At-Risk (18 page)

Kim nodded. She felt silly for remaining in the doorway, yet she wanted to climb onto the couch. She wanted to be held again. She left the apartment quickly, knowing that if she remained she would only embarrass herself.

Kim got on the local and switched at Broadway East New York to the express. There was nowhere for her to sit on the train. She leaned against the doors, bracing herself, and read the same ads above the rail. Half of them were in Spanish. The other half were offers for invisible braces, good foot doctors, chiropractors, and legal attorneys offering to sue for malpractice. A Chinese man selling batteries, gum, and whistles moved through the car soliciting customers.

During the train ride, she made a mental promise not to get into a fight with Malik. She hated fighting in his tiny room with the thin
walls, knowing that everyone in his house could hear. He wasn't a bad father. He loved to spoil the baby when he had the money. Already Danielle had two pairs of tiny gold earrings, one pair of small hoops and one pair of studs. She had a small gold bracelet. He'd even had her and the baby's name tattooed on his arm. But he was no good when it came to making steady payments or bringing routine supplies. He couldn't seem to figure out why one box of Pampers was not enough for the summer or seem to understand how fast a baby's feet could grow.

Malik kissed her and complimented her outfit. He led her past his siblings seated around the living room and drew her into his bedroom. He had a tiny box fan in his window; it hummed and blew hot air into the room. Before she sat down on the bed, Kim glanced at the mirror above his bureau. Taped to the upper left corner of it was a snapshot he had the nurses take of him, her, and the baby in the delivery room. Kim was holding the baby in her arms and Malik was leaning down beside her with an arm draped over her shoulder. Kim looked past the chubbiness of her oily face and focused on the way the three of them looked complete, like a real family, in that picture.

“I see you've still got that picture up,” Kim said.

“My two ladies,” Malik said. “Always.” He showed off his right arm, flexing it for her, making the dark ink and cursive letters that were her and the baby's names jump. He always did it to make her laugh.

For a while, they talked as they listened to songs on the radio. He talked about work. Then he asked about the baby. He grunted when Kim told him about all the crying, but when she started to ask for money, he rolled over on the bed and closed his eyes. He said, “You're always coming over here for money.”

“Where else I'm supposed to go?”

“Don't start, Kim.”

“Why I gotta be starting when I ask you to take care of your daughter?”

He turned back around to face her. “You think I don't want to take care of her? Do you even see all the people living in this damn house? How you think they eat, Kim? How you think they pay the rent? How you think I get to stay here? I got to put money into this right here to make sure I got a roof over my head before I can go throw some money at you.”

She hated how he did that, took her words and talked them into a way that made it seem like she was the selfish one. “She's your daughter,” she said.

“I know that. And this is my family. If I say I ain't got it, I ain't got it. What, Kim? Do you think I got a stash of money lying around here and I'm hiding it from you? I ain't got it, and I wish you stop coming over here asking for shit I ain't got!”

She got off the bed. “Fine, then I won't come no more! You don't never have to worry about us!”

There were tears in her eyes that she didn't want him to see. She turned her head and smoothed out the creases in her skirt.

“Don't get like that,” he said. Malik stood up and went to her. “But how you think I feel, knowing you coming on over here, knowing what you gonna ask me, knowing I got to say no again and have you look at me like I ain't shit?”

“I didn't say all that,” she protested, sitting now on a corner of his bed, far away from him, tucking her hands under her thighs. “I just can't do it by myself.” She could force him to pay. Her mother and sister had told her about her options. She could take him to court, garnish his checks, have him be ordered to pay child support. But then she would lose him. She'd have money coming in for her daughter, but Danielle would lose her father. If he felt all he had to do was pay, then that was all he would do. He wouldn't be in their lives. Kim had seen her friends take that route and the kids were the ones
that really lost out. Besides, she didn't want any bad feelings between them. She hadn't thought about how it would make him feel to have to say no. She only knew what it felt like to hear it, then have to go back home and face the knowing eyes of her mother and sisters.

