The Kid (8 page)

I’m flying now like Michael Jordan across the aisle, over those beds, number one, two, three, four Omar, five Malik, six my bed. Why I’m so stink panicked I don’t know. Ain’ nobody gonna hear that stupid little motherfucker. Shit, nobody never heard me.

I lay down go to sleep. Huh? Huh? What happened? Are you crazy, motherfucker? Nothin’ happened. From inside my sheets I shout, “Shut up, asshole! We tryin’ to sleep!” And I really do wish he would shut up, his crying getting all mixed in with my good feeling of . . . of being a king.

 

 

SUNDAY WE SIT
in Mass by dorm assignment. Same thing after in the cafeteria for breakfast. What I’m getting at is, you just do as you’re told, sit where you sit, ’cause that’s it. So anyway, I carry my tray of cornflakes, orange juice, milk, and pancakes (’cause it’s Sunday) over to the nearest of the tables we spozed to sit at. Like plunk, I put the shit down. I’m not scheming or nothing. I just sit down. Across from Jaime.

The pancakes are one of the few really good things here. On every table is a little stainless steel pitcher of maple syrup. I put some butter on my pancakes, pour some syrup, look over at Jaime who act like his eyes is chained to his plate or some shit. He’s grabbing his fork tight. Not moving.

“Eat up, dude,” I tell him, cut my pancakes, they tastes good. What’s wrong with this dude, he ain’t eating his pancakes. “Come on, dude, you don’t want your food to get cold.” My plate’s empty. “Shit, give ’em to me you don’t want ’em. You can have my cornflakes.” He pushes the plate toward me without even raising his head. “You sure, dude?” I say. “These some good motherfucking pancakes. I don’t know why you don’t like ’em.”

He push the plate the rest of the way across the table. I push the cornflakes in front of him. I’m not really that hungry anymore, but I put some butter and syrup on the pancakes. Jaime raise his hand. To be excused from the table we gotta raise our hands, then one of the brothers come over and we say some shit like, I’m finished, Brother So-and-So, may I be excused to go to the gym or the library, or wherever it is you wanna go.

Brother John come over to the table with his big weird-looking ass. “What’s going on here?”

“Huh?” What’s with this motherfucker, ain’ nothin’ goin’ on. Brother John look at the plates in front of me, Jaime’s plate of pancakes and my empty plate with just a few drops of syrup on it. Then he look at Jaime’s simple ass sitting there holding on to his fork like it’s money with two little boxes of unopened cornflakes in front of him.

“I said what’s going on here?”

I don’t know what he’s talking about.

“Nobody’s got a tongue here?”

“I gotta tongue.” Fuck this faggot.

“So use it to explain how it is you have two pancake plates in front of you and Jaime doesn’t seem to have eaten at all.”

“He didn’t want his pancakes, so he gave ’em to me,” I say, “and I gave him my cornflakes.”

“Is that right, Jaime?”

All of a sudden, Jaime start crying like some bitch. Drop his fork and just you know start boo-hooing. His little curly head going up and down. His whole body is shaking. What’s wrong with him! Brother Bill comes running over to the table and scoop Jaime up in his arms. I wish it was me. I don’t know Brother Bill, everyone say he one of the “nice ones,” whatever that means.

“There, there, Jaime. It’s alright,” he says, and walks out the cafeteria with Jaime in his arms. Brother John and everyone else is just staring at me.

 

 

MONDAY WE’RE REVIEWING
Unit One in earth science.

“J.J.” Brother John always calls on me. I’m the best in the class, I don’t know if I’m the smartest, there is a difference, but I
am
the best. I look in Brother John’s blue eyes that sometimes remind me of the sky but this morning remind me of the painted turquoise bottom of the swimming pool that time I was wading through the warm chlorine-smelling water right left right left step step. And I went too far and the bottom disappeared. I screamed panicked, gulping down water. Panic. I feel panic now hearing Jaime sob. But when I blink and pull my eyes away from Brother John and glance over at Jaime, he’s not sobbing, he’s smiling at me, waiting for me to answer the question, staring at the board where Brother John has written:

I remember my first day here four years ago. Brother John was holding my hand. I wasn’t that scared but I
was
scared, sad too. I thought about my mother every day back then. The class was quiet, it was different from public school, everybody had on a white shirt and a black tie and black corduroy pants. No girls, just boys, who cares, I don’t like girls anyway, no one does until you’re grown up. I never had a girl who was my friend. And it was
bright,
all the lights was on, not like in public school, half the lights out. Everybody was doing something, a lot was going on, but it wasn’t noisy. “Attention please!” Brother John hollered. “I want everybody’s attention. We have a new boy today, Jamal Jones, J.J.” He turned to me. “What do you like to be called, Jamal? J.J.?” J.J., I told him. “OK, everybody say hi to J.J.” Two or three kids say hi and then everybody goes back to what they were doing.

“Omar.” He calls a fat kid almost as tall as me. “Show J.J. around the room, why don’t you.”

Omar immediately goes over to the rabbit’s cage, which is in the back of the room where the sink is and where some boys are doing some kind of experiment with potatoes and some other boys are looking in microscopes.

“Come on!”

I’m afraid of rabbits but more afraid Omar will find out I’m afraid. Omar reaches in the rabbit’s cage where LeRoi Rabbit—that was his name, he’s dead now—is sitting surrounded by pale green lettuce and pellets of doo-doo, or maybe that’s his food, I’m not sure. His eyes are red. Omar grabs him by the neck like you do a cat.

“Here,” he says. “Touch him. He likes people.”

I was sweating, but I made myself touch him. His fur looks fat and fluffy but underneath he’s skinny and trembling. He’s scared! Somebody gonna jump me, maybe all of them, or slap me like Batty Boy. Thinking about that my ear inside my head start ringing. Are they laughing at me?

