At-Risk

by Amina Gautier

  “I see you’ve still got that picture up,” Kim said.

  “My two ladies,” Malik said. “Always.” He showed off his right arm, flexing it for her, making the dark ink and cursive letters that were her and the baby’s names jump. He always did it to make her laugh.

  For a while, they talked as they listened to songs on the radio. He talked about work. Then he asked about the baby. He grunted when Kim told him about all the crying, but when she started to ask for money, he rolled over on the bed and closed his eyes. He said, “You’re always coming over here for money.”

  “Where else I’m supposed to go?”

  “Don’t start, Kim.”

  “Why I gotta be starting when I ask you to take care of your daughter?”

  He turned back around to face her. “You think I don’t want to take care of her? Do you even see all the people living in this damn house? How you think they eat, Kim? How you think they pay the rent? How you think I get to stay here? I got to put money into this right here to make sure I got a roof over my head before I can go throw some money at you.”

  She hated how he did that, took her words and talked them into a way that made it seem like she was the selfish one. “She’s your daughter,” she said.

  “I know that. And this is my family. If I say I ain’t got it, I ain’t got it. What, Kim? Do you think I got a stash of money lying around here and I’m hiding it from you? I ain’t got it, and I wish you stop coming over here asking for shit I ain’t got!”

  She got off the bed. “Fine, then I won’t come no more! You don’t never have to worry about us!”

  There were tears in her eyes that she didn’t want him to see. She turned her head and smoothed out the creases in her skirt.

  “Don’t get like that,” he said. Malik stood up and went to her. “But how you think I feel, knowing you coming on over here, knowing what you gonna ask me, knowing I got to say no again and have you look at me like I ain’t shit?”

  “I didn’t say all that,” she protested, sitting now on a corner of his bed, far away from him, tucking her hands under her thighs. “I just can’t do it by myself.” She could force him to pay. Her mother and sister had told her about her options. She could take him to court, garnish his checks, have him be ordered to pay child support. But then she would lose him. She’d have money coming in for her daughter, but Danielle would lose her father. If he felt all he had to do was pay, then that was all he would do. He wouldn’t be in their lives. Kim had seen her friends take that route and the kids were the ones that really lost out. Besides, she didn’t want any bad feelings between them. She hadn’t thought about how it would make him feel to have to say no. She only knew what it felt like to hear it, then have to go back home and face the knowing eyes of her mother and sisters.

  “We could get our own place,” she whispered. “Then it would just be our bills. Nobody else’s.”

  He didn’t try to hide his amusement. “You not even eighteen. Can’t put your name on nobody’s lease.”

  Kim nodded. She bit her lip and fixed one of her curls that had begun to wilt.

  “Look, can we just not think of this for a while?” he asked, tugging on her leg.

  “No,” Kim said. “I ain’t come here for that.”

  “Okay.” He took her hand and drew light circles on her palm. “Okay.” Then he moved closer to her and began to kiss her until she forgot why she had originally come.

  Kim got off the train and changed her mind about heading home. Without knowing she was going there, she found herself at the park.

  Rashida was seated on a bench across from the kiddie swings reading out loud from a small white book. She held the baby on her lap; the stroller stood nearby. For once, the baby wasn’t crying.

  “Hi.”

  Rashida looked up from the book. “What are you doing here? Don’t tell me that after all that Malik wasn’t home?”

  “He was there,” Kim said. “I just came to get Danielle so you could study.”

  “I told you it was all right. I have my notes—”

  “I just wanted her.”

  Rashida faltered for a moment, sitting stock still with the baby. Then she smiled brightly and said, “Hey. That’s fine. I mean, she’s yours, right? You can have her whenever you want.” Rashida handed the baby over and gathered her belongings. As soon as Kim held her, the baby started to cry.

  Now that she was alone with the child, Kim didn’t know what to do. Most of the time, someone else was always around, watching her. Now the pressure was off of her for just a moment. No one was looking over her shoulder.

