At-Risk

by Amina Gautier

  He didn’t listen to me. He went to his desk and picked up one of his books on gods and demigods. “I used to think that one day she’d be proud of me,” he said, idly turning the pages. “When I was older and rich and had a great job, I was going to take care of her. I was going to buy her a lot of fancy things,” he said. He picked up a pencil sharpener shaped like a globe and put it back down. “Now I’m not doing anything for her. I’ll just take care of you. Only you.”

  “How was you gonna do all that anyway?”

  “I’m going to be somebody big,” he told me. “Money won’t be a problem.”

  “You gonna do what Ma says?”

  “I don’t want to be a doctor,” he said. “But I could be a lawyer. Most presidents are lawyers first.”

  “Boy, you can’t be president.” This much I knew. Everyone knew that the president was always white and never from Brooklyn.

  I left him and went to the kitchen for a glass of juice. Blue was packing in the living room. He had the same look on his face that I’d just seen on my brother’s, that look of hurting and trying to hold it in.

  “He didn’t really mean it,” I said.

  “He’s right,” Blue said. He folded his own borrowed suit and laid it on our couch.

  “You’re no junkie,” I said. “I’ve never even seen you eat a bunch of candy!”

  Blue looked at me strangely, then the corners of his mouth curved. “You’re right about that,” he said. “Never touched the stuff. You know, I had something for him.” He went to his greasy bag and pulled a small brown paper bag out of the zippered section. “I was gonna give him these.” He opened the bag and showed me ten packs of green stars. “They glow in the dark,” he said. “They’re all in there. Planets and stars and even the moon, too. I checked.”

  “What are you gonna do with them now?”

  “Throw them away, I guess. He’s embarrassed. He’s ashamed of me. He won’t want them. He doesn’t want anything from me.” He crumpled the brown bag. “You know you can make the whole sky with them?” Blue said. “Everything.”

  “Can I have them?”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “No, I want them. Please?”

  Blue tried to straighten the bag out, pressing the wrinkles between his fingers. He took the packets of stars from the bag and handed them to me as if they were precious. He piled the packets into my open hands and solemnly folded my fingers, one by one, over the stack of green stars.

  Peter was lying facedown on his bed when I returned. “Look what I got,” I said.

  “What?” He didn’t even look up.

  “Look.” I opened my hands.

  “Oh snap! Where’d you get those?” Peter asked, jumping down from his bunk.

  “Blue gave them to me,” I bragged. “He gave me a whole bunch. Like ten packs. They were supposed to be for you.”

  “For me?”

  “Yeah. Don’t you feel burnt?”

  “Give me those,” he said, snatching them from me.

  “I’m telling!”

  Peter ignored me. He cupped the packets in his hands and looked down at them. “These are like three dollars a pack.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “This must have cost him like thirty dollars.”

  “So?”

  “In order for him to buy me this, it means he couldn’t—” Peter looked up at me. “Forget it.”

  “Couldn’t what?”

  “You’re too young to know,” he said.

  “Couldn’t what? Couldn’t what couldn’t—”

  “—He couldn’t buy something else for himself, that’s all.”

  “Something he really wanted?”

  “Yeah,” Peter said.

  I followed him to the living room. Blue and all of his belongings were gone, his borrowed suit the only proof he’d ever been in our lives.

  Two days later, Peter called me into our room. He’d been holed up in there for hours, refusing to let me in.

  The room was dark. “How come the lights are out?” I asked.

  “Look at that,” he said.

  I looked up. Blue’s stars were spread across the ceiling.

  “You’re gonna get it,” I predicted. As soon as our mother saw how he’d ruined her ceiling, he’d get a beating. He seemed not to hear me. His eyes were fixed on the ceiling, on all the tiny stars he had plastered up there. Some of them were done up like the constellations. I thought I recognized the Big Dipper. “You better not let Ma see.”

  “She can’t hurt me,” he said.

  “They’ll fall off soon anyway,” I predicted.

