by Dwayne Reed
“Whatchu talkin’ ’bout, Simon? We ain’t even ate yet, man.” C.J. makes sure to dap Ms. Kathy up in the air before we slide our trays down to the end of the lunch counter. I size up Booker T.’s boxy cafeteria that also gets used as the auditorium on holidays. Maria always calls it a big ol’ bowl of Fruity-O’s cuz the walls look like milk and each table is round and a different color. I ask her to explain the old signs on the walls about boring nutrition and all the brown kids sitting at the tables. All cereal boxes have a bunch of words on them, duh. And sometimes I mix Reese’s Puffs into my Fruity-O’s, Simon. It still tastes good.
C.J. walks off toward all the tables like he already knows where to sit. Because he does. I guess going to the same school for five years does that. It’s the same ol’ place and he’s headed to our spot at the center table where it’s still empty, just waiting for our squad to fill it up.
We sit down on the hard plastic seats that stick out and float from under the table like something out of the future even though they’re old and raggedy. We both know not to sit on the busted yellow seat that spins. We know it’s gonna be broken forever. Sitting down while balancing trays of popcorn chicken, some weird-looking vegetable, small cups of syrupy fruit, and cartons of chocolate milk, me and C.J. sit across from each other. Neither of us eats all that stuff, but we have favorites. We both keep the popcorn chicken, but Maria gets the fruit cups, C.J. gets our chocolate milk, and we find Lil Kenny and give him the vegetables. He’s the only kid who doesn’t care that he can’t tell what it is and will eat pretty much anything. I put my milk carton on a seat next to me to save it for Maria.
“I’m not talking about the food, C.J.”
“What else is there to talk about right now, Notorious C.A.T.? It’s lunchtime.” C.J. is arranging his extra nuggets on the tray to make enough space for all the extra sauces he’s about to mix together next to them. He swears BBQ and mayonnaise hits different. Me and Maria usually try not to look.
“Notorious D.O.G.,” I say with a groan. This nickname is gon’ take some work. If people are gonna see the new, bigger me, it has to catch on with my friends first.
“Right. Anyway, Simon, what you mad at, then?”
“Okay, so our new teacher, Mr. James, jumps up on his desk and starts rappin’ about—”
“Wait, WHAT?”
“He jumps on the desk and starts rappin’ about his mama, his high school diploma, and working hard and then he—” C.J. puts both of his arms out, signaling me to stop.
“BRUH! You got a teacher that be rappin’ on his desk and you over it?!” C.J. pretends to scratch his head to show his confusion but avoids actually scratching his head so he doesn’t mess with his fresh cut. He moves his hand to his chin and leans in. “I don’t get it, Simon.”
“I didn’t finish! He tricked us, C.J.! After he got done he told us we gotta do an oral presentation. We gotta stand in front of everybody and talk… already!” I stand up in the middle of what I’m saying while trying to explain my problem to C.J., and just then I realize it, plopping back down on the bench feeling like a busted balloon again. “He just kept smiling about it.”
“Sounds like you got the nice, fun teacher. My teacher, Mrs. Leary, is at least five hundred years old and told us we need to ‘keep our nose to the grindstone,’ whatever that means. She prolly hates rap.” C.J. isn’t even exaggerating. Me and Maria saw her bony, wrinkly hand reach out from behind her door like Jack Skellington out of Nightmare Before Christmas. We saw her shuffle to the door to welcome C.J. into her class right before we went into ours. There might have even been a cane, but we didn’t stand there long enough to find out for sure. C.J. frowns, looking like he’s imagining sticking his nose against some kind of rock for the whole year to help him make it to middle school.
“Maybe you’re right,” I say, dunking a stale piece of popcorn chicken into some barbecue sauce. I don’t know why they call it popcorn chicken when it tastes nothing like popcorn. It’s a big lie. Either way, it ain’t got nothing on Dad’s spicy chicken tenders, but BBQ sauce seems to make anything taste better.
YEAH, IT’S TRUE,
BABY, YES IT’S TRUE,
EVERYTHING TASTES BETTER WITH SOME BBQ!
