I tumbled out of my sheets and ran into the hallway to catch up with her. “That’s from Grandpa, though! Give it back!”
“You’re gonna end up in juvenile jail, Claude. See how you like that.”
“I’m in jail all of a sudden? For taking something from your purse even though you’re not gonna tell me what it was? There hasn’t even been anything decent in there lately!”
Headlights from a passing car swooped a spotlight across some Alma flyers stacked on the table in the dark kitchen. I grabbed the one on top.
“Maybe I should get sick!” I yelled. “Then you’d be interested in me for a change!”
Something flickered through Mom’s eyes. “You think because I don’t want you stealing, I’m not interested in you?”
“No. Because you’re more interested in her than me! You never want me around anymore!” I yelled.
“I am exhausted, Claudeline,” said Mom. “Wiped out.”
She rewrapped her robe and disappeared down the dark hallway with my computer under her arm.
“Excuse me, my laptop?” I yelled.
No answer. I followed her to her bedroom. She shut the door in my face.
“MY LAPTOP!” I yelled.
“When you stop stealing, you can have privileges.”
I pounded on the door, yelling for as long as I had the energy. My yells bounced off the walls and landed right back inside my own head. When I could not hold it in anymore, I cried. The crying was so glad to be set free, it turned into bawling. The more I bawled, the younger I felt, like I was aging backward and becoming a baby again.
But what was I bawling about? It kept shape-shifting. Losing my laptop, Mom locking me out, the fact that she thought I was gonna end up in jail . . .
Then I snorted. Mom wasn’t friends with Alma because she reminded her of me. How stupid was I to think that? She was friends with Alma because she wished Alma was me. She wished I was someone completely different! Some corny kid who wore polka dots and wished on the wind.
Now my nose was running, sliming my bare shoulder, turning it shiny and gross.
All I wanted was Grandpa.
I curled up on the floor and cried myself to sleep. When I woke up, it was pitch-black, and I was freezing. It had been an hour, at least. My neck had a crick in it from pressing against Mom’s door. When I stood, I almost cried one more time, just because of the fact that she never opened it.
SKIPPY CHIN’S MISSING CHAPTERS
In the depths of man, unruly water.
—Miguel Hernández, poet
The next morning, the sun was rising behind a wall of blue clouds. The only people outside besides me were elderly dog walkers. My neck was sore, but I felt extra awake. Like I was on the movie set of my own life, but nobody had said “Action!” yet, so anything was possible.
In other words, I felt better.
Was I a morning person now? Was that what this feeling meant? I didn’t think I wanted to be a morning person. They were perky and always pouring you more coffee, right?
It was probably the crying. A long cry is like a thundershower. The hard stuff inside you gets pummeled until it’s raw, and the soft stuff gets muddy, and plants sprout from seeds you never knew were there. When your eyes dry, you’ve got flowers growing out of your cracks. It makes no sense that misery grows buttercups, but there it is.
Obviously, I hadn’t been able to e-mail Alma any more questions on account of my laptop getting stolen by my own mother, but that was fine. I wasn’t sure I wanted to write to her anymore. The dying, the poetry—it was almost too real.
When I put my hand in my pocket, the edges of my photograph felt mushy. And that was when I knew why I was spending my morning loitering instead of snoozing under my comforter, dreaming of chocolate chip pancakes. As I got closer to Eighth Avenue, the wind blew my hair, and I heard a voice-over in my head like they have in Brett’s old-timey movies: Detective Claude is up early this morning, off to another tough interview. Not to worry! Our girl always gets her story.
The sign in the noodle shop said CLOSED, but Mr. Chin waved me inside. “Want some noodles, Claudeline?” He stuck a mop in a bucket.
“No thanks,” I said.
Early-morning light flooded the shop. Mr. Chin dragged the splooshing bucket across the red-and-cream checkerboard floor toward the closet with the sink inside. I observed that his wristwatch had a tie-dye pattern on the band. Its neon splotches were hypnotizing.
“New watch?” I asked.
“Glows in the dark,” he said.