  “Nope,” he said. His voice was barely audible, a whisper of pleasure. “They won’t. They’re made to last.”

  push

  The teacher’s clothes hang off her. She is what the girl’s mother calls a “Skinny Minnie.” Even the girl’s sister dresses better. She gets her clothing from Lerner’s, which has not yet become New York & Company. When the sister is away at work, the girl slides the magazines out from her sister’s hiding place and stares at the models, especially the two black ones. The women are lovely in a way the girl didn’t know black women could be. Her mother is not beautiful, neither is her sister, though her sister probably could be if she tried a little harder.

  When the teacher calls her back after releasing the class into the schoolyard, which is a parking lot for the teachers in the morning (they have to clear their cars out after lunch to make room for the kids to play at recess), the girl does not fully grasp that she has done something wrong. The teacher lets all the other kids go and then says, “Not you.”

  “Did you push Colleen down the last flight of steps on the way out of the building?” Mrs. Greenberg asks in such a way that the girl thinks it entirely possible she is merely curious. After all, the stairwells are painted a deep dark green, which makes it hard to see. The girl wears thick neon laces in her Adidas and she follows her laces down the stairwell, using them as a light to keep her from crashing into the kid in front of her, unless she wants to. Colleen’s place is right in front of her. They are both five feet two inches, but the girl has more hair, which makes her seem taller, so Colleen gets to stand in front. This is size order. Nothing about it ever changes. The girl thinks that nothing ever will. All day long there is a small wooden chair to sit in, with one bolt missing and one edge torn away so that whenever the girl wears tights, which is only on picture day or when her mother forces her, she gets snagged to the chair. There is always the small metal desk with the fake wooden top. It doesn’t lift the way the desks do in the old movies, where the kids come to school with lunch pails and apples and where the boys attach mirrors to the front of their shoes so that they can look up girls’ skirts. (Okay, the part about the mirrors and the shoes isn’t from a movie. The girl’s mother’s boyfriend has told this story more than once, claiming it was something he’d done in his boyhood days, and the girl believes him. She has seen a picture of her mother as a schoolgirl, with a bright clean face and mischievous eyes, and has come to think that the kids in her mother’s day were probably all up to something. In any case, she likes the mother’s boyfriend, whom she has been trained to call Uncle. He is her favorite of all of the mother’s boyfriends she calls Uncle, and she is willing to believe anything of him.)

  Back to the teacher and the question now, yes?

  Yes.

  The girl sometimes has trouble paying attention, but this happened at a time before kids started coming down with ADHD the way they used to come down with colds and flus. The girl goes undiagnosed, undrugged, and is merely scolded by parents and teachers to pay better attention.

  See what I mean?

  The girl decides that the truth is to be used only as a last resort. She says, “No, Mrs. Greenberg. I didn’t push Colleen down the stairs.”

  “I have a perfectly good set of eyes,” the teacher says. “I saw you do it.”

  “Okay,” the girl says. Though she is willing to lie, she is equally will
ing to capitulate. It all depends on her mood and where it takes her.

  “Okay?” the teacher says. “Is that all?”

  “Okay, I pushed her,” the girl says. “It was an accident.” The two of them are still standing in the schoolyard, where kids loiter and teachers look out of place. There are games of jump rope, skelly, freeze tag, and double Dutch going on. The girl watches kids run and then stop as if paralyzed. One boy is tagged in midstride. He freezes with one arm pumped outward, teetering with one foot raised, waiting for someone to unfreeze him. The girl imagines herself joining in unannounced, heroically tagging the boy to unfreeze him, saving him from the clutches of a frozen life. By now, she truly believes that pushing Colleen was accidental. The girl lives by her whims.

  “I don’t believe you,” the teacher says. “Follow me.”

