t . . . they don’t . . . really care for him either.” Her voice broke and tears ran down her face.
Jaris walked over and took Sereeta in his arms. He held her tightly and kissed her. “Hang in there, babe. Just hang in there. It’ll be okay,” he consoled her.
When Jaris got back downstairs, Sereeta’s mother was talking to Pop. “I still remember the senior prom, when I was Sereeta’s age.” She sounded drowsy. “I was so beautiful . . . so beautiful . . . it isn’t fair, is it?”
“You know what?” Pop said to her. “You got to pull yourself together for your kids, lady. You hear what I’m sayin’ to you, Olivia? You got a sixteen-year-old girl who needs a mother bad. She’s in a world of hurt, and she needs a mother. And that baby, he needs a mom too. You gotta step up to the plate, girlie. You gotta start forgettin’ about the prom you went to a hundred years ago, and start being a mother to your kids.”
Olivia Manley stared at the man before her. “Why, you are very rude!” she cried.
“Yeah, well listen,” Pop growled. “Somebody’s got to take care of business around here. I don’t know if that jerk Perry is coming back or not, but it doesn’t do for you to be sittin’ out here in the dark with a baby and drinking yourself into a stupor.”
“You are really mean,” the woman whispered hoarsely. “Poor Monica with a cruel husband like you. I thought you were a gentleman but you’re not. You’re a cruel, harsh man to accuse me of drinking when liquor has not touched my lips for ages.”
Pop went up the porch steps. He snatched up the bottle and poured the remaining liquor onto the lawn. Then he put the empty bottle in the blue recycling bin.
“Oh, you dreadful man!” Olivia Manley sobbed.
“Go in the house and go to bed, Olivia,” Jaris’s father said. He turned to Jaris. “Is Sereeta gonna be okay with the baby?”
“Yeah, she says so,” Jaris said. “She has my cell number if she needs me, if something comes up.”
Olivia Manley got to her feet and walked slowly to the door. She stood a moment looking at Jaris and his father. “I . . . I d-don’t deserve this,” she sobbed before going inside and slamming the door.
Jaris and his father walked back to the pickup. They didn’t talk on the way home.
Jaris was scared, and he tried to sort out his feelings. Sereeta was so fragile. The situation in her home was much worse than he had imagined. And she was going to that vacant lot where the house had burned down, sitting on those blackened foundation stones, and cutting herself. She was talking about a family long ago who died in a fire, and she was thinking it had been a good thing. She was feeling their spirits in the ruins and thinking a tragedy had been somehow good.
“Pop,” Jaris asked when they were almost home, “what are we supposed to do?”
Pop was tightly gripping the wheel. “I don’t know,” he said. “It might be okay. Maybe the jerk’ll come back, and they’ll make up and work it out. Maybe he has more sense than she does”. Then he added, “It’s been hard on that girl. Real hard. You can see it in her eyes. You know what I’m saying, boy? She looks like she’s quitting . . . I can see how she’s holding on with all her might, but a part of her wants to quit . . .” He shook his head. Jaris stared straight ahead into the darkness. He could still feel Sereeta in his arms, soft and tender and fragile, a broken doll.
CHAPTER FOUR
In the morning on Wednesday, as Jaris walked toward Harriet Tubman’s statue, he saw Ryann Kern and Leticia Hicks walking together. They were always together. They were the tightest pair in the junior class. Other juniors had close friends, but sometimes you’d see them with other people. Not Ryann and Leticia. They tried to sit together in classes they shared. They ate lunch together. Both were born in a small town in Alabama. They moved with their families to the Tubman neighborhood about three years ago. Jaris figured they never quite felt at home here, so they stuck together.
Jaris heard the pair whispering behind him. When he turned and looked back, they had strange looks on their faces. He guessed they were saying something like, “There’s that Sereeta’s boyfriend. He probably knows she took the money, and he’s covering for her. These crooked city kids stick together.”
Jaris turned and asked, “You never found the money you lost, huh Ryann?”
“I didn�
��t lose it,” Ryann snapped. “It was stolen.”
“I think it’s a shame people can get away with something like that,” Leticia added.
Just then Tarina Peters, a cheerleader at Tubman High, came running up. “Did you hear? The carwash money is gone!” she screamed. All the students streaming into Tubman for morning classes gathered around Tarina to hear the sad story. On Saturday, to raise money for summer cheerleader camp, the cheerleaders ran a car wash in the supermarket parking lot. Girls stood on surrounding street corners, waving signs announcing the car wash. The money was collected in a steel box, and two mothers were in charge of it. When the cash was officially counted Sunday night, the total was about two hundred dollars short of what was supposed to be in the box.
“And they’re trying to keep things quiet,” Tarina finished her story, “’cause they have to talk with everybody that was there. But I just heard about it from somebody on the team.”
“Who was watchin’ the till,” Sami Archer asked.
“Suzy Pierce, Quincy’s mom, and Jasmine’s mom, Lee,” Tarina answered.
Jasmine came charging over. “It wasn’t my mom’s fault,” she insisted. “It was so mixed up and disorganized that people were throwin’ in money and trying to make their own change. But my mom kept a tight rein anyway. When she turned that box over to Quincy’s mom, all the money was accounted for.”
“If my mom had been in charge, no money would be missin’,” Sami chimed in. “She’d of made sure everything was done right.”
“You don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, girl,” Jasmine yelled. “Don’t go talkin’ trash about my mom. Your mom is a big fat lazy—”
That was all she got to say before Sami’s hand smacked her face. Jasmine flew backward, almost falling into a hedge. Jaris was close enough to grab her, breaking her fall. He held on to her as she struggled to get at Sami. Trevor Jenkins grabbed Sami, who was rushing at Jasmine for a second round.