No Place Safe (26 page)

It was true I hated the school 95 percent of the time, but I didn’t know where Ma got this idea that I was about to lose it.

“You think I’m crazy just because I’m not all the time happy about the school?”

“A mother knows.”

A mother snoops, I realized, especially one who made a living of it.

“You’ve been looking in my journal.”

I was taking a creative writing class that semester and the teacher made us keep a daily journal. It made my day when she left comments like “you have some obvious talent” or “nice use of alliteration” in the margins. Mostly I wrote poetry about racial injustice because I was at my militant stage, using English class to note the inequity of using
black
as a descriptive for bad, like
black list
, or
black sheep
,
and white to make bad more acceptable, like
white lies
and
whitewash
. I noticed on those manifestos there were never any comments in the margin. I also wrote angst-filled poems about how I hated school and my life, with lines like “I’m afraid that when I’m gone, no one will remember me. I’m afraid that I am lost, please take my hand so I won’t slip away” that made my teacher write on that entry “you’ve got to hang in with the hard part” and call me to her desk after class to ask if I was okay. These must have been the lines that made Ma think I was crazy.

Ma looked at me trying to figure out whether she should lie or just come out with it. She decided on the truth, although she tried to justify herself first.

“Anything in this house is my property. I pay the mortgage around here. And I’m the mother—it’s my job to make sure I’m doing the best by you.”

“So yes, you’ve been sneaking into my journal.” I wanted to add that some months when money was tight, I helped pay the mortgage, too. But I didn’t dare.

“I don’t
sneak
into anything that’s in my house.
My house.
Believe me, between you playing sick to get out of school and all that depressing talk in your little diary about being ‘miserable and lost,’ this is a good idea. Your grades are down this year, too. I’m not so busy with the investigation that I don’t know what’s what. If the load is lighter, going to public school might actually help you get your grades up so you can get in to a good college. Besides, I’m tired of you blaming everything wrong in the world on that school, especially when it’s costing a few thousand a year for you to be there.”

*

The list of victims grew quickly in March. Altogether, five people went missing, and three were found dead. April was no better, with another disappearance near the end of the month. All those who went missing in March were found dead in April. By mid-April, the official number of Missing and Murdered Children was twenty-six.

It seemed the bodies were coming faster than I could keep up with. After a while, it was just expected. I woke up in the morning and wondered if anyone would go missing that day. Would Ma tell me that a body was found in some river, some stand of trees not far from a road where people went about their day like any other, while across town some mother was crying because the cops had just left her door after giving the news? At dinner, would she tell me that some mother is angry because here comes Ma again with her questions?

The last three victims to go missing in March, and the victim who disappeared in April, were adult men, young but still men: twenty, twenty-one, and twenty-three years old. They were included on the Missing and Murdered Children’s list because the medical examiner and the cops determined that with one exception, the adult victims had the physical appearance of children and because the MO
was similar. Twenty-three-year-old Michael McIntosh was only 5’4” and 115 pounds. The murderer probably thought he was picking up a child.

The South River and the Chattahoochee had become a favorite dumping ground for the killer because he could easily stop along a bridge at night and throw the bodies over. As in the beginning, the killer was still just throwing bodies over bridges and down embankments as if the boys’ lives didn’t mean a thing at all, as if there wasn’t some mother or father or friend somewhere trying hard to remember the last thing said between them. Probably something small and everyday because they never expected it to be the last time, and they hoped that whatever the words were, they weren’t angry or hurtful or disappointed words.

As the body count grew in April, so did my mother’s fear. The Task Force agreed with the FBI profiler who suggested one or two copycat killers might have committed some of the more recent murders. How could they catch two or three killers if they’d been unable to catch one?

*

Cassandra and I sat on the big boulders that the people who lived in our house before us had put in the front yard, beneath some white pine, oak and dogwood trees. Our property was fairly big, like all the other houses on the street, and it took creativity to fill so much space when you couldn’t afford landscapers. So mostly we just had old trees that were there long before the house was built in the fifties, which kept the house cooler in the summer, but created more fallen leaves and pine needles come autumn than we could ever seem to rake up. Around the boulders we had planted pink azaleas the color of dime-store lipstick, bright and noticeable.

