Secret Saturdays

by Torrey Maldonado

  “Sean,” Hammerhead Gregg said. “Mind your business.”

  “I’m half Puerto Rican, so it is my business. Tease me so I can tell everyone you pooped on yourself last year in class.”

  “You better be out before I hurt you,” Gregg told him.

  “You ain’t hurting anybody, you piss drinker,” Sean yelled for everyone to hear. “Remember in first grade when Derrick dared you to drink piss and you did, nasty?”

  “Shut up!” Hammerhead shoved Sean.

  Sean pushed him back.

  Real quick, kids jumped in between them.

  “Get off me,” Gregg told his friends.

  Sean laughed. “What you gonna do? Becky beat you up last year and she almost put you to sleep with a choke hold. Don’t make me go get her right now so she can knock you out again.”

  Hammerhead tried shaking free and started crying, but his friends held him tighter. “Let me punch him in his face!”

  “Stop!” one of Gregg’s friends told him. “The principal just came out the school and is looking over here.”

  “Crybaby,” Sean continued with a smile. “You only want to fight because your feelings are hurt. You can’t think of a comeback so you want to wrestle me like you’re in kindergarten.” Sean tapped my chest. “Let’s go. Before the principal comes over.”

  At first I wasn’t sure what to do, but I followed Sean. Two blocks away, we stopped at the corner and waited for the crossing guard to let some cars pass. Why’d Sean stick up for me? How come he hadn’t been scared back there? Why didn’t he stay back there and fight? You’re not supposed to walk away from fights. It makes you look soft. Maybe this kid, Sean, was a punk. On the other hand, he made Hammerhead look more butt because he was the one who cried.

  “Hammerhead was being mad racist,” Sean said after I finally told him what I was thinking. “I hate that. And I did fight Hammerhead. With my mouth. You better learn how to defend yourself. Listen, my moms says there are four things to remember about fighting. First, people fight when their feelings are hurt. Second, you can fight with your hands or your mouth. Third, people who fight with their hands are too dumb to beat up somebody with their words.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But you beat up that kid too much. He cried.”

  “That’s the fourth thing,” Sean said. “If you beat up a kid with your words, do it so other kids watching get scared of you. If they are, they’ll leave you alone. I bet Hammerhead won’t say anything to me or you again. Do what my moms said. It works, and that’s why I’m not scared of Hammerhead or anybody else.”

  That was some of the smartest stuff I’d ever heard. Right there, I realized two things.

  First, I wanted to be like Sean. I didn’t want to fight with my fists. I wanted to beat up people with my words.

  Second, I wanted to be Sean’s friend.

  From that day, I started speaking to Sean more.

  Us both being Black and Puerto Rican gave me and him mad similarities. He was completely into hip-hop and a fiend for rap just like me. Soon we had matching black-and-white Composition notebooks to write our rhymes in. We spent mad hours together, listening to music and making verses. We even freestyle-rapped with each other. By fifth grade, me and Sean were so close that kids called us twins and brothers from different mothers.

  Friends

  AFTER HIS DETENTION Sean met me and Vanessa around five o’clock at the handball courts in the stadium. Me, Sean, Kyle, and Vanessa all knew how to play handball, but it was really Sean’s sport. Baseball was Kyle’s and basketball was Vanessa’s. Me? I didn’t have one. I guess writing rhymes was more my sport.

  It was still light out. Later we were doing a sleepover at Sean’s, and Kyle had to stay at home and clean his room if he wanted to be part of it. So right now it was just Sean, me, and Vanessa.

  “What happened at detention?” I asked Sean.

  Sean sucked his teeth. “Ms. Feeney made me write fifty times, ‘I will behave in class.’ After that, she gave me a corny speech about how I should know better.”

  “Manny got detention too?”

  “Nope.” Sean shook his head, then yelled at this Mexican kid smacking his handball against the wall, “You want singles? I’ll play you for your ball.”

  “Whatever,” the kid said.

  Our stadium was maybe the size of four football fields. Besides handball courts, it had a track, bleachers, baseball fields, and benches. Trees, little lawns, and paths to walk on. Everywhere, someone played their sport.

