A Deeper Love Inside

by Sister Souljah

  “It’s true,” I said, thinking of Big Johnnie, Mr. Sharp, Esmeralda, the flower lady, and Bernard the Butcher. Now I was laughing, too.

  I felt nervous when Elisha opened the door to his school and walked me inside. He knocked on another door and then two boys came out.

  “Stephen and Maurice,” Elisha introduced them to me.

  We four left the school together. We met up with two girls, two blocks down from there.

  The girls, Atiyah and Karla, looked me up and down. After I was introduced and said hello, I didn’t glance their way or feel fucked-up because of them. Today, as far as looks go, I was fucking flawless except for the big hole in my heart, and they couldn’t see that.

  “What school do you go to?” Atiyah asked.

  “I just moved to Brooklyn. I didn’t register yet,” I told them.

  “Private or public,” Karla asked.

  “What?” I said.

  “Are you going to a private school like rich boys like Elisha attend? Or a public school like ours?” Karla pushed.

  “Mind your business,” Elisha jumped in. “She didn’t decide yet.”

  I liked him more when he said that.

  “Where are we going?” Atiyah asked.

  “There’s a party at our school tonight at eight. Wanna check it out?” Karla invited.

  “Nope,” Elisha said swiftly. He seemed to say whatever he thought without hesitation.

  “Ah, y’all are punks!” Atiyah said.

  “We not ready to die for you two,” Elisha said.

  “On the strength,” Stephen and Maurice said. I noticed now that they were both dressed in their school blazers. Elisha was not.

  “I got an audition in the morning. I don’t want no bullet holes in my body.” Elisha and the guys laughed. An audition? I thought to myself. I wondered what that was all about. I didn’t ask, though.

  We didn’t do much, but I could tell they’d rather do nothing together than doing nothing alone. It was October. The cold came creeping in but wasn’t full blast yet. We walked around pointing out which cars we wanted to drive when we each got old enough to drive. Atiyah chose a kitted-up Corvette. Karla chose the Cadillac. Maurice was content with the Pathfinder, but Stephen wanted the Suburban and said he would run Maurice off the road. Elisha waited to make his choice. Then he said he wanted the hunter-green Range Rover with wooden steering wheel, rims, and the buttercream-soft leather interior with the evergreen piping that he just saw.

  “And you?” Elisha asked me.

  “I didn’t see one I liked yet,” I said.

  “You must know what you like. Tell me.”

  “A Porsche,” I said. He smiled. “Nobody on this block could afford one,” I added, smiling.

  Downtown Brooklyn, Karla wanted cheesecake. I didn’t cause I never had it before. Me and Elisha sat outside of Junior’s.

  “Let me see your book bag?” I asked him.

  “For what?”

  “I wanna look at your books, see how far behind I am. Or maybe I’m way ahead,” I teased, but I didn’t mean it. I believed I was too far back to catch up. In prison classes I was too angry to learn. At NanaAnna’s, I couldn’t stop learning. Now that I knew for sure I wouldn’t be going to no more school, I had been telling myself it didn’t matter. As long as I could read and write, count, add, subtract, multiply, and divide, I knew enough to not get beat outta my paper.

  Elisha unzipped his bag and handed it to me. “You sure you looking for books?” he joked without laughing or smiling. I didn’t answer him.

  The first book I pulled out was Vocabulary. He smiled. “I gotta test on that on Monday.”

  “Are you ready for it?” I asked him.

  “Why, you gonna be my tutor?” he asked.

  “I’m okay with words,” I said, feeling challenged but not confident.

  “My school is no joke. The words in there, we wouldn’t ever use in no conversation,” he said. I wasn’t sure if he thought I was dumb. I was sure that I didn’t want him to think I was dumb. I couldn’t like anyone who thought that way about me. We definitely couldn’t be friends.

  “What page?” I asked him.

  He took the book from me, flipped some pages and said, “Right here, page 34. I gotta know the definitions and use the words in sentences.” I looked at the first word and the definition his book gave:

  Anomaly—a deviation from the norm, unusual.

