“Of course you’re smart enough. No one expects you to get As. You’ll have a lot of catching up to do, but that’s why I think Benton’s the best place. You’ll get a lot more attention there.”
Jude didn’t doubt that. The question was whether it was the kind of attention that he wanted.
ON HIS FIRST DAY Jude sat through his classes slouched so far down in his seat that his head barely topped the back of the chair. Half the time he didn’t understand what was being discussed. In Spanish class—usually his best subject—he couldn’t follow a thing. At Hartford High his Spanish teacher made them conjugate verbs, or if she was feeling adventurous, she took short dialogues from the book and had the students read them. In the class at Benton the teacher spoke completely in Spanish. Jude caught a word here or there, but that was it. At one point hands went up around him, raised to answer a question, and Jude hadn’t even realized that the teacher had asked one. Math and biology, his other morning classes, weren’t much better, despite the fact they were in English.
There was one good thing about the day. The school had assigned Jude a buddy to take him around for the first week. His name was Simon, and he was surprisingly friendly. Jude could tell Simon was trying to make him feel welcome, but Simon must have been warned about asking too many questions, because he kept starting sentences and leaving off abruptly in the middle.
Jude had been dreading lunch, but after his last morning class Simon was waiting. He walked with Jude to the cafeteria and brought him to sit at a table with all his friends. One kid asked Jude how he liked Benton so far, then there were a few awkward minutes when no one said much of anything. Finally they seemed to get used to him; they started talking to one another, and Jude was able just to eat and listen. Simon’s friends mostly talked about classes and homework, and Jude realized that they must be the smart kids. Maybe they would be able to help him with his schoolwork, he thought. Maybe Benton wouldn’t be so bad after all.
JUDE GOT INTO his first fight at school two weeks later. For the first week he had Simon—who dutifully came to pick him up at his classroom to deliver him to the next. At the end of the week Simon said, “So, you know your way around now?”
Jude told him he did, and then he was on his own. To his surprise, no one bothered him. He walked from class to class alone, though Simon still waved him over to his table at lunch. Kids stopped staring quite so much, and Simon and his friends started to loosen up and ask him about his old neighborhood. Jude found that they were fascinated with his stories about life in the rougher part of town. It seemed like Simon’s friends must have spread the stories, because suddenly there were a lot of kids hesitantly asking him to come over and sit at their tables. Then Jude started to think that Anna was right and that Benton was different.
It was the beginning of his third week that it happened. He was heading toward the cafeteria for lunch when he passed a group of boys lounging against the lockers and he heard one of them call out, “Hey, you.”
Jude kept walking. There were footsteps behind him and a hand grabbed his arm.
“Hey, I’m talking to you.”
He stopped and turned to face the kid. It was a boy from his English class—Jude thought his name was Mike or Matt or something.
“What do you want?” Jude said.
“What do I want? He wants to know what I want,” the boy called over to his friends, and they snickered. “I’ll tell you what I want. I want to see how tough you really are, ghetto boy. You talk real big, but I think you’re a fake. I think I can kick your ass.”
“You’re welcome to try,” Jude said calmly.
The kid stepped forward, and his shove sent Jude stumbling back.
When Jude regained his balance, the boy beckoned him tauntingly. “Come on, pussy. What you gonna do?”
Jude swung, and his fist landed right on target. He’d had his own nose flattened a few times, but he thought from the boy’s shriek that it was probably the first time for him.
The school called Anna in for a conference that afternoon. They had Jude wait outside the office while they talked, and when Anna emerged, she looked grim. She said, “Come on, I’m driving you home,” but she didn’t look at Jude when she spoke.
She led the way to the car, and Jude followed a step behind. He waited for her to break the silence, mainly because he didn’t know what to say, but she didn’t speak again. When she finally pulled up in front of the house, she put the car in neutral but didn’t shut off the engine.
Now she’s going to yell, he thought. But she didn’t. It was worse than that. She said, “I’m disappointed in you, Jude.”