  The stadium’s track had red turf and was maybe half a block from the courts. The track was red like how the planet Mars looked in movies. About ten high school girls in short shorts raced on that track. A chubby Black woman with a tiny Afro in burgundy sweats shouted and blew a whistle at the girls.

  I always stayed on the handball courts. A black fence surrounded the eight courts to keep hand-balls from flying out. Every court had kids, playing or just hanging out. I leaned on the fence next to Vanessa.

  Vanessa was full Puerto Rican. Girls acted like she was Alicia Keys. “You got good hair,” they’d say, and touch it. They meant straight hair. No naps. Whatever. My hair was nappy and so was Sean’s. Kyle’s too. Both his parents were Black. Our hair was just as good as Vanessa’s.

  Vanessa kept her jet-black hair pulled in a bun. A bang hung down the right side of her forehead. Vanessa did remind me a bit of Alicia Keys. She even rocked huge, thin, silver hoop earrings like Alicia wore. I sometimes joked with Vanessa and tried putting my hand through a hoop. She’d punch me in my arm or stomach for that. Quick. Bam.

  Right now, Vanessa was staring at Sean. Too hard. Before June she had looked at Sean like they were homeboys. Over the summer, I thought she watched him differently. The way girls did when they thought a guy was cute. I wasn’t sure.

  “You like Sean,” I told her.

  She put a face on like she was disgusted. “You stupid.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “Then how come this month you both brought Rollerblades to Field Day in Prospect Park? And skated and held hands?”

  To me, that definitely meant Sean liked her. He never held a girl’s hand. And I had never seen Vanessa hold a guy’s hand before that.

  “We did that so we wouldn’t fall,” she said.

  “Dang! Just be honest,” I said. “Being friends means we like family. I consider you family. I trust you. You trust me? Then say you like him.”

  “I don’t like him.”

  “That’s it,” I said.

  “What’s it?”

  “You and me are fake friends because you lying to me.”

  “Who cares?” Vanessa turned her back to me. “You don’t even know what friendship is.”

  “You don’t either,” I said.

  I went back to watching Sean. I wished I could ask him if he liked Vanessa. I didn’t know how to bring it up or how he’d respond.

  Sean was now on the court arguing about the last shot. Was it a killer? Or a choke?

  Sean played two more handball games with that Mexican kid before he came over acting all big because he’d beat him. “You got next?” Sean asked, tossing the ball at me.

  I caught it and bounced it back at him. “Nah.” My mind went back to Ms. Feeney. “I can’t believe Ms. Feeney didn’t punish Manny too.”

  Sean smiled and freestyled:Ayo, Ms. Feeney thinks I’m hotheaded and wants me to cool it.

  But she should do her job better. She’s stupid and foolish.

  I got attacked so I fought back.

  She should grab Manny for starting that crap.

  Me and Vanessa nodded in beat. Sean let his personality go when he rhymed. Right now he rocked wild, side to side. He waved his arms loose and rhymed:I got three friends in our little school.

  You, Justin. You cool.

  Then, let’s see . . .

  Who completes the three?

  There’s Kyle and Vanessa.

  But V wants to be my wifey.

  Sean winked at V
anessa. “Ewww!” Vanessa said, and made a stank face.

  Sean laughed at her, then said to me:Justin, we been peeps since elementary

  So why don’t you try telling me

  Why Ms. Feeney stays grilling me?

  Sean stopped rapping and started beatboxing. That was our way of telling each other to join in.

  Sean, to tell you the truth,

  I have no clue

  Why earlier Ms. Feeney got on you

  Because both times today, other kids first tried playing you.

  But she turned around and put that blame on you. On the flip, though, lunch was sweet When you dissed that punk and made him leave.

  Sean stopped beatboxing, smiled, and gave me a pound. “True. True.”

  “I have to go,” Vanessa said suddenly. “My mom and dad texted and they want to take me to the movies.” Vanessa didn’t have brothers or sisters but she had two good parents. Vanessa’s father was an electrician. Her mother worked in a hospital. In their free time, they took Vanessa out of Red Hook as much as they could. “You both heading to your block? Or you staying?” Vanessa asked me and Sean.

