To Be a Man

by Anne Schraff

Tommy looked Trevor straight in the eye and said, “You think I’d tell Ma you lied about working tonight and instead you hung out with a cheap little chick?”

  “No,” Trevor said in a faltering voice. “I don’t think you would.”

  “You’d be right,” Tommy assured him.

  Trevor didn’t believe the story his brother told him about Vanessa. He didn’t think Tommy deliberately lied, but gossip has a way of starting small and getting out of control. Vanessa was too nice a girl to have done something like that. Or so Trevor believed.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Trevor took his shower and tidied up the house for his mother. She’d be pleased that he had done that. When Trevor’s mother came in, he greeted her. “Hi Ma. Everything okay at work?”

  “As okay as it always is,” Ma sighed wearily. She collapsed into one of her easy chairs, as she always did when she got home from a long day. “Patients grumpy, work never ends. The usual. I’m used to it. But that’s why I’m always houndin’you boys to finish school and be able to get a good job. Desmond, he’s in the army now, and he’s just not learnin’ to be a good soldier. He’s learnin’ a lot of technical stuff that’s gonna help him when he leaves the army. Those boys come outta the military with good skills. They won’ end up like me, workin’ like a slave for chump change.” Ma looked up then. “You get home okay from the Chicken Shack? I was worryin’ about you, boy.”

  “Yeah Ma, fine,” Trevor assured her, the lie bothering him again. He glanced at Tommy standing over in the corner. Tommy gave him a look, but he didn’t say anything.

  “See,” Ma continued, “that work at the chicken place, that’s okay for a boy. But a man, he needs more. Imagine you droppin’ out of school and ending up at the Chicken Shack when you’re thirty years old. Like your father. He didn’ have the gumption to finish high school, so he just done dropped out. Got a job in a car wash. Then cleanin’ up the pool hall. Now he’s forty-seven years old and he’s stumbling around the streets lookin’ for strangers to give him change for a cup of coffee.” Ma got up heavily, shaking her head. Her legs were bothering her. Her back was bothering her. Years ago, she’d told Trevor that all nurses end up with bad backs from lifting patients. After she couldn’t work anymore, she’d be an old lady with a bad back.

  Trevor couldn’t sleep well that night. He worried about Marko and Jasmine seeing him late at night with lipstick on his face. Marko was the kind of a guy who might use information like that against Trevor if he wanted or needed to.

  On the way to school the next day, Trevor dreaded having to look at Jaris after he asked his friend to lie about working at the Chicken Shack. Trevor decided he’d try to avoid Jaris and eat his hamburger on a grassy knoll at the other side of the campus.

  But Jaris caught up with Trevor on the way to Mr. Pippin’s English class. “Did you get done whatever you needed to do last night, Trevor?” Jaris asked.

  “Yeah, I did,” Trevor answered.

  “Who is she?” Jaris shot back.

  “What are you talking about, man?” Trevor asked.

  “Dude,” Jaris snapped, “Marko Lane and Jasmine just told me you had a hot date last night and they gave you a ride home. You had lipstick all over your face. It’s none of my business, Trevor. But if somebody asks me if you were working at the Chicken Shack last night, I’m expected to lie for you, and I don’t like that. And you know Marko’s going to have it all over school before lunchtime. When a lot of kids know you weren’t at the Shack and I say you were, then I look like a liar and a fool, okay?”

  “Jaris,” Trevor whined, “you know how Ma is. There’s this girl who likes me and Ma hates her. I’ve never had a girl like me this way. You gotta understand, man. What am I gonna do? Sure, my ma’s been nicer to me since your mom took her to breakfast, but she still wouldn’t want me dating Vanessa.”

  “Well, just watch yourself, dude. Don’t get in over your head, you hear what I’m saying?” Jaris advised.

  “Jaris,” Trevor replied, “we just went to her place and we watched a dumb movie and ate popcorn. It’s the kind of harmless thing anybody’d do. But I was with Vanessa and that meant a lot to me.”

  As they approached Mr. Pippin’s classroom, Marko and Jasmine were already there at the door.

  “Here comes lover boy,” Marko announced.

  Jasmine blew Trevor kisses. “Here you go, honey. Mine don’t even leave marks.”

