At-Risk (11 page)

“Now,” Ma said. “What do you see?”

Julian looked at me like I was one of those jigsaw puzzles he and our father could spend hours on, slapping me away anytime I tried to point to where a certain piece should go. My face tingled under his inspection.

“I see Joseph. I see my brother,” he said solemnly. Then he began to chew on his lower lip. My mother nodded and waited for me.

“I see my brother, Julian,” I said and shrugged.

“That's right,” she said. “You're the two men of the house now that your dad is gone. You're brothers—blood—and you're all each of you has in this world.”

She squeezed tightly on both of our arms and said, “Don't ever forget that.” There was an urgency in her voice and her grip that we couldn't understand. It seemed so important to her that we answered and said the right thing. I couldn't know that she was preparing us for the hard times to come, that she was trying to both protect us
and make us immune to the things beyond our apartment that would strive to pull us apart.

They began to whisper things about my brother right before school let out that summer. It suddenly became a big deal that Julian had never had a girlfriend when Sasha, a girl in Julian's grade, spread the word that he didn't like girls. Older boys picked on us whenever they saw us around, calling my brother Julie and calling me Josephine. Boys my age that I had previously run around with suddenly wanted to know if I had cooties and if I had caught them from my older brother. No one would let me tag them or borrow their skelly caps and no one would ride the handlebars of my bike. By the end of the summer, I knew that the whispers were fears and confirmations that Julian was what the boys at school called “funny,” what my mother called “nasty” and what the adults referred to as “that way.”

I was too young to understand the various modes of defense we all set up to safeguard ourselves from looking too closely at my brother. I knew only that the kids were shunning him and that their disdain for Julian was trickling down to me. So I turned my back on him, too. That was the summer I began to venture out past our streets and projects, trying to see what was up in the areas close to us. I was an inner-city anthropologist checking out the locals. That summer, I became fascinated with the kids who lived near Livonia Avenue by the three train and with the boys that played in King Park. I was looking for people who didn't know me, who didn't know that Julian was my brother. I looked for ways to avoid him without appearing to do so. Before, I had enjoyed our late-night horror show marathons, but now I threw tantrums on the evenings our mother would go out to midweek service and leave Julian to watch over me. I didn't know what it meant to be
that way
, but I knew that boys who had once eaten paste with me now brushed themselves off and crossed their fingers if they came into contact with me. I didn't know
if what Julian had would rub off on me. And I didn't know if it was temporary like the ringworm I had caught once or permanent like our mother's diabetes.

We were in the candy store on Pitkin and Van Siclen, a block from our house, getting Italian ices when a crew of boys from the first projects came in and saw us. None of them had their shirts on. Their nappy heads were beady with water, their scrawny chests slick with it, and their swim trunks were wet all the way through from spending the afternoon running through the fire hydrant on Bradford Avenue. Their swim trunks had no pockets, which meant that they had no money and no reason for being in the candy store. Except for us. I was hoping they weren't there for us.

They were.

Will's face broke into a grin. “Hey, look what we got here,” he said. “A couple of girls buying ices. Hey Julie. Hey Josephine.”

We kept our backs to him and waited to be served. I could feel the boys moving behind us, forming a semicircle and fanning around us in a crescent moon of brown bodies. I made sure not to step back into their arc.

Derek called out behind us, “Hey Muhammad give me one, too. Put it on my tab. I ain't got no money.”

The man behind the counter said, “You never have money and you never get tab here.” All the boys laughed.

Malcolm said to Derek, “That's all right. You don't want him to serve you after he just finished with them homos.”

“True that,” several boys said. Their voices blended into one large chorus so that I could no longer pick out the individual cadences of their voices and think of them singly.

“Hey Muhammad, you might wanna think about that before you do it,” one of the voices called out behind us to the Arab man at the counter as he started to scoop cherry ice from a gallon canister.

“Don't do it, man!” said another.

