Miles Morales

by Jason Reynolds

  “What is it?”

  “A zombie,” Ganke explained. “And the best part is, you can dress the way you’ve been dressing for the last few days and it’ll work perfectly. You’re already eighty-five percent there!” Ganke flashed a goofy face.

  After running scenarios of what might happen when Miles finally decided to approach Alicia and talking a lot about salsa, both “spilling it” and dancing it, it was time to get dressed for the party. Miles threw on raggedy sweats, an old T-shirt, and the zombie mask. It wasn’t amazing, but it was good enough. Ganke, on the other hand, put on a wool suit, a pink swim cap, and little circle-framed glasses.

  “Who are you supposed to be, man?” Miles asked, sizing Ganke up.

  “I’m Dean Kushner, pretending to be Mr. Chamberlain,” he said, putting his hands together and closing his eyes. “I’m literally going to stand in the middle of the dance floor like this the whole time.”

  Miles howled with laughter.

  “Miles!” his mother’s voice came from down the hall. Miles cracked the door.

  “Yes!”

  “Come speak to everybody. John John and the guys are here.”

  John John was a former Marine and lawyer who was one of Miles’s father’s closest friends. He and “the guys” Miles’s mother was talking about were in the living room, same as they were one Saturday a month for as long as Miles could remember. Playing cards. Spades, to be exact.

  By the time Miles and Ganke were headed out—about ten minutes after the announcement of John John—the spades crew was settled in the living room, and the game was in full swing.

  “Punks jump up to get beat down!” Carlo, an old friend of Miles’s father from his previous life as a street guy, taunted. Carlo was always dressed in a button-down shirt and hard-bottom shoes and had a scar on his cheek that looked like a millipede. He was holding a card in the air, waiting for Miles’s father to play his hand. Miles’s dad laid a queen of clubs down, and Carlo slapped a five of spades on top of it. “Get that mess outta here, boy!” Carlo jeered, raking up the cards.

  Next to him was Sherman. Everybody called him Sip because he was from Mississippi. He didn’t talk too much. Miles’s father met Sip the same night he met Rio, at that Super Bowl party. When Miles’s father asked him why he left Mississippi, all he said was, “The dust got too thick.” Miles’s father didn’t know exactly what that meant, but he knew it had nothing to do with dust.

  “Uh-huh,” Sip grunted, cutting the cards. “You boys get happy so quickly up here in New York. Sometimes things gotta get warm before they get hot.”

  “Sip, please,” John John said, tapping the cards. “You been living here almost twenty years. You one of us now.”

  “No I ain’t. I’m a crooked-letter boy to the grave. A city-dweller now, for sure, but trust me, I still know the ways of the South. Still understand patience.” Sip winked at Miles’s father, his spades partner. John John shook his head and started dealing.

  Miles and Ganke walked into the kitchen for a quick glass of juice before leaving.

  “Oh!” Miles’s mother, who had been at the counter shaking trick-or-treat candy into a bowl, shrieked. “You babies look so cute!”

  “Ain’t no babies in this house!” Carlo yelled from the living room.

  “They are to her,” Miles’s father said under his breath.

  “They are to me!” Miles’s mother yelled back. “Take a look,” she said, presenting Miles and Ganke to the older men at the card table.

  “And who you supposed to be, son?” Miles’s father asked. Miles wasn’t wearing his mask.

  “A zombie.” Miles flung the mask in the air.

  “Well, guess what,” John John said. “You nailed it.”

  “Sure did,” Sip followed up with some additional snark while rearranging the cards in his hand.

  “And what about you, Ganke?” Miles’s father asked.

  “It’s complicated. But basically, I’m me and Miles’s dean, pretending to be our history teacher, Mr. Chamberlain.”

  Miles’s mother let out a high-pitched squeal. “That’s funny. But I’m glad it was you and not Miles who tried to pull this stunt.”

  “Yeah. He would’ve been suspended, again.” Miles’s father shook his head.

  “Kiddo got suspended?” John John laid his cards on the table, facedown, and took a swig of his drink.

  “Yeah, his teacher Mr. Chamberlain wrote him up for running out of class for a, um, bathroom emergency.”

