by Sheela Chari
There’s a place halfway in the black book where the drawings stop, and the rest of the pages are blank. I wasn’t sure if this was when my pop stopped tagging or when he stopped living. So just like that, I started drawing on those pages. A little bit in American Studies, some more in English, and now in math. I didn’t have a tag of my own, so I practiced writing Om. I didn’t do faces like my pop, or make my “O” a sun like Randall. I just did whatever came to me—patterns, whirls, random shapes. And maybe it’s weird, but writing those two letters over and over was like a meditation, of being connected to my pop and Randall.
Tucked at the end of the book was an Om done on a separate paper. On the back was Skinny’s phone number scrawled in Randall’s handwriting. When I first saw it I thought, I could call Skinny and he would tell me where Randall was. But he and Randall weren’t tight. And I remembered the way Skinny had acted last time I saw the crew. Maybe he was with MaxD.
Maybe he was on his way to becoming a Fencer, too. I looked at the front of the sheet again, at Randall’s Om. That was the side Myla got freaked out about when it fell on the floor. And I still didn’t know why she had on the same necklace.
On the last page of the black book, I’d jotted stuff down. You could call it my Find Randall list:
—Look up freerunning and le park.
—See Uncle Richard again. How?
—An Om at every station. Why?
I’d seen the Om tags on the way home from the hospital yesterday. I counted ten, one at each station until I got to Dobbs, which was bare. Randall said train stations were the place he could reach the most people. Is that what he was doing? Reaching the most people? I wished he was trying to reach me.
Mr. Rajan walked down the aisle, handing out packets. “We’re doing a math assessment. Don’t worry if some of it’s hard. By the end of the year, you’ll know everything. Remember, we’re making music.” Then his glasses fell off and he had to pick them up, and we all laughed. Right before he got to me, I added one more item to my list:
—Figure out why Mile-a (sp?) has the same necklace.
I went through Mr. Rajan’s test, and it was easy. There were fractions, and a little algebra I knew from helping Randall. I remembered those nights when he threatened to cut school, and I’d change his mind by doing his homework for him. Sometimes it was an essay for English. For math, I had to teach myself whole sections. But I’d pulled a decent job. I’d kept him from failing.
I finished early and went back to the black book. I was getting frustrated. It seemed like I kept looking and looking, and I still didn’t find anything. All these tags and squiggles and drawings went nowhere. They didn’t add up. They didn’t say what. Then I thought of something—maybe I hadn’t looked at everything after all.
I went back to the early hand styles I couldn’t read well. I’d skipped them before, but now I looked at them more carefully. There was one that kept repeating itself. This time I stopped to untangle the letters: T-O-P-S. I looked at the others, and they were all the same: TOPS, TOPS, TOPS. I couldn’t believe it. The guy Nike had told me about, the one Randall went to meet.
Then if that didn’t do it, I found the last one near the end of the book. When I did, I swallowed hard. I knew I’d come across the biggest clue of all. The tag said TOPS, just like the others did. But this one had three black lines running through it.
Every Thursday after school since last year, Dad, Cheetah, and I took a train and bus to West 116th Street in Manhattan so Cheetah could spell words like “sarcophagus.” There was a youth spelling club at Columbia University, and it was the nearest one my parents could find. Today Dad had a staff meeting at school. Cheetah and I knew the way, so after much debating, Mom and Dad decided we would be okay this one time by ourselves as long as we stuck to our route. I also had Dad’s old cell phone if anything went wrong. So far nothing had, but that didn’t stop Mom from texting every ten minutes to check if Cheetah and I were okay.
We were now getting to the place where the train went close to the Hudson River. It was mostly train tracks and water, but there were a few rocky places where you could spot graffiti like LINK and TATTOO. The cell phone beeped. It was my mom. Reach 125th yet? I texted back: Since 5 min ago? No!