“We could get our own place,” she whispered. “Then it would just be our bills. Nobody else's.”

He didn't try to hide his amusement. “You not even eighteen. Can't put your name on nobody's lease.”

Kim nodded. She bit her lip and fixed one of her curls that had begun to wilt.

“Look, can we just not think of this for a while?” he asked, tugging on her leg.

“No,” Kim said. “I ain't come here for that.”

“Okay.” He took her hand and drew light circles on her palm. “Okay.” Then he moved closer to her and began to kiss her until she forgot why she had originally come.

Kim got off the train and changed her mind about heading home. Without knowing she was going there, she found herself at the park.

Rashida was seated on a bench across from the kiddie swings reading out loud from a small white book. She held the baby on her lap; the stroller stood nearby. For once, the baby wasn't crying.

“Hi.”

Rashida looked up from the book. “What are you doing here? Don't tell me that after all that Malik wasn't home?”

“He was there,” Kim said. “I just came to get Danielle so you could study.”

“I told you it was all right. I have my notes—”

“I just wanted her.”

Rashida faltered for a moment, sitting stock still with the baby. Then she smiled brightly and said, “Hey. That's fine. I mean, she's
yours, right? You can have her whenever you want.” Rashida handed the baby over and gathered her belongings. As soon as Kim held her, the baby started to cry.

Now that she was alone with the child, Kim didn't know what to do. Most of the time, someone else was always around, watching her. Now the pressure was off of her for just a moment. No one was looking over her shoulder.

Kim changed the baby's position and held her under the arms, lifting her high. Kim wiggled her a little so that her tiny feet swung in the air. The crying stopped.

“You like that,” Kim said. “Hey.”

She realized that she was holding the baby incorrectly and brought her back down. She put her hands around the baby's waist and lifted her back into the air. She did it swiftly and the baby began to gurgle and make nonsense noises.

Kim brought the baby back down and held her out at arm's length so that she could look her over. All this time she had thought there was more of Malik in the child than herself. But now she could see traces of her features shining through. It was the eyes. They were hers. A dark, dark brown that made the pupils hard to see. There was a little bit of her in her daughter. She could see herself. Kim touched her daughter's cheek with a finger and smiled into the eyes that were like polished black mirrors.

The baby was quiet now, but curious. Rapt. Her eyes followed Kim's every movement. She brought the infant closer and inhaled, smelling the warm baby scent of powder and new, new skin. The baby reached for her hair and Kim laughed, feeling like the two of them were the only two people that had ever been in the world. And they were only now just meeting.

Kiki didn't have anything smaller than a twenty on him at lunch-time. He'd pulled out a roll of twenties and fifties and told Stephen to meet him at the park when school let out. Stephen had never seen so much money on someone his own age. And even though he knew he was supposed to head straight home, he agreed to meet at the park.

When he got there, he went straight to their spot, a stone house at the edge of the playground that all the kids called the White House. Stone turtles, dolphins, horses in midgallop were scattered all around the park, but the White House was where the boys played spider, where the couples did it, where the teenagers played handball, and where he and Kiki met.

That afternoon, they had it all to themselves.

“Look what I got.” Kiki had a bag full of fireworks, Jumping Jacks, cherry bombs, Butterflies, Ashcans. It wasn't even the Fourth of July.

“Oh snap, where'd you get those? Did you go to Chinatown?”

Kiki was smug, “I got my ways, Steve. I even saw
The Spearman of Death
.”

“For real? The one with the Five Deadly Venoms?”

“No, for fake, Mama's boy,” Kiki pushed him and laughed.

“I'm not.” But even to himself, it sounded whiny.

Stephen imagined Kiki—short, pudgy, and Puerto Rican—riding the subway up to Chinatown, buying fireworks and rice candy, and maybe even taking in a kung fu flick, a real one with the English badly dubbed over. He wished he could have gone. Just thinking about all the things that his mother kept him from doing got him upset. He was almost twelve and still being treated like a baby. If it weren't for Kiki, he'd never get to light any fireworks. His mother was too worried he'd blow his fingers off.

