by Allyson Bird
“No.”
“Good, Mr. White.” He seemed to get some kind of pleasure by calling Payden’s name continuously. “Now we can get down to business. And don’t worry, I’ll take it slow for you, Mr. White.”
Luckily they’d all gotten through the class unscathed and without the teacher calling on Payden again, but he had called out a few of the other students. Now a group of them stood outside Mr. Jefferson’s door. “He’s always like that, don’t take it personal,” Shad told him. She was shorter than him by more than a foot and at least three shades lighter.
“It doesn’t matter.” The boy didn’t say anything else.
Shane walked up, put his arm around her. “What’s up Z? What y’all doin’ out here?”
“They call me Z, or Shaka Z sometimes. You know, as in Shaka Zulu.” She was speaking to Payden, but never took her eyes off of Shane. “I’ve told them to stop doing that. I hate it.”
“He was badass. Own it….”
Before he could finish, Payden was shoved really hard and fell to his knees in the middle of the group. Shaka bent down to help him up, but he pushed her away, probably embarrassed and angry.
“You hear me talkin’ to ya, boy?” Tommy Noles stood over Payden, looking down on him. Shaka was sure that the boy was getting tired of having to look up to people terrorizing him; she knew she was getting tired of seeing it. Behind Tommy, other boys were egging him on, “Go on, Tommy!, he’s a pussy, ain’t he?, Kick his ass, Tommy-Boy!” but none of them made a move to join the fight or to help their friend. Payden stood to his feet slowly, not taking his eyes off Tommy. He was taller than Tommy but leaner. Shaka thought that the boy might just explode. His fist were balled up, his back straight.
“Answer me, boy.” Only, the way he said it, it sounded like, Bo. They weren’t in the country, no, in fact they were in a big city. Chicago. Where else could you get the excellent combination of run down schools, idiot teachers and pig slop for lunch?
Tommy grabbed Payden’s shirt collar and pulled him closer to him. The two stood there for a moment, just staring at each other, in a sorta awkward dance pose. Shaka thought she saw Tommy deflate a bit as Payden didn’t back down like most people did when they encountered him. Tommy wasn’t a big guy, but he was mean and angry about everything. Most people just stayed away from him. He lived in the same building as she did, and she had heard things about Tommy’s father who liked to kick the shit out of the boy at every opportunity he got. She supposed that made him mad as he was and as mean as the man was to him.
Now, Shaka reasoned that Payden wasn’t really a fighter. But he had probably over the years, like most kids in inner city neighborhoods, managed a certain degree of self-preservation. One almost had to in that place.
So Payden unsquared his shoulders and spoke: “Okay, I see. I’m the new kid and you wanna fuck with me, right?” His voice was low and nervous. Everyone was quiet, waiting for what he would say next. He would have to choose his words carefully. “Well, I can most certainly tell you that I have been fucked with, and it will be no fun for you at all.” Shaka closed her eyes, sighed, what the hell was that boy thinking, whatever his plan, this would not work. That sounded like a threat. Stop. Backup. Redo. As if reading her mind, Payden paused, regrouped. “I…I am a much better companion, you see.”
Everyone seemed surprised by this, even Tommy himself, the other boys just stared at him figuring out what to do and say next. Shaka could, however, read people well, and she knew that Tommy was deciding whether to laugh or try to kick the shit out of Payden. You see Tommy was not one of those bullies who was all talk. He’d take his punches and gave more than a few any time he felt like it. He was always down for a fight. Then his face changed into a sneer and she knew the answer.
Just then Mr. Jefferson burst out of his door, “What in the hell are you kids doing out here?” He had the worst mouth that Shaka had ever heard on a teacher. “Surely none of you needs an extra hour with me after school. Now get to your next class.”
Tommy looked at Payden and smiled again. He let go of his shirt, smoothed out the wrinkles as if his fingers were an iron, and then lightly smacked his cheek with his palm. Something else he must have seen on TV. “I’ll catch up with you later.” He walked away.
