by Sheela Chari
I’d never been outside the hospital by myself. When I first stepped through the front doors, I felt my breath go faster as cars whooshed past me, honking loudly, and a taxi driver rolled down his window to yell at someone for double-parking. At the corner of 135th, the smell of eggs, coffee, and honey-roasted peanuts coming together from a stand made me want to hurl. For a moment I almost went back to the hospital. But I didn’t. Even if I’d never been in the city by myself, I was going to that station. I was going to find out if that tag could help me figure out where Randall was.
Even with Randall’s hoodie on, the bus to the station was as cold as a freezer with the air-conditioning. I hadn’t noticed it on the way. But now that I was alone, I noticed everything. I was sick with worry, and I was excited, too. Om. It was written in my pop’s black book, and it had become Randall’s tag. Now it was on the wall at 125th. What did it mean? That Randall was alive and okay? Then why didn’t he come home? With a pang I realized there was no home for him to come back to. Someone had to tell him where we were, or he’d never know. I’ll leave him a note, I decided. I had a Sharpie in my backpack. I’d write something next to the Om.
The bus pulled up to 125th, and I got out. I raced down the street to the train station, then up the stairs, past a nun eating a breakfast burrito. I paused. That was something you didn’t see every day. Then I rushed on. But when I got to the platform, I almost choked. There standing in front of the Om was a cop. I saw the baton hanging from his belt, the sharp look in his eyes, and I knew there was no way of writing on that wall. Above him, the Om glowed like an orange halo.
He must have seen me staring because he said, “Kid, you got somewhere to go?”
That was enough for me. I turned around. I walked past the nun again, who was finishing the last of her burrito, and she belched. Great. A belching nun. The universe was giving me a bad sign. I was about to head down the stairs, when I looked back once more and saw someone with rusty brown hair sitting on a concrete bench. I hustled to him. “Nike!”
The rusty brown head turned. “Petey! What are you doing here, man?”
I’d never seen him up close in the day. He wore a T-shirt and running shorts, and sneakers without socks. He seemed more wiry than I remembered, like a wild cat in the jungle.
There was no point beating around the bush. “I’m looking for Randall.”
“The Om bro.”
I gestured to the tag behind us. “I know you saw that. Now, where is he?”
“Stop pointing, man.”
“I know you know something.” He was the youngest of the crew, and with those long lashes, he didn’t scare me. “You have to tell me, or I’ll talk to that cop over there right now.”
Nike burst out laughing. “You’d pee your pants first.” He stood up, rolling on the balls of his feet, the muscles in his legs flexing.
I gave him my best tough look, but I knew he was right. I turned to go when Nike said, “Mighty’s gone to study with Tops.”
I stopped. “Tops?”
Nike leaned over, stretching his hamstrings, and for a moment I thought he was going to tear down the tracks. I noticed a deep cut on his knee, and it was bleeding.
“There’s more to Mighty than that.” Nike did a sideways jerk of his head toward the Om.
“He’s selling dope,” I said.
“Sshhh,” Nike hissed. “Seriously, are you trying to get arrested?”
I doubted anyone could hear us over the noise in the station. “So what is it?”
Then we both heard it. The train horn.
“That’s for me, dude. I’m going home to chill out my bones.” Nike stretched his legs again, this time gingerly, and I realized he was in pain.
“What happened to you?” I asked, pointing to the cut.
He shrugged it off. “You want to hear what I have to say or not?”
I nodded.
“Parkour.”
“What?” Nike and Randall were speaking French? That’s what it sounded like.
“I’ve been training. Mighty has, too. That’s because he doesn’t want to tag—he wants to fly.” Then Nike stretched his arms out and whooped so everyone stared, even the cop. Now who wanted attention? The train was only a hundred yards away.
“Wait, that’s it? You’re giving me one lousy word?”
“Look it up. You’ll see what I mean. It’s all part of Mighty’s master plan.”
I didn’t understand. His master plan to do what? But the train was too loud to hear anything else as it came to a stop.
Nike got in and saluted me.
“What’s that word again?” I called out.
“Freerunning. Try that instead, home boy.” The door closed and the train pulled away.
