Ola Shakes It Up (8 page)

“Not if you're me,” I said seriously. I'd seen Anna Banaster
twice since homeroom and both times she'd kept her distance. Just like everybody else at this school, I thought.

“Well, who're you?”

I looked at her, surprised. “I'm just Ola.”

The girl looked me up and down. “Well, that doesn't sound too scary to
me.”

I stared at her. This girl was strange. For a second I wondered if I had finally run into the class weirdo.

“So what's it like?”

“What's what like?”

“Roxbury. Everybody says you moved here because it was too dangerous there. Gangs and shootings and everything.”

“My neighborhood was a good one. Just because we don't have huge houses and schools with swimming pools doesn't mean good people don't live there,” I said hotly.

The girl shrugged. “So okay. Sorry.”

“We moved here 'cause of my parents' jobs,” I said loudly. “Anything wrong with that?”

The girl shook her head and was quiet for a moment. Then she stood up. “Well, I better be moseying along now. I have to patrol the schoolyard.”

I stared at her, annoyed but almost sorry she was leaving. As stupid as her questions had been, at least she had clued me in to what was going on with Daphne and Diane and all the stares Aeisha and I had been getting. It wasn't just 'cause we were black or the new kids here. The whole school probably thought Aeisha and I were gangsters. I tried to picture me looking tough in a black bomber jacket and carrying a switchblade. Ola the gangster? I was only nine
years old! Then I tried to picture Aeisha in the same outfit and had to laugh out loud.

When the bell rang to go back to class, I finally saw Aeisha across the schoolyard, and she didn't look too good either. She was sitting on one of the benches on the other side of the schoolyard, hunkered over one of her textbooks. I could tell from the way her shoulders were hunched that she was worried about something. I wondered if she'd found out what everybody in this school thought about us. Then I noticed something strange. There was a short boy sitting at the other end of the bench, watching her. When she got up to go inside, he stood up and followed right behind her. I hurried to keep up with them and watched as he followed Aeisha all the way up to the third floor and into the same classroom, always staying right behind her. Once I saw Aeisha look back at him, but she didn't seem too upset. Who was he? What did he want with my sister? As soon as I saw Aeisha after school I was going to find out.

The rest of the day went pretty much like the morning. In my math class I found out that the name of the girl who'd talked to me in the schoolyard was River, but she didn't say anything to me or even look at me in class. I also had three classes with Maria Poncinelli, who was leaning against the wall outside before and after each one. Most of the teachers sent someone outside to drag her in when they started their lessons. By the time I went to meet Aeisha in the front hallway after school, I was ready to go home — or back to our new house, anyway.

Aeisha was waiting for me just where she'd said she would. She had a mountain of books in her arms and she
still looked worried. I looked around, and sure enough, the short boy was standing not too far behind her, watching her. I put on one of my meanest looks, ready to scare him off. But then I got a really good look at him.

“Who's that?” I asked Aeisha.

Aeisha glanced back and shrugged. “That's Otis. He's in my advanced science class.”

I looked again and tried to keep from laughing. Otis looked like he was falling apart. His shoelaces were untied, half of his shirt was hanging out of his jeans and he'd missed almost all the loops for his belt. That wasn't all, either. Otis had short brown-blond hair that stuck out all over his head like a porcupine's quills and his glasses were sitting crooked on his face. His blue school bag had a big hole in it. He'd left a trail of pencils and papers down the hallway. Behind his glasses I could see that Otis was a little cross-eyed. And both of his crossed eyes were stuck on Aeisha.

“What does he want?” I asked Aeisha in a whisper.

“I don't know. All I did was take a sign off his back,” Aeisha muttered, starting to walk to the front door. “Come on. Bus number eight-oh-eight.”

“What happened?” I asked Aeisha as soon as we sat down on the bus. I noticed that Otis was sitting in the seat behind us. I wondered if he was still following Aeisha or if he belonged on this bus. It was just like Aeisha to take that sign off his back. She doesn't like it when people make fun of other people. But something else was bothering her.

