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For my parents
Thanks to the students who told me what I needed to know to write this book. You know who you are. And to my agent, Ashley Grayson, and my editor at Simon Pulse, Sangeeta Mehta, for their encouragement and assistance along the way.
NOTE TO READERS
All errors, inconsistencies and out-and-out screwups are purely the fault of my agent, editor, publisher, and anyone else who messed with my book before it made it into your hands. This is my story, and I’m gonna tell it like it happened.
THE DEAN’S OFFICE
People always make it sound like God is a man. But we’ve got no proof of that.”
Everybody gasped. Then a few snickers and giggles.
I felt myself blush, but I hurried on. “The whole idea of God looking like a man is a European concept. Back in Ancient Greece—”
“You saying God is a girl?” Eddie Evans shouted. “So God’s got titties and a—”
The class erupted in laughter.
I kicked my volume up. “No, that’s not what I’m saying. God is not male or female.”
“So God is a transvestite?” Jay shouted from the back row.
“Not a transvestite, dumbass, a hermaphrodite,” Cassie said. “That’s when you got a package and a coochie.”
Ms. Howard’s face reddened. I didn’t know if she was going to pass out or go postal. She yelled at everyone to settle down, but no one paid attention. She turned on me. “Just hand in your paper and sit down. We’ve heard enough.”
“You’re not gonna let me present it? I spent a lot of time on this.”
“Too bad you didn’t choose a more appropriate topic.”
“But this was one of the choices you gave us! It was topic seven—explore how different cultures—”
“Sit down,” she snapped.
Knowing when to shut up wasn’t usually a problem for me, but I heard myself saying, “This isn’t fair. You’re the one who assigned the topic.”
The class went, “Oooooohhhh.”
“Go to the dean, Julia.”
The class was so quiet, you could hear a pin drop. As everybody watched, I picked up my books and stalked out. You really should have seen her face. She didn’t think that A-student Julia DiVino would dare stand up to her.
My legs felt like jelly, probably more from the stress of the situation than anything else. Dad was going to kick my ass if he had to take off work to go to a suspension hearing. Or would he be proud that I stuck to my guns? I doubted it.
I surprised myself by heading toward the bathroom on my way to the dean’s office. I guess I needed a few minutes to let the redness in my cheeks go down.
Everybody knew Diana the bathroom lady. She was in her forties, with bleached-blond hair and heavy-metal tattoos. Her job was to spend her entire day outside the girls’ bathroom, making sure nothing nasty was happening—no drugs, no fights . . . no suicides.
“Hey there, baby.” Diana reached out to receive my bathroom pass, but I shook my head.
“I don’t have one.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve been sent to the dean’s office by Ms. Howard, but I want a minute to . . .”
“Go ahead, sweetie.”
Our bathrooms were like a mini Brooklyn housing project, littered with trash and covered in graffiti. The graffiti was mostly gang stuff: RLB rock da house, Hermanas Mexicalis is bad bitches, Crab girls got crabs. The worst culprits were the school’s biggest girl gang, the RLB, aka the Real Live Bitches. I’d spent lots of toilet-sittings deciphering their codes. All you needed to know was a little pig Latin and a little Creole and you could crack pretty much any code.
I splashed cold water on my face and let it spike my lashes and dribble into my eyes. The shock of the water made me feel a bit better. I patted my face dry with scraping brown paper towels, careful not to smear my (thankfully waterproof) mascara. Running my fingers through my hair, I headed out to face the dean, thanking Diana as I left.
“Holla back!”
I jumped when I heard the voice behind me. Turned out it was Black Chuck. “Chuck, what up?”
“I told you, don’t call me Chuck. I’m going by Black now.”
“What kind of a name is Black?”
“My kind of name, Ju.”
I rolled my eyes. “I told you not to call me that. Everybody’s going to think I’m Jewish.”
“So? Nothing wrong with that, is there?”
“ ’Course not, but—”
“No butts. Only asses. So where we going, Ju? Don’t tell me you cutting. Not Miss DiVino. You got a sub in Howard’s class?”
“Actually, she sent me to see the dean.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I’m serious. It’s because I said in my speech that God wasn’t a man and didn’t have a package. She got upset.”
Black Chuck burst out laughing. “I got you. Well, if they gonna suspend your ass, I’ll walk you down there.”
“You’re so sweet.”
He dropped me off outside the office. As he walked away, I shouted over my shoulder, “Your pants are falling down.”
He shouted back, “Damn right they are!”
The dean’s office was a large space with about a dozen orange plastic chairs and several connecting rooms. It used to be guidance central, but the admin switched the offices when they realized that more students needed suspensions than programming advice.
I’d always felt sorry for the poor suckers who got sent here. Today I was one of them, along with a hot Hispanic guy who sat outside Dean Hallett’s door.
The guy lifted his eyes, meeting mine. I looked away quickly, sitting down two seats away from him. I felt him giving me a once-over before looking back down at his iPod.
Just my luck, Hallett was on duty today. She was the strictest of the deans. I took a deep breath, wondering what she’d do to me.
The guy didn’t seem worried. He was nodding his head to his music.
