Fire in the Streets (9 page)

Sam waits for me on the steps outside of school. He doesn't say anything, so I guess I could just keep going and act like I didn't see. But I know it's me he's waiting for. That's how it always used to go with us. And my heart still flips when he looks at me, no matter how hard I try to hold it steady.

“Can I walk you home?” he says.

In spite of everything, I smile. This is how it used to go. This is how it started. “I know my way home,” I say, but quiet. Nicer. Not like I used to, back before I knew he wasn't just any old guy.

I expect him to say something back, like a joke. But everything's changed since then. He just looks up at me with these sad eyes. Says nothing except what's already written on his face. And I'm not sure how to read it.

“Why?” I say. “I really don't want to start over.”

“Okay,” he says. “Please?”

It's those sad eyes that break me. It didn't used to be a hard thing, walking with him, being with him. What we had came pretty easy, once upon a time. I made him work for it, sure, but underneath the game, we fit real easy.

“I guess.” I wave across the yard to Patrice and Emmalee, point at Sam. Putting their heads together, they scamper on without me, leaving us to whatever's about to happen. Then Emmalee turns back, jumping up and down
to get my attention. She brings the fingers of one hand, then the other, to her lips, blows me a stream of melodramatic kisses. Beside her, Patrice shakes her finger at me.

I roll my eyes—even though they're too far away to see—and flick my hand. I know without question that the two of them are rushing home to lurk by our building, hiding at the corner till he leaves. Waiting for my report.

They annoy me sometimes, but I'm lucky to have them. Mostly, Sam's all by himself. Especially now. I think back, and in the whole time I've known him, he's either been hanging by himself, or with Steve, or with me, or with his family. People like him, but he doesn't really have a tight bunch of friends. Not ones that go way back. Like Steve did. Like I do. Sam has Bucky, and Leroy and the Panthers now, but it's not the same thing.

“Okay, come on,” I say, turning toward the gate.

We walk without speaking, and even though it might look like nothing's happening, it isn't how it looks. This is all there is now. Sam's quiet sadness. My uncertainty of what to say or do. We walk, this long, slow, quiet march, and I feel in the air between us that this is as real as it gets.

It's different, other times. He talks, he even laughs. When it's not just us, when we're around people and he puts on his act for the world like everything's okay.

Like now, when we come around the corner onto Bryant
and we pass Rocco and Slim getting out of Slim's car in front of the corner store.

“Sam, my man,” Rocco calls, bounding toward us.

Sam lifts his chin. “Hey, Rocco. What's happening?”

They slap hands and have this guy moment going back and forth, talking about who last had the keys to the storeroom at the health clinic.

“Wasn't me,” Sam says. “Coulda been Bill or Pinky.”

Rocco shakes his head. “It better not be Pinky. That brother can't keep a key to his own damn house in his hand.”

“I hear that.” Sam laughs.

I stand back and watch them, this thought forming in my mind like a tiny bloom. A thought about how Sam is becoming less Sam and more somebody else. I try to pluck it, pluck it like a weed, but it just keeps growing, digging deeper.

“It'll turn up,” Sam says. “I'm keeping an eye out.”

“Sure, sure.” Rocco waves and sweeps off the way we just came from.

“You're working down at the clinic?” I say, just to keep the talking going. I already heard something about it. Anyway, since the clinic was Steve's pet project and all, it figures that Sam would want to pick it up and keep it going.

“Yeah.”

“How do you like it?”

“I like it okay.”

We fall back into silence. My mind, a tangle of weeds. Step after step, the part of me that wants to reach out and take his hand fights with the part of me that wants to run away, close my eyes, and try to forget I ever knew him.

When I can see my building up ahead, it's nothing but a relief.

I don't know what Sam sees when he looks in the mirror, but as the days pass I see more and more of Steve, in his face and in his manner. It's the kind of thing that makes me want to hold my breath till it passes, 'cept it doesn't. And I have to let go.

S
AM KISSES MY CHEEK TO SAY GOOD-BYE.
No words. He leaves me outside my building as used to be usual, and sure enough the girls come scampering out of hiding the moment he's out of sight.

“Ooh, you let him kiss you!” Patrice scolds, laughing.

“Are you taking him back?” Emmalee asks.

Is it really that simple? It wasn't like he dumped me. It ended because it had to, because we're not the same as we used to be. Either of us. I touch my cheek, where his lips brushed. “I don't know.”

Sam turns my world over in his hands every time he looks at me. Today, especially, I'm spinning. Dizzy to the point where there is ringing in my ears.

Patrice says it's a “crush” and I have to get out from under it. But she's never had a “crush,” at least not one who crushed back or held her hand or kissed her, so how would
she know? It's a good enough word, I guess. “Crush.” It lays me flat sometimes. The whole weight pressing on me. The weight of Sam and his sad eyes. The weight of Steve and his memory, which grows smaller and more blurred every day, but not any lighter to carry.

It feels like a dream sometimes, how it used to be between us. At times like that it's easy enough to believe there's no such thing as love, like Mama says. What I thought we had was never real, this long, slow, happy moment when everything was good. But then I see him, and I know, sure as my palm aches without his up against it. I see him and the breath slips out of my body. It all really happened.

When I can breathe again, I want to curse the sky for tearing us apart. I want to forget his name, his scent, the way his arm twists when he reaches for my hand.

I want to go back to being the girl I was before him.

