At-Risk (12 page)

“Oh yes you did! Don't never let me catch you saying something dirty like that again! Take your belt off and hand it to me.”

“No.”

My mother cocked her head to one side and appraised me, looking me over. “Oh really? So you wanna make this more difficult than it needs to be, huh?” she said as she held me down. She slid my belt through its loops with a vengeance and yanked it free so that she could beat me with my own belt. She nudged my shorts and briefs down. A shock of cool air hit my buttocks and I squirmed harder. Until I got the first taste of the belt. It sliced through the air and hit my naked skin so hard my whole body leaped up. Her hand pressed down hard into the center of my back to keep me still. “I didn't raise you to talk filth and I don't wanna hear no mess like that never again! You know what you said is wrong. Why you say something like that? About your own brother?” my mother said, in between whacks from the belt. Her voice was louder and harder than the sound of new leather on nine-year-old skin.

“I can say whatever I want. It's true!” I screamed.

“It's not true!” she yelled back.

“Sasha said so! Everybody said so! It's true. Everybody knows,” I said, my voice rising higher as my face began to overheat. I knew what was coming, but I couldn't stop it. And I hadn't cried since I was a little kid.

“I don't give a damn who said what and who saw what!” She ignored my evidence and whacked me again. “They lyin'!” she said, her voice reaching a feverish pitch and telling me what she needed to believe was true.

But I kept on, “And now they say it everywhere we go! Everything he does means something now. And me, too! They say me, too! And Julian … he won't do or say nothing! He just stand there and
let them say—” Then it came. I couldn't stop it. I started to cry as I told her what happened in the store. The hot tears that I hadn't cried when my mother told me my father was gone, tears that wouldn't come when we went to Grammy's funeral last Easter, tears that knew better than to appear whenever I fell off my bike and ripped my skin open or burned my fingers with firecrackers, those tears now all came in a rush, falling on my mother's lap in dark little spots that spread and dampened and darkened the material of her dress, squeezing out from a tight knot in the center of my chest, pushing up through my ribs, crowding my throat, threatening to choke me if I couldn't cry them fast enough, forcing me to gulp some back in order to breathe.

“So you
left
him there?” she said and whipped me harder. “I don't believe you! Sitting here crying and caterwauling about how
you
feel. He's the one they was picking on! How you think
he
feel, knowing his own brother ain't got his back?” she said. Then she laid the belt gently across the backs of my legs and gave me two sharp stinging slaps with her hand, “
This
is for talking back and
this
is for not listening to me when I tell you to do something. Now get up and fix your clothes.”

Her eyes were dead when she looked at me. She said, “I don't know how you could be my son. You must be your father's son. Just run when things get a little tough. Too scared to fight it out, too caught up in your own self to see somebody else through.”

“You the one told us not to play nasty,” I said, reminded of the beatings we'd get when girls ran home and said we'd tried to play doctor with them or when we were outside with the rest of the boys trying to see who could pee the farthest.

“But I also told you that you and your brother got to cling to each other 'cause you all each other got, Joseph. I don't care if Julian run up and down Pitkin Avenue naked for nothing except a cow bell. I might not like it or approve, but I don't abandon him. 'Cause he's
my son. My life's blood. And he's your blood. You don't never turn your back on your brother. On your blood. No matter what. You hear me?”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said, drying my eyes with the backs of my hands.

“Good. Now get out my face,” she said and handed me back my belt. I knew better than to snatch it. I took it carefully and walked stiffly to my room and threw myself face down across the bottom bunk. I heard the sucking sound of water down the drain and knew she had unstopped the sink.

“And you can finish these dishes before I get back,” she said. I didn't ask her where she was going and she didn't volunteer any information. I heard the slam of our door and the three locks being snapped into place.

The sky turned dark long before they returned home.

I was waiting up for them in front of the living room
TV
, watching the late late show when I heard the key in the lock.

My mother didn't say a word. After she checked first in the sink to make sure I had done the dishes, she marched Julian to the kitchen and heated up the leftovers from dinner for him. As she put a glass of juice and a plate of food in front of Julian, she shot a look over his head at me. That look was a warning and a reminder, both an encouragement to go talk to my brother and a threat of another beating if I didn't. When I got up from my place on the floor and made my way into the kitchen, she walked away and left us alone.

“Hey,” I said as I sat down at the table with him. He looked long at me with wounded eyes, pleading for me to say more. These were the eyes that had scrutinized me that night Mama made us look so carefully at each other. I wondered what he had seen that night and if it had prepared him for a night like this. Either I had not looked closely at Julian or I had not looked long enough because I had not
seen this, this thing that would separate us and divide us, that would breed ignorance, bravado, and fear. I had only looked to see myself in his eyes. I had looked at him to see my future, my face in a few years, what I would become. I had not seen him at all. Now that I could see, I had no words to take it back. We stared at each other for what seemed like hours. Again, neither of us wanted to be the first to look away. Finally, Julian turned his back on me, cutting me with firm dismissal. He downed his juice in one gulp and picked up his plate of food and went to our bedroom with it. He slammed the door, and in a minute, his boom box blared and drowned out whatever I could have thought to say.

By the time Julian emerged from his room, I was halfway through
Tales from the Crypt
.

He dropped his dishes in the sink and ran water over them while I pretended to be engrossed in the film. Just when he was about to walk away I leaned closer to the television as if I couldn't take my eyes off of what I was watching. “Oh snap,” I said, knowing that Julian would hear me. He tried to see what I was looking at, and when he couldn't see the screen, he came into the living room and leaned himself up against the wall near the light switch. “What you watching?” he said, asking as if he didn't care.

“
Tales from the Crypt
,” I said.

“What's this one about?”