“But what about the oral presentations he said we have to do? That don’t sound fun to me at all!” Flashbacks come to me of hearing the words presentation and alphabetical order and Monday. Even my brain feels like it’s covered in goose bumps. “We’re supposed to get up in front of the whole class and talk about something that’s ‘timely.’”
“What’s timely mean?” C.J. asks after taking a gulp of his first chocolate milk.
“It means something that’s important in our world right now. Something that matters to kids here at Booker T. or to people in Creighton Park.” Maria butts in to the conversation as she sits down, plunking her super SHE-roes lunch bag on the table. Me and C.J. stare into a big colorful picture of an older Black woman who looks like my granny Lucille, with a crispy Afro, circle-ly glasses, and a patchy sweater, on the side of the bag as Maria pulls it open to check out Ms. Estelle’s leftovers that she packed for today. We already know the old lady on her bag’s name is Octavia Butler because Maria wouldn’t stop talking about her all summer when we were learning how to build electrified fences in Fortnite. Octavia predicted this would happen in the future! she would say. Camille said that in Octavia’s book everybody has gates around their houses because it’s too dangerous to go outside! I just thought it was cool that she had a name that sounded like one of the girls in our neighborhood.
“Like how Derrick Rose is the best basketball player ever, even though he’s not playing for the Bulls anymore?” C.J. says, warming up to the idea but not really getting it. “That matters a lot! People need to know about his greatness! Vintage D-Rose!” Maria rolls her eyes while holding her hand out for our fruit cups.
“Umm… not exactly. More like, how to get healthier food into schools,” Maria says, scrunching up her face at our half-eaten chicken nuggets, then pulling a plastic bowl of rice and beans out of her lunch box. “’Buela says the food here got too much salt in it.”
“Salt makes everything taste better, though! That can’t be timely. Salt’s a good thing. I looove salt.” C.J. licks all sides of a nugget, then dunks it in his cup of BBQ sauce before taking a bite. Me and Maria stare until he finally looks up and sees us fake-gagging at his nasty nugget eating.
“What?”
“Salt makes it take longer to grow molds on your nuggets!” Maria bites into a slice of plantain and continues. “So they could be old but you wouldn’t even know it. Anyway, like I was saying, something like the environment or homelessness or crime.” I don’t get how she can be so happy worrying about the world’s problems. But even worse: I don’t get how either of us can do a whole project on one in front of everybody.
“So, when do these big talkie-talks start? Y’all probably have a bunch of time, right? Mrs. Leary ain’t give us no real homework yet. She spent the whole class practicing our names and told us to write something in our journals about where our names came from,” C.J. says, already packing up to hit the playground for recess with chocolate milk still drizzling down the side of his mouth. “All I gotta write on the paper is My mama. The end.” I wish I had that assignment.
“Nope, they start next week!” Maria said. “And guess who got picked to go first? SIMON!”
CHAPTER 5
AT THE END OF THE DAY, MS. ESTELLE waits for me and Maria at the bottom of the front steps of Booker T. I’ve told my mom I’m old enough to do the four-block walk by myself, but the answer is always no. So Ms. Estelle usually walks me and Maria home and then I hang out with one of my brothers—usually Markus, who’s in the seventh grade and thinks he’s waaaay older than me—until Moms gets back from work at the hospital. When she gets home she makes me do homework at the kitchen counter while she takes a shower and figures out what her and Dad are gonna do about dinner. I usually rush so I can play
at least one game with Maria and C.J. online. We have a system, Simon. Don’t mess with our system, Moms always says.
Before we even get to the end of the sidewalk by the school parking lot, Maria is busy going on and on to Ms. Estelle about every single thing that happened on our first day, but I don’t really have much to say. Mr. James told us we needed to give a presentation on an issue that’s important to us or to our community. And because I’m the most unlucky kid on the West Side of Chicago, I got picked to go first. How am I supposed to talk in front of the whole class next week?! How am I supposed to know enough about something to make sense of it in just a week? It seems impossible. It seems like the only person who knows how impossible it is, is me.
I’M STRESSIN’, I’M STRESSIN’,
AIN’T GOT NO DIRECTION!
