“Leave my statue, bad girl,” said Mother Fingerless. “What did you eat today?”
As I stepped inside, I said, “I’m full, thanks,” which was almost true. Standing there next to the watercolor of the puppy dog in the heart-shaped frame while the old lady smiled down on me like a sunbeam, I had no appetite. How could I eat food cooked by somebody my parents were robbing?
“Bre-eett,” yelled Mother Fingerless as she pulled the front door shut behind us.
When I got upstairs, Brett was hunched over his desk, reading a book by his metal lamp. He was wearing a green T-shirt—and glasses. Those were new. The frames had green and brown swirls.
“Sorry. I’m interrupting?” I asked.
It wasn’t the philosophy book today. The cover had a picture of a guy in a fedora who looked like a private investigator.
“Nice glasses,” I said.
Brett turned a page.
Behind me the poster for Brett’s old-timey alien movie hung where it always had. PARALYZE THE LIVING AND RESURRECT THE DEAD! it said, above drawings of people looking ready for battle. The movie was hilarious. I understood why he loved it.
But that was eons ago.
I held out the bag I’d picked up on Eighth Avenue. “I brought fortune cookies. Since you’re all into Chinese stuff now.”
And also because of the letters, which I wasn’t supposed to know about, and also because of writing on his stoop, which I didn’t know how to talk about.
Brett kept reading.
“Listen, Brett,” I said. “I know everything is . . . But you’re the only one . . .” I futzed with the edge of the cookie bag. “I’m afraid Alma Lingonberry is my parents. Them and some other people—the gang, I guess. Running a moneymaking scam.”
Brett talked in his usual calm voice without looking up from his book. “So you finally figured out that your father and his band of criminals invented Alma Lingonberry to make money. Took you long enough.”
“What?”
Silence.
“You knew?”
More silence.
“How long have you—wait. How do you know that?” I asked.
No answer.
“Brett!” I yelled.
When Brett looked up, his glasses made his brown eyes huge. “I don’t see why I need to get involved.”
“You don’t see why you need to get involved?” I yelled. “Maybe because your mother crafted up a pile of thirteen thousand stuffed animals to save Alma’s life! You’re not concerned about that?”
Brett’s glared at me with the huge eyes. “No.”
“Just, no?”
It is amazing how long you can stare at someone and not see each other at all.
“Say something!” I said.
Brett closed his eyes. “Claudeline, I’m observing you getting out of control.”
I shut Brett’s bedroom door to check the mirror. I observed myself looking totally normal. In the mirror I saw Brett reading.
“Shut the stupid book!” I yelled.
Brett slapped the book on his desk and took off his glasses. For a split second, he looked like the person I used to know. But his voice was different. It was shaking.
“My mother cried when she read that thing you wrote on our stoop. She assumed it was meant for her.”
Ugh.
“Does she know it was me?”
“No, Claude, but I wouldn’t expect you to understand that that isn’t the point.”
“Look. I am really sorry I wrote that thing, Brett. It was idiotic. It’s just, you’ve been avoiding me like I’m contaminated! And you’re the only one who understands—”
“Who understands what? Your sense of humor? Because I don’t!”
I felt like I was in a subway car that was hurtling forward so fast I was missing all the stops.
“No!” I yelled. “You’re the only one who understands what it’s like to have a dad who breaks the law!”
Brett spit his words at me. “I understand what it’s like not to have a father at all. That is something you don’t understand.”
When I opened my mouth, he cut me off.
“You’ve been treating me like I’m some boring loser because I found something interesting that has nothing to do with you. I only got interested in Chinese philosophies because your grandfather died. Which I’m sure you don’t even realize didn’t have to happen. Because you don’t want to know how horrendous it is, being a so-called gangster. So I don’t want to watch you steal anymore, or get in trouble. I don’t want to help you reach your destiny, as you call it. That makes me a bad friend? Fine.”
“Well, I’ve been trying to tell you all summer that I’m freaked out about the whole gangster thing! I’ve been thinking a lot about it—”
When Brett laughed, it sounded like he was very far away. Like he was laughing in another building, and closing all the windows. “C’mon,” he said. “No you haven’t. You love thinking of yourself as so gangster, and you don’t have to take things seriously because your family’s so important. To you, life is just one big joke.”
“Hey! I’m not like that!” I yelled.
And I knew I was right. I am not like that.
But I was mad. A different kind of mad than I’d been when I wrote that idiotic thing on his stoop.
“You think I don’t know about stuff that’s horrendous? What you don’t understand, Brett, is that when somebody you love gets murdered, the last thing you want to hear about is philosophy! Sometimes you even make jokes! When you hurt so bad you can barely breathe, you’ll try anything to make it stop. And guess what? Nothing works!”
He looked away.
I ran down the stairs and out the front door without hearing what Mother Fingerless was yelling behind me.
LALA & ME
Poetry and letters Persist in silence and solitude.
—Tu Fu, poet
The closer I got to Lala’s, the more the air smelled like car fumes. Vehicles swooshed through the sky on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. The sun had vanished, and it was drizzling again, on and off. What a rainy summer. The wet streets made the city sound like it was whispering in the background. All the trucks swooshing, the buses swooshing, and the bikes.
