At-Risk

Yearn

yearn Kiki didn’t have anything smaller than a twenty on him at lunchtime . He’d pulled out a roll of twenties and fifties and told Stephen to meet him at the park when school let out. Stephen had never seen so much money on someone his own age. And even though he knew he was supposed to head straight home, he agreed to meet at the park. When he got there, he went straight to their spot, a stone house at the edge of the playground that all the kids called the White House. Stone turtles, dolphins, horses in midgallop were scattered all around the park, but the White House was where the boys played spider, where the couples did it, where the teenagers played handball, and where he and Kiki met. That afternoon, they had it all to themselves. “Look what I got.” Kiki had a bag full of fireworks, Jumping Jacks, cherry bombs, Butterflies, Ashcans. It wasn’t even the Fourth of July. “Oh snap, where’d you get those? Did you go to Chinatown?” Yearn | 141 Kiki was smug, “I got my ways, Steve. I even saw The Spearman of Death.” “For real? The one with the Five Deadly Venoms?” “No, for fake, Mama’s boy,” Kiki pushed him and laughed. “I’m not.” But even to himself, it sounded whiny. Stephen imagined Kiki—short, pudgy, and Puerto Rican—riding the subway up to Chinatown, buying fireworks and rice candy, and maybe even taking in a kung fu flick, a real one with the English badly dubbed over. He wished he could have gone. Just thinking about all the things that his mother kept him from doing got him upset. He was almost twelve and still being treated like a baby. If it weren’t for Kiki, he’d never get to light any fireworks. His mother was too worried he’d blow his fingers off. His mother was too worried about too many things. She was worried about where they lived. She didn’t like Bed-Stuy. They lived on a block with nothing but brownstones. Even though they didn’t live in the projects, she said it was still the ghetto. The boys that lived on the block and in the surrounding area worried her. The way they grew up and took up residence on the street corners and glued themselves to the pay phones, rigging them so no one else could use them. The way they wore their jeans so low that they seemed to hang off their narrow behinds. And the way they carried pagers and cell phones as if they were doctors and lawyers even though they had no jobs and nowhere to go. She worried that those boys or boys just like them would kill him. One day, she said, they would turn around and shoot him straight through the head if he said the wrong thing. But he knew that she was wrong. The older boys were his friends. They looked out for him. She worried over nothing and made him look like a punk in the process. “I’m not a mama’s boy,” Stephen said this time without whining. “I’m not.” 142 | Yearn “Be cool, Steve,” Kiki said. They started out behind the kiddie swings. Kiki pulled the Jumping Jacks out of their thin red paper and left the dozen twisted together . He lit the whole pack at once and they watched as it leapt into the air, each firecracker straining against another, ready to dance, each side fizzing and glowing orange, yellow, and green. “Yo, that was fresh,” Kiki said. “You gonna waste them, doing them like that.” “It’s plenty more where that came from. Chill out. Scaredy.” “I’m not!” “Then follow me,” Kiki said as they began to walk away, kicking paper bags and crack vials out of their path. Kiki stopped and watched a group of girls playing rope from a distance. “Isn’t that that puta Maribel you tried to talk to?” “Yeah, that’s her,” Stephen said, not sure what a puta was. She was playing double Dutch with two girls he didn’t recognize. Her back was to him and he lost his train of thought for a moment as he watched her denim cutoffs sway back and forth to the rhythm of the rope she was turning. “—a lot of nerve turning my boy down...