“Some boogieman something,” I said. To tell the truth, I couldn't even remember what the story was or which kind of creature this one was about. Before I started deserting him that summer, Julian and I used to catch every scary flick that came on. And we never missed
Tales from the Crypt
. When I was younger, before I learned to distinguish between creatures from the black lagoon, werewolves, boogiemen, the living dead, ghouls, and vampires, I called all the monsters boogiemen. The name stuck.

“Where were you for all that time?” I asked.

“Out.”

“Why you ain't come back till just now?”

“Didn't feel like it,” he said.

“You all right?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.”

“How is it?” Julian asked, edging closer to the living room, keeping his hands in his pockets.

“It's all right. Nothing special.” I stopped breathing. Sitting there with every body part tensed, I was wondering if he had forgiven me.

“Scary?”

“Nah.”

“How many people got killed so far?”

“None. Nobody ain't even dead yet.”

“That's weak,” he said, sitting down on the couch beside me. He took an end of the thin blanket I had spread across me and yanked some more to his side.

“Yeah,” I said, letting out my breath.

During a commercial, the sound of our mother's loud breathing came to us from down the hallway, where she had fallen asleep with her bedroom door open, trying to eavesdrop on us and see if we had worked things out. Briefly, before the show came back on, I wondered if she had known or just merely hoped that everything would turn out all right. I decided that it didn't really matter. Then I looked at my brother across from me, wearing the face I would one day inherit, a face that was our mother's and father's and mine and yet, I realized, a face that was also his and his alone. A face I had to respect, even if I could not understand it or read it.

Now we were like always. Sitting on the couch with the thin blanket spread over our knees, ready to throw it over our heads
during the scary parts, peeking over the top so that we could see and not see. The film had finally started to get good. The monster was catching people left and right. I was clutching my corner of the blanket in a death grip, tensing when the music sped up, flinching every time I expected the monster to strike a blow. As always, it became so real to me that I felt like it was me running through the woods screaming even though there was no one around for miles to hear. And no one to save me. My heart was in my throat. Then I remembered that my brother was there with me. So I turned to him and whispered, “Ju?”

“Yeah?” Julian peeked out from under the covers, the bottom half of his face lost in the blanket, scared just like me until he saw me looking at him. He dropped the blanket like it was on fire.

“You scared?”

He shook his head, the trace of a smile evident. “Nah,” he said. “Ain't nothing to fear.”

The girls on Lexington had it the worst. Hated maroon skirts the color of dried blood. Navy blazers complete with gaudy emblem. Goldenrod blouses with Peter Pan collars. And knee socks. Actually, knee socks weren't so bad. Knee socks served their purpose in the winter, keeping sturdy calves warm.

The girls on East End wore gray or navy skirts, plain and not pleated, with a white blouse, sweater optional.

Multiple skirts were another way to go. We had our choice of navy, gray, maroon, and an unpleated light blue seersucker meant only for the spring. The choices allowed us to pretend we weren't really wearing a uniform. We hoped merely to be thought eccentric. Girls with a penchant for skirts with panels. But we fooled no one. Our uniforms, our talk, our walk, our avid interest in grooming and normal people's clothing, and our daily preoccupation with what we would wear on upcoming field trips when allowed to be out of uniform filled our time and conversations. We had a special way of standing that was part lean, part slouch, as if posture was too much of a bother to consider.

Nameless, faceless on a school trip, we stood out. Solid-colored blouses, pleated skirts, knee socks, and loafers, bluchers, or oxfords. Private school girls. Not to be confused with Catholic school girls. Or reform school girls (how many times did the kids in my neighborhood look at me in condescending pity?). Not to be confused with the girls from
The Facts of Life
. They were boarders. No matter how many times I tried to explain this, the kids in my neighborhood persisted in calling me Tootie.

We attended a second-tier all-girls school. It wasn't as illustrious as the private schools on the Upper East Side nor as seedy as the ones in Midtown. We clung to our small but unique differences. For example, having our choices of uniforms made us the envy of the other all-girls schools. Girls were sure to take it out on us during soccer games. Secondly, there was our partnership with a nearby all-boys school, our “brother” school two blocks away, which allowed us to have kissing partners whenever we put on a play.

At school, there were the
WASPS
and the
JAPS
. And me. Girls with last names for first names. Riley. Taylor. Haley. Morgan. Hayden. Girls whose names are meant for a boy or girl, depending.

I'd never told anyone this, but I always felt naked in my pleated skirt, vulnerable. There was a trick to rolling the skirt that would take several inches off, a way of folding tightly and minutely that would allow one to hide the extra material beneath a shirt if tucked then pulled out just enough to camouflage the extra bulk. Only I didn't know it. I'd seen it numerous times, jealously watching girls enter the bathroom with skirts that covered their knees and walk back out with skirts that skimmed their thighs, but I still couldn't get it. The lines of my pleat were never quite right, always drooping in the front, making me look slightly off kilter.

It was lunchtime and I was in the school's bathroom with my stomach bared to the mirror as I tried to roll my skirt when Taylor and
Ashley entered and headed for the stalls, deep in conversation. Neither of them noticed me.

“Well, I wouldn't go with a guy from Buckley, that's for sure.”

“I might not get to go at all. We're supposed to go to the Hamptons and my dad really has his heart set on it. How am I supposed to get out of it?”

“I don't know. I so need a new pair of jeans. Do you want to go to the Gap today after we get out of chorus?”

“Um, yeah. Hey, did you hear Heather's parents let Chase go to Cabo San Lucas with her for spring break?”

“No.”

“They even paid his way.”

So caught up in eavesdropping on their conversation, I didn't hear the squeal of the bathroom door the second time it opened. Heather walked in alone and went straight to the mirror. She frowned slightly when she heard herself being discussed. Then she went into a stall near theirs.

“Who said that?”