Undertow (3 page)

“Then I hope I get to be the one that arrests her,” he says.

The reporters laugh and eye their camera operators happily. They've got their sound bite, and it looks like I'm going to be on the news after all.

He scowls. “It's time to move on, people. You're blocking the sidewalks. If you don't disperse, I will have you arrested.”

“You can't arrest us. We're the press! We have rights,” they cry.

“Not in the Zone,” he says.

The reporters drift away, grumbling about the Bill of Rights, and when we can move again, I turn to my father.

“Remind me to give you a lecture about keeping your head down,” I say, hoping it stings.

They call our neighborhood lots of things—the Zone, the DMZ, Fish City. It's two square miles of Coney Island that the military, government, and police keep under constant surveillance. The territory spans the western part of the peninsula at Surf Avenue, swallowing up the gated community of Sea Gate and Leon S. Kaiser Park. It travels east to Stillwell Avenue, and in the north it borders Neptune Avenue, a block from where I live. To the south is the ocean. There are two heavily fortified borders. The first, the north, has tanks, two armed guard towers, and a barbed-wire fence meant to keep us inside. If you want out, you need to have proof of who you are: driver's license, birth certificate, and Social Security card. If you can't provide all three, you aren't going anywhere. The second border is the boardwalk, once the home of Luna Park, the Cyclone rollercoaster, Nathan's Hot Dogs, and the Wonder Wheel. Now it's the home of a massive tent city inhabited by thirty thousand immigrants who call themselves the Alpha, or the First Men. They have a similar fence, guarded by two hundred National Guard members. In the middle is a collapsing slum with frequent, and violent, clashes. You get used to walking around the bloodstains in the street.

So, why don't we all move? Trust me, anyone with two pennies to rub together is long gone. Within six months of the Alphas' arrival, the neighborhood lost ten thousand residents. They packed up, broke their leases, and never looked back. Many of my friends were dragged by their parents to points north—Bushwick, Sunset Park, Brownsville, East Harlem—essentially trading one span of urban blight for another. They're the lucky ones. The rest are stuck without the money to move on. Sure, there are some who stayed out of loyalty. They grew up here and aren't going to surrender their neighborhood, but most live in the housing projects and have nowhere else to go. The city doesn't help poor people move unless rich people want their homes.

And then there are my parents and me. We've got our own screwed-up reasons for staying, but hopefully it won't be for much longer.

“No way,” Bex cries when we turn the corner that leads to our school. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of locals are here to ogle. They mill about, taking pictures and uploading our lives onto Instagram or Tumblr. Hot dog carts are parked along the road; people sell bottles of water out of coolers. There's a guy making balloon animals, and another running around with T-shirts commemorating today's historic event. It looks like a street fair, but there is nothing festive about the mood. Something threatening and dangerous is in the air. It brushes past your arm, nudging you into an uncertain stride. It pokes at your frustrations, reminds you that you're an animal in an overcrowded cage.

Beyond the looky-loos is an angry mob of hundreds, shouting, chanting, bellowing threats into the air. Their words wear brass knuckles. They carry signs, too.
freaks! monsters! animals! satan's spawn!
—all the classics, and, not surprisingly, a lot with scribbled Bible verses.

“Stay close,” my father says as he takes my hand. In turn, I grab Bex and we squirm into their numbers. I'm elbowed and jostled until one of the protestors blocks our way. He's wearing a T-shirt with an eagle ripping through an American flag on it and those jeans with the elastic waistband I didn't know they made for men. He's as tall as he is wide, sweaty and red, and ten minutes from a stroke. His sign misspells the word
abomination
.

“You don't have to go to school with monsters!” He sprays spittle all over me.

“Actually we do,” Bex says. “It's the law.”

“Don't engage with them,” my father barks as he drags us onward. “These people are on the edge. The slightest thing could make them erupt. Use your head!”