I took out my homework. It was only the third day of school, and they were already piling it on. For American Studies, we had to write an ad for a local landmark. We already had the information in a packet, but Mr. Clay told us we had to convince other people to visit, like a real ad. I chose High Bridge. This was what I wrote:
Visit High Bridge, New York’s oldest bridge! Once part of the Aqueduct, this bridge brought fresh water into Manhattan. Now it is a pedestrian bridge between Manhattan and the Bronx. Come see this famous landmark where you can walk, run, and explore, and no one has fallen from the bridge to date!
I supposed Mr. Clay would make me take out that last part, but honestly, if I was visiting a bridge, I’d want to know about fatalities and accidents.
“I met our neighbor,” I said to Cheetah. “His name is Peter.”
He looked interested. “Yeah, I heard you telling Mom. What’s he like?”
“I’m not sure. I haven’t spoken to him after the first day.” I thought of how I accused Peter of being a Fencer. Not exactly neighborly. After that, we’d pretty much avoided each other.
“Is he Indian? One of their cardboard boxes flew over to our driveway. It said Shanthi Wilson on it.”
“That must be his mom. Yeah, he does look a little Indian. Or maybe his mom is.”
“I bet we’ll be friends with Peter,” Cheetah said.
“Why, because his mom’s Indian?”
Cheetah shook his head. “Kids are always friends with their neighbors, right?”
“But you don’t know a thing about him,” I said. I looked at his face in the afternoon light coming through the train window. I remembered when his baby front teeth had fallen out years ago and the new ones came in, and how big they looked for his small mouth, making him seem like a rabbit. But since then, and I wasn’t sure when it happened, his face had grown. Now his teeth were the right size, and he didn’t look like a rabbit anymore. Sitting next to him in the train, I could see a hint of the person he was going to be.
“It doesn’t matter,” Cheetah was saying. “I just know.”
“Whatever,” I said, but I was strangely pleased. So far I hadn’t seen any evidence of Peter and me being friends. We hadn’t talked to each other and he mostly kept to himself, although I saw him with a few guys at lunch. It had been a long time since I’d made a new friend. And I’d never been friends with a boy.
I started to draw a picture of High Bridge to go with my ad when Cheetah said, “Om.”
We had come to a stop, and he pointed to a tag on the outside wall. It was small and done in black paint, but the “O” looked like a sun, just like the one in Yonkers.
“I wonder if it’s the same person,” I said. “I saw an Om tag last weekend.”
“It’s like all the other ones so far.”
The train started to move again. I turned to Cheetah. “What other ones?”
“I’ve seen one at every station except Dobbs. There was nothing there, I’m pretty sure.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I demanded.
Cheetah looked confused. “Why should I?”
I pestered him: how big, what color? But as soon as I questioned him, he blanked out and couldn’t remember a thing. I tried to go back to my High Bridge drawing, but now I was curious. Would there be more?
We reached the next stop. “Another one,” I said. This was bigger with an “O” in bright orange. Now that we were looking for them, they were popping up at every stop. Most were small, drawn with thin lines of black and orange paint. Some appeared near the tracks, and some on the walls several feet high, which made me dizzy just looking at them. How could anyone do those, unless they had magical shoes?
When we went to Arizona two years ago, we saw rock etchings l
eft by the Anasazi Indians. Only they were called “petroglyphs,” with ancient symbols of people hunting, singing, and playing the flute. I was amazed they’d lasted so long. People say petroglyphs aren’t graffiti, but a type of communication. I wondered if the Oms were like petroglyphs, like a secret way of communicating.
At last we reached Harlem Station, our stop. Cheetah and I had counted ten Oms, including the ones Cheetah saw without me. Then as we came out of the train, I literally stopped in my tracks. “Holy smoke!” I couldn’t believe what I saw on the wall.
“It’s huge!” Cheetah cried.