  “And they suspended him for that? Because the kid had to go, what, one…or two?” Carlo added.

  “Doesn’t matter. That seems a bit excessive with the discipline, even to me,” John John said.

  “Man, lemme tell you something, I ain’t never met a Chamberlain I liked,” Carlo said, also putting his cards down. “Matter fact, when I was in school, I struggled with a teacher named Mr. Chamberlain too.”

  “Did he look like this?” Ganke asked, instantly taking on his Chamberlain pose—hands together, eyes closed.

  “Um…nah.” Carlo peered at Ganke. “This dude had a weird red bush. Like Ronald McDonald. And he wasn’t my history teacher. He was my English teacher. But I wasn’t a good reader, you know. And he knew that. But he would call on me anyway. Every single day.”

  “Did you tell him you didn’t want to read?” Miles asked.

  “Yeah, I told him. I even stayed after class one day and explained that I maybe needed a tutor or something. But he didn’t care. He just kept calling on me, letting the other kids laugh at me, until one day I just started ignoring him. And when that happened, he started writing me up. And it wasn’t long before I wasn’t in school no more at all.”

  Miles’s father shook his head. “And how old were you?”

  “I don’t know. Probably fifteen or sixteen. Old enough to put my hands in the poison pot, which you know I did.” He nodded at Miles’s father.

  “Funny,” Sip grumbled. “I had a Mr. Chamberlain too. Except he wasn’t no teacher. He was Principal Chamberlain, but we always called him Old Man Chamberlain. He was a Mississippi good ol’ boy who ain’t give two shakes about kids like me.” Sip cracked the knuckles in his hands. “One day I got into a scuffle with a kid named Willie Richards for calling me out by name. Now, everybody saw it in the lunchroom. Willie said what he said. And I let it roll off me like water on a duck’s back. He was just mad about me being better than him on the football field. Stupid. But then dirtbag had the nerve to spit on me, and well, ain’t no coming back from being spat on. So, I…well…let’s just say Willie, wherever he is right now, is probably still wishing he coulda sucked that spit back in his mouth.” The guys at the table all laughed. Ganke and Miles did too. “Old Man Chamberlain didn’t find it funny though, nor did he think I was justified. So he expelled me. He was always kicking black kids out, though, so it really wasn’t no big surprise.”

  “Did you go to a different school?” Miles asked.

  “I tried. But when you got what I had on my record, and you living in Mississippi back then, ain’t nobody wanna be bothered with you. I was gonna go to college. Get my mother out that old clapboard house. But that required money, and I just felt so…I don’t know…like I couldn’t win for losing. And guess what? When the world is breaking your back, it get a whole lot easier to break some laws.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” Carlo said.

  And the Chamberlain stories continued. John John, the only person at the table who hadn’t dabbled in crime, had also been given the blues by a Mr. Chamberlain.

  “I mean, I had a lot of tough teachers. But the one that gave it to me the worst, funny enough, was also named…Chamberlain.”

  “Yeah, I remember,” Miles’s father said. He and Aaron had gone to school with John John. “He used to ride Aaron hard.”

  “That’s right. What was his actual title, again? Because he wasn’t really a teacher.”

  “He was the dean of discipline. He literally used to just walk the halls,
or pop into classrooms and pick out students he felt needed to be chastised. It just so happened that me, you, Aaron, and a few others were always those students.”

  “Yeah, like Tommy Rice. Remember him? Chamberlain yanked him out of…I can’t remember the teacher’s name, but she taught social studies. Tommy was asleep, but the reason why is because Tommy was up all night looking after his little brothers and sisters because his mom was messed up, and he was still doing his homework and stuff. We all knew that. I think most of the teachers even knew that. But Chamberlain suspended him for sleeping. Sleeping. Said he was being nonverbally disrespectful.”

  “Yeah, he got Aaron on something crazy like that, too. Got him three times, and on the third he booted him from the school. But I kept going until Aaron started pulling up to the schoolyard in fancy cars.”

  “Other people’s fancy cars,” Miles’s mother clarified, setting the bowl of candy on a small table by the front door.

  “Right.” The men all sat in silence for a moment.