DON’T ASK ME NO QUESTIONS,
I WON’T TAKE SUGGESTIONS!
I FEEL LIKE A MESS,
AND MY BEST FRIEND IS MESSIN’
WITH ME, ’BOUT THIS LESSON.
I’M STRESSIN’, I’M STRESSIN’.
“And guess what, Abuela? Mr. James is having everyone give a talk about big, important topics, and Simon gets to go first! Next Monday!” Maria says to Ms. Estelle, turning to smile at me. I look back at her, forcing a fake half smile so I won’t have to say anything. I wish the smile could be real, and Maria probably knows it isn’t.
I remember how we moved to Creighton Park right before winter break when I was seven, and Mr. Peterson, our first-grade teacher, gave me a part in the holiday play, even though I was too new to even know what was going on.
“I like your costume, Simon,” Maria told me, appearing next to me out of nowhere during our dress rehearsal. Because she was little like me, it always felt like she was sneaking up on people. “I wish Mr. Peterson chose me to be a snowman,” she went on, looking down at her sparkling legs and then her sparkling arms. She was a snowflake. There was nothing cool or fun about being picked to be a snowman in a winter play, because I just stood there saying nothing in a hat with a scarf around my neck and a fake carrot tied to my face. At least she could still use her legs. But Maria would smile at me from wherever she was onstage or clap the hardest from her seat in the auditorium when it was my turn to stand under the spotlight looking like what me and my brothers made when the snow got really heavy outside. It was easy to say yes when she asked me to be her friend because she acted like everything I did would be the best even though I never did anything that great. She thought it was cool that I could climb so easily through the tunnels at the playground when the other kids said I looked small enough to still be in preschool. The first day Bobby made fun of the size of my head in front of the whole class, she said I probably had five brains in my head instead of just one like everyone else. “Bobby has a coconut head, anyway,” she told me at lunch. “’Buela says when you crack a coconut open, only water comes out. That’s Bobby’s head. He got a coconut head and no brain.” I’d never seen a whole coconut before and when I thought about coconut I thought of the nasty little white pieces on top of one of the cakes my granny liked to make and only the old people liked to eat. Thinking of water exploding from the head of the meanest kid in school made me laugh until chocolate milk mixed with snot came squirting out of my nose Super Soaker–style. As annoying as she can be sometimes, she’s always made me laugh at silly stuff like that.
“Muy exciting” is all Ms. Estelle has to say now. Maria would continue even if no one said anything to her ever.
“I’m already putting together a list of ideas and topics for my presentation. I bet Mr. James is gonna need to give me two times to share. Five minutes isn’t enough, ’Buela!” Ms. Estelle continues looking in front of us, quietly smiling. A basketball hoop chain jingles to the right of us before a ball flies over the fence above our heads as we walk by Locust Court. A high schooler comes running out into the street after it and I look to see if Aaron, my oldest brother, is playing with his friends. I’d rather be playing than thinking about a project already.
An oral presentation is the perfect assignment for Maria, actually. She has feelings and thoughts about everything. I usually hang out with my brothers and pretend to start my homework when I get home from school until my parents get off work. C.J. does the same thing with his sister. Maria told me she usually helps Ms. Estelle chop onions, clean vegetables, or season meat before her parents get home from work. And after dinner, she sits with her watching the news. Maria can speak English better than Ms. Estelle and so Ms. Estelle sometimes needs Maria to tell her in Spanish what’s being said. It sounds boring to me, but Maria always says it’s cool that we can know what’s going on everywhere in the world just by watching TV.
“What about you, Simon? What you gonna do?” Ms. Estelle squeezes my shoulder.
“Uh, that’s top secret right now. I can’t tell you that, Ms. E,” I say, trying to cover up how clueless I feel. I don’t feel like telling her the truth, which is that I don’t have any ideas at all, and my armpits are sweating so bad I’m glad we’re almost to my house so nobody but Markus will see the big wet stains on my new T-shirt.
UGH! I HATE THIS, I ABSOLUTELY HATE THIS!
WHY DO KIDS HAVE TO DO ORAL PRESENTATIONS?!