  “Knock it off, you guys, please,” Trevor said.

  “Trevor’s got a secret love,” Jasmine giggled. “He meets her by the light of the moon.”

  Mr. Pippin came along, lugging his old briefcase. Mr. Pippin and the briefcase seemed to be aging together. Each day Mr. Pippin had more wrinkles and the briefcase had more cracks in it.

  “Today,” Mr. Pippin announced, “we are examining the nature of reality. We will base our discussion on the story you all have presumably read, Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave.’”

  Marko raised his hand. “I didn’t understand that story, Mr. Pippin. All those guys in the cave looking at the shadows on the wall. What were they doing there? Were they criminals? I mean, I didn’t get it.”

  Mr. Pippin frowned. “Marko,” he explained, “that isn’t the point. The point is that the people in the cave thought that those shadows were everything. They did not know there was a larger world out there beyond the cave. What they saw as reality was just a small part of the world.”

  “I just don’t get it,” Marko insisted. “That guy Plato didn’t explain things good. Who was he anyway?”

  “Some old Greek,” Jasmine said.

  “Maybe there’s another way to talk about reality,” Oliver suggested. “Let’s say you saw a bunch of people running down the street. They’re sweating and straining. You’re thinking—what’s this? A riot? Are they chasing somebody? There’s a guy out front, and they seem to all be chasing him. What are they going to do to him when they catch him? What’s this guy done anyway to get all those people chasing after him? But what are we really looking at?”

  Derrick raised his hand. “There’s been an earthquake, and everybody’s running from it, and the guy up front is leading them to a safer place.”

  Some students snickered, and Derrick Shaw’s friends just smiled. Derrick usually gave the wrong answer.

  Mr. Pippin looked delighted. Once again Oliver Randall had gone beyond his expectations. Randall’s father was an astronomy professor who knew Mr. Pippin at UCLA. Whenever Mr. Pippin had almost completely lost hope in his students, Oliver came up with something. “Yes,” Mr. Pippin responded, “what is truly happening here? What is the reality of this situation?”

  Jasmine raised her hand and said, “Looks like they’ve all gone crazy. Like mass hysteria.”

  “No, no,” Oliver replied. “It’s a marathon. They’re all running a race.”

  “Yes!” Mr. Pippin cried. “So simple. The man in front is the fastest and they’re out to pass him.”

  “Man,” Marko Lane complained after class, “that jerk Randall is a showoff.”

  Jaris and Trevor walked together to their next class. Trevor was still trying to explain himself to Jaris. “Vanessa’s a nice girl. Sure, she did a dumb thing dropping out of Tubman, but that’s no reason for Ma to hate her.”

  “Well Trevor, I don’t know the girl,” Jaris replied, “but Marko and Jasmine are spreading the word about your hot babe. Sooner or later it’s gonna get back to your mom, and she’s gonna go ballistic. If I were you, I’d tell her before she hears it from somebody else.”

  “Man, you don’t know what you’re asking me to do,” Trevor said with a shudder.

  “Maybe you should just drop the girl, Trevor. How long have you known her? You can’t be that connected already,” Jaris suggested.

  “I can’t do that, Jaris,” Trevor told him, “you’ve always had girls interested in you. Now you got Sereeta and she’s the best. But I never could get involved with a girl ’cause of Ma. Now a really cute, nice girl likes me,
and I’m not giving her up. I never knew having a girlfriend could make you feel so good, man. I like the feeling. If I gotta live this way, I will. If I have to be afraid of Ma and deny myself friends like you got, like Kevin and Oliver and Derrick got, I will. Maybe I should just load my stuff in a garbage bag and hit the road.”

  “Don’t do that, man,” Jaris advised. “Your mom’s coming around. She’s gonna change. It’s too bad Vanessa doesn’t go to school at Tubman, and your mom could get to meet her parents at school things. That would go a long way to putting her mind at rest. But Vanessa is estranged from her parents, right?”

  “She told me her parents were on her case all the time,” Trevor explained. “She couldn’t take it. I can feel for her. It’s like you’re in prison, but you never did the crime.”

  “I wonder if her parents still live around here. Maybe you could talk to them,” Jaris suggested.