I would have rather played basketball with the boys down the street on a pretty spring day like that one, but Cassandra never played basketball or softball (nor dodgeball and kickball when we were younger). She always complained it was too warm and she didn’t want to sweat out her hot press and get all sticky after just taking a bath. She was far more girly than I, which I thought was a wasted effort since she didn’t have a boyfriend.

“I don’t need a boyfriend to look nice,” she’d tell me, a fact I didn’t appreciate until I was well into my twenties. 

We watched Bridgette and Latrice doing cheers on Latrice’s driveway, clapping hands and stomping feet in time with the cheers.

Latrice sang, “Latrice is red hot, Latrice is red hot, Latrice is r-e-d red h-o-t hot, once I start I can’t be stopped, Latrice is red hot.”

Bridgette answered with, “Well my name is Bridgette, hello, hello. And I’m a sexy sexy Capricorn, hello, hello. I’m a sing and shout, hello, hello. Until I…turn it out.”

“What do eleven-year-olds know about being sexy and red hot?” Cassandra asked, and we both laughed. After a while, they went inside, taking away our entertainment, so we just watched the occasional car go by and hoped someone would walk past and provide some excitement.

“Maybe we should check on Latrice and them. They’ve been in there too long and too quiet.”

“And them” was only Bridgette, but that’s what we used to say regardless of how many people we were referring to. The way
y’all
was mostly used for plural, but it could be used in the singular, as well.

“As long as they aren’t burning down the house, let them be. I get tired of seeing after Bridgette all the time.” Only briefly did I consider my own close call with burning down the house. I was feeling lazy, and didn’t want to leave the cool spot beneath the trees.

“I know that’s right.”

Like me, Cassandra had to look out for her younger sister because there was only her mother and that’s what happens when you’re the oldest and there’s only a mother. Sometimes knowing each of us was in the same boat made things better for us, though Cassandra didn’t know all the things I did about dead children and a mother who sometimes doesn’t even come home at night anymore, so Cassandra got to be a kid more often than I did.

Just then Latrice came running out of her house, Bridgette running behind her, both of them screaming.

“Sandra, Sandra!”

“Oh Lord, what now?” Cassandra and I both talked like old women when we had to take care of our sisters, though we didn’t notice it then.

Latrice’s hair was wet, and some of it she was holding in her hand, which wasn’t a good thing because she didn’t have much to start with. Bridgette was holding a bottle of Nair.

“What did y’all do?” I asked.

“A girl at school said Nair makes your hair grow faster,” Latrice wailed, likely waking dogs all over the neighborhood.

“Didn’t ya’ll read the bottle?” Cassandra asked. “It’s for taking hair off.”

“But the girl said it works the opposite on head hair,” Bridgette offered since Latrice was bawling and couldn’t defend her poor decision.

Even though the tears were coming fast down Latrice’s face, Cassandra and I looked at each other and burst out laughing at the same time. Then we went inside to see what we could do to save the rest of Latrice’s hair.

Ma checked me out of school after fourth period and we were on our way to the new school I’d chosen. It was in Garden Hills, a neighborhood just south of Buckhead. Though I had no intentions of leaving the private school willingly, I figured if Ma forced me, I’d better spend some time choosing the right school. There were only two schools in the Atlanta system that were in affluent Northside neighborhoods, and I picked one of them.

I told Ma that I was interested in their magnet program, international studies. To appeal to her interests, I reminded her that it was in the same district as the middle school Bridgette would be going to next year, so I could meet her school bus and she could ride home with me on MARTA. Ma wouldn’t have to worry about picking her up, or as was happening more often, begging the mother of Bridgette’s friend to let her spend the night because she couldn’t get away. It was happening so often that Bridgette took to keeping extra clothes and a toothbrush at her friend’s house. I didn’t tell Ma the real story about my selection because it shamed me to think it—that I believed I was safer in places where white people lived in mansions and drove European cars.