Some of the group still stood staring at Payden, Shaka by his side, until the crowd finally dispersed.
“Nice school, huh?”
Shaka didn’t answer; he probably hadn’t expected her to.
Every Saturday, Shaka and her brother scrounge up local kids to get a good game of baseball going in the quad of Project 327, where they lived. Really it was more like stick ball with a giant, hairy, round baseball-like thingy. They played in the yard just behind the housing complex. Although the grounds were usually unkempt and there were broken bottles and debris everywhere, it was secluded and quiet and there was little risk of breaking a window. Mostly because there were no real windows in the projects—just tiny, narrow, little slits of glass that allowed for the smallest bit of sunlight. It kept the days dark and the nights cold.
They stopped by to grab Payden who hadn’t really gotten over the day before. Shaka coaxed him out of the house, promising him a fun time since he’d never played ball with them before. He eventually agreed to go, but only for a little while, because he wanted to be home when his mother got back from work. They had picked up a couple more kids on the way, and just as they had thought, there were even more kids playing around the quad who they could recruit into their makeshift game. By the time they got there, the other kids had already arrived.
Shaka and the others cleared off the field—it hadn’t been used in a while, probably since they’d been here last—and picked teams. Shaka and Richard were the team captains. Nobody liked to play against them when they were on a team together. They were always the best players, and so to keep down confusion, they always split them up. As to be expected, Shaka hit the first home run. Sliding around the bases, she heard her team members screaming her name. “Run Z, girl, go!” She hated to admit it, but she was beginning to relate to the nickname, Z. It was different—unique—without her needing to have had to earn it at all.
“Well, well, well.” The voice came from behind them. Shaka knew who it was before she even looked. Tommy. And his “gang.”
His gang, consisted of who it usually did. Tommy, his brother, Bobby, Tony, Sammy, Robby, Larry and this time they had a girl with them, Louise Taylor. She went to their school too, and was in Shaka’s grade. She was a real pain. Tommy hardly ever went anywhere without her now-a-days, as they were supposed to be an item. They were stuck to each other like with some kind of weird glue. Shaka wondered what in the world anyone would ever see in him, then she looked at Louise and realized that she was no real catch either, and that perhaps the two deserved each other. Shaka instantly felt terrible for thinking that about the girl and made a mental note about the type of people her grandmother told her that judge people by the way they look. They started with “w” and ended with “e.”
“What you guys doin’?” Tommy, put his arm around Louise and pulled her close to him. He was trying to impress her. She smiled like a kid with a new big, stupid toy.
“Nothin. Just playin.” Richard answered hoping to defuse the situation before it actually became a situation. Because with Tommy anything could become a situation.
“Playin baseball, huh? And nobody invited me? I think I feel some kinda way about that. What about you guys, you feel hurt for not being invited.”
“Yeah,” they all giggle, like a bunch of senseless hyenas.
“So, tell me, what in the hell are a bunch of faggots doing tryin to play ball anyway.”
“We don’t want any trouble.” Richard was always the mediator; the big brother. Their momma had told him that if Shaka got hurt somehow, he might as well not come home either. She’d been kidding, but he took his big brother duty very seriously.
Tommy turned to look at Payden. “So I guess we still have unfin
ished business. Don’t we?” The girl was smiling, clinging to Tommy’s arm. Without giving him time to react, Tommy rushed Payden, grabbed him and pulled him closer so that they were face to face. Payden stood a full half a foot over Tommy, but he was stronger and had nothing to lose.
“Tommy!” Shaka screamed so loud she thought they’d hear her inside the buildings. The boy turned to look at her, caught by surprise at the power in her voice. She stood, four feet, eleven and a half inches tall, the stick thick enough to slam a baseball into the woods at her side, tapping her leg. “Baseball. We’re playin baseball. Do you wanna join? If not, as I count, there are about half a dozen more of us, than there are of you. Now I’m not good at math, but I figure those odds aren’t good for you.”