The colorful blobs on Mr. Chin’s watch strap made my thoughts swirl together. For all the time I spent in his noodle shop, I hardly knew anything about the guy. He was a Mets fan, a proud grandfather. Other than that . . .
Mr. Chin was squeezing the mop. It dribbled dirty water into the sink.
“Skippy Chin, you were Simon Song Senior’s best friend,” I said. “On account of that fact, I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“Best friend?” Mr. Chin burst out with a short laugh. “Yeah, right.”
“What?” I said.
A bare lightbulb with a short chain dangled near the sink, but it wasn’t on. Mr. Chin was looking at me like I had three noses. “Where’d you get that idea?”
“Because of . . .” I spotted a step stool and sat on it. “Everything! You talked at his funeral.”
Mr. Chin shook his head back and forth quickly, like he needed to correct me as fast as possible. “That was an obligation. It’s different.”
Obligation, eh? I gave him my statue stare.
“Is that because you’re in the underworld, Skippy?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Let’s go back to calling me Mr. Chin.”
“Mr. Chin?”
Mr. Chin took his time pouring dirty suds from the bucket into the sink, turning the creaky faucet knobs, rinsing it out.
“Wait,” I said. “Don’t tell me. Clearly, I could be a rat. But was Grandpa a real gangster, like in the movies? With everybody getting dumped in the ocean and bad cops working for him and people kissing his shoelaces and everywhere he went people feeding him free pasta, except it was Chinese food? Like, all that?”
Mr. Chin rubbed his beard with the back of his hand. “You consume too much media.”
“Tell me the truth,” I said. “Otherwise I’m gonna think he cornered finks in the butcher shop and beat up grannies for squealing. Or maybe—”
“Cut it out, Claudeline. I don’t like this kind of talk.”
I felt an urge to swallow, although my mouth was dry. Once again, what I was saying out loud didn’t exactly match what I was worried about. Hamming it up with the comic-book details made the Thing seem like less of a threat. Like it wasn’t gonna dump me in the ocean, or corner me in the butcher shop.
“What do you mean by obligation?” I asked.
“Oh, maybe I’m exaggerating. Your grandfather and I weren’t best friends. But Si held meetings here.”
“Why here?” I asked.
Mr. Chin breathed out through his nose like he was blowing some thoughts that were floating around his brain, to see where they would go. “Because I was eager to help a powerful guy. And possibly because I felt I had no choice.”
No choice? I bit my top lip with my bottom teeth and looked over my shoulder. The noodle shop’s rock-patterned wallpaper was peeling at the corners. Rip it down, I thought. All at once.
I narrowed my eyes at Mr. Chin. “Were people only nice to Grandpa because they felt like they had to be?”
Mr. Chin made one last nose puff, like he was blowing the rest of his thoughts away. “Why not ask your father these types of questions, Claudeline?”
“Dad is useless,” I said. “He won’t tell me anything.”
Mr. Chin put his hands on his hips and leaned on the sink. I could tell he was holding in a smile.
“Let me guess,” I moaned. “Neither will you.”
“Untrue,” said Mr. Chin. “As a matter of fact, I was
awaiting the right occasion. C’mere.”
I followed Mr. Chin through the shiny kitchen, silent and ready for a new day of noodles, and into the stockroom, with its metal shelves stacked with boxes and books, which I quickly observed all seemed to be about improving your golf swing. We turned around a corner I didn’t expect and went up three stairs with scraps of worn orange carpet on them, into a small room with a black tile floor and a giant window overlooking the restaurant.
“There’s no window in the noodle shop,” I said.
“The mirror behind the cash register,” said Mr. Chin. “It’s one-way. So your grandfather could watch people. And look at this.”
Mr. Chin unlocked a padlock on a cabinet below the one-way mirror. Inside was a ton of electronic equipment. He pointed to the corners of the room where the ceiling meets the walls. “Those speakers connect to the shop. So you can hear what’s going on. There are cameras, too. If he wanted to, Si could watch meetings from my house. The video feed is rigged to Mrs. Chin’s large-screen television. And this room is soundproof. I installed everything myself.”
