by Alyssa Cole
No one had second-guessed whether we belonged or were a good investment. The realtors had talked about how we were part of a wave of new people coming in to enrich the neighborhood, make it better and more valuable, without knowing a damn thing about us.
No, that’s not true. The realtors had known one thing, that I was starting to see was more important than I’d realized.
Us.
Them.
Gifford Place OurHood post by Jenn Lithwick:
Hey everyone, I know things have been pretty somber, but are we still having the block party this weekend? I’ve been calling Mr. Perkins, but he seems to still be out of town.
Candace Tompkins: The block party is still on. Nothing short of the second coming could stop it.
Josie Ulnar: Fantastic! I’ll be making the potato salad. I’m using this recipe I’ve been looking forward to trying. Link: Carly’s Raisin-tastic Potato Salad.
Fitzroy Sweeney: Frightening!
Derek James:
Chapter 12
Sydney
THE TIGHTNESS IN MY CHEST DOESN’T LOOSEN AFTER THEO leaves. It doesn’t as I walk toward the train station, even though it’s hot enough to feel like I’m in a sauna. Isn’t that shit supposed to relax you? Instead I just feel like I can’t breathe.
I spend three hours of my afternoon in the waiting room of a nonprofit that helps with situations like mine, one I looked up after Ms. Gianetti’s secretary had told me she couldn’t help. The waiting room is packed with people, mostly Black and brown, most sporting either a numbed-out, hopeless expression or one of annoyance. I spend another two hours waiting at the next nonprofit after the first one tells me they can’t help, either. When I finally sit with the poor overworked and harassed advocate, she apologetically tells me I need to come back on Tuesday and to bring my mother with me if possible, or something that shows I have power of attorney.
By the time I get back to Gifford Place, I’m exhausted to the marrow and craving nicotine, alcohol, a few snuggles from the bodega cat—anything to make the shit circling round and round in my head just stop. The block feels off—there are no kids playing in the street. Len, Amber, and LaTasha sit on a stoop, but they look hunched in and sad instead of like kids enjoying the last days of summer. A police car slows as it passes on the street, and maybe I’ve watched too much Animal Planet but it reminds me of a predator scanning a herd, looking for a weak youngster to pick off.
The bodega has its gate down during the evening for the first time ever, maybe, when I stop in front of it. It’s stayed open through nor’easters and hurricanes, through blackouts and water main breaks, and of course now it’s closed. As I stare in annoyed disbelief, I hear a clanking noise coming from the metal cellar door embedded in the sidewalk outside the store. There’s been everything from a number hole to a social club down there over the years, but this isn’t the sound of people gambling or shooting the shit. There’s scraping along with the clanking and then abrupt silence.
I stomp on the metal door twice. “Abdul?”
The noise stops, but I get no response.
I know it’s probably nothing, but that unsettled feeling descends on me again. I curl my fists at my side and march toward the next bodega, two blocks over. I usually avoid it because the guy who works there is always trying to holla when I just want to buy some snacks and go. I end up getting a whole pack of Parliament Lights because he plays dumb when I ask him for a loosie and I won’t beg him for it.
The full box is expensive as shit. I hope Abdul finishes his renovations quickly.
I smoke a cigarette on the walk back to cut the need, deep, greedy pulls that leave me light-headed. My hands are shaking by the time I get to my stoop, and I wonder if I should maybe go to a doctor to get this lack-of-sleep thing looked into because I’m really starting to feel the effects. My mood has plummeted and all I want to do is sit and cry.
I just had my period so I know it can’t be PMS.
When I open the mailbox and see another bundle of medical bills, the worst kind of déjà vu, I let out a little desperate laugh. Yeah, I’m not going to the doctor anytime soon, unless it’s against my will.
Again.
I pull out my phone as I walk through the hallway toward my apartment door, pausing to swipe away the missed calls from bill collectors to see if Drea has texted.
Nothing.
She sometimes does this, disappears into a new bae, eating, drinking, and breathing nothing but them. With a holiday weekend and a surplus of personal days, she could be gone for who knows how long, though I’m surprised that she would boo up right before the West Indian Day parade. This is generally her free agent period so she can whine on whoever.
And at her most infatuated, she still responds to me, even if just with tongue + water drops emojis, or a thumbs-up.
And she never lets a fight drag on. If I piss her off, she tells me. If I start shit, she finishes it, and we get back to normal.
But the Drea is typing . . . message still mocks me from the top of our chat. I bet she started to write something while annoyed and thought better of it, but imagining what it could be, and how angry she must be at me not to even look at the chat and notice, shoots my stress through the roof.
“You’re too clingy.”
“I can’t stand being around you anymore.”
“God, you’re pathetic.”
No. Those are things Marcus would say. Not Drea. Drea loves me. For real loves me.
I shouldn’t push anymore, but I feel frazzled by just about everything, and guilty for putting so much onto her, and worried because a million things could have happened on her date with a stranger.
I call her cell, and when it goes to voicemail, I try to sound normal and not like a stalker friend. “Hey, big head. Let me know you’re okay, okay?”