As we get closer I see soldiers in green camouflage uniforms. Each carries an assault rifle strapped to his or her chest. Some stand on street corners watching and waiting, their fingers resting on triggers. Some cruise slowly by in black jeeps with high-pressure water cannons mounted on top. Others lurk on rooftops and talk into radios. One is on horseback. He trots back and forth behind a barricade, barking a laundry list of rules into the air.

“Citizens must stay ten yards from the barricades unless they are students, parents, or staff. Violators will be arrested. Anyone can be stopped and searched. Individuals who do not submit will be immediately arrested. Citizens who fail to obey direct orders will be arrested.”

In the crowd is a stocky boy with shaggy brown hair hanging in his eyes. He's Latino, with milky brown skin and a wide grin. His smartphone scans the crowd in every direction, capturing the protest and the vicious words. When he spots us, he smiles, turning his lens on Bex and me.

“Say hi to the world,” he urges.

“Hi, world. I'm Bex and this is Lyric and this sucks!”

He laughs, as usual. He finds Bex endlessly entertaining, and when they are together, the two turn into a couple of giggling idiots. His name is Tito but we call him Shadow because he's been following Bex around since the fifth grade, shortly after we found him in our elementary school cafeteria trying to get milk to dribble out of his eyeball. He swore he saw someone do it online, so we watched with disgusted fascination. After three cartons, all he had managed to do was give himself a headache, but Bex saw his potential as a friend and a curiosity. Shadow gradually lost his baby fat and grew into a handsome guy. Thank goodness he stopped trying to do the milk trick.

Now his fascination, aside from Bex, is making movies and putting them on the Internet. There is a lot to document in the Zone and an endless appetite for a peek inside. The
Daily News
and the
LA Times
pay to use the videos he posts. I've seen some of his stuff on CNN. His website gets a million views a month.

“Are they here yet?” Bex asks him.

He shakes his head and continues to record the crowd with his phone. “Not yet, but I hear they're on their way.”

My father talks to a soldier who points us toward some blue police barricades that mark off a path to the front steps of the school. He tells us we have to get in line, but I don't see any other students waiting, so I guess we're first, or maybe we're the only kids coming to school today.
Many parents threatened to keep their children home when the integration plan was announced, even under threat of arrest. Bex, Shadow, and I might have the whole place to ourselves—well, except for the Alpha.

When we get to the front of the line, another cop orders us to wait while he shouts something into his radio. He's a short, stubby fireplug who might as well have the word
Irish
tattooed on his blotchy, freckled face. His white shirt is soaked through with sweat and reveals way more than anyone should ever see. His arms and hair glisten. Wet thumb stains smear the paperwork on his clipboard.

When he sees my dad, his face falls as he eyes his list, like he's being asked to choose which one of us will live or die. “Leonard? Your girl goes here?”

My father nods. “Tommy, this is my daughter, Lyric, and her friends Becca Conrad and—kid, what's your name?”

Shadow grins. “Tito Ramirez.”

Irish Tommy takes our IDs and double-checks his list. “Okay, kids. Keep your identification on you at all times. If you are found in the halls without it, you will be arrested, whether you're this guy's daughter or not. Got it?”

I nod my head.

“Once inside, go to your homerooms and stay there until you're told to move to the next class. The bells don't mean anything today. Do not linger in the halls or bathrooms between classes. Your lockers are subject to search at any time. If a soldier, police officer, teacher, or staff member tells you to do something, do it. We're not putting up with any teenage crap today. If you start a fight, argue, or look at anyone cross-eyed, you're going to the Tombs.”

“No way!” Bex cries.

Even if my father wasn't a cop, I would know about the Tombs. It's a jail in lower Manhattan stocked with crackheads, muggers, and rapists waiting for arraignment. It's notoriously dangerous. People walk out with their noses in different places than when they went in. Sometimes people die in there. Bex's stepfather has spent more than a few nights inside Hell Hotel. He comes home tame as a housecat, until it wears off and he's back to being an ass.

Tommy pats us down while another cop waves a metal-detector wand over us in case Tommy didn't find everything. It goes wild over Shadow's sack lunch, and when he empties it the cops confiscate his spoon.

“Okay, hand over the cell phones,” Irish Tommy says.