He tried to explain, to defend himself. “But he started it,” he protested.
“You should have just ignored him and walked away.”
“He shoved me.”
“In that case you go get a teacher. You don’t break his nose. That’s not the way to solve things.”
It was the way he had always solved them in the past, but he didn’t think he should bring that up.
“I need to get back to work,” she said.
“Okay.”
He started to open the door, and she added, “I hope this won’t happen again.”
He shook his head no. But it did.
Two days later, in retaliation for his attack on their friend Matt, a group of boys jumped him in the bathroom during lunch. It was four against one, but Jude had been fighting all his life and they weren’t any better fighters than Matt. The two boys who tried to grab his arms found they could barely hold on, and they hadn’t counted on the reach of his feet. The struggle lasted less than a minute. The two who were supposed to be doing the damage took off after Jude landed a few good kicks. Then one of the boys holding his arm escaped, but Jude didn’t let the other go as easily. Jude didn’t break his nose, but if anything, this boy looked worse—he ended up with a black eye and a split lip that bled all over his shirt.
This time Anna didn’t come right away. Jude spent the afternoon in a chair outside the principal’s office, across the hallway from a room full of secretaries. He was very aware of the fact that he had some blood from the kid’s split lip on his white button-down shirt.
They wouldn’t let him go home on the bus, and one of the secretaries had to stay late to wait for his mother to come pick him up. The woman packed her bag and put on her coat, so when his mother finally arrived, the woman was out the door before Anna finished apologizing. Then they were alone.
Jude started to say, “It wasn’t my fault—”
“Not here,” she snapped, but this time he didn’t have to wait until they got home for her to speak. As soon as he shut the car door behind him, she said, “They’re thinking of expelling you.”
“Fine with me,” he muttered.
“Fine with you? What, do you want to end up like your father? Is that what you want? Because that’s right where you’re headed.”
She couldn’t have known that she was touching on his greatest fear. He answered with fury. “I’m not like my father. I’m not a bit like him.”
“Oh yeah? Two days ago you broke a boy’s nose. Today the principal said that you bruised three boys and that a fourth was badly beaten on his face. That sounds just like Anthony to me.”
“I was defending myself,” he said. It had been a point of pride with him that he never made the first move.
“Fists aren’t the answer. They’re never the answer.”
“If someone comes after me, I’m not going to just stand there and take it. I did that for a long time,” Jude shot back. “I’m never going to do that again.”
Anna, who had an answer for everything, didn’t seem to know what to say to that.
Strangely enough, it was Dolores who came up with the solution. Dolores said that her nephew had been in trouble in school, but he settled down when he started taking boxing lessons. The gym where the lessons were offered made it a requirement that the kids pledge not to fight outside of the ring. If they did, even once, th
ey were out of the program. Dolores reported that they had great success with the rule.
Anna hated the idea, but she agreed to try it.
Jude went reluctantly, but he found that he liked it. It was the first thing he had found that he was really good at. He didn’t think about what that might mean.
10
AS MUCH AS his mother had disapproved of his fighting, Jude became a minor celebrity after his two victories. The fact that Jude had beaten up four kids at one time made for instant popularity. It seemed like suddenly everyone wanted to be his best friend. It should have been wonderful, but instead he discovered that you could be lonely even when you were surrounded by people.
Jude decided the feeling came from the fact that he was so different from most of the kids at Benton. As far as he could tell, ultimate tragedy for them was getting a B- on a test. They thought he was tough because he beat up a couple of kids. They lived less than ten miles from one of the most violent neighborhoods in the country, but it could have been ten thousand. It was so far out of their experience they couldn’t even fathom it.