Where was I supposed to look that up? My ma hadn’t set up the computer at home. Maybe I could look on the computer in her office at the hospital. The hospital! I flew like the wind. The last thing I needed was Ma worrying about me. As I went past the Om, I saw that the cop was gone. I stopped, staring hard at my brother’s letters. Think. Think. I whipped out my Sharpie and I wrote: Find me in Dobbs Ferry—PW
If anyone noticed what I did, they didn’t say. I took a few steps back, wondering if Randall would see the message. Would he know PW was me? Peter Wilson. Little brother. Dobbs Ferry resident. I turned around, my fake Jordans pounding the ground as I ran.
It was the first day of sixth grade. I thought of all the first days I’ve dressed for, how I never quite know what to wear, or how to get it right. But this year I had the necklace. So I parted my hair to one side, put on a peacock-blue shirt from Coney Island, and wore my Om pendant. I wasn’t sure, but it seemed like for once, everything matched up—hair, shirt, Om—and I might even look decent.
Downstairs, Mom and Dad were talking to Cheetah about the first day of fourth grade.
“You could start using your real name,” Mom said to my brother. “Now that you’re older.”
“No one calls me Chetan,” Cheetah said. “Nobody calls Myla by her real name either.”
“But just because somebody called you Cheetah doesn’t make it your name,” Dad said. He and Mom called it “the Great Irony” that Cheetah liked to spell but misspelled his name. It was their favorite story, the one they liked to tell everybody, how my brother wrote his name down in preschool and the teacher thought it said Cheetah. Like who would call their kid that? But that’s how the name stuck.
Meanwhile, I was thinking how strange it was that Cheetah and I wouldn’t be in the same school anymore, but that Dad and I now would. We’d already gone over the whole thing, like how I didn’t have to call him Mr. Rajan unless I was in his class, and he wouldn’t stop in the halls to talk to me. Even so, I was feeling jittery. It was also the first day of middle school, where I had to suddenly juggle teachers, lockers, and upper-class students.
Ana and I wanted to go together, but Dad and I had to drop off Cheetah first. As we left the driveway, I looked over at Margaret’s house. I hadn’t seen the new renters yet. Nora had said one of them was a boy starting middle school. Maybe he would be in one of my classes.
When we got there, Dad dropped me off at my homeroom. Afterward, I got my locker assignment, and that’s when I finally saw Ana. She was wearing her cap from the street fair. “You look different,” she told me. “And you’re wearing that necklace.”
I smoothed down my peacock-blue shirt. “Is the color too bright?”
Violet Márquez came up to us. “Ana, I love your hat. I want one just like it.” She stood right in front of me like I wasn’t there.
“You’d have to go to Yonkers,” I said. “That’s where I got this necklace, too.”
Ana’s eyes shifted from her to me. “Myla’s right. That’s where we got everything.”
I waited for Violet to turn around and notice my necklace. But instead she joined her other friends in the hall and said, “Yeah, like I’d ever even go there, Ans!”
I wondered if I had on an invisibility cloak like Ha
rry Potter. We’d all gone to the same preschool. We’d done tea parties in the sandbox with twigs and dirt packed into plastic containers, and even when Violet accidentally swallowed some sand and threw up, I didn’t judge. I kept playing with her that day and stepped around her barf. But I guess she’d forgotten about that.
Ana looked at me now apologetically. “She’s always been annoying. You look great, Myla.”
“You look great, too,” I said automatically. But I was feeling a lack of greatness in the air.
We walked together to American Studies, and I tried not to think of how tall Ana was, and how short I was, or how we must look next to each other with her straight hair and my frizzy hair, and with her grace, and my what? Instead I tried to concentrate on the blueness of my shirt and the weight of the necklace. I even said Om in my head a few times. I’m not sure it made me any calmer, but it gave me something to do.
When we sat down, our teacher was writing his name on the board in block letters: MR. CLAY. Dad had told me about him. I think the word he used was “caffeinated.” After watching him, I thought Mr. Clay was someone who could benefit from saying Om. He was small and jumpy, like he had too many words inside him, and he paced up and down the aisle a hundred times as the class filed in. I got out of breath just watching him.