“Not cool!” Shadow cries.

My father looks just as surprised as me. “What if there's an emergency?”

“Don't worry about emergencies. We've got SWAT teams in every hallway, officers stationed in the bathrooms, and cameras in every class,” Tommy says. “What you need to worry about is some wacko firing a gun through a window because one of these kids called him and told him which room has a fish head in it. No phones.”

My father's arm tenses. He hates how casually people use that ugly term. If he was allowed, he'd rip Tommy's head off. But he's not allowed.

Bex reaches into her pocket and hands hers to my dad. “You keep it. No peeking.”

Shadow's next. It's like he's handing over one of his kidneys. “People should be able to see what happens in there. This is history,” he grumbles.

I set mine into my father's hand while trying to make it seem like it's no big deal, but it is a very, very big deal. There are pictures on it I don't want him to see, pictures from when I was not trying to disappear into the background. They're ancient but not something I want my daddy to see.
Please don't look through the text messages. Oh, man! Don't look in the Gabriel folder!
My imagination is hyperventilating into a paper bag.

Satisfied, Irish Tommy jams his radio against his ear so he can hear over the din. “Get ready! You're going in as soon as they get her off the steps.”

“Who?” Bex says.

He points along the barricades and up the stairs to the front door. A middle-aged woman in a blue business suit is blocking the doors and flashing her porcelain veneers to the crowd. You can't call her smile pretty. It's a little too saccharine and uncomfortable, like she has to stay focused on its corners to keep it in place. She has crazy eyes, too, the kind where you can see white all around the irises, but the crowd doesn't seem to mind. They love Governor Pauline Bachman. Most seventeen-year-olds wouldn't recognize a politician, but I know this one well. My folks have spent endless nervous hours watching her self-declared war against the Alpha. She's a proud thorn in the Alpha's side, pushing for laws that deny them medical care (which they've never asked for), and blocking efforts to put them in permanent housing (which they would never take). Some of her ideas fall squarely into the evil-and-creepy category, like implanting tracking devices into their bodies, shipping them to Guantánamo Bay, and forcing them to undergo sterilization. Before the president ordered our school system to open its doors to the Alpha, she was crusading for an electrified wall to keep them away from us. Lots of people write her off as a kook. They say her ideas are just theatrics to appease her base of frightened voters and keep the money rolling into her campaign. They call her a clown. I say she's dangerous. Everywhere this clown goes, she brings her own circus.

She lifts her trademark red-white-and-blue megaphone to her mouth and releases a feedback whine over the crowd.

“The National Guard, Homeland Security, FEMA, local police, and even the president of the United States have asked me to step aside. They want me to go away. They don't want to know what the good people of the state of New York have to say about this debacle. They don't want to hear that this misguided plan is putting your children in harm's way! Well, folks, that's why I brought a megaphone!”

The crowd's roar rattles my head.

“Our schools are not the places to run social experiments. I have no problem with educating their . . . I guess you can call them children, but that should be done in their own schools, not ones paid for by hardworking, red-blooded American taxpayers! No, sir! Over my dead body!

“I will block these doors, and not one of them will step foot inside, and I will not move until they drag me away. Hell, no, I won't go!”

The crowd adopts her chant and it shakes the air.

“All right,” Irish Tommy shouts at us. “Let's go!”

“What about her?” my father cries as he points to Bachman.

“GO! GO!”

My father grabs my hand and starts up the path.

“No, Leonard,” Tommy shouts. “Just the kids.”

“That's not what I was told at the precinct!”

“Things are evolving, Leonard. You can't go in!”

My father looks pained. “Be safe!”

“I will.” I hope it's a promise I can keep.

“I'll keep her out of trouble, Big Guy,” Bex says. She grabs my hand and then Shadow's, and the three of us sprint through the barricades, past the ugly faces and their ugly signs.

Once we hit the top step, Bachman leaps in front of us. She grabs my arm and turns my hands over to study my palms and the skin between my fingers, then my neck. She's putting on a show for the crowd, and I'm too stunned to protest.