Darius & Twig
Authors: Walter Dean Myers
chapter one
High above the city, above the black tar rooftops, the dark brick chimneys spewing angry wisps of burnt fuel, there is a black speck making circles against the gray patchwork of Harlem sky. From the park below it looks like a small bird. No, it doesn't look like a small bird, but what else could it be?
At the end of a bench, a young man holds up a running shoe
.
“It doesn't weigh anything.”
“That's the thing,” Twig said. “There's going to be nothing keeping me back except gravity. When I hit the track in these babies, I'm going to be flying!”
“The heel is flat. Why doesn't it have a heel?” I asked.
“Because this shoe doesn't want my heels touching the ground,” Twig said, smiling. “This shoe doesn't play. This is eighty-five dollars' worth of kick-ass running, my man.”
“You paid eighty-five dollars for these shoes?”
“Coach Day got them for me because I'm on the team.”
“Looks good, I guess,” I said, handing the track shoe back to Twig.
“Hey, Darius, my grandmother said you should come by this weekend,” Twig said. “I told her that you were really Dominican but didn't want to admit it.”
“Why did you tell her that?” I asked. “I'm not Dominican.”
“Right, but she thinks she's a detective,” Twig said. “When you come over, she's going to break out into some Spanish in her Dominican accent and see how you answer. She thinks you're going to come back in Spanish, and then she's got you!”
“Why do you do stuff like that?”
“Because it's fun,” Twig said.
“It's stupid,” I said.
“A little,” Twig said, smiling. “But it's fun, too. You saw Mr. Ramey today? You said you were going to talk to him about a scholarship.”
“I saw him,” I said.
“Didn't go too good?” The corners of Twig's mouth tightened.
“I ran into the numbers,” I said. “He asked me what my grade-point average was, as if he didn't already have it. I told him it was about three point two, and he just shrugged and said it was closer to three even.”
“You show him the letter from Miss Carroll?”
“Yeah, she already spoke to him about me,” I said. “The thing I couldn't get around was that she was saying I'm smartâ”
“You are, man!”
“Okay, but what he's saying is that when you send a transcript to a college, they want to see the numbers written down that say you're smart. Two point five isn't going to make anybody jump up and down unless you're six nine or can run a ten-second hundred yards wearing football cleats.”
“Man, you got too much on the ball not to get a scholarship to some school,” Twig said. “You tell him about the letter you got from that magazine?”
“How if I revise my story they might publish it?”
“Yeah.”
“I showed it to him so he could see it was real,” I said. “He got right to the bottom line. He said that right now I wasn't scholarship material. If the
Delta Review
actually published the story, I should come back to him and he'd call a few colleges. I don't think he thought I had a chance. The
Delta Review
is a college quarterly, Twig. It's got a lot of prestige, and everybody who's a serious writer is shooting for it.”
“He's a cold dude, Darius,” Twig said.
“No, man, it's a cold-ass world. When you open the refrigerator and you get cold coming out, you should expect it.”
“That's all he had to say?”
“No, he said that maybe I should drop out and do my junior year over again. He said he wasn't recommending it but that I should maybe think about it.”
“You going to do that?”
“No. I could run into the same thing I ran into this year and then just not finish high school,” I said. “This way at least I'm on the track to graduating.”
“You tell him why your grades were messed up?”
“I started to get at it, but he didn't want to hear it,” I said. “He wasn't bitchy about it or anything like that, but he laid it out straight. He said that what I needed, a full scholarship in a school away from Harlem, just wasn't going to happen.”
“So what you going to do?”
“Hope I can fix up the story so that they'll publish it,” I said.
“You can do it, bro,” Twig said. “I know you can do it!”
“He called up Miss Carroll when I was sitting there,” I said. “He asked her point friggin' blank if I had a chance to get published. She said I had a chance, but the way she said itâ”
“He had her on speakerphone?”
“Yes. The way she said it was like . . . she didn't much believe in it,” I said. “She told him that they probably had hundreds of submissions and mine had to be one of the better ones if they were even considering it. She was pushing for me, but she was being realistic.”
“What did Ramey have to say about that?”
“He said that the colleges wanted to know what
happened
, not what
could
have happened.”
I watched as Twig laced on his new running shoes and tried them out on the track. He looked happy as he ran. I was watching him, but in my head I was replaying the conversation between me and Mr. Ramey, the school's guidance counselor. He had said a lot of things about how well I had tested when I entered the school, and how much promise I had. Then he went on about my chances for a scholarship. That was the short part of the conversation. I had figured it would be.