“Whoa. Does it still work?” I asked.
“Sure!” said Mr. Chin. “Lately I’ve been flipping on the whole caboodle when I go to golf tournaments. My son-in-law takes care of the shop, and my wife keeps an eye on him from the couch at home.”
“Can I watch the videos?” I asked.
“No videos,” said Mr. Chin. “Your grandfather didn’t want anything recorded. It’s just live streaming.”
“Your son-in-law steals?” I asked.
“Not yet,” said Mr. Chin. “But when he does? It’ll only happen once.”
Mr. Chin put his hands in his pockets and smiled. He reminded me of those old-timey pictures of men standing next to fancy cars. Like the cars are an extension of themselves, and if you want to understand them, you gotta look under the hood.
I crouched down to get a closer look. “How did you learn so much about electronics?”
“At the risk of sounding pretentious,” said Mr. Chin, “a long life is full of chapters.”
Grandpa would’ve had so much fun spying on people. I knew exactly how much fun. “This is so, so, so amazing,” I said.
“Thought you’d like it. I have very few opportunities to show off. Don’t get carried away, though. People got hurt, thanks to your grandfather’s preoccupations.”
I tried not to get carried away, but it was pretty cool imagining Grandpa organizing a major spy session. I felt relieved, too, seeing Mr. Chin proud. Yes, I’d just heard him say that people got hurt. Okay—wait.
I bit my lip again, as hard as I could stand it, and reminded myself that the Thing could torment me all it wanted—I was the one with the teeth.
I looked up at Mr. Chin. “Who got hurt?”
Mr. Chin crossed his arms. “I’m not comfortable talking about this.”
I exhaled. Thank the lord of dumplings for that. I ran my fingertips along the rows of levers and curvy knobs of the surveillance equipment. Anyway, Grandpa had told me himself he didn’t wait for life’s punches. He swung first. And he’d gotten Mr. Chin to do all this. As my language arts teacher used to say when she assigned a stack of homework over Christmas, sometimes you need that extra push. I looked up at Mr. Chin again. “You can’t tell me that watching your spy equipment in action was not the most amazing thing ever.”
“Sure I can. It was a total waste.” Mr. Chin motioned for me to step back, and locked up the cabinets. “Better run along now, Claude. Time for me to get cookin’.”
I followed Mr. Chin back through the kitchen. A total waste?
He wasn’t exactly making it nice for me, was he.
In the dining room we stood together, facing the mirror, which was surrounded by holiday lights. On Mr. Chin’s orange T-shirt a baseball smiled. The glass mirror blurred around the edges, like it had been bolted to the wall for decades. A string of paper lanterns dangled in front of it. You’d never suspect a thing.
I didn’t love how this interview was turning out, but as long as we were still standing there, I decided to risk one more question.
“What’s gonna happen in your next chapter, Mr. Chin?”
Mr. Chin held his hands like they were gripping an invisible stick, wound up his arms, and took a swing that dipped low to the floor. “Hopefully, a lot of golf.”
THE RAMIREZ FAMILY
Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.
—Simone Weil, philosopher
If you want to see something real in New York City, skip Times Square and take a long, pointless walk. That day I had a bunch of hours to kill, like usual. And once again I had no best friend to kill them with. I’d decided to make Brett wait exactly three days. Then I’d let our friendship snap back to normal, and we’d observe the Thing, and slap a leash on it, together.
Meanwhile I’d be walking alone. Walking by yourself has its advantages anyway. Advantage number one is silence. You being silent, not what’s around you. When you are not talking or listening to a specific person, you hear everything. Engines revving. Doors opening. Music floating out of open windows. Advantage number two is that you have the freedom to move your eyes wherever they feel like going, instead of making eye contact or having to look at the ground or straight ahead so that whoever you are walking with does not think you are distracted, or insane.
That day I saw three interesting sights:
1. A bicyclist with a live cat riding on top of his helmet.
2. A school bus painted black with strands of beads in the windows and a bumper sticker that said HONK IF YOU LIKE NOISE POLLUTION.