He looked around. Unfortunately, most of the people in her group looked like they’d run at the hint of a fight. Tommy laughed. “You really think they’re gonna fight for you?”
Darrius from downstairs screamed out, “We got your back, Z!”
“Maybe not all of them, but I will plant this bat into the side of your head. I can promise that. And I’m good. Never strike out.” She was bluffing. Her knees were shaking so hard she hoped the boy wouldn’t hear. “It’d just be easier to join the game, ya know. We ain’t even gotta fight like that.” People said she had a way about her, Shaka. She could usually talk the hot air out of pissed off folks. It had kept momma from using the belt on her more times than she could count.
Tommy let go of Payden and walked over to Shaka. He reached for her, but she resisted jerking away from him. Instead he took the bat and looked around. “So who’s gonna try to pitch against this MVP?”
Tommy cracked the ball clear into the brush. Shaka chased it, though it was an obvious home run. She was just glad that bases weren’t loaded and that Tommy hadn’t used his skills with a bat to smack her skull in when she’d gotten too full of herself and threatened him. Thinking back on it, that could have gone terribly wrong.
She reached the spot where she thought the ball had landed, and bent down searching through the high grass to find it. She tripped and landed head first in the brush. As she stood up, her hands got caught in an old, dirty rag. She tried to get free, but the cloth was tangled around her fingers. She pulled it out of the dirt and realized that there was a small triangle box shaped thing wrapped within the dirty, black cloth.
“Come on Z! Where’s the ball?” Shad called. Then right behind her, “Whoa, what’s that?”
Several people had walked up behind her while she had struggled to get back to her feet. They all stared at her muddy find, like it was a forgotten gift left under the Christmas tree. She began to unwrap it, folding back one edge of the rag to reveal a sliver of faded yellow binding on a book. She quickly unwrapped it to reveal a tiny, faded yellow book. “What is it?” Richard had joined the crowd.
Shaka shook her head, then paused for a moment, her hand hovering over the yellow. There was something so intriguing about it. Who would bury this book all the way out here, in the middle of nowhere, among the nobodies, with little hope of it being found again? Maybe it was more than a mere book. She had all of these feelings and emotions and she didn’t know why. Something inside her desperately wanted inside the pages of this thing that only moments before had not even mattered to her.
Without waiting, she reached out and laid her right hand on it. Just beneath her skin, she thought she felt her senses ripple and move like they were charged with electricity, so she moved her hand quickly away, afraid of what was happening.
“What’s wrong with you?” her brother seemed concerned. He’d get in trouble if something, anything, happened to her, but really he was just the nervous sort.
“It’s weird. It feels…weird. I don’t know.”
Not wanting her brother to stop her, she grabbed the book tighter, sending a wave of power through her body. She held on to the thin pages while her body began to shake and tremble so violently that she looked as if she was having a seizure. Suddenly a bright light ripped out of the book, through her finger tips and the force sent her soaring backward, landing against a tree.
Her brother, Richard, ran to her side helping her to her feet. “What the fuck…What the fuck… Shaka what happened?”
When she got to her feet, she realized that everyone was staring at her, speechless. She walked back over to the book. It lay on the ground, its pages opened to a page with a single line etched on the page: Lost Carcosa. She bent down to pick it up.
“No! Don’t touch it. You saw what it did the first time.” Richard was really afraid. She would have to cure him of this.
She ignored him, then picked it up, holding it with both hands this time. Whatever was inside this book was strong, and she felt it, overwhelming her, speaking to her senses, her very essence. She could sense hopelessness and vileness, but those things were not within the book itself, but pieces of it that men misinterpret. No, instead, this book offered any open mind possibilities unimaginable. It offered truth. And that seemed to be the thing that many men could not handle. She saw all of these things in her head, her mind swam with possibilities of new ideas and new knowledge.
She reached out for her brother, who took her hand reluctantly. “Come on! Everyone, grab on. Touch each other. Feel it!” One by one each of the members of their make shift baseball game, joined hands. Shaka closed her eyes, sending the images from her head into theirs. She spread the knowledge she had learned with them, while they shared dreams and imaginations that they had never thought possible.