Then I noticed something else. At the bottom, someone had added in Sharpie: Find me in Dobbs Ferry—PW. Those words were just like Craggy’s note. And yet . . . I caught my breath. The orange paint on Peter’s sleeve. PW. Peter Wilson. Find me in Dobbs Ferry. It couldn’t be a coincidence, could it?
Just then a cop walked by. “No getting lovey-dovey with that. It’s being removed.”
“Removed?” I asked him before I could stop myself. “Why?”
“Because we’re a city that says no to vandalism. No telling when the next one will pop up if we don’t take this one down before the next moonless night.” He hoisted his buckle.
“Huh?” Cheetah asked.
I watched the policeman walk off. “He means the next time someone paints, Cheet.”
“You mean like Dobbs?”
I shrugged. “Maybe.” When I first wanted to spray-paint my bed, I went online to look at videos on how to do it. I found tons of stuff on graffiti, too: the best equipment, the best clothes to wear, the best time to paint. One guy said it was when there was no moonlight so you wouldn’t be seen. I started telling Cheetah about the videos, but he was in his own thoughts.
“The next moonless night,” he murmured to himself.
I looked at the Om again. It was like a big, beautiful fireball that lit up the station. But I couldn’t help wondering, who was supposed to find Peter? And would Craggy find me?
Tops. I couldn’t stop thinking about his name crossed out in the black book. So why was Randall training with this guy? Didn’t he know about the Fencers? Didn’t he see those three lines running through Tops’s name? It seemed that Randall had jumped into the lion’s den. Unless that’s where he was aiming all along.
I was itching to get online. We had a brand-new router at home, but no matter what I did, the connection was dead. Ma said she’d call for someone to take a look. But I couldn’t wait anymore so after school on Thursday, I hurried to the library, where I finally scored a working computer.
I remembered what Nike had told me: “freerunning.” I looked that up first, and that’s how I found “parkour.” The other word Nike used. And what was it? A kind of running people did in New York, Cleveland, Amsterdam, Paris, and basically anywhere around the world. But it wasn’t just running. In one of the PK videos I watched, this guy jumps the same way Randall did onto the third rail. Then he climbs a concrete wall, leaps over another, and jumps from one building to another and lands in a roll. This was what Nike meant: climbing without ropes, balancing on poles, flying like a superman with no one to spot you. Was this how Randall got his Oms high up on those walls? But who was Tops? Was he teaching Randall how it was done? The mystery started there.
On the way home, all I could think about was Randall and Nike flying through the air. On the sidewalk, I tried to jump and land on the balls of my feet. I saw a fence, and I jumped against it, and kicked myself away like in one of the videos. Only I didn’t go flying in the air. I went flying onto the sidewalk. Face forward, palms scraping the ground. Like a dumb-ass.
“You’re doing it wrong,” said somebody.
I looked up, still flat on the sidewalk. A girl was standing in the doorway of a store. I got up quickly, brushing myself off. “I tripped, that’s all,” I said.
“No, you didn’t.” She was dark-haired, with a look on her face like she knew all the answers. “I know what you were doing.” She came over to where I was standing.
“You know what I was doing?” I crossed my arms. How would this girl know what I was doing when I didn’t even do it right?
She looked at me for a moment. Then she ran at the same fence I did a minute ago, clomped her shoes against it, and jumped off, landing neatly next to me. Not on her face like I did. “You were trying to do a tic tac,” she explained.
“I suppose you’re some fancy parkour runner,” I said.
“Not really. But I know a little about it, and if you do something wrong, you’ll get hurt. That’s why I said something. You looked like you were going to skin your face.”
Great. So a PK expert was watching me make a fool of myself. I had more privacy in Yonkers. I picked my backpack up off the ground.
“Hey, no hard feelings,” she called after me. “You’re new, aren’t you?”
I turned around. “What, my life’s an open book?”
“No, my mom works here.” She tilted her head toward the store behind her. That’s when I saw it was a real estate agency. “She’s the one who gave you the keys. Remember, you came over the weekend with your mom? You didn’t see me. I was in the back.”
