Robbie Forester and the Outlaws of Sherwood Street (2 page)

Bbbbzzzz.
The buzzer buzzed. Game over. Thatcher 19, Welland 18. A buzzer beater? I’d just won the game with a buzzer beater, like in the kind of daydream fantasy I didn’t even have anymore, at least when it came to sports. The kids were around me now, pretty pumped, although not too pumped, which seemed to be the Thatcher way.

We went into the locker room. In my old school, PS 501, the Joe Louis School, there hadn’t been a locker room—the kids made do with the bathroom near the gym—but the Thatcher girls’ locker room was nice, with a steam bath, individual shower stalls, fluffy white towels.

Ms. Kleinberg patted me on the back. “Nice job,” she said. “More, more, more.”

“Um,” I said, giving Ms. Kleinberg a careful look.
Now that the excitement, what there’d been of it, had died down, I had a chance to think,
Hello? That beam, red and gold? Anybody?
But nobody said a word about it. Meaning no one else saw it except me? Whoa.

“No foul?” said Ashanti, kicking off her shoes. “Is he blind or something?”

“That’s life,” said Ms. Kleinberg, handing her an ice pack. “Have a good weekend, everybody. Practice Monday.” She went into her office.

Ashanti sat in front of her locker, dropped the ice pack on the floor, gave me what seemed like an angry look. “An elbow in the head is life?”

“Does it hurt?” I said.

“What do you think?” said Ashanti.

Ashanti was intimidating, but a question I thought was important had occurred to me, so I pressed on. “Does it feel kind of like a tiny electric ball?”

Ashanti squinted at me in a scary way. “Huh? Is that supposed to be funny?”

“No,” I said. “No, no.” I moved to my own locker, which looked out of focus, meaning my vision was back to normal. I took out my glasses and put them on. Very cool glasses from the Smith Street Eyeware Boutique, one of the coolest opticians in Brooklyn, which probably meant in the whole world, but I hated them. Other ophthalmologists handed out contacts left and right. How
come I got stuck with Dr. Singh? And as for the red-gold beam, either some new eye screwup was in the mix, or I’d imagined it. What other explanation was there? No one had seen it: therefore, not real. The imagination played tricks on you. That was one of my dad’s big beliefs. He was writing a novella about it, or possibly a memoir.

I closed my locker, glimpsing my face in the mirror that hung on the inside of the door. Nonna—the name for Grandma that my grandmother on my mother’s side had finally chosen for herself, after tryouts for Mummymum, Nana, and Gretchen (her given name)—had gazed at me on her last visit (she lived in Arizona and didn’t visit often) and said, “She’ll be a beautiful woman, one day.” Kind of a mystery who Nonna had been addressing, since there’d been just the two us in the room, but that wasn’t the point. The point: was this supposed day coming anytime soon, the day of my beauty revealed for all to see? No sign of it yet. I clicked the combination into the locked position and was turning to leave when I felt a strange warmth in my pocket. I reached in and took out the braided bracelet. The tiny silver heart was more than warm—in fact, almost too hot to touch. My locker was near the heating vent: maybe that was the explanation. But that silver heart was kind of pretty. I slipped the bracelet on my wrist.

Home was two subway stops away, but it was a nice day—nice for winter, meaning sunny, not too cold, and none of that wind funneling through the gaps between buildings and down the streets, like icy invisible streams—so I started walking. Twenty-two blocks—twenty-five if I took a detour past Joe Louis—from the edge of one cool neighborhood, where the adults looked a lot like my parents, through the main portion of the walk where they did not, and finally to the edge of another cool neighborhood, mine, where they did again. The difference wasn’t skin color—Ashanti, for example, lived practically across the street from me—or the manner of dress, although that was part of it; it was more something else, some attitude thing, much harder to define.

I passed some nice brownstones, the fixed-up kind with freshly painted trim, nothing crumbling, plants in the windows. Two nannies stood in front of one of them, each push-pulling on a stroller, back and forth, back and forth, in a machinelike way. The babies slept, one drooling, one not. Then came a grocery store with brightly colored fruit in the window, all arranged in neat rows. I crossed the street to the first block where walking at night wasn’t a good idea, passing a boarded-up building, a warehouse, an old greasy sofa in the gutter. A veiled woman with just a little slit to see through went past, her
dark eyes lighting on me for a moment. Rowdy boys on bikes blew by, fluttering the veiled woman’s robe. My backpack got heavier—there was homework at Thatcher, lots—but I turned left at the next corner and took the detour anyway. Not that I liked going by Joe Louis, exactly; it was more a matter of just being drawn to it.

It was past dismissal by the time I reached my old school, a brick and glass building of no distinction, very different from Thatcher, which was a grand nineteenth-century affair on the outside, bright and modern on the inside, thanks to the work of a famous architect who was also an alum; there were lots of famous alums from Thatcher.

Some of the kids from my neighborhood got sent to private school right from kindergarten; others made the switch later—third grade, maybe, or fifth. But the plan had always been for me to be a public school kid from start to finish; my parents believed in public schools. “Just wait,” some of their friends had said. I’d heard that plenty of times. My parents had waited and waited and then been in the very last group to cave. Nothing I said or did had budged them, and I’d thrown everything I’d had at them, emptied out the cupboard of bad behavior. “Your friends from Joe Louis will still be your friends,” they’d told me. Which had already turned out to be false. And “Don’t worry—you’ll make new friends
at Thatcher.” Which hadn’t happened yet, most of the Thatcher kids having been there together for years. Didn’t mean it wouldn’t happen, I told myself, stopping by the chain-link fence and gazing through at the small, paved school yard with its single backboard, no net on the basket, windblown trash and broken glass heaped in the corners.