  “We staying,” we said.

  Vanessa left.

  Sean turned around and with both hands gripped the fence and rocked it back and forth real slow. He stared at the Grey House. It was an abandoned building built on a pier next to the stadium. All burned twenty-something floors of it. My mother said that when she moved into Red Hook, the Grey House was a sugar factory and a lot of Red Hook people worked there. When the Grey House burned down, all these different companies wanted to fix it up, do this and that with it. But in the end no companies ever bought it.

  But people in Red Hook didn’t forget about it for a few reasons. First, the size of the Grey House kept it on people’s minds. It was gigantic compared with the pipsqueak buildings around the stadium. It looked almost like a skyscraper. Second, everything in the stadium was new and shiny. Not the Grey House. You could tell its walls used to be white, but now it was stained gray from fire smoke. When we were younger, me and Sean played this game where we took guesses about how many people had died in the Grey House fire. Some kids who went in and came back to our block said the Grey House had ghosts. That just made me and Sean talk even more about the Grey House. We agreed it was the scariest, biggest haunted house ever and talked about different ways we’d sneak in there and how crazy it would be to get on that roof.

  “Let’s go in there,” Sean said right now.

  “How?”

  “Climb the gate. Cross the junkyard. Sneak in through a broken window.”

  For a second, I thought he was kidding. But I caught how serious he was, clutching the fence. Like he was fiending to be in the Grey House.

  “Nah, I’m not doing it,” I told Sean.

  “Faggot.”

  “You the faggot.”

  “Me?” Sean said. “You the one who’s afraid to go in there.”

  I wasn’t sure what to do. I didn’t want to climb the Grey House but also didn’t want Sean thinking I was a punk.

  “Be like that, Justin,” Sean said. “Who climbed the gate with you when you wanted to swim in the Red Hook Pool at night?”

  I strained hard to see the dogs that were supposed to guard the Grey House, but I didn’t spot any. I looked up, and up, and up, to the top. I wondered if we could see Manhattan from the Grey House roof. My mother sometimes took me to Manhattan to museums and parks. Manhattan was mad peaceful.

  “If we see dogs, we jet, right?”

  “Bet.” He smiled.

  Once over the gate, we had to cross this junkyard.

  “I’ll race you inside,” I said.

  “On your mark. Get set. Go!” Sean said.

  We ran fast and I tried not to bust my butt because the ground was slippery with glass and garbage. Burned car parts. Broken bikes. Boxes with trash in them. We got to a window, and as scared as I was, I hopped in first because I still figured a dog might pop out of somewhere. Sean was right behind me. It was dark in the Grey House. The only light came in through the windows. I checked my watch and could barely see the time: 5:45 P.M. I caught something else. My palms were black like I had rubbed charcoal on them. The fire that burned the Grey House must’ve left ash, and it got on me when I climbed in the window. “This ain’t coming off,” I said, showing Sean my hands.

  “Calm down. It’s on me too. We’ll wash it off later,” Sean said. All of a sudden, his face glowed like a lightbulb. I turned to see what he was looking at. A staircase. It had one step, then two steps missing, then another step, then three steps missing. The staircase was mostly stairless.

  “Son, we need to climb that,” Sean said.

  I had a huge smile and he knew why. I was The Man at climbing. I used to rock-climb up the three-story bread factory behind my building just for fun. I’d squeeze my fingers into cracks in the wall and grip my hands onto poked-out bricks and grab and yank myself up until I stood on the cracker factory roof.

  We walked up staircase after staircase. On some floors, only half a staircase went up to the next floor. The other half was missing from the fire. When we found staircases like that, me and Sean walked up as far as we could, then tugged at wires and pipes hanging out walls to see if they felt strong enough to hold our weight. If they didn’t snap out the wall, we grabbed them and pulled ourselves to the next floor. We got to the fourteenth floor before we knew it. We looked for a staircase going up to the fifteenth floor but couldn’t find one. We wandered into this huge room full of factory machines. Dust on everything. Probably old equipment used back in the day. Light came in through busted windows. Sharp, broken glass stuck out window frames like they could slice somebody’s head off. While eyeing the room, I saw on the opposite side a staircase going up to the next floor. That’s when I spotted something that scared me. The floor between us and that staircase had huge holes in it. Everywhere. Like heavy equipment had fallen through it. We had to cross this holey floor to get to the staircase.