Out of all the boys in his grade the one Jude thought he would have the most in common with turned out to be the only one that kept his distance. His name was Nick, and Nick’s pack was the cool crowd. They were the group that everyone wanted to join. Jude wasn’t the only one who watched them from the corner of his eye as they laughed and smacked the table in the cafeteria with their palms, and he wasn’t the only one who studied the way they draped themselves over their desks in the classrooms, daring the teachers to tell them to sit up and pay attention. Everyone in the tenth grade watched Nick and his gang, and they knew it. They wore clothes like Jude’s friends from Hartford High—loose, baggy pants and black ski caps. Sometimes one of the kids brought out a boom box and they played rap and hip-hop. They faked basketball moves in the hallway, though Jude never saw them go out to the court to throw up a ball.
Then one day Jude looked up from his lunch and Nick was standing there.
“Hey, you’re Jude, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m Nick.”
“Yeah, I know,” Jude said.
“Hey, I wanted to ask you something.”
“Sure,” Jude agreed.
“Not with these dweebs listening.” Nick jerked his head toward Simon and his friends.
The kid next to Jude whispered, “Asshole,” but not quite loud enough for Nick to hear. Nick turned and started walking away. He didn’t even look over his shoulder to make sure that Jude was following. He led the way out of the cafeteria and into the bathroom, and checked the stalls to make sure they were empty before he spoke.
“Hey, I was thinking you might be able to help me and my buddies.”
Jude leaned against one of the sinks. “Help you with what?”
“We want to pick up some weed. We thought you might be able to score some.”
Jude could do it easily enough. He went back to the old neighborhood to play ball and hang with R. J. at least once a week. He would have gone more often if he could, but things were different now. The first time he returned to the old neighborhood, the guys stopped the game when they noticed him standing by the fence. The court emptied in seconds, and they were all around him, pounding him on the back, slapping his hand, bumping fists. R. J. shouldered his way through and tackled him in a bear hug. They all wanted to know about the good life. They thought Jude had it made, and they teased him about Benton and pretended to be scared of his mother. Then they returned to the court and played ball until it got dark, and afterward Jude and R. J. sat on the court, their backs against the chain-link fence, catching up.
It was a great day, but after all the guys had made such a big deal about his new life, Jude found he couldn’t exactly go back every afternoon. It wouldn’t look right. So Jude went back when he could, and he watched Nick’s group from across the cafeteria. They were the ones Jude wanted to know, so of course they were the only ones who pretended to ignore him.
Until now.
“So you gonna help us out?”
Would it be such a big deal if he just took Nick over to the old neighborhood? He wouldn’t actually be selling or anything. He could just take Nick there, as if for a game, and point him in the right direction. It seemed like such a little thing. On the other hand, there was his mother to think about.
It was a struggle, but finally Jude said, “I can’t. Sorry.”
“I thought you were in the game,” Nick coaxed.
“Nope, sorry.”
“Awright.” Nick shrugged. “Well, catch you later.”
“Yeah, later,” Jude said, and watched Nick walk out of the bathroom. The door swung closed slowly behind him.
AT THE TIME things had been going well at home despite the fights at school. On the days Jude didn’t have boxing or tutoring, the bus delivered him home at four. Dolores stayed until Anna came home around six or six thirty, and then Jude and his mother would sit and eat dinner together. Sometimes Harry would join them. After dinner Anna needed to work, but there was an extra table in her study, which she cleared off so Jude could do his homework. She had a small radio that she kept tuned to the classical station.
The homework assignments seemed practically impossible to Jude, but he liked how it felt to be sitting there working next to his mother. It was as if he were playing at another life—almost as if he weren’t the same person that had lived with his father for fifteen years. The boy who sat in the study hunched over schoolbooks couldn’t possibly be the same one who had sat slumped on a succession of old ratty couches in front of the TV most nights, the books left unopened in a bag.
Then there was one night that Anna didn’t get home until seven. A week later there was a night she didn’t get home until eight. The week after that it was nearly nine three nights in a row. On those nights he ate dinner with Dolores, listening to the sound of her loud chewing, the scrape of her knife on the plate, the tink of the fork hitting her front teeth, and all the time she kept checking her watch and shaking her head.
