At-Risk

by Amina Gautier

  “But you’re a boy,” Jason said. Then Kiki leaned backward over the railing, falling and pulling Jason with him.

  Jason struggled against the arms around him that kept tightening like bands, squeezing him so that he couldn’t breathe. It was like someone was pushing him into a coffin and trying to force the lid down. He couldn’t see anything, only darkness. There was only a thick blinding shroud of darkness and the suffocating feel of arms.

  He was being shaken. He was covered in sweat. His body felt as if it had been dipped in water. He kept hearing a voice saying, “You all right. You all right.” A calm thread of sanity and assurance thrown out to him like a lifeline. He could follow the steady sound of the phrase and the voice and let them pull him back to shore, realizing that the arms were an anchor, not a snag.

  He could breathe again. He felt as if he had been submerged underwater and now had to learn to breathe in the open air again. He opened his eyes and found himself half-sitting in bed, the covers pooled at his waist, his chest sweaty, his grandfather holding his shoulders and shaking him slightly. “You all right, you all right, boy,” the old man continued to say, long after Jason had opened his eyes and left the dream behind.

  “Do you ever stay over, Miss Charlotte?” Jason asked the next day when he found her in the kitchen and she showed no signs of leaving. She had set up the ironing board and was pressing creases into a pair of slacks.

  “Sometimes when it’s needed,” she said. “Off the books, you know. But you’re here now.”

  “I ain’t no home attendant.”

  “No, but you’re a body in the house,” she said. “Cal’s been through so much, seen so much. Now it’s like he just wants to pull into himself, pull away from everybody else. Only he can’t because his body won’t let him. That’s hard, wanting not to need anybody, but needing them anyway, even if just for the little things. I don’t like leaving him alone to fend for himself. It’s not that he can’t do most of these things for himself because he can. It’s the loneliness. People do things when they’re alone that they wouldn’t think of with people around.”

  Miss Charlotte made it sound like a bad thing, but he didn’t see it that way. There were plenty of things he couldn’t do while he lived with his mother, and he couldn’t wait to get out and have some privacy.

  “I know what you mean. Man, when I turn eighteen, I’m getting out of my mom’s crib and that’s my word,” he said.

  “What’re you going to do?”

  “Get up when I want. Play whatever music I want. Loud as I want. Do my thing. Don’t answer to nobody. That’s all I got to say. A man’s got to be a man, you feel me? That’s the only way I’ll ever be able to get her to stop hounding me.”

  His grandfather’s front wheel turned into the kitchen. “So she’s hounding you, huh? Let me ask you something, Youngblood. Do you think it’s her job to love you and take care of you?” his grandfather asked.

  “We take care of each other. I help out, too, you know.” His mother paid the bills and provided him with a roof over his head, but he felt they were mutually dependent on each other. He was, after all, the only man around the house. Neither his father nor grandfather was there to help out. He was the one who had to fix things without thanks, to change the lightbulbs, to throw rock salt on the snow-covered stoop when the city workers didn’t come fast enough to suit her. He was the one who had to beat mice senseless with the broom, carry the groceries, and fix the storm windows and realign them back into their grooves. So yes, it was her job to love him. He had earned it, paid for it. He had not deserved to be sent away.

  “Helping out is a small price to pay when somebody works to feed and dress you and keep the lights on and the cold out. It’s a small price to pay for those sneakers on your feet, those jeans hanging halfway off your ass, and that little gold ball in your ear. It’s a real small price to pay to have somebody watching out for you and waiting up for you when you don’t even have to say thanks. No, all you have to do is tell her your whereabouts and show your face every once in a while.” His grandfather looked down at his hands, running the thumbnail under the other nails to clean them. He continued to survey his nails as he talked, making Jason feel small. “Yeah, you got it real bad. Got somebody to love you and here you are complaining about the thing that’s keeping you alive, keeping you from being laid out there like your little dead friends.”

  The old man snatched a small orange pill bottle off the counter and wheeled himself out of the kitchen.

  Jason turned to Miss Charlotte. “Damn, what I do? He’s been coming down on me since the moment I got here and I ain’t do shit to him. The day I walked in the door he started in on me and he’s always talking about my boys!”

  For some reason the old man had it in for him. All he ever did was bring up the murders. Jason thought a man his grandfather’s age should know better. After all, wasn’t that why he had been sent here? To get away from it? To forget?

  Later that day, after Miss Charlotte had gone home for the evening, Jason went to his grandfather’s room. The door was wide open. The old man was seated in his wheelchair, polishing his black shoes, a chore that Jason had forgotten to complete.

  “Don’t lurk in the doorway, Youngblood.”

  “I just want you to know that I’m gonna call my mom and ask her to change my ticket so I can be up out of here. I don’t know why you so mad at me when I ain’t do nothing to you.”

  “I’m not mad at you.”

  “Then what’s your problem?”

  “What’s yours?”

  “I don’t have one,” Jason said. “I just wanna go home.”