  I had never heard that word before. As I scanned down the word list on page 34, I felt a pinch of panic. Nothing looked familiar. I was behind, too behind to catch up. More than that, I was embarrassed. I didn’t want to be embarrassed in front of him.

  “I told you. Forget it. Let’s do something else,” he said.

  “Anomaly,” I said aloud. “Use it in a sentence.” I reversed the challenge onto him. He paused then smiled, his white teeth perfect. I could tell he was thinking.

  “Some people consider my parents’ marriage an anomaly, because my mother is a Wall Street lawyer, and my father works for UPS,” he said.

  I thought about it swiftly. I guess he used it right. The word really just means unusual. I guess he’s saying his mother earns more money than his father. To me, that was unusual.

  “Good!” I told Elisha. “You got that one right. The next word is . . .”

  “Now you use it in a sentence,” he said, folding his arms across his chest.

  “I don’t have a test on Monday,” I said softly, trying to ease out of it. He didn’t say nothing back. I tried to think quickly.

  “I hope love never becomes an anomaly,” I blurted out. His eyes widened some. He stared at me for a moment.

  “What’s the next word?” he asked me.

  “Duplicity,” I read aloud. Then I looked at the definition, so I would know. I read to myself.

  Duplicity—Deceitful in speech and conduct by acting in two different ways to different people concerning the same matter.

  I kept my eyes on the page of the book instead of looking up at Elisha. I was feeling naked and guilty because of that word.

  “My mother says that when money is involved, a lot of people deal in duplicity to make a higher profit,” Elisha said.

  “Yep, that’s right. That fits the definition,” I told him. “You must’ve studied already. You don’t need me.”

  “Your turn,” he said, ignoring my escape route. I sat thinking.

  “Don’t look at me,” I said suddenly.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “Cause,” was all I said. Silence fell between us.

  “She was sincere in her duplicity.” I said my sentence softly.

  “What does that mean?” he laughed. “Duplicity and sincerity are opposites,” he said.

  “Not really . . .,” I disagreed.

  “How aren’t they opposites?” he asked.

  “Because someone could say two different things to two different people about the same thing, because the person has a different relationship with one of the people compared to the other,” I explained myself.

  “You could say two different things, true. But that would be duplicity if the two things weren’t true.”

  “No,” I said softly, wishing I had taken his offer to do something else. “If you asked me if I was happy right now, I would say yes. It would be true cause I’m happy to meet you and have a new friend. But I could be happy to meet you and sad at the same time. Depending on who asked me, my answers would be different about the same thing, but they would both be true,” I said, still looking down. He was quiet now.

  “What’s the next word?” he asked.

  “Let’s just quit it,” I said.

  “I’m learning . . .,” he said.

  “But I can tell you know all of the definitions already,” I said. “So we should do something else.”

  “I’m learning about you . . .,” he said. “One last word, then that’s it,” he said.

  “Perfunctory . . .” I read aloud, hardly able to pronounce it cor
rectly.

  “I don’t know that one. Choose something different,” he said.

  “You know it! Now you’re dealing in deceit and duplicity!” I laughed a true laugh. He smiled.

  “Seriously, I don’t know that one,” he said, smiling. I still didn’t believe him. I thought he was just trying to make me feel better by pretending that he didn’t know something. So I read the definition aloud to him.

  “Perfunctory—Lacking interest, care, or enthusiasm. Merely performing a routine without feeling.” Then I read the definition silently to myself over again. I thought of Momma. That’s what was happening between Momma and me. Momma was lacking any interest in me. She didn’t even seem to care about me. She came home when she needed something. Otherwise she didn’t come home at all. Even when she was sitting right in front of me, she didn’t seem to have any feelings. She was perfunctory, just going through the motions.

  When I looked up, Elisha was staring at me and my tears. He wiped them away with his fingers.

