At-Risk

by Amina Gautier

  “Show him the money! Show him the money! Show him the money!” They sang tirelessly as if they would never stop. Their voices, jeering, slurring, rang out behind us, louder and closer until their voices seemed to be directly in my ears.

  “Show him the money! Show him the money! Show him the money!” An arm brushed the back of my hand, a knee slid past my leg. I couldn’t step back for fear of them. They were closer than close.

  Then Will broke the chant. “Are you sure you wanna take his money, Muhammad? I mean, you don’t know where they hands been.”

  They stopped chanting when Julian screamed, “Joe! Just give him the money!” Julian’s voice had risen to a high-pitched strain. His cry, intended to be heard over their chanting, rang out in the stillness. Julian’s cry hung in the air between us, disproportionately loud, separate, afraid. His voice seemed about to break. I imagined his vocal cords being stretched out like those exercise rubber bands, about to pop and snap. I had forgotten about Julian there by my side, so lost in the voices singing to me. His brown eyes were wide, frenzied, wild. I could see the whites of them.

  They heard Julian’s desperation and fed on it. They changed their chant. “Give him the money! Give him the money! Give it to him!” they sang, closer and closer.

  “Just give it to him or hand it over to me,” he whispered. “Please.” He stuck his hand out at me. I studied his palm. It had a short life line. It was callused over from playing too much basketball. I couldn’t put the money in it. Those boys were behind me, close close close. I could smell them now. The funk of their triumph mixed in with the smell of sweaty skin cooled over by the hydrant’s water that clung to their bony arms and chests, rolling down their ashy legs in small beads, collecting in the bottom of their sneakers, making that clucking, squeaking sound as their heels met the squishy insteps of their sneakers and clung to them, rubbing and giving off that faintly sick aroma of dampness, sweaty socks, and rubber. That smell was up my nose and down my throat, becoming part of me. I squeezed my fist on the dollar I was holding. The dollar in my hand was sweating. It burned my palm. I couldn’t give it to Julian. I couldn’t hand it to the man behind the counter. I couldn’t move at all. I was stuck there with the voices, with the smell, with the song and chant, with the closeness that trapped me. I felt the weight of all their eyes on me, boring into my back, heavy enough to snap my neck.

  I had to get out.

  I threw the crumpled bill on the floor and ran through the crowd of boys, all who quickly backed away so that they wouldn’t have to touch me. I ran out the store and down the street, leaving my brother behind.

  I ran until my chest began to burn. When I stopped I was down by where the J and Z trains ran above the streets down Atlantic Avenue. I vaguely knew that Maxwell’s Bakery was near in one direction and that the McDonald’s was not far in the other, but none of the streets themselves looked familiar. I had come to a place outside of my neighborhood. I was where no one knew me as Julian’s brother or knew that he was that way. I thought of that moment in the store and felt all of my anger at Julian return. Anger at my brother and fear of the thing that he was and hurt that he had not pulled me to the side and told me but made me find out from everyone else—all of these feelings filled me as I slowly made my way back home, kicking every can or bottle in the street that I could find. I hated him for what he had done to me. He’d made me think that we were blood brothers, that we were close, like two heartbeats beating in tandem. But it was a lie. How could we be when he was what he was?

  “Where’s your brother?” my mother asked when I finally slunk back into the house. Her back was turned to me as she washed dishes in the sink.

  “I don’t know. I don’t care. Probably out there sucking somebody’s dick, that nasty ass homo.”

  “What?” she asked, turning to me with quicksilver speed. “What did you just say, Joseph?” she asked me, carefully, neutrally. I could have heard the slyness in her voice if I had chosen to listen, but I began to repeat what I had just said without thinking when her heavy hand came out of nowhere and caught me across my mouth. The tiny diamond of her engagement ring nicked my cheek from the force of the blow. I staggered back, feeling the burn and sting of the air making contact with the fresh blood that rose to the surface of my cheek.