  “No, I’d never do that,” Trevor objected. “It would be like checking up on Vanessa. I know what I’d feel like if she called Ma. She got away from her parents because they were impossible, just like Ma is.”

  After school, Jaris and Trevor were standing near Harriet Tubman’s statue when Tommy Jenkins drove up to take Trevor home.

  Before Tommy got close, Jaris asked, “Does your brother know you’re dating Vanessa?”

  “Yeah, but he’s not on my side,” Trevor admitted.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Jaris demanded. “Your brother has always been on your side, dude. All you Jenkins boys have stuck together every time. I always admired that. Tommy’s rock solid.”

  “He’s against Vanessa too,” Trevor insisted. “He told me some crazy story about how she got a teacher fired at Tubman when she was a sophomore.”

  Tommy came walking over to where Jaris and Trevor stood. Tommy looked at Jaris and asked coldly, “Jaris, do you know who this fool is dating?”

  “Yeah,” Jaris admitted, “but I don’t know much about the girl. I vaguely remember her as a freshman.”

  “Yeah, well she’s trouble,” Tommy asserted bitterly. “She lied about a teacher and got him fired!”

  “What teacher?” Jaris asked.

  “You remember Mr. Collier?” Tommy replied.

  “Oh yeah. That young guy,” Jaris recalled. “He was almost as shy as the students. He was nice though. Good looking dude. Some of the girls had crushes on him.”

  “Well, I was a junior then and we found out what happened,” Tommy explained. “Vanessa flirted with that teacher every chance she got. When he put her in her place and demanded she quit doing that, she got even. She went to see that wimp of a vice principal we got, Mr. Hawthorne, and told him Mr. Collier was harassing her and trying to make dates with her. Hawthorne has no backbone, so he went the easy way. Mr. Collier wasn’t asked back for the next school year. Hawthorne figured it was a scam, but he was terrified of the publicity. Poor Collier didn’t have tenure, so it was easy to let him go. Hawthorne used some lame excuse that Collier’s discipline was weak. But it was her. It was Vanessa Allen who got him out.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Trevor insisted. “Vanessa’s too nice to have done something like that.”

  Tommy looked at Jaris and rolled his eyes. “My little brother is stupid, Jaris. He’s gone stupid on us.”

  Trevor got in Tommy’s car, and they headed home.

  “We gotta clean up the house a little, maybe mop the kitchen floor,” Tommy said. “Ma was really tired when she left for work this morning. She was moaning about the dirty kitchen floor, so we gotta take care of that.”

  “Sure,” Trevor agreed. “I’ll do that.” Trevor looked at his brother as he was driving home. “Tommy, when you were at Tubman, didn’t it bother you that Ma didn’t want you to date? You’re a lot cooler than I am, so a lotta girls must have been looking in your direction. I mean, how’d you handle it?”

  “Yeah, it bothered me,” Tommy confessed. “But I thought to myself when I’m in the community college it’s all gonna be different. I’ll make up for lost time. I got a girlfriend now, Trevor. She’s great. She’s planning to do something good with her life just like I am. She looks like a keeper, man.”

  “But that seems so long to wait,” Trevor objected.

  “Two lousy years when you’re starting your junior year. One year when you’re finishing it like you are. Trust me, Trev, it’s worth the wait,” Tommy advised. “Hey, little brother, I hear you. I know. I know it’s not right what Ma is doing. She’s impossible a lot of the time. But, you know, she provides a roof over our heads. Imagine what it was like for her when the old man cut out. We were all little and it was all on her. Uneducated, no money to speak of, four hungry babies yelling for food. Yeah, she went a little crazy, but Trev, she’s earned the right to be a little nuts.”

  “Remember how she’d whup us, Tommy?” Trevor recalled. “I remember being like ten years old, and she’d whup my backside so hard I couldn’t sit down right for days.”

  “Yeah, mine too,” Tommy recollected. “But look around the neighborhood. How many guys from here in jail, in the cemetery? I don’t know what I’d be like if she hadn’t bullied me. I remember hanging with a couple of guys from the Nite Ryders when I was fourteen. I thought they were really cool. Ma caught me, and dragged me in the house, and knotted a wet towel, and hit me again and again. If somebody had seen her, maybe she’d of gotten in trouble and us kids would’ve ended up in foster care. Who knows? But I know one thing. I never hung with those Nite Ryders no more.”