  Kim changed the baby’s position and held her under the arms, lifting her high. Kim wiggled her a little so that her tiny feet swung in the air. The crying stopped.

  “You like that,” Kim said. “Hey.”

  She realized that she was holding the baby incorrectly and brought her back down. She put her hands around the baby’s waist and lifted her back into the air. She did it swiftly and the baby began to gurgle and make nonsense noises.

  Kim brought the baby back down and held her out at arm’s length so that she could look her over. All this time she had thought there was more of Malik in the child than herself. But now she could see traces of her features shining through. It was the eyes. They were hers. A dark, dark brown that made the pupils hard to see. There was a little bit of her in her daughter. She could see herself. Kim touched her daughter’s cheek with a finger and smiled into the eyes that were like polished black mirrors.

  The baby was quiet now, but curious. Rapt. Her eyes followed Kim’s every movement. She brought the infant closer and inhaled, smelling the warm baby scent of powder and new, new skin. The baby reached for her hair and Kim laughed, feeling like the two of them were the only two people that had ever been in the world. And they were only now just meeting.

  Yearn

  Kiki didn’t have anything smaller than a twenty on him at lunch-time. He’d pulled out a roll of twenties and fifties and told Stephen to meet him at the park when school let out. Stephen had never seen so much money on someone his own age. And even though he knew he was supposed to head straight home, he agreed to meet at the park.

  When he got there, he went straight to their spot, a stone house at the edge of the playground that all the kids called the White House. Stone turtles, dolphins, horses in midgallop were scattered all around the park, but the White House was where the boys played spider, where the couples did it, where the teenagers played handball, and where he and Kiki met.

  That afternoon, they had it all to themselves.

  “Look what I got.” Kiki had a bag full of fireworks, Jumping Jacks, cherry bombs, Butterflies, Ashcans. It wasn’t even the Fourth of July.

  “Oh snap, where’d you get those? Did you go to Chinatown?”

  Kiki was smug, “I got my ways, Steve. I even saw The Spearman of Death.”

  “For real? The one with the Five Deadly Venoms?”

  “No, for fake, Mama’s boy,” Kiki pushed him and laughed.

  “I’m not.” But even to himself, it sounded whiny.

  Stephen imagined Kiki—short, pudgy, and Puerto Rican—riding the subway up to Chinatown, buying fireworks and rice candy, and maybe even taking in a kung fu flick, a real one with the English badly dubbed over. He wished he could have gone. Just thinking about all the things that his mother kept him from doing got him upset. He was almost twelve and still being treated like a baby. If it weren’t for Kiki, he’d never get to light any fireworks. His mother was too worried he’d blow his fingers off.

  His mother was too worried about too many things. She was worried about where they lived. She didn’t like Bed-Stuy. They lived on a block with nothing but brownstones. Even though they didn’t live in the projects, she said it was still the ghetto. The boys that lived on the block and in the surrounding area worried her. The way they grew up and took up residence on the street corners and glued themselves to the pay phones, rigging them so no one else could use t
hem. The way they wore their jeans so low that they seemed to hang off their narrow behinds. And the way they carried pagers and cell phones as if they were doctors and lawyers even though they had no jobs and nowhere to go. She worried that those boys or boys just like them would kill him. One day, she said, they would turn around and shoot him straight through the head if he said the wrong thing.

  But he knew that she was wrong. The older boys were his friends. They looked out for him. She worried over nothing and made him look like a punk in the process.

  “I’m not a mama’s boy,” Stephen said this time without whining. “I’m not.”

  “Be cool, Steve,” Kiki said.

  They started out behind the kiddie swings. Kiki pulled the Jumping Jacks out of their thin red paper and left the dozen twisted together. He lit the whole pack at once and they watched as it leapt into the air, each firecracker straining against another, ready to dance, each side fizzing and glowing orange, yellow, and green.