After I disconnect the call, I dial her work number, and it also goes to voicemail, but I hang up before the beep.
I call Mr. Perkins again and leave another voicemail for him, too. He was always so bad about leaving his phone on silent. One reason why “City Hall” became City Hall was that people knew you had to just go over and see him, since he never answered his phone. I don’t like not hearing from him, but I’m sure Ms. Candace has spoken to him.
When I unlock the door to my apartment and push it open, I’m met with resistance.
I push again and it opens a little and then closes.
Something is pushing back.
Fear slides down my spine and swirls around in my belly, but when I push one more time, I realize that the resistance is coming from the mat on the other side of the door—sometimes the corner rolls back. I let out a shaky breath, tired of being scared of every damn thing. I wiggle the door back and forth, which pushes the mat away and reveals the mustard yellow of a manila envelope.
Drea had told me that she’d slipped the VerenTech info under my door, and I had totally forgotten. She’d gone out of her way for me, like she always did, and I couldn’t even be bothered to remember until days later.
I’m almost relieved to realize I fucked up—maybe this is why she’s avoiding me. This is fixable.
After closing the door, I toss the folder onto the kitchen table with my other research, shuck off my grimy clothes, and head directly into the shower. Lathering up my washcloth and scrubbing until my skin tingles is cheap therapy, and by the time I slip on shorts and a tank top, I’m still exhausted but feel slightly less like I’m in a tar pit of depression.
Night is falling outside and I open the back door to let in a breeze; the neighborhood is too quiet for a summer night, and I jump when a lone cicada suddenly bursts into song somewhere nearby.
Mommy’s Coney Island ashtray, from way back before she quit smoking, rests next to the place mat. I brought it inside a few weeks ago, breaking the “no smoking inside” rule, because every time I tried to relax out back, Toby would go off like I was coming for his Purina. I sometimes imagined him clutching his dog bowl the same way his owner clut
ched her purse when I was behind her on the walk home from work one day just after they moved here.
Whatever. Toby and his owner can kiss my ass. I have more important things to focus on.
The envelope is thin, especially compared to the stacks of papers already on the table. When I open it and pull the papers out I realize this isn’t what I would’ve gotten if I’d gone downtown to make the request. Each one of the ten pages has FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY stamped in red in the top right corner. I grab the lighter from the tabletop and a cigarette, light it, and scan the first page.
The Company (VerenTech) acknowledges that this Memorandum is a public record subject to disclosure but do hereby require that we be notified of any and all FOIA requests, both during the city selection process and in the event that this city is chosen, to allow the Company to seek a protective order or other appropriate remedy.
Legalese is not my jam, but I’m pretty sure that this is VerenTech asking the City of New York to snitch if anyone asks about what they’re doing. I have no idea if this is normal or not, but asking for a list of people who requested information that should be public in order to seek “a protective order or other appropriate remedy” against them is ominous as hell.
I had requested information. I’d been denied but . . .
I take another drag from the cigarette.
The second page, after the “snitches get stitches” clause, is full of terminology I fully have no fucking idea what to make of.
The third page seems to be from some kind of census report on the neighborhood surrounding the old medical center. My neighborhood. Number of inhabitants, racial breakdown of the inhabitants, median income, how many people make use of SSI, WIC, Medicaid. These numbers are bumped up by the housing projects, but it’s somewhat alarming to see the totals highlighted in red below a certain income level.
There’s a block of text in a memo area under the numbers.
Area is centrally located. It’s at the convergence of several subway lines, making it ideal for commuting into Manhattan. There is also commuter train service to Long Island and Penn Station. Tree-lined streets abound and there are many parks, small and large, though most are currently used as hangouts for delinquents or drug dealers. It is also within reasonable walking distance from Prospect Park, meaning the goal of closing gap between the Park Slope operations and the Northwest sector can be reached within the next few years.
JFK is not far, for those who travel often, and access to and from Long Island and its beaches is convenient for those with property there. These resources are currently underutilized. While many of the brownstones and apartment buildings have not been kept up, a surprising number will require minimal work to meet our standards. We anticipate a full rej-
I turn the paper over but there’s nothing on the back and the next page is from a different report. A quick flip through shows that all of the pages were printed slightly too big, cutting off portions of the text.
I didn’t know that VerenTech had a Park Slope campus. That doesn’t make sense, given how everyone made such a big deal of the project about to get started in my neighborhood.
The fourth page is clearly from another report, given its numbering, and lists “incentives” from the city that VerenTech is currently considering, and I inhale wrong and start to choke. The tax subsidies alone amount to over a billion dollars. A billion motherfucking dollars.
This is a lot of money at play, before anything else is even on the table. It’s more than a little rage-inducing when thinking about the redline map Kendra had given us, and how little investment the neighborhood has been deemed worthy of.
The next page is just columns of numbers that mean nothing to me, but the last three pages are easily understandable.
VERENTECH HEADQUARTERS CAMPUS, 5-YEAR PROJECTION reads the first page, and it’s a mock-up of an immense shining tower right in the middle of the neighborhood, like the mother ship for those alien cranes hovering everywhere. At its base is the renovated medical center that will serve as the research and development building. The buildings around it are the familiar ones that have always lined these streets.