  “So the moral to the story is, don’t trust nobody named Chamberlain unless it’s Wilt Chamberlain. Got it?” Carlo gruffed.

  “Oh, be quiet,” Miles’s mother said, wrapping her arms around Miles’s and Ganke’s shoulders. “There’s no way you can blame all the bad stuff in your life on a few tough teachers.”

  “Absolutely not,” Sip said. “I don’t blame nobody for my life but me. But I’ll tell you what, for some of us, school is like a tree we get to hide in. And at the bottom of it is a bunch of dogs. Them dogs are bad decisions. So when people shake us out that tree for no reason, it becomes a lot easier to get bit.”

  “And that there’s the truth,” John John agreed. “It don’t always happen that way, but it definitely does happen.”

  “Don’t matter what kind of family you from either. There’s enough out here to snatch you away from a good upbringing, especially if you got idle time and no clear path to success. Man…forget about it,” Carlo added.

  “Okay, okay, that’s enough.” Miles’s mother cut the conversation. “You boys leave these old men here to reminisce and complain while y’all go party.” She gave Ganke a hug. And then she gave Miles one, and whispered in his ear, “Spill the salsa.”

  “How weird is it that all my dad’s friends have bad stories about teachers named Mr. Chamberlain?” Miles asked Ganke as they walked to the train. He couldn’t help but think about how one of the things that led them down the wrong road was being kicked out of school. School might’ve been the formula to create a continual function, a life drawn without interruption. Calculus. Or to Miles’s father and his friends, basic arithmetic.

  It was a strangely warm night for Halloween. Little kids dressed as witches and princesses, animals and Super Heroes, were all out, walking slowly up and down the block.

  “I mean, it’s weird, but no more weird than if we were to ask how many people had a bad teacher named Mr. Johnson,” Ganke said. “It’d probably be like a million people. It’s just one of those things. Besides, they were all different people. It would’ve been more of a shock if they all had the same Mr. Chamberlain, even the guy in Mississippi. Like our Mr. Chamberlain has spent his whole life as a traveling educational jerk.”

  “Word,” Miles agreed, but it was still pinballing around his mind until they got to the train. The train was full of people, some dressed in extravagant costumes, others in simple masks, and some just trying to avoid the madness of Halloween. “But what about the guard?”

  “Who?”

  “The guard in the prison. The one I told you whose name was Chamberlain, too.”

  “Hmm. Co-winky-dink?”

  Miles gnawed on his bottom lip as the train doors closed. “Doubt it.”

  Once they were back on the Brooklyn Visions Academy campus, the boys ran up to their room to drop off their backpacks, wipe the sweat from their necks, and reapply deodorant. Well, Miles did. Ganke reminded him about Koreans not having body odor.

  “But I can smell you, dude,” Miles said, digging around in his everyday jeans at the back of his closet. He pulled out the poem he had written Alicia—right where he’d left it. The denim had stained the paper indigo blue. Miles slipped it into his sweatpants, then checked himself out in the mirror. Such a shame his fresh haircut was going to be hidden under the zombie mask, Miles thought.

  “That’s you you smell, salsa boy,” Ganke insisted. “Now, can we please get to the party? I got some standing in the middle of the floor to do.”

  They could hear the music blaring from the outside when they got to the party, a splattering of teenagers pushing through the double doors to join. The auditorium was packed with dancing students dressed in kooky costumes, some as elaborate as C-3PO, the golden robot from Star Wars, and others as simple as whiskers drawn on a face. The side walls were lined with tables of food and drinks, and up on the stage was Judge, dressed as a judge with a fat pair of headphones on his head, standing behind two turntables.

  “First let’s do a walk-through,” Ganke screamed in Miles’s ear. The two of them wormed through the crowd, trying to see who was there, and who wasn’t. They recognized Winnie first because she was dressed in regular clothes—a sleeveless dress and heels. Miles asked her who she was supposed to be.

  “What?!” she yelled back.

  “Who are you?!” Miles leaned in closer.