His mother was too worried about too many things. She was worried about where they lived. She didn't like Bed-Stuy. They lived on a block with nothing but brownstones. Even though they didn't live in the projects, she said it was still the ghetto. The boys that lived on the block and in the surrounding area worried her. The way they grew up and took up residence on the street corners and glued themselves to the pay phones, rigging them so no one else could use them. The way they wore their jeans so low that they seemed to hang off their narrow behinds. And the way they carried pagers and cell phones as if they were doctors and lawyers even though they had no jobs and nowhere to go. She worried that those boys or boys just like them would kill him. One day, she said, they would turn around and shoot him straight through the head if he said the wrong thing.

But he knew that she was wrong. The older boys were his friends. They looked out for him. She worried over nothing and made him look like a punk in the process.

“I'm not a mama's boy,” Stephen said this time without whining. “I'm
not
.”

“Be cool, Steve,” Kiki said.

They started out behind the kiddie swings. Kiki pulled the Jumping Jacks out of their thin red paper and left the dozen twisted together. He lit the whole pack at once and they watched as it leapt into the air, each firecracker straining against another, ready to dance, each side fizzing and glowing orange, yellow, and green.

“Yo, that was fresh,” Kiki said.

“You gonna waste them, doing them like that.”

“It's plenty more where that came from. Chill out. Scaredy.”

“I'm not!”

“Then follow me,” Kiki said as they began to walk away, kicking paper bags and crack vials out of their path. Kiki stopped and watched a group of girls playing rope from a distance. “Isn't that that
puta
Maribel you tried to talk to?”

“Yeah, that's her,” Stephen said, not sure what a
puta
was. She was playing double Dutch with two girls he didn't recognize. Her back was to him and he lost his train of thought for a moment as he watched her denim cutoffs sway back and forth to the rhythm of the rope she was turning.

“—a lot of nerve turning my boy down. I'll show her she can't play with my homie like that,” Kiki was muttering. He reached around in his bag until he pulled out a stink bomb.

“Get behind that tree!” Kiki shouted as he lit and tossed the stink bomb at the girls and scampered out of sight.

“Yo, why'd you—”

Kiki was doubled over with laughter, “Stop frontin'. You know you thought that was funny.”

He tried to deny it, but as soon as he opened his mouth, he started to laugh hard. It
had
been funny to watch the girls. They had started sniffing the air and before they'd realized it was a stink bomb, the girls had all stared at Maribel with disgust, as if the smell came from her. Red-faced, Maribel dropped her end of the rope and ran.

“Bet you wish you coulda did it yourself,” Kiki said.

He wondered how Kiki knew. Stephen had tried to dance with Maribel at her birthday party twice and she'd turned him down. He'd written her a note, asking her to go steady with him and she'd shown it to all the girls in their class at lunchtime. When he'd seen the note wafting through the cafeteria, covered in chocolate milk stains, he
had
wished for some sort of divine hand to come down and smack her silly. But he hadn't done anything himself. It felt good to see her get humiliated for a change.

Kiki pulled himself together, “Damn, I almost pissed myself from that. Serves her stank ass right.”

“Stank ass!” they both screamed with laughter.

They heard the Mister Softee ice cream truck a block away and Stephen realized he was late. The ice cream man always came down their block between five-thirty and six, when he judged the parents would be home to give their kids money. “Oh dip, I gotta go,” he said.

Kiki gave him a pound, “I got a little more work to do first. I see that
pendeja
Rosario over by the swings. I got something for her.”

“I thought that was your girl?”

“I dumped her. I started going with Tiffany yesterday. Come by my house tomorrow after school.”

“I don't know. I'll try.”

“She's bringing her girlfriend Wanda over. She'll heal your broken heart.”