“So you’re a real estate agent who does PK,” I said.
“No, my mom’s the real estate agent. I’m not into that. I’m not even into PK.”
“You just know how to do some candy jump off a wall.”
She laughed. “You’re funny. No, I write. I helped someone write a story on parkour when a new gym opened in Hastings. And I always try to learn on the job. What was your name again?”
I told her, even though I hadn’t told her before.
She nodded. “I’m Kai. We should talk again, Peter, since you’re learning parkour.”
“I’m not learning it at all.” I didn’t like the way she said it, like she was implying something that wasn’t there. I narrowed my eyes. There was something off about her.
“By the way, we just left a complimentary gift for you and your mom at your house.” Before I could say thanks or ask her what it was, she went back inside.
I walked home, curious to know what it was. A plant? A cat? A box of chocolates? It was hard to know what people in Dobbs did for hospitality. When we moved to our last apartment, we found broken glass in front of our door. Ma yelled at us not to step on it.
When I reached home, my hands were still stinging. Kai was right. I had skinned myself. Not so much that I was bleeding, but enough that my hands hurt. I thought about what she’d done, running at the wall clean like that. She made it look easy, but I was living proof it wasn’t. Nike and Randall, they were out of their collective minds.
I climbed up the porch and saw a newspaper delivered. I picked it up, surprised. We never got a paper delivered to our door. Ma said she had no time for the news. Then I saw the note at the top: Welcome to Dobbs Ferry! There was a card attached, which read “Kai Filnik, The Westchester Times.” So this was her surprise. The local newspaper. Well, it was better than broken glass.
I got out my key to open the door. But today the key wouldn’t turn. I tried and tried. Still nothing. What was going on? It had worked fine yesterday and the day before. I wiped the key up and down my jeans. Then I spit on it for good measure. Same thing. I swore out loud.
Then I thought maybe the neighbors had a spare. So I went next door and rang the doorbell. No one was home. I guess the universe wasn’t coming through for me today.
Back on the front steps of my house, I gave up and sat down to read the newspaper. There was nothing interesting. All local stuff, like the Aqueduct renovations, some prison dude set to be released, and a story about the waterfront. Boring. But I was glad they had the moon forecast. Randall never needed to look
On Saturday, we were coming up to a new moon. Somewhere, Randall was getting ready.
Sometimes I wondered why I bothered. Like, Ma and me, we could coast and let Randall take care of himself. Plus I was getting tired of being the little brother who followed. Wa
sn’t he the one who was supposed to watch my back? Wasn’t that what big brothers were supposed to do?
Even so, I couldn’t help worrying about him. In a way, my family was like a Fencer tag. Three strokes, when there used to be four. If I didn’t try hard enough, there would be just two.
I must have fallen asleep, because next thing I knew I heard voices across the yard. It was early evening and the neighbors were home. I scooted off the porch to their house, and rang the doorbell once more. The first person I saw was my math teacher. But more surprising was the person next to him. I groaned and said, “Not you.”
“What do you know about opening a sticky door?” Peter asked skeptically, as I inserted his key into the lock.
I felt a flash of annoyance. “Listen, you can either get my help or forget about it.”
There was a moment of silence. “Fine,” he said.
“You have to pull the door when you’re turning,” I explained, then pushed the door open.
Peter stared at the gaping door. “I tried that.”
I shrugged. “Margaret should really fix the door.”
We looked at each other. “Thanks,” he said. “Really.”
I’d been thinking about it all afternoon on the way to the city. It was hard to say it, but I did. “Sorry I called you a Fencer. I guess it didn’t make sense.”
“Yeah, well,” he said.
That wasn’t exactly the response I expected, but okay. I wasn’t good at sorry either. “So why were you so interested in my necklace?” I asked. I waited for him to say he knew the craggy-faced man who was looking for it.
Instead, what he said next surprised me. “That’s because I have the same necklace.”