Street Pharm (22 page)
Authors: Allison van Diepen
I rolled my eyes. “I told you not to call me that. Everybody’s going to think I’m Jewish.”
“So? Nothing wrong with that, is there?”
“ ’Course not, but—”
“No butts. Only asses. So where we going, Ju? Don’t tell me you cutting. Not Miss DiVino. You got a sub in Howard’s class?”
“Actually, she sent me to see the dean.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I’m serious. It’s because I said in my speech that God wasn’t a man and didn’t have a package. She got upset.”
Black Chuck burst out laughing. “I got you. Well, if they gonna suspend your ass, I’ll walk you down there.”
“You’re so sweet.”
He dropped me off outside the office. As he walked away, I shouted over my shoulder, “Your pants are falling down.”
He shouted back, “Damn right they are!”
The dean’s office was a large space with about a dozen orange plastic chairs and several connecting rooms. It used to be guidance central, but the admin switched the offices when they realized that more students needed suspensions than programming advice.
I’d always felt sorry for the poor suckers who got sent here. Today I was one of them, along with a hot Hispanic guy who sat outside Dean Hallett’s door.
The guy lifted his eyes, meeting mine. I looked away quickly, sitting down two seats away from him. I felt him giving me a once-over before looking back down at his iPod.
Just my luck, Hallett was on duty today. She was the strictest of the deans. I took a deep breath, wondering what she’d do to me.
The guy didn’t seem worried. He was nodding his head to his music.
“Is it too loud?” he asked, removing one of his earbuds.
“No, it’s fine,” I said, without looking at him.
I was hoping he’d put the earbud back in and go back to minding his business, but he kept looking at me. “So, you in trouble or something?”
“Well, I
am
in the dean’s office.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. I’m just here to get my ID card.” I glanced at him. His smile was smooth, easy.
“Not me, unfortunately.”
“I feel you. I’ve been at the dean’s office myself a few times at my old school.”
Okay, so I had to ask. “What school’s that?”
“You wouldn’t know it unless you know Detroit.”
“Detroit, huh? I hear that place is gangsta. Guess you won’t have trouble getting used to Brooklyn.”
“No trouble at all.”
“How’d you end up in Brooklyn?”
But he couldn’t answer, because that’s when Hallett’s door opened. She was a heavyset woman with the shrewd eyes of a criminal prosecutor.
“Hi, Eric. Come on in.” Her eyes landed on me. “Was there something I could help you with, Julia?”
“Uh, well . . . Ms. Howard wanted me to speak to you.”
“All right. I’ll see you in a few minutes.” She let Eric into her office and closed the door.
I sighed. Wait until she found out why I was there.
M
y best friend, Q, begged for the 411 on the bus ride home. She already knew about my trip to the dean’s office and that I’d been spotted talking to a hot guy.
We took the special bus that stopped outside the school. It was convenient, and we both knew it wasn’t smart to hang out at the bus stops on Nostrand Avenue. There was always drama going on, and we didn’t want to be part of it.
“You’ve got to be kidding. Not
literally
one minute.”
“I’m serious. One and a half, tops. I told her what happened and she said to try to be less controversial next time so Ms. Howard won’t get upset. That’s it.”
“She must like you.”
“She likes
us
.” I smiled. “ ’Cause we’re cornballs.”
Q laughed. We weren’t cornball honors students, but we weren’t totally mainstream either. We fit somewhere between the gangbangers and the nerds, though we weren’t really sure where.
In a school run by gangs, staying out was harder than joining. But Q and me had made a pact in seventh grade not to join any gang, and we’d stuck to it. There were a few different gangs represented at the school: Real Live Bitches and Real Live Niggaz (Blood connection), Hands Up (Blood connection), Sixty-Six Mafia (Crip connection), Flatbush Junction Crips (Crip connection.) We knew who our friends were and were careful about what we said. If people thought we were haters, it would only be a matter of time before we got jumped.
Q had mocha skin and a wide, mobile mouth. She had a great figure, petite but with boobs, which got her mad attention. Her skin was good too, despite the occasional zit in her T-zone.
Q’s name was actually Latisha Stairs, but over the years it went from Latisha to Queen Latifa to Queen and now just Q.
“Wanna come over?” Asking her was a daily ritual. Unless she had dance class, she came over to my place for a couple of hours pretty much every weekday. I liked the company, and she
liked the downtime when she didn’t have to deal with her mom or her annoying younger brother and sister.
Q always had to be home for dinner at 5:30 p.m. on the dot or her mom would go into her speech about young people not respecting their parents. The lecture was the same every time with little variations she’d picked up like “You should’ve seen that mama backhand her child in the grocery store—you be glad I ain’t taking to you like that,” or “Her child missed dinner one night, and she was pregnant and not a day above fourteen.
Fourteen
, do you hear me?”
Yeah, that was Q’s mom. Her dad was a firefighter in the city, but since her parents were divorced, she only saw him every month or two.
We got off the number 44 at the corner of Nostrand and Flatbush and jaywalked to my apartment building opposite the projects. On bleak days, it looked gray and depressing as hell. Today, with the September sun gleaming off the brick, I was almost proud of where I lived. Most of my friends lived in much worse.
I dug into my jeans and fished out my key.
The DiVino crib was pretty stylin’, with a black leather couch and love seat, an oval glass coffee table, cream carpeting, and an entertainment system, to which my dad had added a fifty-inch flat-screen a few months back. By the front window was a desk
with a computer. Dad thought I needed the most up-to-date technology to do my homework; he didn’t know that I spent most of my computer time on Facebook and YouTube.
Q had barely entered the crib and found the Doritos when she asked me to tell her more about the guy in the office.
“His name’s Eric. He’s from Detroit. That’s all I know.” I chose not to mention that I wasn’t exactly sweet to him right off the bat. Q thought I self-sabotaged when in the vicinity of good-looking guys.
“Is he a junior?”
“I don’t know. He looks more like a senior.”
“Well, you’ll have to find a way to talk to him again. Maybe he’ll be at the dance Friday night. I hear he’s so fine.” Her eyebrows went up and down. “Mmmm . . . ”
“As if! Don’t look at me like that.”
“Let me guess. He ain’t your type?”
“Right.”
“You always say that, Julia. Chill. Not every guy’s like Joe.”
I stared at her. She knew not to bring him up. She knew mentioning that asshole could put me in a bad mood for the rest of the day. She just didn’t know the whole story.
“Sorry, Julia.” She licked the powdered cheese off her fingertips. “I’m just saying. It’s time you made an effort to find a guy.”
“I’m not
not
making an effort.”
“Good. So you cannot
not
make an effort Friday night at the dance.”
“Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t.”
Q crunched some more, grinning.
Allison van Diepen is also the author of
Takedown
,
Snitch
, and
Raven
. She teaches at an alternative high school in Ottawa, Canada. Visit her at allisonvandiepen.com.
Also by Allison van Diepen
TAKEDOWN
SNITCH
RAVEN
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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This Simon Pulse paperback edition September 2013
Copyright © 2006 by Allison van Diepen
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The text of this book was set in Adobe Caslon Pro.
Library of Congress Control Number 2005933468
ISBN 978-1-4424-8166-4
ISBN 978-1-4391-2032-3 (eBook)
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