  “Eat a piece of chocolate,” he said. “My mother said chocolate makes girls happy. That’s why I gave it to you. And give me back my books. I never meant for my exam to make you cry,” he joked. I didn’t tell him how much I hate my tears for telling on me every time.

  Leaning on a car that was old enough to lean on, I handed him a chocolate. “They’re for you. I’ll eat one if you eat one,” he said. So we did.

  “What time you gotta be home?” he asked out of the blue. His questions kept making me pause. There was no one at my “home.” There was no one telling me to do anything any particular way. The thought reminded me that I’m not cared for enough to be scolded or looked for if I went missing for too long.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Cause I want to take you somewhere with me. I don’t want to get you in no trouble with your moms,” he said.

  “Eight o’clock,” I said without pausing or thinking.

  “Good enough,” he said.

  When his noisy crew came pushing out of the doors of Junior’s, they saw a photographer selling Polaroid shots. Maurice flagged him over. They all jumped in but I stayed back.

  “C’mon, get in the picture,” the girls waved me over.

  “No, that’s alright,” I told them.

  “Elisha’s girlfriend must be ‘America’s Most Wanted,’ and shit!” Atiyah said. They laughed.

  Elisha stayed leaning on the car and said, “The best pictures are the ones when we ain’t posing.”

  “Take the shot!” Stephen ordered the photographer. Maurice paid for it. The photographer stood shaking the photo, then framed it. Stephen grabbed it and gave it to Karla.

  “We bout to bounce,” Elisha said to his friends.

  “Where y’all headed?” Maurice asked. “What’s up with the arcade?”

  “Check y’all Monday,” Elisha told them. “C’mon,” he said to me. We walked over one block. Elisha stopped at the bus line.

  “You know your way around Brooklyn?” he asked me. Before I could put together my answer, he said, “You just moved here. I’ll show you around.”

  When the bus rolled up, he moved me in front of him. “Get on. I got you,” he said. I climbed the two steps. And walked passed the driver. Elisha flashed one bus card and dropped one fare into the machine. The bus was packed. We stood for some blocks. I began thinking how I never rode a Brooklyn bus. When I lived here, for all of my young life, I rode in Poppa’s car.

  In my mind, I was writing down my firsts. It was the first time I met up with a boy. It was my first time receiving a gift from anyone besides family. It was my first Brooklyn bus ride.

  When I came out of my thoughts, Elisha was staring at me.

  “What?” I reacted.

  “Nothing, I’m just watching,” he said. As I began watching him, watching me, I noticed that he was watching everyone, not just me. He seemed like a person who was always studying. I wondered why.

  “Sit there,” he said when a seat opened up. I sat down. He stood over me.

  When a seat next to me became open, he sat down.

  “What do you think that lady right there is thinking,” Elisha asked me, pointing out a lady who, now that I looked, seemed upset about something.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Why does it matter what she’s thinking?” I asked.

  “If I want to make great movies, I have to be able to capture great scenes, unusual and ordinary people. A great writer and director has to be able to go inside of his character’s mind.”

  “So are you the writer or the director?” I asked.

  “I’m the director. So I should learn how to do everything. The man in charge shouldn’t be someone who’s just guessing,” he said.

  “So where we going? You said you were gonna show me around.”

  “This is it. This is Brooklyn, real people doing real things,” he said. Then he smiled. “I’m checking out locations, too,” he added.

  “Locations?” I repeated.

  “Yeah. I gotta match up the right scenes with the right locations, to get the right feeling. Different parts of Brooklyn have different feelings, and different things going on. I know the whole place, but every now and then, I walk or ride around like this to check out the changes. Things change a lot, you know. Things change quick. Don’t be surprised,” he said, like he was absolutely certain.

  We rode quietly. I was used to paying attention and watching people for my own safety. Trying to figure out what random people had on their minds, that was new. I realized that I was usually trapped in my own thoughts. How could I get into anyone else’s? Why should I? Elisha’s the director, not me.