  “You think everything down here is small and beneath you, but I can’t see how what you have back at home is so much better. At least I can say I have what I want. Nobody gave it to me and that means nobody can take it from me.”

  “Look, I ain’t come in here for a lecture. I just wanted to let you know how I felt—”

  His grandfather stopped him. “You ever stop to think that maybe one of those boys could have been you?”

  “What?”

  “That you should be grateful it wasn’t you? No, you just want to jump right back in, doing what you were doing, going nowhere fast. Your mother wanted you to come down here so you could get away from all of that mess and I guess I felt sorry for you when I heard that your little friends died. Your mother thinks you got smarts. She thinks you can turn yourself around before you end up like your little friends.”

  “Stop saying that! You don’t have the right to be talking about them all the time—”

  “I have the right,” his grandfather said. “Last night was not the first night I heard you.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m up every night you are. I hear you every time you have one of those dreams.”

  “No, you don’t!”

  “Those boys, the ones in your dreams or the ones out on the street, can only take what you give.”

  “Shut up! What do you do know about them? You don’t know nothing about them! Don’t say nothing about them! Don’t say—” He was tired of hearing about it, tired of being vigilant night and day. Each time his grandfather talked about it, it did something to him. Made it so he could barely breathe. Made it so that he felt that he was the boy in the coffin, in the suit, with no smile. As though he was the one dead, dying, and already buried. Buried alive.

  He started to cry. A boy his age. Sixteen years old and crying, but he couldn’t help it. He told his grandfather that they weren’t even really aiming for Kiki and Stephen. That the boys who shot them didn’t even know them. That it had nothing to do with them. Revenge he could understand. Revenge was cold. Calculated. Methodical. Logical. Everybody got even. But the bullets that had killed them weren’t even meant for Kiki and Stephen. This thing that happened was accidental, careless. Murder. He thought his friends deserved better. Someone should have at least known who they were.

  It had only gotten worse after they died. They had b
een used as examples. All of the young boys older than six but younger than fourteen, dressed in borrowed brown, black, and navy suits, had been led up to the caskets by relatives and been forced to look at the boys. Kiki and Stephen had become an example of what could happen to them and all other black boys that didn’t stay out of the streets. The accidental part of the shooting only made the adults feel that much more justified. The adults whispered that bullets didn’t have anyone’s names written on them, the phrase he’d heard on nights after a shooting when his whole block turned off their lights and pulled their shades and closed their windows to repel the stray bullets. Because it was a funeral and the dead boys’ mothers were present, the adults kept the other words under their tongues. Serves them right, they wanted to say. Jason knew that they all believed it was just desserts just because of the people Kiki and Stephen knew and hung out with. Sooner or later something like this was bound to happen, they wanted to say. He knew the adults felt the same way about him. They kept their distance when he walked down the block. No one ever gave him a five dollar bill and asked him to run to the store for them. No one ever asked him to help carry a shopping cart up the fourteen steps of the stoop to their front door. To them he was the same as Kiki and Stephen, and Kiki and Stephen were the same as the boys who had shot them. So they didn’t speak to him. Instead, they watched him and waited for him to die.

  He told his grandfather about the shooting. Jason had never seen a boy die before. When it happened, it wasn’t at all like in the movies that he and his boys sneaked into all summer long. The gun going off hadn’t had the loud clap sound it has in the movies. At first Jason had mistaken the sound of the gunshots for firecrackers going off. Then the popping sounds started folks on the other end of the block to running. When the girls and the children scattered and hid he saw that Kiki and Stephen had fallen. Then the popping had stopped. Then he had run himself.

  “Get yourself together,” his grandfather said when he was done.

  Sympathy would have shamed him, but the command released the tightness in Jason’s chest, made it so he could breathe. He stopped crying, but he didn’t wipe his eyes. He stood and waited to see what the old man would do.

  “You can sleep in here tonight if you want,” he said. “Get in.”

  Jason kicked his boots off and got into his grandfather’s bed, just as he was, dressed in his baggy jeans and basketball jersey.

  “You ought to take better care of your shoes.”

  The light went off. Jason heard the roll of the wheelchair as it settled on the other side of the bed and then the shuffle of a dead foot and the creak and heave of a body settling into bed. He rolled onto his back and tried to focus on the ceiling fan to keep awake, but the absence of all the night sounds he was used to and the comforting silence that remained instead were slowly claiming him. His eyelids were starting to meet when he stifled a yawn and asked, “What’s it feel like, having a stroke?”

  The silence was thick with his grandfather’s breathing. Jason thought that he would not answer, that maybe he had asked too much.

  His grandfather finally said, “You don’t need to know. Settle down and go to sleep.”

  His grandfather’s caustic response made Jason desire the answer more. “Tell me,” he said. “Please. I can’t sleep unless I know.” As soon as he said it, he knew that it was true. He believed that he would never have a night free of wakefulness unless his grandfather told him what he wanted to know.