Someone said, “You could be making the biggest mistake of your life.”

“Hey Muhammad, don't be giving that homo no ice cream, man,” said one of the voices behind us. It sounded like a boy I knew from the third projects named Kyle, but I hadn't seen him come in with the group. I wondered when he had come in. I no longer knew just how many of them there were behind us and I was too scared to look and see.

Another voice said, “Hey Muhammad, you better be careful who you sell to.”

And another, “Yeah, you might get a reputation for selling ice cream to homos.”

The man behind the counter looked up, unsure of what they were talking about. He was used to all our bullshit, the way we called him Muhammad without bothering to learn his name, the way we asked how many wives he had, and the way we always asked him if there was pork in the ice cream. But something in their voices triggered him off to the underlying seriousness beneath the joke and warning. The joking had stretched to include him. He straightened and relaxed his hold on the metal ice cream scooper. “What are you all talking about? I don't want trouble here. None of you boys' bullshit now!” he said in his thick accent, suggestive of caravans and savannas.

One of the boys shouted, “No, no man! No bullshit.”

This time I recognized Will's voice: “Nah. For real. Didn't you know you got two homos in your store?”

“Homos?” the man behind the counter asked, his accent distorting the word until it sounded like
hummus
.

“Homos,” Will said, distinctly, perfectly. “Don't get upset, man. That word probably wasn't in your English-Arab dictionary. Homos.
Homos
,” he said. He stepped out to the side of the semicircle. I could see him from the corner of my eye. He pushed his rear end out and
pointed to it. He made a circle with his right hand and pushed his left index finger back and forth through it at the same time. He made a face, closing his eyes in ecstasy. The boys behind him joined in with a chorus of, “Ooh! Ooh baby!”

“Homos,” Will said. “And I don't wanna eat in no establishment that caters to homos.”

One boy threw out, “Yeah, unless you gonna give him a double dip!”

Laughter broke out behind us, the guilty forced laughter that erupts in groups where each person has something to hide. They
had
to laugh. Whoever didn't would be next. The man behind the counter had resumed fixing our ices. Yet when the thread of laughter spooled toward him with its implied threat, his left hand—the one that held the scooper—slowed its scraping motion across the top of the hard-packed gelati. He stiffened, lowering his hand until the scooper fell from it.

The man behind the counter's face turned red. His eyes swung to us. “You boys are brothers, no? You buy ices? You have money? You give it to me now!” he said. He had never before demanded payment first.

“Look man, we got your money,” Julian said toughly. “Just like we always do. Now you give us our ices and then you get your money.”

“Let me see the money. I don't want no games,” he said, his eyes sliding back and forth between us and the boys who circled us.

Maybe Julian realized the futility of fighting. The longer it took for him to give us our ices, the more boys passing by saw the commotion and crowded in behind us. There were already too many of them to count now.

Julian turned to me. “Give him the money, Joe.”

“Yeah Josephine, let's see the money,” someone said.

“Give him the money, Joe,” Julian urged.

“It better not be no Monopoly money,” said another.

“Just show it to him! Give him the damn money,” Julian said, teeth clenched.

Will shouted, “Show him the money!”

Then they all picked it up. “Show him the money! Show
him
the money! Show him the
money
!” they chanted behind us as they jostled each other.

“Show him the money! Show
him
the money! Show him the
money
!” The chant became louder and louder as they closed in the half-circle behind us and got closer and closer.

“Show him the money! Show
him
the money! Show him the
money
!” They sang tirelessly as if they would never stop. Their voices, jeering, slurring, rang out behind us, louder and closer until their voices seemed to be directly in my ears.

“Show him the money! Show
him
the money! Show him the
money
!” An arm brushed the back of my hand, a knee slid past my leg. I couldn't step back for fear of them. They were closer than close.

Then Will broke the chant. “Are you sure you wanna take his money, Muhammad? I mean, you don't know where they hands been.”