  She follows the teacher back to their classroom on the fourth floor. The teacher mumbles as she unlocks the classroom door and turns on the lights. The chalkboards are clean. For the last half hour, kids begged for the chance to wash the boards. The girl has done this before, but only once. She remembers the privileged feeling of standing at the front of the classroom with a basin of warm water and a thick porous sponge at her disposal. First, she erased the boards, wiping away the day’s spelling words, math problems, and penmanship lessons in the teacher’s looping cursive. Then she dipped the sponge and squeezed it out. Starting at the top of the board, she’d pressed it against the hard slate and dragged it downward, the grayish green chalkboard turning gleaming, wet, black. After several vertical strokes took her to the edge of the board, she’d looked back and seen the board drying in streaks, swaths of water quickly evaporating as if she’d never been there at all.

  The teacher waves her over, and even though the girl expects to be struck, she comes. These are the days when everyone has a pass to beat up kids—teachers and neighbors alike—the days when parents thank you for doing it and then bring their kids home and tear them up some more. The girl has seen the teacher yank a boy by the ear to push him into the corner. The teacher points to the nearest seat and says to the girl, “You will sit here for the next hour to think over what you have done. Open your composition book to a fresh page and record your reflections.”

  “What does that mean?” the girl asks. She is thinking of reflection like in the mirror and, anyway, the teacher lost her once she said the girl had to stay a whole hour. She is supposed to go straight home after school and wait in the apartment until her mother and sister get there. Although she usually lollygags playing in the schoolyard and buying candy in the bodega, she has never gone home an entire hour late.

  “I want you to explain why you constantly pick on Colleen. You’re nothing but a bully. Perhaps if you can see that in black and white, you’ll stop tormenting the poor girl.” The girl does not think of herself as mean or as a bully. She doesn’t even dislike Colleen. It is just what they do. The girl doesn’t think Colleen minds as much as Mrs. Greenberg seems to.

  The teacher looks at her watch and slides out of her coat. “Since I am giving you an hour of my unpaid time, you had better make it good.”

  The pressure. The pressure. The girl has never been good at language arts. She prefers science and the solidity of the earth as she has come to know it; she can stare at the cutaways of the earth, revealing core, mantle, and crust for hours. When she finishes her workbook assignments before the allotted time runs out, she draws volcanoes, paying close attention to her rendering of ash clouds and magma chambers. She doesn’t know what Mrs. Greenberg wants her to say, but she opens her notebook to a fresh page. Staring at the chalkboard, which looks lonely with no student, no teacher, no dust, and no words, the girl thinks that if she could write her thoughts all across it, she might be able to produce something beautiful.

  The teacher hangs her coat on the back of her adult-sized chair, and the girl realizes that she is still wearing hers. She slips her arms out of the sleeves and drapes it over her shoulders, wearing it like a cape, like She-Ra, Princess of Power. Mrs. Greenberg carries her lesson plan to the boards at the front of the room (the ones at the back are covered with construction paper) and begins copying the next day’s spelling words on the far left board. The girl thinks about copying the words now and getting a head start. When all the kids are present, Mrs. Greenberg has to leave the assignments up on each board until every kid has copied them, which can take a while because the kids have to be called up in shifts, the ones from the back rows and the ones with poor eyesight coming forward and crouching with their notebooks balanced on their knees as they get as close to the board as possible. Last year, the girl had twenty-eight classmates. This year, she has forty-four. Pretending to write what Mrs. Greenberg wants, the girl jots down the spelling words. The third word down is cower, the fifth word is intimidate. The girl stops copying when she realizes that the teacher is trying to make a point.

  When Mrs. Greenberg writes at the chalkboard, it is easy to see just how poorly her clothes fit. The girl can see the extra material at the back of her suit jacket billowing out over her waist. The girl’s sister works for a company that pays next to nothing, but her clothes fit better than the teacher’s. Mrs. Greenberg’s shoulder pads are not at the shoulders; they hang down over her biceps. The teacher’s sleeves are too long. When her arms are down by her sides, her thumbs disappear, the cuffs swallowing them. The girl is feeling charitable, and so she decides that although the teacher is definitely to blame for her invisible thumbs, she should not be held responsible for the shoulder part. Anyone can see Mrs. Greenberg has weak shoulders.