The thing was that I needed a scholarship that would get me out of my house, away from my mom, away from the hood, and most of all, away from the crap that was going on in my head every day. Mr. Ramey was right. It didn't do any good being smart. If you were smart and if the world had been right side up, then you would be rewarded for being smart. But the way the world really worked, the way it went down especially when it came to dudes like me, was that you had to walk a path to show you were smart, and it didn't have anything to do with what you had in your head or in your heart. It had to do with what you scored on tests, the grades you got, and what grades they could send to a college.
It was a struggle for me to stay in high school. My dad was living somewhere on the Lower East Side, drugging himself to death, and Mom was struggling with a string of cheap jobs that never paid enough to get by on. She was depressed and about a heartbeat from giving up. I had seen her like that previously. Before my father steppedâback when he was really reaching out to herâshe had withdrawn inside and hidden away from the world. My father couldn't take it and moved out one Friday evening. Mom had cried herself to sleep for the next few days and then went even deeper into her shell. She had even talked about killing herself.
Up until then, I had done well in school. When crap came my way, I just pushed back and got by it somehow. It got harder. I had to look out for my brother, and for Mom as well. Then I just wanted to be away from the whole set.
At first I began to think of myself as a bird, flying high over the rooftops, or even a plane just passing from LaGuardia Airport on its way to Europe or Africa. But then, as the anger rose in me, I started thinking of things I would like to do to people who messed life up, who could take an ordinary day and turn it into something nasty and screwed up. That was when I began to think of birds of prey.
Twig didn't know it, but he kept me sane. In my darkest moments, when I was feeling really, really shitty, I could think about him and his running and feel better about life. It was always good to see him smiling and trying to win his races. He had talent, so winning was possible. And if winning was possible for him, I felt I might cap a break, too.
There is a slithering in the grass. The movements of the shadowed patterns are almost invisible in the small patch of bush, except from where I hover far above the earth. On the other side of the patch, a small brown animal moves away from the green carpet and along the winding edge of a stream. It is a paca. The paca stops near the base of a tree and lifts its head to sniff the heavy, humid air. Suddenly it stops, frozen in the moment, listening to whatever is moving through the dewy grass. The paca feels a sense of doom, knowing that whatever it is that moves so silently will surely kill it
.
Then a diamond-shaped head arises, hesitates for a moment before it resumes its tracking, looking for a meal. It is a moment too long. I begin my flight downward, faster and faster, my eyes fixed on the colorful skin of the snake, which is now free of the tall grass
.
My downward flight turns into a dive as I fold my wings. I am a streak across the gray Andes skies. I am a black dart screaming to the earth. I am death
.
And now I strike. My talons just behind the head, crushing the flesh within them. I lift my wings and rise as the snake thrashes wildly, its tail swinging around my legs. I strike the head, pulling the flesh away from the small skull
.
We go up and down, no higher than the height of the paca that stands transfixed against the high grass. I tear away more flesh, this time from the eyes
.
This time from the skull that breaks beneath my beak
.
The grip around my talons eases. It is over. I have my meal
.
All is well
.
I am living on the dark side of the moon. Pretending to be in another place, sometimes another time, and always in another light, I walk among my friends and the people I know as if everything is as it should be. Nothing is as it should be.
One of the things that scare me, that wake me up in the middle of the night, is that I am too conscious of my thoughts. It's as if there is a talk show in my head that I'm constantly watching. I wonder if everyone has a talk show in their head. Or if they have voices laying out their future.
Never mind my address. Never mind that my mail comes to 145th Street, or that I live in a place called Harlem. It is really the dark side of the moon. In the mornings, I walk past guys a little older than I am. They stand on street corners or fill up the old gray stoops on my block and watch the world go by.
“They're not smart,” Twig said when I mentioned them. “Half of them didn't even finish high school.”
What I know is that it doesn't matter if they did or didn't finish. High school doesn't mean anything anymore. If you want to invent your own life, you need to have more than a high school diploma.
The school I go to, Phoenix, is the old Powell School at 128th and Amsterdam Avenue in Harlem. Red bricks are piled on top of red bricks to make an old New York building. Behind us, on what was once called Old Broadway, an overhead train whines and creaks its way through Harlem. A short distance away, the George Bruce branch of the New York Public Library squats like a homeless woman with many stories to tell and few ears to give them to.