  But I did watch Elisha get up and give his seat, the one right next to me, to a pregnant woman. I watched how easy he was with people. He was the opposite of me. He didn’t seem suspicious of everyone. He acknowledged other boys his same age with ease. That was an “anomaly,” I thought. He didn’t have that Brooklyn murder stare that Brooklyn boys walked with. Hell, we were known for Notorious B.I.G., “Who Shot Ya!” and shit like that. We were known to be rough. Elisha wasn’t rough. He wasn’t a sucker either. He had something that I couldn’t put into words right then.

  It was 8:00 p.m. by the time me and Elisha were back to where we first met, the organic market. It was closed now. Elisha kept walking. I asked him where he was going.

  “Twenty-eight blocks in that direction,” he said and pointed. “I’m walking you home.”

  I didn’t want him to leave me. I liked the feeling of something completely unfamiliar to me, a boy. I grew up with three sisters, no brothers. Before I was old enough to think of boys I was locked down with all girls. Now here was a boy I was meeting who was a year older but almost my same age, something different and it felt okay. We walked.

  In the colder wind of the October night, my skin began heating up with worries. Worries of him finding out I lived underground, beneath the store floor where there are no windows. My poppa’s doing life. My momma’s doing crack. My sister’s doing fifteen. My little sisters are lost somewhere, and no one is looking for them. I knew that even though Elisha liked to know what other people were thinking and going through, there was no way he would guess my thoughts or my life.

  We stopped in front of the building Mr. Sharp owned.

  “That’s twenty-eight blocks,” he said.

  “This is the building, but I can’t have company!” I said swiftly.

  I didn’t want him following me into the building towards an apartment where I don’t really live!

  “I wasn’t inviting myself in. Let’s just chill right here for a minute,” he said, leaning against the green mail pickup. “What’s your phone number?”

  I broke out in a sweat beneath my clothes. I never even considered putting a phone in the underground. I had not made one phone call since my escape. Of course I didn’t receive no calls either. Embarrassed, I blurted out, “I can’t get no calls. Give me your number?” I said to him.

  “You can’t
get calls, but you can make calls?” he said, smiling.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Um,” he said, pulling out a pen and scrap of paper from his long side Guess jeans pocket. He wrote his number down, folded it, and pushed it into my front pocket of my jeans. I felt something.

  “Do me a favor?” he said. He went inside his jacket and pulled out some sheets of paper. “Oh no,” I thought to myself, not more vocabulary words.

  “Before you go, help me practice my lines for my audition tomorrow.”

  He handed me three sheets. “You be Yvonne, the mother. I’m auditioning for the son’s role. Read your lines first. Try and act it out,” he said. I guess he really thought of me as an actress. But I actually hated pretending.

  “You don’t have a script,” I said, waving the papers he gave me.

  “I memorized it already. Go head, test me.” He seemed to like tests.

  I read my first line: “Nothing is more important to me than you are, my son.”

  Emotion began racing throughout my body. I wished Momma would say something like that to me, her daughter. Maybe she would’ve said those warm words if I was a son? Maybe Riot was right. Maybe being a boy is better, with more benefits and more love.

  Then Elisha said his lines like he really was the son in the script named Byron. Elisha’s face even changed. He was making gestures as though his mom was really standing there in front of us. I was no longer Ivory. I was Yvonne, his mother. He was Byron, my son.

  When I read my last line on the third page, “Tell him to wait. I’m talking to my son,” my tears fell down. Elisha stood staring at me.

  “I knew it,” Elisha said calmly and thoughtfully without a smile. “You’re an actress.” He gave me three claps. But he was wrong. I wasn’t acting. What he was seeing was my true feelings exploding.

  “I gotta go in now,” I told him, wiping away my tears and handing him back his script.

  “I’ll walk you up,” he said.

  “I live on the top floor,” I told him.

  “I’m healthy. We can walk or take the elevator,” he said, patting his leg with his right hand as if to show how strong and sturdy it was.

  “I’ll go up and wave when I reach so you’ll know I’m good,” I told him, trying to hurry off.