They stopped chanting when Julian screamed, “Joe! Just give him the money!” Julian's voice had risen to a high-pitched strain. His cry, intended to be heard over their chanting, rang out in the stillness. Julian's cry hung in the air between us, disproportionately loud, separate, afraid. His voice seemed about to break. I imagined his vocal cords being stretched out like those exercise rubber bands, about to pop and snap. I had forgotten about Julian there by my side, so lost in the voices singing to me. His brown eyes were wide, frenzied, wild. I could see the whites of them.

They heard Julian's desperation and fed on it. They changed their chant. “
Give
him the money! Give him the money! Give it to him!” they sang, closer and closer.

“Just give it to him or hand it over to me,” he whispered. “Please.” He stuck his hand out at me. I studied his palm. It had a short life line. It was callused over from playing too much basketball. I couldn't put the money in it. Those boys were behind me, close close close. I could smell them now. The funk of their triumph mixed in with the smell of sweaty skin cooled over by the hydrant's water that clung to their bony arms and chests, rolling down their ashy legs in small beads, collecting in the bottom of their sneakers, making that clucking, squeaking sound as their heels met the squishy insteps of their sneakers and clung to them, rubbing and giving off that faintly sick aroma of dampness, sweaty socks, and rubber. That smell was up my nose and down my throat, becoming part of me. I squeezed my fist on the dollar I was holding. The dollar in my hand was sweating. It burned my palm. I couldn't give it to Julian. I couldn't hand it to the man behind the counter. I couldn't move at all. I was stuck there with the voices, with the smell, with the song and chant, with the closeness that trapped me. I felt the weight of all their eyes on me, boring into my back, heavy enough to snap my neck.

I had to get out.

I threw the crumpled bill on the floor and ran through the crowd of boys, all who quickly backed away so that they wouldn't have to touch me. I ran out the store and down the street, leaving my brother behind.

I ran until my chest began to burn. When I stopped I was down by where the J and Z trains ran above the streets down Atlantic Avenue. I vaguely knew that Maxwell's Bakery was near in one direction and that the McDonald's was not far in the other, but none of the streets themselves looked familiar. I had come to a place outside of my neighborhood. I was where no one knew me as Julian's brother or knew that he was
that way
. I thought of that moment in the store and felt all of my anger at Julian return. Anger at my brother and fear of the thing that he was and hurt that he had
not pulled me to the side and told me but made me find out from everyone else—all of these feelings filled me as I slowly made my way back home, kicking every can or bottle in the street that I could find. I hated him for what he had done to me. He'd made me think that we were blood brothers, that we were close, like two heartbeats beating in tandem. But it was a lie. How could we be when he was what he was?

“Where's your brother?” my mother asked when I finally slunk back into the house. Her back was turned to me as she washed dishes in the sink.

“I don't know. I don't care. Probably out there sucking somebody's dick, that nasty ass homo.”

“What?” she asked, turning to me with quicksilver speed. “What did you just say, Joseph?” she asked me, carefully, neutrally. I could have heard the slyness in her voice if I had chosen to listen, but I began to repeat what I had just said without thinking when her heavy hand came out of nowhere and caught me across my mouth. The tiny diamond of her engagement ring nicked my cheek from the force of the blow. I staggered back, feeling the burn and sting of the air making contact with the fresh blood that rose to the surface of my cheek.

“You not too old to be beat, you know.” She grabbed me by my arm and pulled me back to her. I knew what was coming next, but I couldn't believe that she would dare. She dragged my struggling body over to the kitchen table and managed to pull out a seat for herself. “Let me go! Get off me!” I said, kicking my feet out to loosen her hold on me.

Her voice was deadly calm when she said, “You had better be still.”

She sat down and pulled me on top of her lap. I knew better than to talk back or even act like I was trying to resist, but I wasn't about
to be humiliated by a beating. “Let me go! I ain't do nothing!” I said, squirming once again.