3. Two busted pianos, facing each other, on top of a Dumpster. It looked like they were kissing. The mystery of how they got up there threatened to make me cancel all my other mysteries and investigate, and that’s the real New York City for you—the one I love, anyway.
When the sun passed the sky’s halfway point and started its slow slide down the other side, I stopped in front of a key-making shop and called Lala.
“Can I borrow your computer?” I asked. “Mine crashed.”
“Hang on,” said Lala.
Sunlight flickered off the wall of keys, their tiny teeth.
Suddenly Mrs. Ramirez was on the phone. “I’ll sign you up for an Internet time slot, Claudeline. Please pick up a bag of green beans on your way over, as you’ll be joining us for dinner. And you can tell us all how you’re planning to help with the Sunset Park carnival.”
Green beans!
The only thing I’d ever “shopped” for at our bodega was candy. When I spotted the green beans, I had no idea what to do. For instance, were you supposed to put them in a bag with your bare hands? How many beans did one person want to eat? And here’s a news flash for you: Not all green beans are the same size! Twisted, shriveled, stubby—they’re all over the place! I picked beans out of the pile one by one until I had fifty that were almost identical. Although I had never seen anyone do this, I could think of no other possible way.
I’d spent so long digging through beans, there was no chance I could leave without paying. The only cash in my pocket was the two-dollar bill Grandpa had given me for my eleventh birthday, which I didn’t want to spend, but the owner didn’t notice the extreme sad faces I was making as it flapped in the wind from the fan and glowed blue from the weird light of the store, in the hopes he’d feel sorry for me and give me the beans for free. He just snatched my two dollars and said, “Next time you bring the rest!” and shooed me so he could ring up the next customer.
Before we ate (fish in tomato sauce, my green beans, which I could not take my eyes off of, beets from a can, rolls), Kelvin said a prayer for Mr. Ramirez. Everybody was quiet while he mentioned how caring he was and how much they all missed him. Even DeShawn wiped a tear.
After that, Mrs. Ramirez made us go around the table telling one remarkable thing that had happened in our day, which took up the whol
e rest of dinner. Community activities did not even come up. Mostly people talked about stunts they’d pulled or jokes they’d told while silverware clinked against dishes and every crumb of dinner got inhaled.
For my remarkable thing, I told about the torture of buying green beans. Even Mrs. Ramirez laughed at my beans story, despite the fact that I was basically admitting I was so used to stealing that I didn’t know how to shop like a normal person. Then Lala’s cousin Rico put his green beans in a line and held up his plate to show that I wasn’t lying about making them all the same size, and Jamie and DeShawn got into a battle, acting like their floppy cooked beans were swords.
I admit, I had a much better time than I’d thought I would. I love talking and eating with people, and eating and talking with people, no matter what. Period.
After dinner, I had to wait until my seven forty-five p.m. slot to use the computer, so me and Lala went into her room to work out a new hairstyle for me. I sat on the puffy purple mini seat facing the low dresser with the moveable mirror, and Lala stood behind me. Lala’s vision was lots of tiny braids, but they kept slipping out. Of course, Lala spent half of hair-salon time texting with “Andrew,” so she wasn’t killing herself solving that problem.
While she texted, I examined my face. I observed how round it is. One of the rounder faces I had seen. And the color of my eyes reminded me of a frog. Would I look older/better/less round with makeup? I wondered how I’d look with black eyeliner and purple mascara, like Lala snuck from the drugstore. Brett hated makeup, I was pretty sure.
Why was Brett in my head again? Nobody invited him.
Finally it was seven forty-five.
“Why do you need the computer so much?” asked Lala.
“No reason,” I said. “Maybe I’ll check the New York Post.”
Lala’s phone buzzed. “Tell me when you’re done,” she said, and wandered off.
I still didn’t know what to make of my chat with Alma—she hadn’t told me where she lived or anything. But I did know how much I’d miss wandering around pointlessly if I was stuck in a hospital bed. And that had been gnawing at me, on my walk. So I’d decided that I had to write her back. If she wasn’t real, so what? But if she was . . .
The Bad Kid Page 8