  “You not too old to be beat, you know.” She grabbed me by my arm and pulled me back to her. I knew what was coming next, but I couldn’t believe that she would dare. She dragged my struggling body over to the kitchen table and managed to pull out a seat for herself. “Let me go! Get off me!” I said, kicking my feet out to loosen her hold on me.

  Her voice was deadly calm when she said, “You had better be still.”

  She sat down and pulled me on top of her lap. I knew better than to talk back or even act like I was trying to resist, but I wasn’t about to be humiliated by a beating. “Let me go! I ain’t do nothing!” I said, squirming once again.

  “Oh yes you did! Don’t never let me catch you saying something dirty like that again! Take your belt off and hand it to me.”

  “No.”

  My mother cocked her head to one side and appraised me, looking me over. “Oh really? So you wanna make this more difficult than it needs to be, huh?” she said as she held me down. She slid my belt through its loops with a vengeance and yanked it free so that she could beat me with my own belt. She nudged my shorts and briefs down. A shock of cool air hit my buttocks and I squirmed harder. Until I got the first taste of the belt. It sliced through the air and hit my naked skin so hard my whole body leaped up. Her hand pressed down hard into the center of my back to keep me still. “I didn’t raise you to talk filth and I don’t wanna hear no mess like that never again! You know what you said is wrong. Why you say something like that? About your own brother?” my mother said, in between whacks from the belt. Her voice was louder and harder than the sound of new leather on nine-year-old skin.

  “I can say whatever I want. It’s true!” I screamed.

  “It’s not true!” she yelled back.

  “Sasha said so! Everybody said so! It’s true. Everybody knows,” I said, my voice rising higher as my face began to overheat. I knew what was coming, but I couldn’t stop it. And I hadn’t cried since I was a little kid.

  “I don’t give a damn who said what and who saw what!” She ignored my evidence and whacked me again. “They lyin’!” she said, her voice reaching a feverish pitch and telling me what she needed to believe was true.

  But I kept on, “And now they say it everywhere we go! Everything he does means something now. And me, too! They say me, too! And Julian … he won’t do or say nothing! He just stand there and let them say—” Then it came. I couldn’t stop it. I started to cry as I told her what happened in the store. The hot tears that I hadn’t cried when my mother told me my father was gone, tears that wouldn’t come when we went to Grammy’s funeral last Easter, tears that knew better than to appear whenever I fell off my bike and ripped my skin open or burned my fingers with firecrackers, those tears now all came in a rush, falling on my mother’s lap in dark little spots that spread and dampened and darkened the material of her dress, squeezing out from a tight knot in the center of my chest, pushing up through my ribs, crowding my throat, threatening to choke me if I couldn’t cry them fast enough, forcing me to gulp some back in order to breathe.

  “So you left him there?” she said and whipped me harder. “I don’t believe you! Sitting here crying and caterwauling about how you feel. He’s the one they was picking on! How you think he feel, knowing his own brother ain’t got his back?” she said. Then she laid the belt gently across the backs of my legs and gave me two sharp stinging slaps with her hand, “This is for talking back and this is for not listening to me when I tell you to do something. Now get up and fix your clothes.”

  Her eyes were dead when she looked at me. She said, “I don’t know how you could be my son. You must be your father’s son. Just run when things get a little tough. Too scared to fight it o
ut, too caught up in your own self to see somebody else through.”

  “You the one told us not to play nasty,” I said, reminded of the beatings we’d get when girls ran home and said we’d tried to play doctor with them or when we were outside with the rest of the boys trying to see who could pee the farthest.

  “But I also told you that you and your brother got to cling to each other ’cause you all each other got, Joseph. I don’t care if Julian run up and down Pitkin Avenue naked for nothing except a cow bell. I might not like it or approve, but I don’t abandon him. ’Cause he’s my son. My life’s blood. And he’s your blood. You don’t never turn your back on your brother. On your blood. No matter what. You hear me?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, drying my eyes with the backs of my hands.

