The Orange Houses

Table of Contents

 

 

 

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Copyright © 2009 by Paul Griffin

Photos by Paul Griffin and Robyn Meshulam
All rights reserved

 

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility
for author or third-party websites or their content.
All characters and incidents depicted in this work are fictitious.
Any resemblance to real persons or events is purely coincidental.

 

 

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Griffin, Paul, date.
The Orange Houses / Paul Griffin.
p. cm.

Summary: Tamika, a fifteen-year-old hearing-impaired girl, Jimmi, an eighteen-year-old veteran who stopped taking his antipsychotic medication, and sixteen-year-old Fatima, an illegal immigrant from Africa, meet and connect in their Bronx, New York, neighborhood, with devastating results.

eISBN : 978-1-101-05273-0

[1. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 2. Hearing impaired—Fiction.
3. Veterans—Fiction. 4. Mental illness—Fiction. 5. Illegal aliens—Fiction.
6. Africans—United States—Fiction. 7. Bronx (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.G8813594Or 2009
[Fic]—dc22
2008046259

 

 

 

 

 

James Semprevivo changed his name to Jimmi Sixes when he came back from the desert, but most folks called him Crazy Jimmi. His military service ended with a mandatory discharge—honorable—after army psychiatrists determined he was incapable of carrying out his duties. He'd enlisted at seventeen, shipped out his eighteenth birthday and was sent home six months later.

 

What follows here happened a few months after Jimmi came home, shortly before he was supposed to turn nineteen. He sketched this rhyme into a newspaper margin, then whispered it to the rats that shared his cave so as not to wake his friend fifteen-year-old Tamika Sykes, sleeping restlessly in the stove light but not bleeding anymore. She'd been cut bad. Jimmi's other friend Fatima Espérer was aboveground but in no less danger.

 

An hour after Jimmi wrote the poem the vigilantes hung him.

Everybody's eyes were like, Say
what
?

The teacher said the word again: “Taphophobia.”

Spelling bee. Hate It scale rating: somewhere between scrubbing toilets and PMS, say 8 out of 10. The big-boned girl in the corner did not speak in front of crowds. She would write her answer on the board or be dumb. She studied the shapes made by old lady Rodriguez's mouth: Ta. Fo. Fo. Bee-ya.

Meningitis struck her ten years before, when she was five. Technically her hearing loss was “moderately severe,” what lawyers looking to sue hospitals pegged 50 percent deficient. Being halfway to sound was like never being able to catch your breath.

She got by just fine when she kept her hearing aids turned on. She didn't much. The machines were what City Services could give her, old technology that jug-handled her ears and rattled her with phone and radio static, a high-pitched whir. They sharpened and dulled everything at the same time the way water will just below the surface. But turned off and plugging up her drums, the aids screened out the world. She lived for this silky silence.

“I seen more activity at sleep clinics,” Teach said. “Somebody stand and deliver. Mika Sykes, save us.”

Tamika rolled her eyes.
Meek
-a? Call her Mik, like
nick
.

Her thick hip caught a desk corner as she hopped over the outstretched foot of the pretty girl Shanelle just back from juvie. Word was Sha kept a box cutter tucked into her sock, its blade home-ground plastic to sneak it through the metal detector but sharp enough to slash and spill some gal's cowhide backpack last week.

Mik stabbed the blackboard with fresh chalk and spun back to her seat. She propped her head on stacked fists and closed her eyes. She was up late again last night doing her secret thing, slinking away into her dream world: drawing. Add to the no-sleep night a sugar hangover to pound the gray out of her dome. She'd washed down a box of Fig Newtons with a snuck beer. Eyes shut she saw what she drilled into the slate:

At lunch another outcast bum-rushed her loner spot under the stairs. The G he called himself. So sad. He handed Mik his homework. Mik eyed the paper, algebra, held up three fingers.

“For ten questions?” The dude fished his pockets and came up with lint and dirty pennies. “All I got is a buck and some.”

Mik squinted, taking in The G. Thick glasses bugged his eyes. A mouthful of metal failed to tame his buckteeth. That twisting sting pitted her stomach: repulsion, lust, both. She had a thing for losers. She grabbed the coins.

“Yo, I like y'all's braids bunched like that,” he said. “Cat's ears is crazy sexy.”

Mom had rolled them that morning as Mik ate breakfast—an annoying ritual. Mik fought a blush as she flipped up her phone. She clicked a hot key for a ready reply text: WUT EVR.

“Mik, lemme watch you do it, the math.”

Another hot key: NOT NEVR. Last time she let him watch he faked a yawn and dropped his arm over her shoulder. So corny. She had let him brush her breast, his hand clammy and shaking. That was either too disgusting or too exciting, and she'd nailed him, elbow to ribs.

“Y'all are mad beautiful.”

“Y'all are blind.” The words were out before she realized she spoke them. She sounded twice as good as she thought she did, half as good as she thought she should. With her ears plugged her voice was a hollow echo trapped in her head. Stick your fingers in your ears and talk, you'll get the idea.

“Same way, slip it through my locker slot, text me after you make the drop?”

That got the BET button. She watched the player wannabe pimp limp away. Sucker would get his fool butt shot off during some bagman errand—a corpse before he hit the right to enlist. Mik blinked away that sadness and checked the boy's math. G did not stand for genius. Poor baby, she almost said.

Doing other kids' homework for small change wasn't glamorous, but she had her eye on this dope ergonomic pen that cost forty-six bucks at that Japanese bookstore downtown. She worked old-school style with Speedball ink and crow quill points. She did not dare dream the pen could be more than a hobby piece, maybe even her ticket out, a one-way escape from Mom's fate: slaving behind the Dunkin' Donuts counter when she wasn't humping the overnight restock shift at Target.

She tucked The G's buck-and-some into her pocket and started in on his algebra. The half-off discount was no sweat. She helped out when she could, but on the down low, no need to get friendly. She'd do a slow kid's math or help a blind lady cross a street. Hit and run, over and done, like that. She didn't know why she did these things. They didn't make her feel good. They didn't make her feel bad either. She couldn't figure it out.

She pulled her hair out of the bunched braids to hide her ears.