  “Oh. Michelle Obama!” she said, pointing to a small American-flag pin on her chest. The triplets, Sandy, Mandy, and Brandy, were dressed as the sun, moon, and stars, which were basically hokey costumes made from felt and an overused glue gun. Of course Ryan was there. Miles was expecting him to be dressed in something cheesy like a three-piece suit, but he was a shoddily crafted monster, which technically made him a good-looking monster. But then he opened his mouth and there were fangs. Of course. Any way to work in sucking on some girl’s neck. There were teachers there as well, some dressed in costumes, and some not. Mrs. Khalil had elaborate feathered-wing attachments connected to her arms and a beak over her nose. It was enough of a costume for her to look cool but still be able to walk around and monitor the students, who were constantly looking over their shoulders for a chance to grind against one another. Ms. Blaufuss, on the other hand, went all out—Edgar Allan Poe. The jet-black hair, the stark white face, the black suit, and a stuffed raven perched on her arm the whole time. Nailed. It. Mrs. Tripley was dressed not as Frankenstein, but as Mary Shelley, the lady who wrote Frankenstein. As if anyone could tell. And Mr. Chamberlain was there too, as expected, dressed as a Civil War Confederate soldier, ghosting through the crowd, slipping in between dancing couples, wagging fingers.

  When Miles and Ganke saw him coming toward them, Ganke stopped cold, put his hands together, and froze in Chamberlain-pose.

  Miles, however, rushed out of the crowd. He didn’t want to have any brush-ups with his teacher. At least not yet. He walked over to the punch table to pour himself a cup, but there was a line. The…thing waiting in front of him had a hunchback and a mess of matted hair. And smelled of sandalwood.

  “Alicia?”

  The ogre turned around, and sure enough it was her, her brown skin painted an awful green. She was ladling red juice into a red cup.

  Alicia looked at Miles, but didn’t say anything.

  “Oh,” he said, realizing he had his mask on, which also muffled his voice. “It’s me.” He yanked it up over his face.

  “Oh, hey,” she said, her tone sizzling with awkwardness as she dropped the scoop back in the bowl and stepped to the side. She opened her mouth as if she wanted to say something, but didn’t.

  First pour a drink. Then, spill the salsa, Miles reminded himself.

  But before he could execute his plan, Alicia had ducked back into the crowd.

  “Pour me one, bro,” Ganke said just then, coming up on Miles’s side. He took the full cup from Miles’s hand, pounded it back.

  “It’s like she didn’t even notice me.”

  “Oh yes she did. She wa
s blushing!”

  “Her face is gree—”

  Before Miles could finish Ganke shouted, “But he didn’t even notice me! Everybody else knew exactly what I was doing, but Chamberlain is so oblivious it’s like he didn’t even see me. Such a weirdo!”

  Miles looked over Ganke’s shoulder, scanning the room for where Alicia might’ve gone. He spotted her mixing into the mob of costumes.

  “We’ll talk about it later,” Miles said, dashing off toward her. He burrowed through the crowd, trying his best to avoid bumping anybody and splashing juice all over the place. Not that it would’ve mattered. If anything, it would’ve just looked like more fake blood.

  Miles, still unmasked, found Alicia in the center, huddled with some other people Miles recognized. At least the ones who weren’t wearing masks. Most of them were her Dream Defender friends, like Dawn Leary, but others were students from class, like Brad Canby, dressed as a professional tennis player.

  “Alicia!” Miles tried to get her attention, but she didn’t hear him. He had been waiting for this moment all day, planning out in his head how he was going to do it, to say it. He slipped the folded poem out of his pocket. “Alicia!” She turned away from Dawn. “I have to tell you something!” Miles took a step toward her. As soon as he did, a volcano erupted in his stomach, an earthquake in his head. Oh no. And before he could say another word, Mr. Chamberlain came out of nowhere, wedging himself between Miles and Alicia. He eyeballed Miles. Miles swallowed hard.

  “How about a little distance between you two, Morales. If I see you try anything inappropriate, we’ll have a problem.”

  “Nobody’s trying anything!” Alicia puffed up.

  Miles’s skin got hot, as if he were cooking from the inside out. But he held his tongue and nodded his head. Mr. Chamberlain walked away, pushing through the teenage jumble.

  “Such a jerk,” Alicia muttered. “And by the way, I have to tell you something, too. I’m sorry about what happened in class. I should’ve said something or…done something.”