  “Good. Now get out my face,” she said and handed me back my belt. I knew better than to snatch it. I took it carefully and walked stiffly to my room and threw myself face down across the bottom bunk. I heard the sucking sound of water down the drain and knew she had unstopped the sink.

  “And you can finish these dishes before I get back,” she said. I didn’t ask her where she was going and she didn’t volunteer any information. I heard the slam of our door and the three locks being snapped into place.

  The sky turned dark long before they returned home.

  I was waiting up for them in front of the living room TV, watching the late late show when I heard the key in the lock.

  My mother didn’t say a word. After she checked first in the sink to make sure I had done the dishes, she marched Julian to the kitchen and heated up the leftovers from dinner for him. As she put a glass of juice and a plate of food in front of Julian, she shot a look over his head at me. That look was a warning and a reminder, both an encouragement to go talk to my brother and a threat of another beating if I didn’t. When I got up from my place on the floor and made my way into the kitchen, she walked away and left us alone.

  “Hey,” I said as I sat down at the table with him. He looked long at me with wounded eyes, pleading for me to say more. These were the eyes that had scrutinized me that night Mama made us look so carefully at each other. I wondered what he had seen that night and if it had prepared him for a night like this. Either I had not looked closely at Julian or I had not looked long enough because I had not seen this, this thing that would separate us and divide us, that would breed ignorance, bravado, and fear. I had only looked to see myself in his eyes. I had looked at him to see my future, my face in a few years, what I would become. I had not seen him at all. Now that I could see, I had no words to take it back. We stared at each other for what seemed like hours. Again, neither of us wanted to be the first to look away. Finally, Julian turned his back on me, cutting me with firm dismissal. He downed his juice in one gulp and picked up his plate of food and went to our bedroom with it. He slammed the door, and in a minute, his boom box blared and drowned out whatever I could have thought to say.

  By the time Julian emerged from his room, I was halfway through Tales from the Crypt.

  He dropped his dishes in the sink and ran water over them while I pretended to be engrossed in the film. Just when he was about to walk away I leaned closer to the television as if I couldn’t take my eyes off of what I was watching. “Oh snap,” I said, knowing that Julian would hear me. He tried to see what I was looking at, and when he couldn’t see the screen, he came into the living room and leaned himself up against the wall near the light switch. “What you watching?” he said, asking as if he didn’t care.

  “Tales from the Crypt,” I said.

  “What’s this one about?”

  “Some boogieman something,” I said. To tell the truth, I couldn’t even remember what the story was or which kind of creature this one was about. Before I started deserting him that summer, Julian and I used to catch every scary flick that came on. And we never missed Tales from the Crypt. When I was younger, before I learned to distinguish between creatures from the black lagoon, werewolves, boogiemen, the living dead, ghouls, and vampires, I called all the monsters boogiemen. The name stuck.

  “Where were you for all that time?” I asked.

  “Out.”

  “Why you ain’t come back till just now?”

  “Didn’t feel like it,” he said.

  “You all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good.”

  “How is it?” Julian asked, edging closer to the living room, keeping his hands in his pockets.

  “It’s all right. Nothing special.” I stopped breathing. Sitting there with every body part tensed, I was wondering if he had forgiven me.

  “Scary?”

  “Nah.”

  “How many people got killed so far?”

  “None. Nobody ain’t even dead yet.”

  “That’s weak,” he said, sitting down on the couch beside me. He took an end of the thin blanket I had spread across me and yanked some more to his side.

  “Yeah,” I said, letting out my breath.

  During a commercial, the sound of our mother’s loud breathing came to us from down the hallway, where she had fallen asleep with her bedroom door open, trying to eavesdrop on us and see if we had worked things out. Briefly, before the show came back on, I wondered if she had known or just merely hoped that everything would turn out all right. I decided that it didn’t really matter. Then I looked at my brother across from me, wearing the face I would one day inherit, a face that was our mother’s and father’s and mine and yet, I realized, a face that was also his and his alone. A face I had to respect, even if I could not understand it or read it.