WHY CAN’T WE JUST WRITE ABOUT WHAT OUR NAME IS?
OR READ STORIES TALKIN’ ’BOUT PEOPLE WHO ARE FAMOUS?
I MEAN, MR. JAMES IS COOL… I GUESS,
BUT THIS PROJECT IS LIKE… DUDE, WHAT THE HECK?!
AND I’M GOING FIRST! I SWEAR, IT’S THE WORST!
FIFTH GRADE IS ALREADY TOO MUCH WORK!
I DON’T HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT TO SAY.
MAYBE I SHOULD TALK ABOUT THE FIRST SCHOOL DAY?
AND HOW IT’S PLAIN WRONG TO MAKE KIDS DO THIS!
YUP, THAT’S MY TOPIC, THAT’S WHAT I’LL PICK!
WOOF! WOOF!
As we get closer to the corner just before Loving Street, Maria looks at me and I know we need to get Ms. Estelle to reward us for a great first day. It wasn’t great for me, but neither of us got sent to the principal’s office, and we know that will convince Ms. Estelle to give us money for snacks even if it wouldn’t work on my mom.
“’Buela, Mr. James even knew I was Camille’s sister and he said he expects great things from me,” Maria says with her eyes all big.
“Ay Dios mío. You babies are so smart.”
“’Buela.”
“Yes, baby?”
“Can we—”
“I knew you wanted the candies. Simon, just don’t tell your madre, okay?” Ms. Estelle hands us both a dollar and we run into Chicago Corner. With a dollar we each can get a bag of chips and some Frooties. In minutes we’re both back out on the sidewalk, stuffing our brown paper bags deep into our backpacks with the door jingling behind us.
We turn onto Loving Street and walk down the long pathway up to Creighton Crest Apartments, where I see Sunny pushing a broom up and down the sidewalk. The sidewalk is mostly clean from him sweeping in front of our building just a few days ago, but he never lets all the empty candy wrappers and random pop bottles pile up in our neighborhood. Sunny is somebody who’s like my grandpa that I’ve seen around our neighborhood since we moved here, but I don’t really know where he lives. All I know is that he’s usually sweeping up the sidewalks and that he’s always nice to me and my brothers.
“Hey-o, Rhymin’ Simon and Miss Maria! Back to school? Hitting the books?” Sunny says to us with a pile of empty chip bags and cans in front of him. I don’t know if it was Dad or Moms who snitched about DeShawn naming me that because I rap, but it stuck and it’s all he’s called me ever since. He looks funny standing in front of us in clothes that look like they belong to somebody much bigger than he is. Today he wears a stretched-out-looking blue polo shirt with a tag on his chest that says MECHANIC on it with a little bit of his gray-haired chest poking out where buttons used to be. His jeans seem kind of new, but he keeps having to pull them up every few steps. He pushes random candy wrappers into the trash pile
with his once-white Air Force 1s that never had shoelaces but, somehow, he keeps them on. I think he’s had the same ones the whole time I’ve known him.
“Hi, Sunny,” Maria and I say at the same time.
“Let’s get you home, Simon,” Ms. Estelle says, suddenly picking up speed toward my building. We aren’t far and it’s gonna be a long time before it gets dark out, but it seems like the minute Ms. Estelle sees Sunny trying to talk to us, we need to move faster. Ms. Estelle rushes to the gate at the front of my apartment building, barely letting me and Maria say too much more. I’ve never seen Ms. Estelle rush anywhere, but it seems like Sunny makes her a little nervous.
As I open the gate, I hear Sunny singing a song to himself while he sweeps.
Grab your coat, grab your hat.
Sweep, sweep.
Don’t you worry ’bout this and that.
Sweep, sweep, sweep.
Move your feet, on the sunny side of the street.
Sunny almost sounds like somebody else’s voice is coming out of his body. How he sings is better than most of the old folks who be singin’ in the choir at church on Sunday mornings. Compared to Sunny’s smooth hums, they sound like tires screeching against the street right before an accident. I don’t understand how he can sing like that, but it doesn’t seem like he has anywhere to perform for real.