  “Yo, that was fresh,” Kiki said.

  “You gonna waste them, doing them like that.”

  “It’s plenty more where that came from. Chill out. Scaredy.”

  “I’m not!”

  “Then follow me,” Kiki said as they began to walk away, kicking paper bags and crack vials out of their path. Kiki stopped and watched a group of girls playing rope from a distance. “Isn’t that that puta Maribel you tried to talk to?”

  “Yeah, that’s her,” Stephen said, not sure what a puta was. She was playing double Dutch with two girls he didn’t recognize. Her back was to him and he lost his train of thought for a moment as he watched her denim cutoffs sway back and forth to the rhythm of the rope she was turning.

  “—a lot of nerve turning my boy down. I’ll show her she can’t play with my homie like that,” Kiki was muttering. He reached around in his bag until he pulled out a stink bomb.

  “Get behind that tree!” Kiki shouted as he lit and tossed the stink bomb at the girls and scampered out of sight.

  “Yo, why’d you—”

  Kiki was doubled over with laughter, “Stop frontin’. You know you thought that was funny.”

  He tried to deny it, but as soon as he opened his mouth, he started to laugh hard. It had been funny to watch the girls. They had started sniffing the air and before they’d realized it was a stink bomb, the girls had all stared at Maribel with disgust, as if the smell came from her. Red-faced, Maribel dropped her end of the rope and ran.

  “Bet you wish you coulda did it yourself,” Kiki said.

  He wondered how Kiki knew. Stephen had tried to dance with Maribel at her birthday party twice and she’d turned him down. He’d written her a note, asking her to go steady with him and she’d shown it to all the girls in their class at lunchtime. When he’d seen the note wafting through the cafeteria, covered in chocolate milk stains, he had wished for some sort of divine hand to come down and smack her silly. But he hadn’t done anything himself. It felt good to see her get humiliated for a change.

  Kiki pulled himself together, “Damn, I almost pissed myself from that. Serves her stank ass right.”

  “Stank ass!” they both screamed with laughter.

  They heard the Mister Softee ice cream truck a block away and Stephen realized he was late. The ice cream man always came down their block between five-thirty and six, when he judged the parents would be home to give their kids money. “Oh dip, I gotta go,” he said.

  Kiki gave him a pound, “I got a little more work to do first. I see that pendeja Rosario over by the swings. I got something for her.”

  “I thought that was your girl?”

  “I dumped her. I started going with Tiffany yesterday. Come by my house tomorrow after school.”

  “I don’t know. I’ll try.”

  “She’s bringing her girlfriend Wanda over. She’ll heal your broken heart.”

  “Man, forget you,” Stephen said. But as he walked away, he was trying to remember what he knew about Wanda. Wanda had started to grow real breasts in the fifth grade. He’d find a way to be there all right.

  By the time he got to his street, MacDonough, everyone was already outside. He walked through the maze of bodies, sidestepping double Dutch ropes that whipped by fast enough to sting and stepping over the boys using yellow chalk to etch their lines and numbers on the sidewalk so they could play skelly, without really seeing any of them. He could count on his neighbors to be the same. Each day the heat brought them downstairs with the promise of a breeze or two before dinner. The stoops were littered with adults playing cards, fixing hair, smoking, and talking. Each day the old men on the street congregated in front of 32, his building, and sat on milk crates at the top of the stoop, dressed for church and talking quietly to each other. And each day Miss Earlene drank herself into a stupor and tried to pick fights.

  “Yes, that’s what I said! These kids here today ain’t amountin’ to nothing.” She looked up at the old men on the stoop for support but they ignored her. She sat at the bottom of the stoop, with her knees spread and her skirt tented over them, a forty-ounce bottle of beer in her lap. Stephen knew the moment she laid eyes on him.

  “Not even close to nothing! Look at you. Yes, you Townsend boy. You, Stephen, you! You special, huh? That’s what your mama make you out to be? What’s your father say, huh? Mama’s baby and Papi’s maybe. Your daddy wasn’t nothing and you ain’t never gonna be nothing neither.”

