Playground

by 50 Cent

  That’s why his nice rich parents decided not to press charges—because no real damage had been done.

  “Who’s Bobbie?” Liz asked, surprising me. It wasn’t the follow-up question I’d expected. “Can you tell me about him?”

  “Bobbie’s just this guy at school,” I said. “He’s cool.”

  “I see,” Liz said, scribbling something in her notebook.

  Bobbie was second in command of Andres’s posse, a kickass basketball player who was about seven feet tall and ripped and could date any girl he wanted, including at the high school. He’d high-fived me in the cafeteria that morning when I’d gone in for my chocolate milk and said I should check out Maurice’s busted-up face. Bobbie’s the one who told me Maurice was planning to eat in the nurse’s office from then on.

  “Anything else happen today?” Liz had stopped writing and was staring at me again.

  I shook my head. “Nah, it was just the same old shit as always.”

  Except that at lunch Andres had high-fived me, too, and so had Darrell, and they’d even told me I should come sit with them. But by the time I had made it out of the hot-food line with my tray, their table was already full, so instead I just waved and kept on walking to my usual table in the back corner by the recycling bins no one ever used. I was pissed to see that, during my week on suspension, two geeky-ass seventh-graders had tried to edge in on my domain.

  “Get the hell out of here, you assholes,” I said, slamming my tray down right on top of the littler kid’s—I’m pretty sure his name was Jamal—Fried Fish Delight. After the two kids scurried away without even taking their food with them, I had the table all to myself again, and that was just how I liked it.

  “So there’s nothing else you want to tell me about?”

  She was really persistent, this Liz. But I didn’t crack that easy and kept on just shaking my head. I didn’t think she cared to hear about how I actually kind of liked the way people, even teachers, looked at me differently in the halls all day long, like I was someone worthy of respect, not just another big invisible blob.

  My second appointment with Liz went by faster than the first one, and by the time I walked out of there, I wasn’t even in all that bad a mood. Old Liz was all right in her way. She may not be all that smart, but at least she could sit there and listen without interrupting all the time.

  Outside it was rainy and cold, a deep gloominess that never seemed to fall over the city, or that all the big buildings did a good job of concealing. I saw my mom’s old Honda and jogged over toward it. I’d already opened the passenger door before I noticed that the person behind the wheel wasn’t my mom but her friend Evelyn. I hesitated, but just for a second, before sliding into the seat. I don’t know why I was even surprised anymore.

  “Where’s my mom?” I asked, looking straight ahead of me. “Because I don’t need a babysitter anymore, you know.”

  Evelyn sighed and shook her head. “Apparently you do,” she murmured, as if I couldn’t hear her. She only pretended to be nice when my mom was around. When it was just the two of us, the gloves came off. In a louder voice she said, “Your mom is working the night shift, as I believe she told you this morning.”

  “Yeah, yeah, right, of course she did.” My mom had missed a ton of shifts during my suspension, and she hadn’t let me forget it. “It’s just I thought the night shift didn’t start till the night, and last time I checked it was like five o’clock in the afternoon. But whatever.”

  Evelyn just sighed: her specialty. But then, after a pause, she asked, “Do you have any makeup work I can help you with? Your mom thought maybe you’d have a lot of assignments after a whole week away.”

  “I can do my own damn assignments,” I snapped. “I don’t need any help from you.”

  “All right, then,” Evelyn said in her sad old-lady way. “I was just offering.”

  We drove the rest of the way in silence, and when we got home, Evelyn immediately switched on the TV and went into the kitchen to start dinner. She didn’t say any-thing else to me, so I just sat on the couch waiting for the right time to make my escape. I was hungry, and Evelyn never made me food I liked, and she always kept the TV on stupid true-crime shows that sucked, and she didn’t even watch them because she was in the next room making beans and tofu (I’m not joking) and all sorts of other nasty crap no one in his right mind would eat.

  After a few minutes, Evelyn came in and placed a bowl in front of me. “Veggie chili,” she said. “Try it.” Instead of looking at me, she started tidying the room, arranging our shoes in the corner and stacking up the books I’d dumped out of my backpack.

  “I ain’t hungry,” I said and shoved the bowl away. That wasn’t true. I was starving, but I wasn’t going to give Evelyn the pleasure of eating that disgusting sludge she’d put in front of me.

  She didn’t seem to care either way. “Suit yourself,” she said. And then she stood up, switched off the TV, and walked into my mom’s room with a book. Well, if she didn’t like me hanging around her, I’d give her her precious space. Evelyn and I were pretty much through with pretending around each other.

  I fished around my backpack for some money and dug out two quarters and three dimes, just enough for a Snickers bar. I spread my books out across the little table again, then grabbed my portable video camera, the Panasonic I’d bought when my old flip cam got jacked on the subway, just in case I ran across anything cool to shoot. Yeah, right. There was never anything worth filming in ugly Garden City. No street life, no action at all.

  “I’m going outside,” I said after a few more minutes of silence. Evelyn didn’t respond, not even to remind me of my mom’s favorite subject, which was that I was grounded for life. Well, screw her, too. I pounded down the steps and out the front door.