“Is it too loud?” he asked, removing one of his earbuds.
“No, it’s fine,” I said without looking at him.
I was hoping he’d put the earbud back in and go back to minding his business, but he kept looking at me. “So, you in trouble or something?”
“Well, I am in the dean’s office.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. I’m just here to get my ID card.” I glanced at him. His smile was smooth, easy.
“Not me, unfortunately.”
“I feel you. I’ve been at the dean’s office myself a few times at my old school.”
Okay, so I had to ask. “What school’s that?”
“You wouldn’t know it unless you know Detroit.”
“Detroit, huh? I hear that place is gangsta. Guess you won’t have trouble getting used to Brooklyn.”
“No trouble at all.”
“How’d you end up in Brooklyn?”
But he couldn’t answer, because that’s when Hallett’s door opened. She was a heavyset woman with the shrewd eyes of a criminal prosecutor.
“Hi, Eric. Come on in.” Her eyes landed on me. “Was there something I could help you with, Julia?”
“Uh, well . . . Ms. Howard wanted me to speak to you.”
“All right. I’ll see you in a few minutes.” She let Eric into her office and closed the door.
I sighed. Wait until she found out why I was there.
Q
My best friend, Q, begged for the 411 on the bus ride home. She already knew about my trip to the dean’s office and that I’d been spotted talking to a hot guy.
We took the special bus that stopped outside the school. It was convenient, and we both knew it wasn’t smart to hang out at the bus stops on Nostrand Avenue. There was always drama going on, and we didn’t want to be part of it.
“You’ve got to be kidding. Not literally one minute.”
“I’m serious. One and a half, tops. I told her what happened and she said to try to be less controversial next time so Ms. Howard won’t get upset. That’s it.”
“She must like you.”
“She likes us.” I smiled. “ ’Cause we’re cornballs.”
Q laughed. We weren’t cornball honors students, but we weren’t totally mainstream either. We fit somewhere between the gangbangers and the nerds, though we weren’t really sure where.
In a school run by gangs, staying out was harder than joining. But Q and me had made a pact in seventh grade not to join any gang, and we’d stuck to it. There were a few different gangs represented at the school: Real Live Bitches and Real Live Niggaz (Blood connection), Hands Up (Blood connection), Sixty-Six Mafia (Crip connection), Flatbush Junction Crips (Crip connection.) We knew who our friends were and were careful about what we said. If people thought we were haters, it would only be a matter of time before we got jumped.
Q had mocha skin and a wide, mobile mouth. She had a great figure, petite but with boobs, which got her mad attention. Her skin was good too, despite the occasional zit in her T-zone.
Q’s name was actually Latisha Stairs, but over the years it went from Latisha to Queen Latifa to Queen and now just Q.
“Wanna come over?” Asking her was a daily ritual. Unless she had dance class, she came over to my place for a couple of hours pretty much every weekday. I liked the company, and she liked the downtime when she didn’t have to deal with her mom or her annoying younger brother and sister.
Q always had to be home for dinner at 5:30 p.m. on the dot or her mom would go into her speech about young people not respecting their parents. The lecture was the same every time with little variations she’d picked up like “You should’ve seen that mama backhand her child in the grocery store—you be glad I ain’t taking to you like that,” or “Her child missed dinner one night, and she was pregnant and not a day above fourteen. Fourteen, do you hear me?”
Yeah, that was Q’s mom. Her dad was a firefighter in the city, but since her parents were divorced, she only saw him every month or two.
We got off the number 44 at the corner of Nostrand and Flatbush and jaywalked to my apartment building opposite the projects. On bleak days, it looked gray and depressing as hell. Today, with the September sun gleaming off the brick, I was almost proud of where I lived. Most of my friends lived in much worse.
I dug into my jeans and fished out my key.
The DiVino crib was pretty stylin’, with a black leather couch and love seat, an oval glass coffee table, cream carpeting, and an entertainment system, to which my dad had added a fifty-inch flat-screen a few months back. By the front window was a desk with a computer. Dad thought I needed the most up-to-date technology to do my homework; he didn’t know that I spent most of my computer time on Facebook and YouTube.
Q had barely entered the crib and found the Doritos when she asked me to tell her more about the guy in the office.
“His name’s Eric. He’s from Detroit. That’s all I know.” I chose not to mention that I wasn’t exactly sweet to him right off the bat. Q thought I self-sabotaged when in the vicinity of good-looking guys.
“Is he a junior?”
“I don’t know. He looks more like a senior.”
“Well, you’ll have to find a way to talk to him again. Maybe he’ll be at the dance Friday night. I hear he’s so fine.” Her eyebrows went up and down. “Mmmm . . .”
“As if! Don’t look at me like that.”
“Let me guess. He ain’t your type?”
“Right.”
“You always say that, Julia. Chill. Not every guy’s like Joe.”
I stared at her. She knew not to bring him up. She knew mentioning that asshole could put me in a bad mood for the rest of the day. She just didn’t know the whole story.
“Sorry, Julia.” She licked the powdered cheese off her fingertips. “I’m just saying. It’s time you made an effort to find a guy.”