As they shared thoughts and ideas, around them the grass beneath their feet brightened, the weeds which had long ago taken over began to die and flowers long dead quickly bloomed again. They lost all concept of time, as they shared the book, themselves and the great ideas. Each individual had separate thoughts, while the collective clung to the relevant ideas from each, leaving their individuality to prosper untouched. What they learned, she realized—they all realized—had not been previously unknown to them. Instead, it was the ability to be able to interpret lost histories and events and philosophies within their own lives. The power within them grew the dirty, trash riddled field into a vast, lush garden. Simply because one of them had imagined it and the others had allowed for the thought to prosper fully within their collect imaginary.
They were, they realized, because they deserved to be. And that, indeed, was a novel thought.
The collective reasoning of a group is very powerful. It can change things. Like the leaky roof of project buildings that haven’t been fixed in three years. Or the boiler in building six, which threatened to explode every winter. Or turn dry vegetation into a community food garden. It can feed multitudes.
But sometimes that is not enough.
“We can’t do this without you, you know that, don’t you?” Shaka’s brother was always the one that they sent to talk to her. Now that The Collective—that’s what they called themselves—had studied how exactly their powers worked, they had realized that Shaka was somehow the catalyst. They needed her. But she needed them as well. They each had their own functions and hers was to lead them. She didn’t really like it, but it got things done efficiently and effectively. He stopped in the middle of the side walk, held her hand.
“I don’t know. We’ve never done anything like this. We help people. The roofs and the garden. That’s what we do.”
“I know….”
“We help people.”
“This is helping! And he deserves it. You know that.” His voice was louder than he meant it to be, but he wasn’t yelling at her. He couldn’t do that. But she could sense his emotions rising to the surface. He needed to control them better. Before the Collective, Shaka would have been able to read the expression on his face, and his body language to know how he felt. She had thought it was just one of those strange things she was able to do. But now she realized that she had had a gift. That gift had been heightened by the knowledge that the book had given them and now she could even know what h
e was thinking and feel what he felt. None of the others had the power she did.
He continued to hold her hand as they walked into school, but he didn’t mention it gain.
In class, Payden slid into his usual seat in the front of the classroom. They didn’t have assigned seats, but Mr. Jefferson forced him to sit there because he said the boy didn’t need any distractions. Payden looked back at Shaka, holding her gaze. She wanted to turn away, but she didn’t. She couldn’t.
“Mr. White, I see again that you have forgotten that the important part of the class lays in the front.” Payden straightened in his chair, angry.
“All right, class. Turn to page 223. Considering that Columbus Day is coming up next week, we’re not going to focus on Christopher Columbus discovering America, which you have learned, but on…”
“That’s not true,” Shad had not originally been part of the collective, but they had bought her in recently. Her grandmother had been sick and the group had helped her to get over pneumonia.
“Who was that? What’s not true?”
“Columbus was a murder and a rapist and you can’t discover something someone already has.”
“Stand up! You will not use my class to defile an American hero. Columbus was brave enough to set out to sea when everyone else thought the Earth was flat.”
“That’s not true either.” Payden stood to his feet without being told. “By the 1400s no one thought the Earth was flat. Columbus was after riches. He wasn’t a hero at all.” The collective link was buzzing. Shaka could feel them all getting excited at the idea of proving Jefferson wrong in his own classroom. But more importantly, they needed to teach him in a way that he had never taught them. Her brother had tried to warn her that this needed to happen that very morning. Even collective members from other classes, such as Richard, had linked in, feeling and watching everything that was going on in that room. Offering their support.
Mr. Jefferson paused for a moment, speechless for seemingly the first time in his teaching career. Then the man moved toward Payden, stood before the younger man. “You presume to lecture me on history? Payden, whose mother could not spell her own son’s name without sounding it out like a third grader, Pay…den. Whose best accomplishment in life is getting through the third grade after having failed it twice?”