T
HE GIRLS AND I SIT IN THE PARK, ON THE
brick wall that runs by the basketball courts. It's just a half wall with no kind of function but to separate the grass from the pavement, so you have to walk around it to enter the courts. We've never been sure what it's even doing here, but it makes a nice place to sit and watch stuff happen.

We read aloud to each other, chapters from
The Wretched of the Earth
. The edges of the book curl from being touched by many hands. Emmalee reads soft and clear, but even her gentle voice can't soften the words themselves. She reads about the struggle, the way the people who Have try to fix it so that the rest of us will always Have Not. I think of Mama, trying to keep a job, and that edge of fury about Raheem as he counts his pay like it's never going to be enough, no matter what; never going to be enough hours in the day to make ends meet.
The words are stirring, the sun is baking, and I feel my skin begin to burn, inside and out.

Emmalee hands the book to me. I don't especially like it when it's my turn to read. Emmalee does better. But she practices more, not just for homework but also for fun. Books from the library, all stacked by her bed. Patrice too. Her family has books on the wall, all up in a whole big bookcase. Fat books and thin books, fact books and storybooks, all jumbled together—a whole store of tiny printed words. Not like me. Holding the book's paper spine is a little bit foreign to me. It's not like the thick shell of our school books, heavy as knowledge and hard to crack through. It's easy to turn these pages. But my tongue trips over the sound of things like they can never become a part of me, even when I want them to be, even when they already are. Emmalee helps me sound words out. We look them up in her pocket dictionary; there are a lot I don't know. It makes it seem true, what Raheem says about needing to stay in school, if there's ever going to be a chance for something better for any of us. He thinks I can get a good job in an office, the kind Mama dreams of but isn't smart enough for, she sometimes says. But I am, they say. Smart enough. Raheem thinks if I learn more words, and how to type them, I'll be okay.

Once when he was mad at me for not shutting up, he
said I might as well be a lawyer in a courtroom, 'cause I can talk people's ears off. I liked that idea especially, and for a while I pictured myself like a businesswoman on TV, wearing a skirt suit and my hair up all pretty, with a briefcase and a head full of important things to say like “cross-examine” and “My client pleads not guilty.” It was fun for a little while, but afterward I got mad right back at Raheem for even bringing it up. I don't know why he put an idea like that in my mind. We both know it can't happen. There's a whole lot of school between me and the courtroom, unless I get real far into the Panthers, and then I might end up in court after all, but on the wrong side. Seems more likely, anyhow. I don't know anyone from Bryant Street who's ever turned into a lawyer, but I know plenty of folks behind bars.

I
RETURN TO THE APARTMENT TO FIND MAMA AND
Raheem hunched over the kitchen table with their heads together.

“We don't have to worry about that yet,” Mama's saying. “There's a grace period.”

“No, look. It's already past due,” Raheem says. “We have to pay them something by the end of the month.”

“Rent comes first,” Mama says. “It's all we have enough for. And we have to eat.”

“I know, but we have to . . .” His voice trails off as Mama gets up from the table. Or else as he sees me coming over. Stifling whatever was left to say, he folds the household bills into a neat stack.

“Hey, Maxie.”

“Are we in trouble again?” I ask. Raheem gives me the shut-your-mouth look. The one that makes him seem all grown-up and the only thing it makes me want to
do in response is stick out my tongue at him. He rolls his eyes.

“Don't worry your head about it,” Mama says. She fills a cup of water from the tap. Looks at me over the rim as she sips.

I do worry about it. I don't know why they try to hide it from me. I can always tell when we're broke.

Raheem gets up from the table and puts the bills in the cupboard where we hide them when we don't want to think about the reality of things. “I have to go. I have a shift.”

“At work?” I say.

He catches my eye. “Policing.”

Mama lets her cup clatter onto the counter. “They pay you for that?”

Raheem gives me another look, as if to remind me why we try not to talk about Panther stuff in front of Mama too much. “It's important,” he tells her.

“Important,” she repeats, cutting her eyes to the closed cabinet where the bills are hiding.

Raheem leans heavy on the back of the chair. “A minute ago, you said everything's fine. Is it fine or isn't it?”

After a moment, caught like that, Mama shrugs. “You go do whatever you gotta do.”

“Yeah, I will.” Raheem sweeps past me, grabbing up his black jacket on the way out of the apartment.

Mama serves me fried eggs with rice and beans for dinner. The combo is good. The volume is small. I look at the sack of uncooked rice on the counter and wonder how far we'll have to stretch it.

My imagination strays to the full plate of food I'll get tomorrow at The Breakfast, but I'm careful not to mention it to Mama.

“How's school?” she says. I find this troubling.

“Same as always.”

“You like your teachers? You got any grades to show me yet?” Troubling because she's coming down from the place she likes to live, where the things we do to be real in the world—like turn in homework and pay bills on time—don't matter.

“A-minus on a math test,” I tell her. “Not too shabby.”

“You're a smart girl.” She smiles at me.

I duck my head, proud. “Maybe.”

“You're both smart.” She looks at the door like Raheem is just beyond it. “I don't know where that comes from.”

“Oh, Mama.”

“I tell people,” she says. “I ain't much, but I done two things good.”

“Sure. You do a lot of good stuff. You're a good person.” I should say more, maybe.

She looks at me across our small empty bowls. I pick them up and take them to the sink. We've all but licked them clean. I barely have to rinse them; the soap is just a formality.

“I'm going out for a while,” she says, over the sound of the water running. I know this tone of voice, the voice that comes when the bill pile is high and the only thing that'll make it better is to get away for a while. To the bar, to the liquor store, to some guy we haven't met yet, probably don't want to.