Finally when everyone was seated, he bounced on the balls of his feet and said, “Welcome to American Studies.” He said it like the words were written in flashing lights on a billboard. “You will all become experts on Dobbs Ferry, then and now. We will study George Washington’s revolutionary route from Dobbs to Virginia. We will visit the Historical Society and the famous Croton Aqueduct Trail, and research what life was like for those who worked for the old waterworks system in New York.”
The “famous” Croton Aqueduct Trail? Was this the same one down the street from us where Cheetah and I went biking during the summers? The only reason we’d even go was that there was an old house on the trail that was totally creepy and looked haunted, and we’d dare each other to go inside, though neither of us had gone near it except to look inside the broken-down windows. Not exactly my idea of famous.
I was writing in my journal during attendance, when I heard Mr. Clay say, “Myth . . . Myth . . .”
“Myla,” I spoke up quickly. “Myla Rajan.” No one can say my real name. Only I don’t have a cool story about it like Cheetah that my parents tell everyone. The truth is that when I was little, I couldn’t say my name either. I could only say Myla. My parents told me Mythili is another name for Seetha, an Indian goddess. I liked that. But I liked Myla better.
Mr. Clay nodded at me, and I couldn’t tell if it was a generic nod, or one that said you’re-the math-teacher’s-kid-and-I’ve-already-decided-things-about-you. Then he called out a name I hadn’t heard before. “Peter Wilson,” he said.
“Yeah,” said a voice.
I sat up. Turning slowly so it wouldn’t look like I was staring, I peeked at the boy across the aisle from me. When I saw his face, I almost jumped out of my seat. It was the boy from Yonkers, the one bleeding on his pizza box. The cut was gone. His face was calmer now. But he was wearing the same hoodie, and his hair was the same mass of dark curls pushed back from his eyes. He met my eyes, and the same jolt of recognition passed through him. He remembered me!
I felt the prick of Ana’s pencil through my peacock-blue shirt.
“He’s cute,” she whispered. “Is he the new neighbor? Nora told us it was the Wilsons.”
Oh God. I’d forgotten about that. “I don’t know,” I whispered back. Was this my neighbor? The boy from Yonkers? What could it mean, this boy named Peter moving in next door? Was it another fact to add to my list of strange things about Margaret’s house?
I was going to ask Ana if she remembered him from the photo on her phone, but Mr. Clay was looking right at me as he told us about our assignment. So instead, I snuck another look at Peter. This time I saw he had a small notebook sandwiched inside a bigger one. I looked down at my own journal wedged inside my binder. It was something I did all the time last year when I didn’t want the teacher seeing me writing in it. And here was someone else who did the same thing.
During the rest of class, I kept stealing looks at him. He was tall and thin, and his wrist bone stuck out from the sleeve of his hoodie. The edges of his sleeves were frayed and speckled with paint, and I wondered why he’d wear something so old on the first day of school. I also noticed the way he spread his thin fingers over his twin notebooks, the nails like white half-moons at the tips, as if he didn’t want anyone to see.
Was he cute, like Ana said? He was different from anyone I’d seen in Dobbs Ferry. There was an Indian boy in the grade ahead of me. And someone from Vietnam in our grade, and another from the Philippines, but no one who looked like Peter. His long legs were wedged awkwardly beneath his desk, which made him seem like he didn’t fit, that he belonged somewhere else.
When the bell rang, Mr. Clay pulled the blinds. “All of you out while I enjoy my sun therapy,” he said. He looked at us over his coffee cup, and it occurred to me he wasn’t joking.
We herded ourselves to the door. I wondered if I would have to say something to Peter, but he’d gone ahead, which made me strangely relieved and disappointed at the same time. I searched for Ana but she had moved up ahead, too. Then I saw her bump into Peter in the doorway. A small sheet of paper flew from the stack in his hands and fell facedown on the floor.
“I’m so sorry!” she exclaimed.
He looked surprised. “No big deal. I didn’t see you either.” He said it nice enough. Not like when he told me to mind my own business.
“You’re new? I haven’t seen you before. Are you from Brooklyn?”