No one was shooting hoops. There was only one person around, a kid I’d seen in the halls. What did they call him? Tut-Tut? Yes, that was it, on account of his stutter. He’d arrived from—Where was it? Haiti?—two or three years before, a scrawny kid with modified dreads and a sweet face. Right now he was squatting down on the pavement just a few feet from the fence, drawing with chalk. Tut-Tut didn’t seem to notice me at all; I could feel his concentration. He shifted around a little, and I saw what he was drawing.

Hey! It was beautiful: a red bird, maybe a parrot, with a green head and yellow eyes, so lifelike that it looked as though it could actually fly off the pavement at any moment.

“It’s great,” I said.

Tut-Tut glanced up, startled. He almost tipped over backward.

“Is it based on a real bird?” I said.

Tut-Tut’s mouth opened, and his lips moved a bit, like he was forming a word, but no sound came out.

“Or did you just make it up?” I said.

“N-n-n-n-,” said Tut-Tut. “T-t-t-th-th-th-th…” He went silent.

“It’s real?” I said.

“T-t-t-t-th-th-th-th-the b-b-b-bb-bb-bbb-bbbb-bbbbb-bbbbbb…” He went silent again, took a deep breath, and nodded yes.

A real parrot, meaning it had a name, maybe a parrot he’d seen in Haiti, or even kept in a cage. I had lots of follow-up questions, but I didn’t have the heart to watch Tut-Tut trying to answer them. Plus, that strange pressure ball thing in my head was back, not electrical and powerful like on the basketball court, more just letting me know it was there.

Tut-Tut licked his lips. “W-,” he began. “W-w-w-w-w-
w-w-wh-wh-wh—”

The pressure thing grew. And the more Tut-Tut tried to say whatever it was he wanted to say, the stronger it got. “W-wh-wh-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha—” Now I felt the electrical component, and my vision started going funny. My imagination playing tricks? I took off my glasses, watched the world grow clearer.

“Wh-wha-wha-wh-wh-wh-w-w-w-w…” Tut-Tut gave up.

And the moment he gave up, my vision began deteriorating back to normal. The pressure in my head vanished. I put on my glasses. If this was my imagination,
it was suddenly getting good at tricks. The streetlights went on.

“I better get going,” I said.

Was I coming down with something? I took off my glove and touched my forehead; it felt cool. And in fact I felt fine all over, head to toe, the way you do after running around for a while. There were also growing pains to factor in: lots of possible explanations for something that would probably never happen again. “Anyway, cool bird,” I said.

Tut-Tut grunted.

I walked off. A block away, waiting for the light to change, I felt the silver heart. It had heated up again, but now cooled quickly under my touch. The light changed. I glanced back. The school yard was empty.

I
t was almost fully dark when I turned onto my street, climbed for a couple of blocks, and reached the top of the slope. The western view opened up: the river, which still somehow had a glow to it, like it was clinging to daytime; the Brooklyn Bridge, looking like it was built of lights alone; Manhattan. A million-dollar view, which was probably an underestimate. People said a million dollars weren’t what they used to be; maybe it would be better to go back to when they were. But that was off topic, the kind of mind wandering that kept me from being a straight-A student, according to my first-term report card, or getting any A’s at all, the grading at Thatcher turning out to be much stricter than at Joe Louis.

The best part of the view, in my opinion and maybe mine alone, was how it disappeared behind the nearby buildings slice by slice and piece by piece on the way
down the other side. Hard to explain why, and also off topic. I headed down the street, passing Local, the new cool neighborhood bar, and Zimmy’s, the used-to-be-cool neighborhood bar, then Au Boulot, the bistro that had been cheap until it got a great review, I couldn’t remember where, and Monsieur Señor’s, the coffee place where my dad sometimes worked when he got sick of being alone at home. And there he was at one of the window tables, espresso cup in front of him and laptop open—although he didn’t seem to be working, instead was talking to a guy at the next table, also with espresso and laptop. He saw me, smiled, and waved me inside. I went in—the air always so different from ordinary air, like landing on planet Coffee—and walked over to Dad’s table.

“Hey, there,” he said. “How was your day?”

“Good.”

“Shep,” he said, turning to the other guy, “this is my daughter, Robyn. Robyn, meet Shep van Slyke.”

I shook hands with Shep van Slyke, remembering too late that maybe you were supposed to take off your glove first.

“Shep wrote that book you loved so much when you were little,” Dad said.

“
One Snake, Two Snakes
?” I asked. An important book for me: it had taught me how to count, for one thing, and not to fear snakes, for another.

“No, no, no,” Dad said. “The one where everybody’s a baker.”

“
Too Many Pies
?” I said.

“Yeah.”

I turned to Shep van Slyke. He was watching me kind of intently, like… like, was he waiting for me to say something about
Too Many Pies,
some kind of compliment?

“Um,” I said, no compliments coming in time.

Shep van Slyke blinked. “I’m a fan of
One Snake, Two Snakes,
too, Robyn,” he said. “And—”

“Robbie.”

“I’d be interested in what you liked most about it.”

“The pictures, I guess,” I said. “I really liked your pictures, too,” I added, which was true, although for some reason the story in
Too Many Pies
hadn’t grabbed me. Not even the story, so much, but the… what was the word? Started with
C.
I couldn’t come up with it.

“My pictures?” said Shep van Slyke.

“In
Too Many Pies.
”

“I didn’t do the pictures.”

“Oh.”

“Just the text,” he said. “And the concept, too, of course.”