  The teacher’s pantyhose are the old-fashioned kind, the kind with the little lines down the back of them, the kind the white women in those old black-and-white movies wear with the skirt suits whose hems fall way past their knees. The seams at the back of the teacher’s pantyhose do not follow down her leg in a straight line. They curve around her calves, twisting all the way to the front. Mrs. Greenberg is bowlegged. Perhaps, the girl thinks, this is why her stockings are always crooked.

  The stockings make her think of the movies Uncle always brings over. Every time he comes over, he brings a big black garbage bag stuffed full of dirty newspaper, and inside the bag there is always a VCR. He takes out the VCR and hooks it up to the big floor model television in the living room, where everyone can watch. He brings popcorn for the stove and puts in tapes of old movies, of films he said were made when he was little. The girl is a sucker for these movies. She likes Rosalind Russell. Maureen O’Hara. Doris Day. She will watch old movies until her eyes are dry. They sit on the plastic-covered couch, he and the girl and the sister and the mother, watching women telling men to put their lips together and blow, having a good time, until the mother crosses her arms and says, “Thought I was the one you came to see.”

  Mrs. Greenberg speaks over her shoulder. “How are you making out?” she asks.

  “I don’t know what to write,” the girl says.

  Mrs. Greenberg turns from the chalkboard, which is half-filled with tomorrow’s lessons. “All right,” she says. “Try this. How would you feel if the roles were reversed? What if it were you that was always being pushed or shoved or picked on? What if you were always Colleen’s target? How would you like it then? What do you get out of torturing an innocent girl? Think about answering at least one of those questions and see if you come up with something to say.”

  The teacher raises her eyebrows, implying profundity. The girl remains unimpressed. It could never be the other way around. Colleen is not a leading lady. The girl likens her to the brunettes in the old movies, the ones who never get the guy. The girl is thinking of Ruth Hussey in The Philadelphia Story and Janice Rule in Bell, Book, and Candle. There is always a Katharine Hepburn or a Kim Novak to tempt the Jimmy Stewarts of the world. Colleen is the kind to get attention only by default.

  Though she can hardly remember how it all began, the girl’s first push truly was accidental. Mrs. Greenberg assembled the class in two rows b
y the coat closet, boys on the left and girls on the right. Colleen was in front of the girl, Abdul to her left. As they filed out of the classroom and down the hall to the far stairwell, the girl began to lag behind. She had spotted a small reddish stain in the center of Colleen’s skirt. It bloomed brightly as if someone had cut her, as if she’d sat on a tube of paint. Entranced by the blooming, spreading stain—it had no edges, it looked like an inkblot, like something the girl’s sister had shown her from an old college psychology textbook before she’d dropped out to make money—the girl lifted her feet mechanically, walking with legs made of wood, knowing Colleen knew things that the girl had yet to learn, wondering if she should follow Colleen more closely so that no one else might see (for surely the girl hadn’t noticed the stain when they’d first lined up), when, closing the space between them, the girl stepped too close, right on the back of Colleen’s LA Gear sneakers, making Colleen stumble and collide with the girl in front of her. The girl imagined them as a line of dominoes toppling from the one accidental push, but it did not happen like that. Colleen righted herself quickly, but not quick enough to fool Mrs. Greenberg, who walked alongside the class, keeping close to the middle, a vantage point that allowed her to survey the entire line. She cut her eyes at the girl, saying nothing, chalking it up to clumsiness, to an accident. An accident it had been that first time. After that, it simply felt too good to stop. First, there was the closeness of Colleen’s body when the girl pushed her, stepping close enough to smell the grease against Colleen’s scalp. Second, there was the Jean Naté that wafted from Colleen’s collar. When the girl stepped against Colleen, she saw Colleen begging her mother for a splash of cologne from the yellow bottle in the hopes that wearing it would make someone finally notice her. Stepping against the back of Colleen’s sneakers was stepping into her life, a life the girl guesses to be less complicated than her own. Colleen, the girl thinks, has a father and no unrelated uncles. When she goes home, someone is always waiting.