He smiled a sudden easy smile, and I noticed then how they were perfectly matched, Ana’s height and his. “Seriously? I’m from Yonkers.”
“No way! I was just there this weekend!” She said it as if she went there all the time. I heard her telling Peter her name as I bent down to pick up the paper off the ground. A strange jealousy gripped me. Had she bumped into him on purpose? Was it because she thought he was cute?
As I handed the sheet to Peter, I saw what was on it: two letters in bright, streaky colors, like an orange sun. Om. Like the one in Yonkers. That’s when I froze.
But that was nothing compared to the astonishment on his face. “That necklace,” he croaked.
My hand went up automatically to my throat. Then I blurted it out before I could stop myself. “Are you a Fencer?”
For a moment, I wasn’t sure I was hearing right. She thought I was a Fencer?
“Of course not!” I wanted to get to the important stuff, like her necklace. Only the crazy girl was having none of it.
“Are you sure? Then why are you following me?”
“Following you?” I asked in disbelief. “I don’t know what you’re barking about, but you’ve got some problem thinking it’s about you.”
“I’m not a dog,” she said coldly. “And I’m late for class.” Then she walked off.
“And you can stay out of my business, too,” I called after her, but even I could hear how lame I sounded. I glanced at the girl named Ana, who was still standing there.
She gave me a tiny smile. “You really pissed Myla off.”
“Well, she pissed me off, too.”
“I guess so.” She tossed her hair as she walked away. “Have a nice day, Peter Wilson.”
Have a nice day. I didn’t even say anything back to Ana, that pretty girl with the hat. Of all the stupid things. I was still remembering that conversation from the morning. I was now in sixth period, my last class of the day, and it sucked. Usually I like math, but I was tired and I hated being the new kid. In my old school, you had Latinos and black kids, the mixed ones like me, a few Italians, a few Jewish kids, maybe an Indian or two. Nobody looked like nobody, so nobody cared. Here most of the kids were white. For the first time, I saw my skin was dark, and I looked different.
The
math teacher was Indian, though, and he laughed a lot, mostly at his own jokes. At the beginning of class he said, “My name is Mr. Rajan, and this year we’re going to make music. Another kind of music, with symbols and equations.” And I was like, great. Another freak. My last math teacher was one, too, and it seemed the whole year we did nothing but fractions, and everything was about food and pie and what people ate during the holidays.
I took a seat next to the window, and saw the sky was a creamy blue. I wondered what kind of moon it was tonight. Randall always knew. He would count it out on his fingers. He said quarter moon was okay with clouds, but no moonlight was better for tagging and not being seen.
My thoughts went back to Myla. She had the necklace. The same one as inside the duffel bag. And she knew about the Fencers. At least enough so she thought I was one. It made me realize that Ma and I hadn’t come to Dobbs by accident. There was something that connected my family to this place. Something mysterious. Maybe it was even the reason why Randall was gone.
I reached into my backpack and pulled out the little black book. This morning, I wasn’t sure if I should take it to school. Then I decided I’d be extra careful. In mysteries, there are always clues everyone overlooks. The book was a clue. I just didn’t know yet how it could help me find Randall.
Quietly, so Mr. Rajan wouldn’t see, I spread it open on my lap and flipped through pages of letters and tags written over and over. By now, I’d figured out that this here was my pop’s black book. All the guys on the crew carried one, even Randall for a while. A black book was where you practiced your tag before throwing it on a wall. You only showed it to people you trusted, because a black book was like your ID—it said what you were. I guess I’d known all along, but the black book confirmed it for me: It wasn’t just Randall who was a graffiti writer, but my pop. History repeating itself.
At first my pop wrote in that lean hand style you see on street signs, where you can’t read anything because all the letters run into each other:
Then his style evolved, and my pop went from choppy and unsure, to round and strong, with bubble lettering that exploded with faces inside them. In between, he practiced his tag until it went from OMAR to Om. Randall called that aging. My pop had aged his way to Om. Randall had aged from Speed to Mighty. Then one day he threw Pop’s tag on the wall. Not sure if that was aging so much as taking.