“So how was it?” I asked when Aeisha didn't answer me the first time. I wanted to see if she felt the same way I had all day— like we were onstage acting, with the whole school
for our audience. I wanted to know if she thought the same way I did about the colors being different here. I couldn't get used to seeing so many blue-, green- or gray-eyed people, and hardly any of the girls had short hair. None of them wore braids like me. But most of all I wanted to get Aeisha's opinion on this whole gangster thing and see if it bothered her as much as it bothered me.

Aeisha shrugged and looked out the window. She wouldn't say anything else the whole way home. She must have had a really bad day, too, 'cause she didn't even read her romance novel on the way, though I knew she had packed one that morning. She just flipped through the pages of her new books. None of the other kids on the bus said anything to us, but a few of them stared. When we got off the bus, I heard somebody say, “Bye, black girls,” and start laughing, but when I turned around, I couldn't tell who it was. Aeisha pulled me off the bus without saying anything and started walking fast to our house. I walked more slowly because, first, I wanted to see if Aeisha could even find our house, and second, I was watching Otis. He'd gotten off the bus with us and was trying to keep up with Aeisha—which wasn't easy to do with his shoelaces untied. A couple of times I thought he was going to crash on the sidewalk and break his head.

“Who's that?” I heard Aeisha ask ahead of me.

I turned to see what she was talking about and noticed an old lady and an old man staring at us from the windows of their house. They both had gray hair and pink, wrinkled skin, and both of them were frowning at us.

“Mr. and Mrs. Stern,” I heard Otis say. It was the first
time I'd heard him speak, and I was surprised that he didn't have a high, squeaky voice to go with his appearance. His voice sounded normal. “They watch everybody.”

“How come?” I asked, catching up with them.

“They're in charge of the neighborhood association,” Otis said, as if that explained everything.

I looked back at them one more time. They didn't look very friendly.

Aeisha found our house with no problem. She didn't even have to look at the number. When we all got to the front door, she pulled me inside and turned around to say, “Go home, Otis,” before shutting the door in his face.

I dropped my school bag, patted Grady, who was sitting at the bottom of the stairs, and went straight to the big window in the living room to see if Otis had listened to her. Sure enough, Otis was walking away from our house slowly. When he got to the sidewalk, he turned around to look back, as if to see whether Aeisha was really gone. Then he crossed the street and walked right into the house across from us. The same one Mrs. Spunklemeyer had gone into.

Otis was one of our neighbors.

“Aeisha!” I shouted, turning around. I didn't see Aeisha anywhere, but her new sneakers were sitting at the bottom of the stairs. “The kid across the street who left his bike outside is Otis! Can you believe it? He's a Spunklemeyer! Aeisha!”

“Ola,
what
are you screaming for?” I looked, and there was Mama sticking her head out from behind the kitchen door. Boy, was I glad to see her.

“Aeisha's got a boyfriend and he lives right across the
street. He must be one of Mrs. Spunklemeyer's kids,” I said, coming into the kitchen and giving her a tight hug. “And something's bothering Aeisha, but she won't tell what it is. When do we get out of here?” I'd given this neighborhood and this school a chance and it hadn't worked.

Mama cocked her head to one side and rolled her eyes. “Do you ever give up?” Her hair was pulled back into a big, bushy ponytail and she was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, 'cause she'd spent the day unpacking.

“Mama—” I was about to explain my whole day at school when I noticed who else was in the kitchen. With all this school stuff, I'd forgotten about Lillian. She was unpacking pots and pans and putting them in one of the cabinets. She had on an ugly green-and-white polka-dot dress that looked like it used to be somebody's party dress, and gray sweat socks pulled up to her knees. I wondered who'd given her all those strange clothes.

Khatib was in the kitchen, too, perched on one of the stools, and I could tell that he was trying not to laugh every time he looked at Lillian. Then I noticed that Khatib had a big plate of rice and peas sitting right in front of him.

“Hey, Ola,” Khatib said in between mouthfuls.

I walked over to look at his food and sniffed. It smelled a lot like Mrs. Gransby's food. “Where'd you get that?”

“Lillian made it,” Mama said, smiling at Lillian.