“I’m not not making an effort.”
“Good. So you cannot not make an effort Friday night at the dance.”
“Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t.”
Q crunched some more, grinning.
TONY DIVINO, AKA MY DAD
I was the devil’s daughter. My Italian grandma told me that once and ever since I liked the idea.
“I had-a three sons,” she told me one sweaty summer night on their porch in Astoria, Queens. “One was a chef, one was a cabdriver, and one was a devil. Don’tcha be asking me which one your papa was!”
I gave my most wicked grin as she eyed me above her reading glasses. She seemed to think I took after my dad. But I also knew that she was proud of her youngest son ever since he started operating subways for the MTA.
Tony DiVino had been getting into scrapes since he was in the cradle. The worst one was marrying my mom, Marisol, the daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants. I’d heard enough of my grandma’s mutterings to know what she thought of Hispanics. Gold diggers, hustlers, shoplifters, all of them.
I’d always hurt for my mom because I knew how they must’ve treated her. It was just stupid for the DiVinos to think that she married my dad for any reason but love. When she married him, he was stocking shelves in a grocery store. Even a dumbass gold digger could’ve done better than that. If it was money she wanted, she probably would’ve encouraged him to become a pusher instead of a subway operator.
I looked up from my food to the picture of my mom on the mantel. That picture had smiled down at me almost as far back as I could remember. She’d died in a car accident when I was six, and I only remembered what she looked like from pictures. But I remembered how she smelled. Sometimes I caught her scent out of the blue—on the street, at the mall, at home. And I’d remember how it felt to be in her arms.
The door opened, jolting me from my thoughts. “Dad?”
“Hey, bella.” Dad carried a pizza. He looked down at the cheese-smeared bowl on the coffee table. “You’ve already eaten? But I brought pepperoni pizza from Angelo’s!”
How should I know he was going to do that? I was surprised enough that he was actually home. But I didn’t bother saying it, because Dad was never going to change. The man obviously had adult ADD. Most of what I said went in one ear and out the other.
“Mac and cheese again?” He frowned.
“I didn’t get a chance to go for groceries.” Usually I cooked myself something good. Q said I made an amazing stir-fry. “It doesn’t matter. I’m still hungry. I can have a slice of pizza. Maybe two.”
I promised myself I’d eat at least one and a half slices. Sure, I was already pretty full, but it wasn’t often Dad came home with a surprise like this. I had to make him feel it was worth it if he was ever going to do it again.
Dad went to change. I put out a couple of plates, then got him a beer and opened it with the bottle opener on his key chain.
When he came back, he wore an old Yankees shirt and jeans. He once told me that the biggest division between the MTA employees wasn’t black or white, male or female, but Mets or Yankees. I wasn’t into baseball myself, though I had great memories of going to games with my dad when I was young. And I tried to stay up on the scores in case he asked for my opinion on the games. I wanted him to think that I watched baseball when he wasn’t around.
When he wasn’t working, Dad was out with his buddies or his girl, Gina, a thirty-five-year-old secretary in a real estate office. She reminded me of Paula Abdul—short, done-up, and the kind o
f sweet that made your teeth ache. They’d been going out for five or six months, but I’d only seen her a few times. I knew it didn’t matter, because with Dad it never lasted more than a few months. Which meant there was no point in anybody making too much of an effort.
Dad had a dark, scruffy Benicio Del Toro look that seemed to go over well with the ladies despite a few extra pounds. And of course, he had his God-given (as he put it) Italian charm.
“I’m going to the dance at South Bay Friday night,” I said. Dad usually didn’t remember those things, but I figured I’d tell him anyway.
“Have fun. Don’t forget to wear a bulletproof vest.”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s not that bad.”
“Since when is a shooting in the locker room not that bad?”
Okay, despite his adult ADD, Dad remembered some things. “That was two years ago, Dad.”
“So whoever did it got arrested and charged, right?” When I shook my head, he said, “Exactly. It’s a lawless culture these days.”
“Yeah, well, the kid didn’t die, thankfully.”
“That’s comforting. Forgive me if I can’t wait till you get out of that shithole school.” He licked the tomato sauce off his fingers. “Pardon my French.”
GEOGRAPHY OF MY LIFE: ASTORIA, FLATBUSH, AND SOUTH BAY
Before moving to Flatbush ten years ago, we lived in Astoria, Queens. Dad and I moved down here so that he could be closer to his job. He drove the 5 train from Brooklyn College to the Bronx and back about a million times a day.
Now I lived on the border between the projects of Flatbush and the leafy neighborhood of Midwood (or Victorian Flatbush as white people call it). At first nobody was sure what to think of the Hispanic/Italian kid from Queens. But eventually I was welcomed in, and my second favorite food after pizza became Jamaican patties.
Like a million other teenagers, I’m bused to a school that isn’t in my neighborhood so that I can have better educational opportunities. I applied to South Bay because it had some law-focused courses that I thought would look good on a college application. Too bad the school’s going downhill fast. Last year it was ranked the fifth most-dangerous school in all five boroughs.
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