I flip to the ten-year projection; in this illustration, the campus has spread. A few more tall buildings—this time condominiums, with storefronts along the bottom. For this to work out, a few other buildings will have to be torn down. There’s a condominium where the YMCA should be, too.
My mom told me something about the YMCA maybe moving to a bigger space, which would make sense if an office building accommodating thousands and thousands of new workers was moving into the immediate area, but it’s still unsettling to see such a major change neatly laid out.
The fifteen-year projection shows a neighborhood that’s completely unrecognizable to me at first glance, even though it’s my street. Condominiums, large faux brownstones and smaller glass-fronted cubes, have replaced several of the familiar houses.
I stare at the image for a long time before I notice that there are people along the bottom edge of the paper, slightly cut off by the bad print job. All of the little illustrated heads I see?
Belong to white people.
Something slams upstairs, right above my head. A door in Drea’s apartment? I didn’t hear her come in the front, but maybe she crept up because she’s still mad at me.
Sulking and evasion aren’t Drea’s usual style. I pick up my phone and check our text chat even though I know damn well she hasn’t responded: Drea is typing . . .
Enough is enough.
I shove my feet into my house slippers and head out into the hallway. I pass the coat closet under the stairs, pushing the door that’s always slightly ajar shut, and walk to the bottom of the steps.
“Drea?” I call up the stairs, and the frightened-sounding reverberation of my own voice jump-starts my pulse. There’s no reason to be scared. This is the house I grew up in. Any spirits that linger here have either had a lifetime to make their move or wish me no harm.
What if it’s not a spirit?
The question slithers icily down the nape of my neck.
I head up the stairs, just to prove I can. Mommy would have been ashamed at how I’m acting this week, shook by every little thing. One time when I was about eight, I woke her up to tell her a monster was living under my bed. She told me to get the .22 and shoot it, then take my behind to sleep.
I laugh a little at that memory, fortify myself with it.
When I get up to the second landing, there’s silence behind Drea’s door. Usually when she’s home, there’s music or humming, or just the thrum of her energy—the same thing that first drew me into the light of her friendship.
“Dre?” I knock. Silence.
I turn the knob.
It opens.
The apartment is sticky with humidity and smells of sage, coconut, and shea butter. Everything in the living room fits Drea’s personal color palette—yellow, teal, and orange, bathing you in brightness as soon as you step through the door.
The late-afternoon light from the sun setting behind the buildings across the street spears into the apartment, pinning down Drea’s belongings around the apartment: the altar with a half-burnt sage bundle and various crystals; the heart-shaped couch pillow I cross-stitched her name into during our home economics class; her college diploma, framed with a photo of me, her, and Mommy at her graduation.
A door slams down the hallway again and I jump, then breathe a sigh of relief. One of the best parts of her apartment layout is she gets the bomb cross-breeze, but if she doesn’t put a doorstop under her bedroom door, it’ll slam and open, slam and open.
I head back to her bedroom, pushing the door open and sliding the wooden triangle under it with my foot. The color scheme in here is different—all white and purple. I head over to her window; her polka-dot curtains flap in my face from the breeze but then go still after I shut the window.
She must have been home at some point today if her window is open . . .
My body tenses. This
is where her air conditioner should be. Her brand-new air conditioner. There’s no reason for there to be a cross-breeze because this window shouldn’t be open.
My head starts to spin a little and I realize I’m not breathing. My brain is too busy trying to piece everything together, and has forgotten basic functions.
I have to get out of here. The air conditioner is gone, Drea didn’t tell me she was moving it, and anyone could’ve come in from the fire escape. They could be in here right now.
I start to dash out of the room, but a dark stain on Drea’s white duvet catches my eye and I skid to a halt.
Dried blood is dark like that.
I walk slowly toward the bed, heart in my throat and the fear threatening to blot out any sense I have left. Then the stain moves.
Tiny flecks of it crawl around the edges, and this time it’s not my mind playing tricks on me.
It’s not blood. It’s a clump of bedbugs.
A ripple of repulsion passes over my skin, leaving itchiness in its wake.
I run for a giant plastic bag from under the kitchen sink, force myself to ball the duvet up around the mass of bugs, and shove it into the bag, then run it outside after double-bagging it four times over.
I don’t think as I’m doing it, or feel. I’m on autopilot, just like last time . . .
I don’t know how much time passes after that. I search every crevice of her bed, her floorboards, her closet, but find no other evidence of the bugs.
I start to shove her clothes into bags to be heat-treated, but it’s too much.
I’m overwhelmed and she might not appreciate me all up in her stuff, especially since she already thinks I’m unhealthily obsessed with the bedbugs. I didn’t take a picture. By the time she comes home, I’m going to look like a maniac who threw away her favorite duvet out of spite.
She’s already suggesting therapy and I need to calm down. I don’t think she would hurt me purposely, like Marcus did, but the bite of restraints against my wrists isn’t something I want to feel again.