  “But Tommy,” Trevor protested, “our friends are doing okay, and they’re not catching it from their parents like we did from Ma. Look at a guy like Jaris. Nobody leaning on him like that and he’s fine.”

  “You know what, Trevor?” Tommy asked, “I got a story to tell you. I didn’t hear it from Jaris. He never would’ve told. I heard it from another guy who was there that night. It’s about Jaris’s sister, little fourteen-year-old Chelsea. A while back she started hanging with this freshman from Tubman, a guy named Brandon Yates. She was going to his house for a party, and she lied to her parents. She said she was going to study with a girlfriend, but she was headed to this party. She gets there and they’re all smoking dope and drinking. One of the guys there was that drug dealer, B.J. Brady, the guy who ended up murdering another guy and being killed in a police chase. Just think about it. There was this innocent little fourteen-year-old in there, and who knows what might’ve happened. Except Jaris saw her sneak off, and he dragged her out of there, and told Yates he’d bust his head if he ever came near Chelsea again. You see what coulda happened? The Spains, they’re great people, but Chelsea wasn’t afraid to lie and almost got herself in deep trouble. They’re nice, not tough like Ma. So Chelsea wasn’t afraid to lie and put herself in danger. She knows sweet Mrs. Spain isn’t going to whup her with a knotted wet towel, like our ma. So who knows what’s right and what’s wrong? I know this, Trevor, our mom loves us so much she would die before seeing us go bad, and there’s something to be said for a love like that, dude.”

  Trevor felt sad and frightened. He was afraid his mother would find out he had lied. He was ashamed that he’d gone against her rules, even though he thought they were wrong.

  Still, deep down in Trevor’s heart, he knew he would not—could not—give up Vanessa Allen. He kept seeing that pair of smoky eyes, the red lips, the wonderful red hair around her soft face. He kept feeling her fingers on his skin. He wanted to see her again. He would see her again. He was sure of that.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  When the boys got home, Trevor mopped the kitchen floor and dusted around the living room where Ma kept her few treasured possessions. She had a glass figurine of an angel that was a gift from her mother, long dead. Trevor didn’t know if it was worth anything, but it was beautiful, and he dusted carefully around it. Alongside the glass angel was a clown figurine. Trevor never knew who gave his mother the clown, but she was attached to it. The clown had a sad face, with tears painte
d on his cheeks. Trevor dusted the clown too.

  Trevor did his homework and went to bed. After tossing for about an hour, he finally fell asleep. Then the nightmare came.

  In the nightmare, Trevor was lying in bed, and his mother came into the room. She carried in her hand a huge wet bath towel, the biggest one Trevor had ever seen. Several knots were tied at the end of it.

  “Trevor Jenkins!” Ma shouted. “You lied to me about working at the Chicken Shack.” The wet towel came crashing down over Trevor’s face. “You were with that trashy redhead, Vanessa Allen.” Again the knotted towel crashed against Trevor’s face. The beating went on and on, and Trevor thought he was going to die. Ma was finally going to kill him.

  Trevor woke up shaking, his face throbbing. He imagined it red and bruised, perhaps bloody. He got out of bed, staggered into the bathroom, and turned on the light over the mirror. He stared at his undamaged face. He hung his head over the basin for a moment until he stopped trembling.

  Trevor turned slowly and walked down the hall to his mother’s room. She lay across the bed in her old faded nightgown. She had not even bothered to pull the blankets up over herself. She had apparently been so tired she washed up, got into her nightgown, and fell across the bed with all the blankets gathered at the bottom of the it. It was chilly in the house because Ma kept the thermostat down to conserve on the energy bills. She lay there and she was cold. Trevor carefully pulled the blankets up from the bottom of the bed and covered her. She didn’t wake up. She was sleeping too soundly. Hers was the deep sleep of exhaustion.

  When Trevor went back to his room, he called Vanessa. “Hi,” he said quietly into the phone. “Did I wake you?”

  “No Trevor, how’s it goin’?” Vanessa asked.

  “I was just thinking about you, Vanessa,” Trevor replied.