I looked over at Lillian and saw that she was opening and closing one cabinet door. She did it several times, like she was trying to figure out how it worked. Then she stuck her head inside the cabinet to look at the latch. Weird. I thought it was kind of unfair that she got to spend the whole day with
Mama by herself while I had to go to school. But on the other hand, if she could make rice and peas like Mrs. Gransby, then maybe she was worth keeping. I walked over to stand by her and said, “Hi, Lillian,” in a really loud voice.

Lillian looked down, surprised, and I got my first look at her eyes. They were cat-shaped and a dark molasses color. They were beautiful, but they also were very sad.

I turned away and walked back to Mama. I needed another hug but I didn't want to look like a baby in front of Khatib. Mama was reading something on a piece of paper and not paying any attention to me.

“What's that?” I asked, leaning against her.

“It's the rules for the development. Mr. Stern from the neighborhood association dropped them off.” Mama was frowning deeply. I wasn't surprised. Anything Mr. and Mrs. Stern dropped off couldn't be good. I leaned in to look at the paper, too, and my mouth dropped open. The list was a page long and had fifteen rules typed out in bold black letters. Right at the top was the one I already knew, about not hanging your clothes out in the yard, but there were a bunch of crazy rules, too, like not having visitors after 10 P.M., not having parties without informing the neighborhood association, and no playing outside except in the backyard. The worst one was the curfew for kids. No kids under sixteen could be outside after dark. There was also a whole bunch of recommendations on how often to cut your grass and what kind of flowers to plant in the spring.

I sniffed. “We have to follow all these rules?”

“It's for the good of the neighborhood. Keep it a safe place.” Mama sighed. “It won't kill us to follow a few rules.”

“So we can't play in the street and I can't go outside after seven o'clock?” I asked. Mama and Dad wouldn't let me go out after dark anyway, but that was a family rule, not a neighborhood rule. Whose business was it if Mama and Dad did let me stay out late or we hung a clothesline in our own backyard or we wanted to plant purple petunias instead of dogwoods?

Mama put the paper away and got up to take a plate out of one of the cabinets. “How was school?”

I climbed up on the stool opposite Khatib. I'd almost forgotten about how awful school had been. I started complaining right away. “They stuck me with Anna Banana and the ding-dong girls and nobody except this girl River talked to me.”

“That's nothing. They're making me take a modern-dance class,” Khatib muttered between mouthfuls of rice. “For PE. I have to wear tights.”

I dug into the plate of rice and peas that Mama placed in front of me. “That's nothing. Everybody stared at me in homeroom, and the ding-dong girls acted like they were scared of me.”

“That's nothin'.” Khatib put his fork down. “After my try-out I heard one of the guys on the team say that I would make the team 'cause I'm black.”

“Small potatoes,” I said. “Some boy at school called us ‘stupid new kids,’ and then some other boy on the school bus said, ‘Bye, black girls,’ when we got off the bus. And this girl River said everyone thinks we came here because our old neighborhood was too dangerous. The whole school probably thinks we're gangsters.”

Mama sat down on the stool next to me. She was frowning. “Are the two of you okay?”

Khatib and I looked at each other carefully. I was okay, I guessed. It didn't so much hurt me what people at school thought about me, but it did bother me a lot. I could tell Khatib felt the same way.

“Because you know that all that comes from just plain ignorance.” Mama put her hands on my shoulders and squeezed gently. “When people get to know you for who you are, those perceptions will die down.”

“What if they don't?” Khatib asked quietly.

“Then we'll deal with it.” Mama nodded. She said it just as quietly as Khatib, but I knew that Mama's kind of quietness meant business. I started to feel a little better.

“Did anything
good
happen to you two today?” Mama picked up the list of rules and started frowning again.

Khatib and I looked at each other.

“I made the team.” Khatib shrugged.

“The school has a swimming pool.” I shrugged, too.

Both of us were quiet after that. Lillian had finished unpacking one of the boxes and went to the other side of the kitchen to get another one. She picked it up like it weighed nothing and carried it back.

Then I heard Mama sigh and say, “Well, it's a start.”

But the start of what? So far it had been a horrible day, and worrying about what everybody thought about me at school had left me feeling restless. Watching Mama read the rules, I started to get an idea. Mama wasn't the only one around here who could take care of business.