Omar puts the rabbit back in the cage. “Wanna see the turtles?” he asks, looking at the turtles, reaching back to latch the rabbit cage shut, but before he can do it LeRoi jumps out the cage! Then Brother John leaps from his desk, swoops down, and grabs LeRoi by his ears, and it seems like in one step he goes from the front of the room to the back and throws LeRoi in the cage and locks it in one motion! The class giggles nervous all together like they’re one boy instead of twenty.

Omar don’t pay them no mind and tries to hand me a turtle.

“Show him the wall, why don’t you, and then come back to the turtles and then go over to the rocks.”

I didn’t know then Brother John was a geologist. This school didn’t have reading groups like my old school—High Alligators, Beavers, and Cobras. Everybody was in a cluster depending on what their class project was and everybody read hard stuff and easy stuff too, the same. Omar told me later he was keeping up for the first time in school. Omar hands me the turtle and takes me over to the mural.

“Jaime, Amir, you want to come over here and help Omar tell J.J. about the mural.”

The mural takes up half the wall. Amir, who turns out to be Omar’s cousin, is one of the biggest kids I ever seen in fourth grade, he’s fatter than Omar and taller than me. And Jaime is one of the littlest kids I ever seen to be in the fourth grade.

Amir points to the mural. “We painted that. The building is the Schomburg Library, and the man in the middle”—he points to a face in the middle of the building, a dark, heavy man with wavy hair—“that’s Arthur Schomburg, and all the faces floating in the sky around the building is famous people that’s in the Schomburg.”

Amir starts reading the words underneath the mural:

“That’s how the Schomburg Center got started, man!” the little guy Jaime screamed. I didn’t know then he was gonna be my friend. I wanted to say back,
I know,
but I just ask, “What’s bibliophilia?” I wanted to ask,
What’s the mythology of racism?
too, but I realize they probably don’t know either. What’s on the Internet is complicated and true. I know they got this from the Internet, that’s how we did at my old school, we got a name and then went to Google and read it and then print out what’s the best for our reports.

“A bibliophile is a person who collects or has a great love of books,” Brother John answers my question. “Do you love books, J.J.?” I shrug my shoulders. What kinda question is that, what kinda school is this?

Omar takes me over to the turtles. I’m looking at the faces floating in the sky on the mural, Charles Drew, Zora Neale Hurston, John Perry, and Crispus Attucks. I heard of them before. I even been to the Schomburg before, I think, I’m not sure. Omar hands me a turtle. That’s where they got Langston Hughes. I know stuff, these boys better not be thinking I’m dumb. I was in High-A reading group in my old school. Batty Boy thought I was a girl, dumb. I’ll show these boys. My ear does its funny buzz buzz. They better not mess with me. Nuh uh! Not here!

“J.J.!” Brother John has grabbed my arm. “Open your eyes! Let the turtle go! You’re going to squeeze him to death! What’s wrong with you!”

Confused, I look up at Brother John and open my hand. Omar is making little circles with his finger and pointing to his head.

“I . . . I was just holding him.”

“So tight!”

“I didn’t know I was holding him so tight.”

“Why did you close your eyes?”

“My ear was hurting me—”

 

 

“Huh?”

“Huh!
We’re waiting for you, and you’re daydreaming!”

I look up and Brother John is tapping a piece of chalk on the board beneath where he’s written
The Four Branches of Earth Science.
OK, OK, I get it.

“Oceanography, geography, meteorology, and astronomy,” I snap.

“
And
describe two events that occur in each branch.”

In the seat in front of me, Bobby Jackson looks at the clock, shifts in his seat, and closes his book. What he do that for?

Brother John looks at him nasty and mean. “Well, Mr Jackson, since you seem so impatient today, perhaps you can answer the other half of the question.”

Bobby looks at him, real pain on his face, he is not faking. He couldn’t answer the question even if he
had
been listening, he’s like, DUH, stupid for real. The silence Bobby should be filling with the answer gets big. Way past big. But I ain’t gonna say anything, I ain’t gonna dis Bobby.

“Well, Mr Jackson, let me ask you where it is you’re in such a hurry to go to.”

“The bathroom,” Bobby says. Everybody laughs.

“While you’re there, read chapters one, two, and three and have the answer Wednesday when I call on you. Class dismissed!”

On my way out the door, Brother John asks me to stop by his office before I go out to next period.

 

 

THE PICTURES HANGING
in the halls here is mostly dead niggers or faggots like Martin Luther King and astronauts and shit. But Brother John’s office got pictures of Alonzo Mourning, Shaq O’Neal, Dikembe, Michael Jordan, Dennis Rodman, Magic, Kareem, and some other back-in-the-day dudes I can’t name, motherfuckers way way before my time. For a fraction of a second, a thousandth, no, a millionth of a second, I see Brother John’s pale pink penis shining in the fluorescent light coming from the window over my bed. It’s the only window in the whole room, only thing it looks out onto is the parking lot. He’s sitting on my bunk and someone who looks like me is on his knees in front of him. “Gimme some luv,” he’s saying. I exhale hard, nothing like that could happen in front of everybody, why asinine shit like that is even in my head to think.

Brother John is supposed to be a special guy. He was abandoned at birth and raised by a black foster mother in Harlem. La-di-da, how about that! He get up, cock his head to the side in assembly, and say shit like, “I know these mean streets.” To himself he sounds like a nigger, to me he just sounds wacko. I don’t hate him like I do Brother Samuel, but I don’t like him either. Sixteen, I’m outta here if I make St Ailanthus Boys’ Prep Program upstate. Brother John said I probably would. Five from out each junior class from each school in the diocese get picked. I’m gonna be one of them, I think.