When we pulled in front of the school, I realized for the first time that there were varying degrees of rich and white. The school was ancient, a single large red-bricked building that I was certain had been built a few hundred years earlier. Had I arrived at the school straight out of the West End, I’d have thought this place was heaven in comparison. It sat at the end of a quiet residential street in a neighborhood just two blocks off bustling Peachtree Road. Ancient white oaks, a clue on the age of the school, provided shade and there was a large grass yard out front. But I hadn’t come straight from the West End, so I only noticed that the grass wasn’t so green and had plenty of brown spots mixed in. There was no great swath of a soccer field. There was a single building from what I could see—no separate library, no tennis courts, no series of buildings connected by breezeways and courtyards, no weeping willow
–
canopied creek running alongside the property.

We arrived while classes were in session so the halls were empty. I noticed there were only half lockers, not the full lockers I was used to, meaning there was a chance I’d have to negotiate with someone each time I wanted to get into my locker. Paint peeled from walls, and the concrete steps between floors were cracked in places. I was certain the hallways smelled faintly of urine. A passing teacher gave us directions to the guidance counselor’s office.

I was in a school office with Ma for the second time in a month, more times than there’d been in the past two years. While Ma made introductions for us both, I realized I was more nervous here, even though there was no one to give me sermons or hand down punishment.

“I’ve been looking over your transcript,” said the guidance counselor, who appeared to be eighty if a day. “I think you’ll do well here. Because you were required to take eight classes per semester at your old school and we only require six, you’re on track to graduate nearly a year ahead of schedule.”

Two things struck me besides wondering why she hadn’t yet retired: she spoke as if it was a done deal, referring to my “old school”; and she was a good salesperson, aware that a promise of an early parole would appeal to most any kid.

“Now that sounds promising. A chance to get a head start on college and your future,” Ma said with a level of cheer that sounded foreign. She’d turned into June Cleaver between the car and the building. Different school, different agenda, different mother.

“I spoke to your mother on the phone, but I’d like to hear your reasons for transferring to our school.”

“I don’t have any. My mother has all the reasons.” I stole a look at Ma, and her expression told me to drop the smart-ass attitude, so I did. “It isn’t final that I’m transferring, but I’m not sure I fit in so well at my current school.”

“Yes, your mother told me there was an issue with the homogeneity in the student body over there.”

“That’s one way to put it.”

“Well, I think you’ll find a big difference here. The minority-to-majority program has ensured that we have students from all over the city, including some from your school district. Our racial makeup between black and white is fairly balanced, and with our International Studies magnet program, we attract students from many different cultures. Our English as a Second Language program is the largest in the school system.”

The old woman was a talking brochure, and I wondered why I was getting a sales job. I knew why they did it when I first visited the private school—they had to justify a parent spending half the price of a sub-compact car each year. But in public school, I thought the city would just say, attend or don’t, your call. I liked the idea of the counselor pitching the school as a place that wanted me, rather than a place I should want to be.

I answered the counselor’s questions, surprising myself that my feigned interest had become real by the end of the interview. Ma continued her TV mother impersonation right down to our goodbye, which happened just as the halls began to fill with kids heading for last period. The counselor had been right about the student body. There were faces ranging from Scandinavian light to Nigerian dark and all the hues in between, including mine. Languages other than English were being spoken in front of lockers. There were no uniforms to get just right, no priests patrolling the halls with a ruler in hand to measure the length of plaid skirts. No class stratification made obvious by the quality of shoes, or the authenticity of Lilly Pulitzer Bermuda bags, or the number and type of stones strung on Add-a-Bead
necklaces, or the car emblem key chain dangling from Jansport backpacks. For the first time since we’d discussed public school as a real possibility, I thought maybe Ma’s suggestion was a good one.