Anna apologized when she got home. She told them about whatever crisis had arisen, trapping her in the office. Dolores listened to the nightly excuses in silence. At the end she’d give a little nod, pick up her purse, retrieve her coat from the closet, and bark good night at him. On the third night in a row that Jude’s mother didn’t get home until nine, Dolores didn’t grab her coat and leave. Both she and Jude stood there in the kitchen watching Anna pick at her reheated dinner. Then Dolores said, “I know I said I’d stay with the boy, but I can’t keep on with these kinds of hours.”
Jude waited for Anna to appease her. He waited for her to say that it would get better—that she wouldn’t always be this late, but she didn’t. She said, “I know, Dolores.”
“You should be at home with your son,” Dolores said.
Jude was angry at his mother for not coming home, but he certainly didn’t want Dolores criticizing her. He immediately rose to his mother’s defense. “She couldn’t help it. Besides, it’s only a couple of hours after school, and I’m old enough to be on my own now.”
Anna turned to him in relief. “Would you be okay with that?”
“Sure,” Jude said. “Yeah.”
“Great. That is such a help to me.”
Jude felt a glow of pride. “No problem.”
His mother turned back to Dolores. “You can go home at the normal time, Dolores. Jude will be okay on the days I’m a little late.”
Dolores frowned, her lips pinching together in disapproval, but she didn’t say anything.
When Jude got home the next afternoon, Dolores met him at the door and said, “I know your mother told me I should go home, but I think I will stay.”
“I’m fine,” he told her.
“Your mother should be here with you,” Dolores said. “Not at the office till all hours.”
“I’m okay, Dolores,” he assured her. “Don’t worry about me.”
So she went, and
Jude was left in the big, sprawling house by himself. That first week there was only one day that Anna managed to get home before seven, but she apologized and said that it was just a bad week and that it should get better. But if anything, the second week was worse. Her explanation that time was that autumn tended to be a very busy season. After that it happened so often she stopped giving excuses. The fact was that Anna had gotten swept up in her work again, and Jude spent the evenings alone, usually in front of the TV. The homework seemed too hard for him now. What was the point? Anna wasn’t around to impress anyway.
Then one day, on a whim, Jude went up to Nick in the cafeteria. “I can help you with that thing,” he said. He told himself that it wasn’t like he was selling it or anything, and it would be only this once. What could it hurt?
Part II
11
“JUDE, MY MAN, you comin’ or what?” Nick called out, slamming his locker closed.
Jude wanted to say, “No, I’m not coming.” Even better, he’d like to punctuate the words with a fast sucker punch right to the head. After more than a year of being Nick’s “homeboy” the role was getting a little old.
It had started with that first trip back to the old neighborhood with Nick to get him weed. Jude had arranged to meet R. J. and buy from his brother. They did the deal, and Jude got them both out of there as fast as possible. He could tell that R. J. didn’t think much of Nick, but Nick hadn’t noticed. He was excited by the trip and impressed by R. J. and his crack-smoking, dope-dealing brother. Nick kept saying, “This is some real street shit. This is off the top,” and he wouldn’t stop talking about it the next day in school. He kept telling the other kids, “It’s all about the ‘hood.” And that Jude was his “hustler,” his “connection.” Whatever they wanted, Jude could get it for them.
Jude had tried to protest, to say that he didn’t do anything but give him a tour, but Nick rolled his eyes and said, “The hell you say. You the man.” In the end Jude let it slide. He had pinned his hopes for a real friendship on Nick and his buddies because they had seemed to be the most like his old friends. Now he couldn’t imagine how he had been so stupid. Pretty soon he’d found out that all they ever did was get high and try to act like they were from the ’hood instead of what they were—rich white kids from the suburbs. He tried to remember the first time he had looked at Nick and thought, What an asshole. Maybe it was when Nick bought his first bag of heroin.
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