  On the stoop was a little kid, Malik, who was maybe eight or nine and lived in the basement apartment with his mom and grandparents.

  “Get outta my way,” I said and shoved him off his perch.

  He fell flat on his ass on the top step and burst into tears. Whatever, I’d done him a favor. Stupid little kid like that shouldn’t be on the street at this time of night, not even in Garden City. He was lucky I didn’t do a lot worse to him. It’d teach him a lesson.

  5

  “Yeah, of course I love my dad” I said. I’d only been there five minutes and already Liz was starting in again. “Why wouldn’t I? He’s the bomb. We’d still be living with him—and be a lot happier, too—if my mom hadn’t walked out on him like she did. It wasn’t his fault she left,” I added, in case that wasn’t totally clear already. Sometimes you had to spell shit out for old Liz.

  Liz leaned forward, nodding in that annoying way she had. “And can you tell me why you think your mom, as you put it, walked out on him?”

  I shrugged. I couldn’t believe Liz actually got paid to just sit on her ass and repeat everything I said right back to me. Then again, I thought, looking around the dark little fried-chicken room, she clearly didn’t get paid that much. Yeah, my mom could definitely afford Liz on the kind of overtime she worked.

  “Damned if I know,” I said finally, when she just kept on staring at me. “My mom’s just one of those types who’s never satisfied with what she’s got, you know? Nothing’s ever good enough for her—not her job and definitely not my dad’s. But it wasn’t his fault he couldn’t live up to some nonexistent standard of perfection she set up in her brain, was it?”

  “So your dad,” Liz said, “he wanted your mom to stay?”

  “Hell, yes, he wanted her to stay—haven’t you been listening? For that whole first year, he was practically begging her to come back. I’m his only kid, you know? He took that seriously.”

  “So how would you describe your mom and dad’s relationship right now?” Liz asked. “Is it—productive? Would you say your dad is still interested in, ah, holding onto your mother?”

  “Nah, I think my dad’s kind of moved on by this point,” I said. I saw no reason to mention Diane,
the skanky Dallas BBQ waitress who’d been hanging around his place the last few times I’d visited.

  The last weekend I was in the city, the same trip I bought the D batteries to fill my old sock, Dad and Diane had spent most of Saturday inside the bedroom, with the door closed and the hip-hop music blasting so loudly I wouldn’t have been able to hear anything even if I’d wanted to, which I didn’t. I’d been hoping to go out and window-shop for some new shoes, but I wasn’t about to interrupt whatever nasty business they had going on, and my dad liked when I asked permission before hitting the streets. That was about the only rule he had, which was yet another reason I looked forward to visiting him.

  I spent most of Saturday watching Turner Classic Movies, which I could never have done at my mom’s place, and not only because she’s too cheap to shell out for cable. She’s anti-TV, even if the TV I’m watching happens to be prime classic cinema. If nothing else I love weekends at my dad’s for his deluxe cable package.

  “How’d a good-looking man like you get such a fattie for a kid?” Diane had asked, and I tried not to notice when my dad busted up laughing and told her it was a real good question. But that was always how my dad had acted around the women in his life, including my mom. In my personal opinion, he let the ladies boss him around a little too much.

  “I’d say my mom and dad still get along pretty well,” I told Liz. “He’s dated a bunch of different women, but no one serious. The same goes for my mom. Even though she’s the one who did the dumping, she’s stayed single ever since we moved out to Garden City, so I don’t know, could be she’s still a little hung up on him?”

  “I see,” said Liz, nodding as if she’d just figured out the answer to some really complicated math problem. She actually reminded me a little of my math teacher Mrs. Fleming that way, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. I wondered how many black kids Liz had coming to her “practice”—that’s what she called it—and what the rest of them thought of that stupid sailboat painting hanging lopsided over Liz’s head. “So you said something earlier about not seeing your Garden City friends much on the weekends. How many weekends a month would you say you spend with your dad?”

  “Two,” I answered. “I mean, that’s what they agreed on when my mom first moved out here, but sometimes it works out to more like . . . The thing is, my dad works a lot, so when he’s on a job, it can be hard to take time off. And then my mom is sometimes too busy to drive me into the city—it’s not all that close, you know, and she doesn’t like me riding the train on my own, which is crazy since in the city I’ve been riding the subway since I was like six. But anyway, yeah, sometimes it’s more like one weekend a month, and sometimes it’s three if my mom’s working a ton. It really just sort of depends.”

  Last time I was over there, on Saturday night Dad actually kicked Diane out—which she said was fine because she was working that night anyway, and she made more in one shift than his lazy ass earned in a week—so he could take me to the big Magic Johnson Theater on 125th Street. He told me I could pick out any movie I wanted; I just had to name it.

  Another thing about my mom: She never takes me to movies. She says they’re a big waste of money when you could watch the same crap on TV for free, and a complete waste of time, too. We all knew that time was a pretty precious commodity to my mom, who, ever since she left my dad to “better our lives,” spent every second of the day either working a double shift as an orderly at St. Vincent’s, or attending a class at nursing school, or studying for a class, or catching up on sleep. There was, she said so herself, very little left afterward.