  Sean moved farther into that room.

  “Chill.” I grabbed his arm. “That floor’ll break.”

  “Relax.” He snatched his arm and took another step to see if the floor was solid. He looked at his feet and waited. Nothing. My heart was beating hard. Sean took another step forward and stood still again for two seconds. Nothing happened. Sean took a few steps more into the room. From his new spot, he jumped up and down.

  He looked at me and smiled. “See?” he said, waving me to come over. “It’s fine.”

  I slowly stepped halfway to where he was.

  “Keep coming!” he yelled.

  I moved in closer.

  “Now, follow me,” he said. He turned and took a step, and the floor broke right underneath him. His legs went straight down until he was showing only from the waist up. I grabbed his forearms type-fast and pulled. But his skin and my hands were slippery from that black charcoal stuff. Sean kept sliding down. He started crying, “Pull me up!”

  I had never seen Sean so scared.

  I reached for his T-shirt and caught some of it under his armpit. With my other hand, I grabbed a pipe built into the floor. Sean kept slipping deeper into the hole and stuff flashed through my head. Like Sean falling downstairs and breaking his leg. Him laid out with his skull cracked open and bleeding.

  Sean’s eyes were shut tight and tears ran down his cheeks. He breathed so hard through his mouth that I thought he was having an asthma attack.

  I gripped the pipe harder and pulled on his tee and started to cry. Sean came more out the hole. A second later, his hand was next to mine on the pipe. Soon we were laid on the floor, side by side, breathing heavy.

  We were there for a minute, calming down. Sean wasn’t a scaredy-cat, but he cried. This was the first time I had seen him cry, and he’d never seen me cry before. That’s for sure.

  “Let’s leave,” Sean said, standing up slowly. He still looked a little shook.

  But when I got up, we noticed something a
t the same time. Almost hidden underneath pieces of fallen ceiling was a third staircase that went upstairs. We didn’t need to cross this holey floor after all. “Maybe the floor’s better upstairs,” I said.

  Sean wiped a tear from his eye with his wrist and put on a serious face. Tough. Maybe to show he wasn’t afraid to go to the next floor. “Let’s see what’s upstairs,” he said.

  We climbed seven more floors and soon we were at a door. Sean put one hand on the door and shoved it. It squeaked back. Right there, on the twenty-first floor, through that door frame, we saw straight over our housing projects and into Manhattan. The sky was a bit darker now that it was later. I looked at Sean and smiled, but he didn’t catch it. He was too busy tapping his foot on the roof to see if it was safe for us to walk on.

  “Want to go to the edge?” he asked.

  “Nah, man. Nah,” I said. “And you not a punk if you don’t go neither.”

  Sean looked at me. He tapped the floor again and thought it over. “If anybody asks, we went to the edge. Cool?”

  “I’m not telling anybody we came in here,” I said. “My mom’ll hit me if she finds out. Let’s keep this between me and you.”

  I knew I was asking Sean for a lot. He was known in our projects and school for not being scared. Asking him to keep our climbing the Grey House secret was like asking LeBron James to lose a game on purpose. Sean probably was dying to jet back and tell everyone we’d done this.

  Sean got quiet and looked out at Manhattan for a real long time. I did too. We had a clear view of the city. The tall buildings there were so far away they looked like they could fit in my hand. Watching the Manhattan buildings all lit up was like seeing different parts of a diamond shine.

  From the Grey House roof, Red Hook reminded me of Lego toy blocks except the buildings were all brick and tan. Not just the six-story buildings where me and Sean lived. The tall projects in the back of Red Hook looked as small as Lego blocks too. Even though they were fourteen floors high. From where we stood, way above everything, cars on the streets were tiny and moved slow, how ants did. It was nice up there.