Lala was alone on her stoop, wearing her zebra-print raincoat, writing with a purple marker in a notebook.
“Yo,” I said.
“’Sup,” said Lala in a sad voice.
I sat next to her. “What are you writing?”
Lala put the cap on her marker and stuck it in her hair. “A poem for my dad.”
We sat listening to the traffic above us. I could almost see the black exhaust fumes soaking into the buildings and trees, making them sick. This part of the neighborhood feels extra depressing sometimes. Stuck here soaking up evil fumes.
“I’m sorry about your dad, Lala,” I said.
“Writing poems is the best thing with that, lately,” said Lala.
“It helps?” I asked.
Lala half smiled at me. I half smiled back.
We looked at our feet. Lala had on black sneakers and white socks. I had on my pink sandals and red socks. Our shoes were exactly the same size.
“Lala, we gotta talk about something,” I said.
“No worries,” she said. “I read all Andrew’s texts.”
I looked up. “So you know Alma isn’t real?”
“Well . . .” Lala stretched her legs and set her notebook beside her on the stoop. “I know she’s supposedly not real. I kind of don’t believe it, though. If it’s true, it’s too embarrassing. That girl acted like she liked me.”
“Everybody likes you, Lala,” I said.
“Nobody knows the real me,” said Lala.
“You’re Barba Amarilla! Who doesn’t know that?”
“Nobody knows I’m a poet.” When Lala glanced at me, her gold-brown eyes reminded me of autumn leaves. Same as her mother’s. She talked slowly, while she untied and retied her sneakers. “I sent her my poems.”
&
nbsp; “Really?” I said.
“And Alma said she thought they were amazing,” said Lala. “She made me feel like, yeah, maybe I am a real poet. Like I keep telling everybody. Now I just feel dumb.”
“Alma being fake doesn’t change that you’re the best poet in this whole city,” I said.
Lala looked up from her sneakers and smiled through her squiggly hair. “You haven’t read my poems.”
“I would if you showed them to me!”
“Alma is a poet too, though,” said Lala, leaning back on the stoop again and looking across the street. “So she knows what she’s talking about.”
The way Lala kept calling Alma “Alma,” I could tell she hoped Money was wrong. That there was some chance Alma could still be who she said she was.
I sighed. “Lala, I gotta tell you two more things.”
She leaned away from me. “Okaaay . . .”
“Number one is I wrote her too,” I said. “Alma. About personal stuff.”
Lala smacked my arm. “You told everybody she was faking it!”
“That’s what I thought! Until she wrote me back,” I said, rubbing my arm. “You’re brutal.”
“You’re gonna have a bruise,” said Lala. “So what happened?”
“I don’t know. From the first message, I could tell Alma was just some . . .” I tried to remember what it was about that first message that made me think Alma might be real. It wasn’t anything in particular.
“Cheesy girl, right?” said Lala, smiling.
“Boring, even,” I said.
“Oh, Claude.” Lala pulled her marker out of her hair. “We should’ve been talking to each other instead of some stranger off the street. What’s up with us?”
“I don’t know, Lala. But I have to tell you the other thing.” I closed my eyes and listened to the city whispering. “I think Alma Lingonberry is my parents.”
“Huh?” said Lala.
I opened my eyes and pointed at her. “But they’re not writing those e-mails. They wouldn’t do us like that.”
Lala scrunched her nose. “Seriously? Your parents?”
I nodded and waited to see what kind of face she would make next, to see if she already knew or had suspected. But I couldn’t tell anything from Lala’s face; it looked like maybe she wasn’t sure.
Lala took the cap off her marker and put it back on. “Your family does have issues.”
“Ya think?” I said.
She looked at me sideways. “How do you know this, Claude?”
“I saw Dad posting Alma flyers under the BQE. And my mom had a bunch of them in her purse. Somebody else has to be writing the e-mails, but you know—it’s called organized crime. Maybe my parents organized it.”
“I don’t know your mother too well, but to me, this doesn’t feel like the type of thing your pops would do,” said Lala. “I’m all confused right now, though, and I hear you. So let’s say he is being Alma. We will get wild on him. But after that, let’s think about you for a second.”
“Okay,” I said.
Lala put her notebook on her lap and draped her arm around me. “So what? So what if your parents made up Alma to make money?”
Now I was scrunching my nose.
“Yeah, it’s grimy. But does it change if they love you?” Lala held a hand out, with her palm up, like she was giving me her idea and I could take it if I wanted to. “Your pops could steal all the money in the world, but isn’t he still your pops? Just saying, Claudeline.”
I didn’t know what to think. If my family stole all the money in the world, did it change if they loved me? I didn’t know. Did it change if I loved them? I didn’t know! I mean, shouldn’t it?
Why couldn’t my family feel like what a family was supposed to feel like? Instead of sketchy people I was stuck with. Cursed by.
I looked at the buildings across the street. One was kind of red but kind of black. The one beside it was kind of yellow but kind of black.
“I don’t know how to feel anymore, Lala. But I need to know the truth.”