  Miss Earlene was a conversational drunk. After a few beers she talked to any one who would listen. His mother said she had been beautiful once, when she was much younger. And what his mother hadn’t told him, but others had, was that Miss Earlene had loved his father and tried to steal him away. She and his mother had gotten into fights over his father, and his grandmother always had to pull them apart.

  He’d learned to ignore Miss Earlene’s tirades over the years. Especially when they were about his father. All his mother had ever said was that his father had left them, and since Stephen had been too young to remember him, he’d left it at that. He had no feelings where his father was concerned. No hatred, no bitterness, no nothing. He was the only remainder of his father’s presence. There were no pictures or souvenirs. Only absence. Drunk as she was, Miss Earlene was careful. She could say what she wanted about his father, but she knew better than to say anything about his mother.

  The kitchen was hot because the windows were closed and the shades drawn; the smells that would have wafted out now turned back and circled around the apartment. His mother stood in front of the stove, her brown arms and elbows smattered with flour. Her short pixie haircut was wilting. Damp black tendrils framed her face. She was frying chicken when she heard him come up behind her.

  “Hey, Ma.”

  “Hey, yourself. Where you been?”

  “Out. Chillin’. You know.”

  “No, I don’t know. That’s why I asked you. Mind telling me why you didn’t take out the garbage today? Too busy doing all your ‘chillin”?”

  “Ah, c’mon, man—”

  “Boy, who are you talking to?”

  “Ma, I forgot, all right?”

  “Well, why don’t you just go on and remember, then?”

  “All right. Dag.”

  “Stephen, how many times I got to tell you to quit saying that? Sounds too much like damn.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Thank you.” She kissed his cheek and wiped off the counter, motioning for him to help his grandmother set the table.

  They sat down to eat and his mother opened up the conversation after saying grace, “You sure were late getting home today. I got here before you. What were you doing?”

  “Nothin’ really. Chillin’.”

  “Well, who were you doing ‘nothing really’ with?” she asked.

  “Nobody.”

  “I may not be hip, Stephen, but even I know you can’t ‘chill’ alone. I don’t mind if you stay after to be with your friends as long as it wasn’t that Kiki. But I know it wasn’t Kiki beca
use I told you I didn’t want you around that rough little boy anymore. He’s got too much time on his hands and too much money in his pockets for a boy that age.”

  “Does he have a rich grandfather, do you think? Maybe he could give me some of that money,” his grandmother quipped.

  Stephen bit back his laughter, “No Gram, he don’t have no rich grandfather.”

  His mother raised her eyebrows and sent his grandmother a knowing look, as if he couldn’t understand their communication. “Mama, that money is dirty money. He gets money from that brother of his,” she said.

  “Wilfredo has a job, Ma.”

  “Mmmhhm. A job. Washing cars down on Atlantic Avenue. They don’t pay that kind of money down there. He got a job but he’s got a something else, too,” she said.

  She wouldn’t say the words drug dealer, but he heard them just the same.

  “Ma, Kiki’s brother is not what you think. It’s nothing wrong with his money.”

  “First off, don’t tell me what I think. You don’t know where Wilfredo’s money comes from and neither do I. I swear. One of these days, somebody gonna come looking for that boy to make him pay up and whoever is around him is gonna get caught up in it. Even if they’re just minding their own business. And they gonna be real sorry, too. When they come looking for him, they’re not gonna care who all is with him or if they’re kin or if they’re too young or what. Just don’t let it be my child, please,” his mother said, speaking to no one in particular but making it clear that she was talking to him. She wiped her mouth with a paper towel that had been folded to look like a napkin. When she put it down, he could see the faint traces of the raisin-colored lipstick she wore to work. “But none of that even matters since you don’t play with Kiki anymore. Isn’t that right, Stephen?”