  His grandfather said, “It feels like one half of you is gone. Like half a body is all you got left. But you still know the other half is there, you know? You can see it, this other side of your body that you’re just dragging along with you, hoping that one day it’s going to wake up and get started again, knowing that it won’t. So you have to pretend that something can be done with it since you can’t just cut it all off. It feels like having somebody you don’t like coming to eat supper with you every night, and then that person has to make a big deal of the fact that he’s there, so a man can’t enjoy some peace and quiet with his meal. No, this person has just got to keep reminding everybody he’s there.”

  “You talking about me?”

  “No, son. That’s what it feels like when you can’t use a part of your body. Anybody that tells you it don’t feel like nothing or they don’t notice it anymore is lying. It never goes away.”

  “So then what?” Jason asked. He thought that there must be some secret and that the old man must have it, something that told him how to do it, how to live, how to survive, how to make it through another day when half of him was dead and dragging by his side. “I mean, what do you do?”

  “Nothing to do. Nothing but live with it.”

  “I guess that’s not so bad,” he said. “I mean, it doesn’t sound so hard.”

  “Who told you that?” The boy felt his grandfather shift in the bed, felt him looking at him through the darkness. “Living ain’t easy. It’s about the hardest thing a body can do.”

  Afternoon Tea

  A women’s organization decided to adopt the girls in our school for the year, but we weren’t supposed to feel lucky. We were selected not for our scholasticism or high test marks but because our school had the highest percentage of eighth grade girls dropping out to have babies. The organization selected us out of all the other junior highs in Brooklyn as the most need-worthy, designated us as the most at-risk. Ten women from the group would serve as volunteer mentors. Time spent with the women was supposed to raise our self-esteem. It would keep us from making negative decisions that could permanently alter and impact our lives. Translation: the program would keep us from having babies at an early age and living off of welfare.

  Today was the registration and the welcome for the program and my mother feared we would lose face by showing up late. She rapped on the bathroom door to get me out of the shower. “What, do you think you’re a fish? Make haste!”

  Once I came out, I said, “I bet this is going to be really boring.”

  “It will be good for you,” she said. “Just give it a try. You have nothing better to do on Saturday mornings.”

  This was true. Most Saturdays I stayed at home alone while my mother went out. She visited our extended family, making sure they were getting acclimated to life in the States, shopping for them, and helping them barrel up goods that they wanted to send back home to Jamaica. Because she was the first to come to the States, she was the veteran, the expert, the one who helped everyone else out, the one with whom all our relatives came to live when they first moved here.

  She was taking a break from visiting to accompany me to the program today.

  “I still don’t see why I have to go to this,” I said.

  She tsked at me, grabbed my shoulder, and pushed me toward my room. She ignored my question. “Hurry.”

  Breakfast was on the table by the time I was fully dressed. “Bun and cheese,” she said. “You don’t have time for anything else.”

  I checked my watch. “It doesn’t start for another half hour.”

  My mother sucked air through her teeth. “On time is too late. A half hour early is right on time.”

  “They’ll probably feed us there,” I said. “I can skip breakfast. That’ll save time.”

  My mother shook her head. “You are only to nibble while you’re there. You don’t want to stuff yourself on their food and look like a glutton. When people are watching, you have to make a good impression.”

  “Who’s watching?” I mumbled as I chewed.

  My mother frowned at me. “They are.”

  At different times, depending on whom my mother was talking about, they could be anyone. They applied to all Americans, and sometimes specifically American blacks, and on rare occasions to the family my mother had left behind in Jamaica, proud and aristocratic, constantly watching from across the sea and waiting for her to fail and go back home.

  I finished off my breakfast and got up from my chair.

  “What are you doing?”<
br />
  “You said to hurry—”

  “You’ll clean up after yourself first.”

  “I thought we were late.”

  “There’s always time for that,” she said, watching me carefully as I took my plate to the sink and wiped the table off with a dishcloth. “You have no servants in this house.”

  Thirteen years ago, my mother left St. Elizabeth, Jamaica, with the seed of me inside of her, leaving behind a life of affluence for one of struggle. She had grown up a rich little girl. She’d lived in a house with servants. There were women whose job it was to cook and serve dinner, and these women were different from the ones who gathered the laundry and washed her unmentionables. Now my mother worked in a hospital five days a week, changing bedpans and dealing with other people’s filth.

  Twenty-two of us girls showed up at the school’s library with our mothers. Ten black American women, all dressed impeccably in blue and red, waited for us. Three women met us at the door.

  “Good morning.”

  “We’re so glad you could make it.”

  “Please sign in at the table to your right.”

  They rushed to greet us, all speaking at once, then checked our names against their list to make sure we weren’t crashers. Another group of three stood behind a long table loaded with red and blue gift bags. The last group of three poured cups of juice and lined them up on another table, next to plates piled high with cinnamon rolls and bagels. One woman stood apart from the others, watching and nodding as we entered and sat nervously.

  “Why are they all dressed alike?” I whispered as my mother led the way to an empty table.

  “They’re a sorority,” my mother said, pointing to the coat of arms on the colorful banner the women had strewn between two scarred bookshelves. Our library had been redone, transformed by these women and their presence. “Those are their colors.”