  “How would you say your dad and you spend your weekends together?” Liz asked, still jotting down stupid shit in her notebook. “You guys ever do anything special?”

  I shrugged. “Nah, I don’t know. We just do—stuff. We hang out with some of my old school friends, and some friends he’s made since we left the city”—before Diane there was Tina, and before Tina there was Alexis—“and sometimes we play some b-ball and sometimes we go to the movies. That’s what I like best, when he takes me to the movies.”

  I chose Battleground: LA because I’d always been a sucker for post-apocalyptic urban shit, and my dad said okay and bought the tickets. He got us popcorn, which was great even if he felt like he had to add, “I don’t think you need the extra butter, boy.” When we got inside the theater, we sat down next to each other in the dark, and about five minutes into the previews my dad fell dead asleep. He works really hard, my dad—right now they’re putting up a new condo building across the street from Marcus Garvey Park—and he and Diane had been up really late the night before. So I didn’t mind at all that he slept for two hours straight and didn’t wake up till after the final credits had rolled and the lights had come back on. Earlier he’d said we could grab a couple of burgers on the way home, but sometimes when my dad naps, he has trouble waking up afterward. So instead, after pointing out that my ass sure didn’t need another burger on it, anyway, my dad suggested we just head back uptown to have dinner in his apartment.

  The only problem was that my dad’s refrigerator was completely empty, and there was no food anywhere else in the apartment, either. About thirty seconds after he let us into the apartment, my dad collapsed onto his messy bed and fell right back asleep. I lay awake on the couch for hours afterward, my stomach growling over the background buzz of the city on the other side of the window. But the movie was really great, as good as everyone said for sure. The special effects were just mind-blowing.

  6

  When I woke up the Saturday after my first full week back in school, I was surprised to find my mom in the kitchen cooking breakfast in her bathrobe. “Hey, Mom,” I said, totally taken aback by the scene before me. “Have I forgotten my own birthday or something?”

  She gave me a look and shook her head. “Very funny. No, sweetie. I just thought you might want pancakes this morning, that’s all.”

  I looked around the kitchen, which was crazy tidy, almost sparkling, like in a TV commercial or something. Mom had sure gotten up early. “So you’re not working today? Did you get fired? What’s up?”

  Mom stirred the batter with a wooden spoon. “Ha, ha. No, I took the day off—what’s so strange about that? I just feel like I haven’t seen enough of you lately.”

  The thing that was strange about my mom taking the day off was that she hadn’t taken a day off in almost two years, not since she’d started studying for her R.N. degree. My mom wanted to be a nurse so bad, she’d work twenty-four-hour shifts as an orderly just to be in the thick of the whole hospital scene she loved so much. So that meant—hmm. I looked at her suspiciously.

  She said, “I was thinking we could do something together, just the two of us. Like maybe we could go to the zoo, what do you think?”

  Now I knew she’d lost it. That, or the school had forced her to spend more time with me as a condition of my “rehabilitation.” Seemed like my mom would do anything to keep me out of the expensive Catholic school on the other side of town from Watkins.

  “The zoo?” I said. “Mom, I’m 13, not 5. I’m going to high school next year, for crying out loud.” And then, for the first time, I looked around the apartment, which seemed tidier than usual, and emptier. “Is Evelyn coming, too?” I asked.

  My mom appeared to think this was the craziest question ever. “No, why would she? Evelyn’s visiting family in Jersey this weekend,” she said. “I can’t remember when she said she’d be back.”

  Yeah, right. “So that’s the deal then? Everyone-spend- time-with-their-family-day, that it?”

  “Here, sit down,” Mom said, arranging a stack of pancakes on one of our old plates. “I even went out and got new syrup this morning. I hadn’t noticed we were out.”

  That was probably because she hadn’t opened a single kitchen cabinet in the almost eighteen months since we’d moved out here. But because I was still treading on thin ice with her after my suspension, I was careful not to say anything that might piss her
off. Instead I pulled up a chair to the dinky kitchen table, which was mostly used as a storage surface for all the bills and pizza menus shoved into our little mailbox every day, and dug into the pancakes.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d actually had a meal here, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t excited to chow down. Because unlike Evelyn, my mom can actually cook, and what’s more, she knows what I like to eat. That’s the only reason it bothered me that for the last—I don’t even know how long—I’d lived off bodega snacks and frozen pizzas, unless of course Evelyn was around to prepare one of her extra-special stews.

  “So, Bunny,” Mom said, glancing over at me from the stove. “How was your week at school?”

  “Fine,” I said, then took another big bite. I knew what my mom was going for, but I wasn’t taking the bait. I was too busy working my way through that second stack of pancakes.

  “I heard that the other boy, that friend of yours . . .”

  I didn’t even have to shut my mom up because right then her cell phone rang. “Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yes, all right,” she said in her desperate-to-be-a-nurse voice, and even her expression became serious and stern. “Yes, well, of course, I understand.”

  She hung up the phone and turned off the hob where the last pancake was still sizzling. She walked over to me and pulled up the other rickety chair to the table. “Bunny,” she said, “I’m so sorry but—”