“We’re not playing games,” said Lala. “We’re about to crack this open.”
I checked to see what kind of face she was making.
“Yes, I said we,” said Lala.
And we hugged and snapped our fingers and made a plan.
THE PLAN
What difference between good and bad?
—Lao Tzu, philosopher
My assignment was to observe my parents for information about what they were doing, where they were going, and anything else. That night, when I heard Dad come home, I tiptoed out of my bedroom into the dark hallway and peeked through the doorway to the kitchen. Dad was using a chair as a footrest, watching music videos on his phone. His bare knees poked through the rips in his jeans.
Why would he watch videos on a phone in the kitchen when we’ve got a huge TV in the living room? Unclear. I stood with my back flat against the plaster, waiting for something to happen, until I was so tired of thinking about Dad and the videos—I mean, there are ways of hooking up your TV screen to the Internet so you can watch whatever you want; you don’t have to settle for rappers with heads one centimeter tall and mouths the size of a speck of lint, unless you love being annoyed, which I didn’t—I had to go to bed. I didn’t bother tiptoeing down the hall.
“Good night, Claude,” called Dad.
“It could go either way,” I called back. Then I went into my room to put on my nightgown and try to stay awake until Mom came home. Maybe they’d let something slip about Alma when they thought I was asleep.
When I finally heard the front door unlock, I was barely awake. Mom and Dad clinked around the kitchen for a while, yammering about nothing. Eventually, I heard this:
Mom: You’re supposed to be there at noon?
Dad: Anytime after noon. Why am I working with him again?
Mom: Gotcha!
Dad: Gotcha!
Mom: Head case. How you getting into Manhattan?
Dad: Car service.
Mom: I’m so tired. All this junk. Did you show him the new ones?
Dad: Come in with me tomorrow. He’s constantly asking for you.
Mom: I’d rather not.
Dad: Then stop agitating and let me handle it.
Mom: Gotcha!
Dad: Pass me that thing with the chicken.
Besides the strange but useless fact that my parents had a secret catchphrase, I learned that Dad was taking a car service to Manhattan sometime after noon the next day to meet somebody he was working with. Where in Manhattan I had no idea, but it was a start.
I texted Lala. She said she’d tell her mother we were selling raffle tickets for the carnival and reserve a car service for us to follow Dad. A car service is Brooklyn’s version of a taxi. Instead of standing on the street waiting for a yellow cab to flag down, you call a black town car to pick you up. And town cars take reservations, which is helpful when you have to be someplace at a certain time and can’t afford to spend half an hour jumping up and down on the curb, flailing your arms.
I worried about how we’d follow Dad without getting noticed, and how we’d pay for the car service, but Lala said she never worried about things like that, so I decided not to either.
I had enough to worry about.
THE CHASE
For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.
—Jean-Paul Sartre, philosopher
Our town car was waiting around the corner by the Fourth Avenue N train subway stop. Lala was sure that Dad’s car would pick him up in front of our apartment, turn right, and pass us on its way to Manhattan. That’s when we’d jump on his tail.
As we walked toward the subway stop, I asked, “Which car service did you call?”
“The one next door to the noodle shop. At Your Service Car Service,” said Lala. “The sign says, ‘It’s More Than a Destination. It’s a Journey.’”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
As soon as we climbed into the backseat and shut the door behind us, the driver waved us out. “Oh, no you don’t. I don’t pick up no kids alone.”
“We’re not kids; we’re tweens,” said Lala. “And we’re on a journey! I made a reservation.”
“My right to refuse! I got rights. Out,” said the driver.
“It’s an emergency!” said Lala.
“Call an ambulance,” said the driver.
“Sir,” I said, “we reserved this car because of an important situation and it’s—”
“Not my problem. I’m not taking no kids nowhere without an adult!” said the driver.
Me and Lala looked at each other.
“Out! Now!” The driver was wearing a patterned scarf, a cap, and reflecting sunglasses.
Lala sniffled. Her voice quivered like she was about to cry. “It’s just that someone is very sick.”
“Don’t know the guy,” said the driver. “Outta my car.”
That’s when the town car with Dad inside passed us, just as Lala predicted, and stopped at the light.
I punched Lala. We ducked.
So At Your Service Car Service was next door to the noodle shop, eh?
I chewed my lip. I had an idea. The type of thing a bad guy would do. On the other hand, it was for a good cause. Did that matter? No. But Dad was getting away, and what was I supposed to do? Become an angel overnight? You shouldn’t try to change all at once. You might pull a muscle. That was Chinese philosophy, I was pretty sure.
I said, “Sir, do you know Si Song?”
“The old one or the son?” said the driver.
“Senior,” I said.
The driver said, “Dead.”
“Oh, really?” I laughed.
“DEAD!” said the driver. “Dead, dead, dead.”
“Sir,” I said. “Do you really think . . .”
I peeked out the window. The light had turned green. Dad was getting away.
“Do you really think a man like Si Song dies? This is a message from my grandfather: FOLLOW THAT CAR! You don’t wanna—”
“WAIT!” yelled the driver. He pointed at me in the rearview mirror. “Not dead?”
The Bad Kid Page 11