  Now we were like always. Sitting on the couch with the thin blanket spread over our knees, ready to throw it over our heads during the scary parts, peeking over the top so that we could see and not see. The film had finally started to get good. The monster was catching people left and right. I was clutching my corner of the blanket in a death grip, tensing when the music sped up, flinching every time I expected the monster to strike a blow. As always, it became so real to me that I felt like it was me running through the woods screaming even though there was no one around for miles to hear. And no one to save me. My heart was in my throat. Then I remembered that my brother was there with me. So I turned to him and whispered, “Ju?”

  “Yeah?” Julian peeked out from under the covers, the bottom half of his face lost in the blanket, scared just like me until he saw me looking at him. He dropped the blanket like it was on fire.

  “You scared?”

  He shook his head, the trace of a smile evident. “Nah,” he said. “Ain’t nothing to fear.”

  dance for me

  The girls on Lexington had it the worst. Hated maroon skirts the color of dried blood. Navy blazers complete with gaudy emblem. Goldenrod blouses with Peter Pan collars. And knee socks. Actually, knee socks weren’t so bad. Knee socks served their purpose in the winter, keeping sturdy calves warm.

  The girls on East End wore gray or navy skirts, plain and not pleated, with a white blouse, sweater optional.

  Multiple skirts were another way to go. We had our choice of navy, gray, maroon, and an unpleated light blue seersucker meant only for the spring. The choices allowed us to pretend we weren’t really wearing a uniform. We hoped merely to be thought eccentric. Girls with a penchant for skirts with panels. But we fooled no one. Our uniforms, our talk, our walk, our avid interest in grooming and normal people’s clothing, and our daily preoccupation with what we would wear on upcoming field trips when allowed to be out of uniform filled our time and conversations. We had a special way of standing that was part lean, part slouch, as if posture was too much of a bother to consider.

  Nameless, faceless on a school trip, we stood out. Solid-colored blouses, pleated skirts, knee socks, and loafers, bluchers, or oxfords. Private school girls. Not to be confused with Catholic school girls. Or reform school girls (how many times did the kids in my neighborhood look at me in condescending pity?). Not to be confused with the girls
from The Facts of Life. They were boarders. No matter how many times I tried to explain this, the kids in my neighborhood persisted in calling me Tootie.

  We attended a second-tier all-girls school. It wasn’t as illustrious as the private schools on the Upper East Side nor as seedy as the ones in Midtown. We clung to our small but unique differences. For example, having our choices of uniforms made us the envy of the other all-girls schools. Girls were sure to take it out on us during soccer games. Secondly, there was our partnership with a nearby all-boys school, our “brother” school two blocks away, which allowed us to have kissing partners whenever we put on a play.

  At school, there were the WASPS and the JAPS. And me. Girls with last names for first names. Riley. Taylor. Haley. Morgan. Hayden. Girls whose names are meant for a boy or girl, depending.

  I’d never told anyone this, but I always felt naked in my pleated skirt, vulnerable. There was a trick to rolling the skirt that would take several inches off, a way of folding tightly and minutely that would allow one to hide the extra material beneath a shirt if tucked then pulled out just enough to camouflage the extra bulk. Only I didn’t know it. I’d seen it numerous times, jealously watching girls enter the bathroom with skirts that covered their knees and walk back out with skirts that skimmed their thighs, but I still couldn’t get it. The lines of my pleat were never quite right, always drooping in the front, making me look slightly off kilter.

  It was lunchtime and I was in the school’s bathroom with my stomach bared to the mirror as I tried to roll my skirt when Taylor and Ashley entered and headed for the stalls, deep in conversation. Neither of them noticed me.

  “Well, I wouldn’t go with a guy from Buckley, that’s for sure.”

  “I might not get to go at all. We’re supposed to go to the Hamptons and my dad really has his heart set on it. How am I supposed to get out of it?”

  “I don’t know. I so need a new pair of jeans. Do you want to go to the Gap today after we get out of chorus?”