by Pat Cummings
Angel raised an eyebrow at her dad. Trace could tell they bantered like this all the time, and it made him wonder about where her mom was. Then she turned and gave him a conspiratorial wink. Now he had to wonder about that.
Just then, Auntie Lea reappeared, cupping something in her hands. She sat down and slid the metal toy from Aunt Frenchy’s basket across the table to Roman.
“Any idea what this is?” she asked.
Roman carefully wiped his lips with a napkin, reached into his shirt pocket, and pulled out a rimless pair of glasses. “Definitely a toy,” he began. “Could be as early as the Civil War? Not sure about the time, but they were making tin toys like this as far back as the 1840s, maybe even earlier.” Roman rolled the toy around in his hands. “It’s some kind of rattle; that you’d already know. Probably for a toddler since it has the ABCs all over it. And probably not from a very well-to-do family since it looks crudely made, even for the time.” He ran his thumb over the letters hammered into the side of the rattle, then shook it a few times and laid it on the table.
“Where’d you get it?” he asked.
Auntie Lea pushed back from the table, waving again at Roman to stay seated as she started to collect plates. “It was in a bunch of old stuff my mom gave me from an aunt who died recently. It was the only thing like that in the pile, though. That old, I mean. Or a toy.”
Trace could feel Auntie Lea watching him, but he kept his eyes on the cold beans and rice on his plate. The toy bothered him. More than bothered, it was making him think of that kid again. Angel had picked up the rattle and was shaking it. The noise grated on his nerves.
“Oh, sorry for your loss,” Roman said. “Were you close?”
Angel was turning the rattle over again and again, pausing only to run her fingers over the alphabet like her dad had done. Trace knew it would seem insane for him to just grab it and make her stop.
“You finished?” Auntie Lea asked, reaching for his plate. Trace nodded. Angel really needed to put down the toy.
To Roman his aunt replied, “Not really. I mean, I didn’t see her very often. But she didn’t have children and I was her only niece. Our family’s been all girls since, well, since forever I guess. Until this guy here.” Auntie Lea nodded toward Trace, then turned to open a bakery box that had been sitting on the stove.
“Flan de carrrrrrramelo, anyone?” she asked with a wicked grin.
It was midnight. Trace had escaped to his room, citing tons of homework as his reason to skip dessert. He actually did have a lot to do. He needed back-to-back, mind-boggling facts to throw on the table when the group met tomorrow. But instead of cracking open the books he had brought home, he had been lying in bed, dozing and waking, his feet on and off the ceiling for hours.
And rather than untangling the threads he felt snarling up his mind, he was trying to focus on Angel. When she had looked up at him the first time, what kind of look had that been on her face? And then when she put her hand on his arm, what was that about? Trace was pretty sure she was older than he was, but not by much. So how old was she? Maybe fifteen? She was really pretty. Not the same pretty as Kali, who was a kind of exotic, fashion-model, high-cheekbones, snooty sort of pretty. Angel was more like the sweet sort of pretty, the kind of girl who was friendly to everyone and who might like a guy even if he was younger. It was not working. Thinking about her just made things seem more muddled. He needed to sleep.
“Okay,” he said aloud, the sound of his own voice spooking him in the dark. His words were, in fact, so disembodied that, with very little effort, he could believe someone else had spoken. Trace needed to shake off whatever it was that was making him feel so edgy. He would get up early and do enough research to be ready for the meeting. He would pull it together. Presley was in his corner, but Ty and Kali? They would be so impressed they would have to come around. He would make things right.
“Okay,” he repeated sleepily. “KKK. Jim Crow. Draft riots. First thing tomorrow.” Trace turned onto his stomach, flipped his pillow over, and, wrapping his arms around it, sunk his cheek into its cool softness. Everything would be fine. 1860s. That was what? Like over a hundred and fifty years . . . ages and ages ago? Ages and ages . . . Angel’s face smiled up at him. “Ages, Papi,” she whispered. They burned an orphanage, Trace tried to tell her. “Harsh.” Angel sighed. Who would do that, right? Little kids. Fire. Man, that’s sad. “I know. I know.” Angel was shaking her head slowly. It kind of rattled when she did that and Trace frowned into the pillow. Should he tell her about the library being built over ashes? Or the one kid who was, well, was possibly . . . No. No, Angel, not that kid. Not my kid. That little guy was just . . . Trace breathed into the pillow. He was lost, probably. Just lost. He wanted to reassure Angel, but she was drifting away. Smiling, drifting, shaking her head. Trace held out his hand, trying to pull her back. Take my hand. He almost . . . almost had her hand . . . Slowly, slowly, Angel’s face turned toward him. Her soft eyes were filling with water. Trace choked. That same sick, green water. He was in the river.
12
It was probably the dream that had made him bolt awake at 5:26 a.m., but Trace had wanted to get up early anyway. So, there was a silver lining to his dark cloud. Judging by the low snores and occasional creaks from Auntie Lea’s room, he was on his own for breakfast. With the kitchen to himself, he had been able to listen to some Jay-Z, surf the internet, take notes, and stuff himself with oatmeal without interruption.
He was feeling pretty good as he left the apartment. He threaded his way along streets filled with children on their way to school, all twitchy in anticipation of Halloween, which was four whole days away. Had he ever been that excited about trick-or-treating when he was little? Trace tried to remember back to when he was a kid. Back before. Sometimes, it seemed to Trace as if a heavy curtain, like the thick red velvet kind that hung in old-time movie theaters, had dropped over his past. Onstage in front was everything that happened after the accident. But everything before was back there behind the curtain. Trapped like a moth in a glass, its frantic beating of wings muffled. At least, he thought it was all there. He felt sure he could look behind the curtain and remember everything, anything—if ever he wanted to. But not today. Today, he needed to feel good.
A frothy pink tutu peeked out of a little girl’s down jacket as she skipped past him, holding her mother’s hand. And ahead at the corner, a tiny boy with a pair of bumblebee antennae balanced crookedly atop his hoodie bounced as he waited for the light to change. All along the street, witches and the occasional skull leered out from store windows.
How did it work here? Back in Baltimore, kids could knock on doors at real houses with lawns and garages. But here in Brooklyn, did they have to trek up and down the high stoops of brownstones or take elevators to apartment hallways lined with strangers’ doors? They must, he thought. Cobwebs and jack-o’-lanterns decorated many of the railings and doorsteps along his path to the subway. The trick-or-treating must go on.
When he reached the front steps at IS 99, Trace found them deserted. He took that as a good sign, although it was cold weather and not, he suspected, the gods of good fortune he should thank. Any unscheduled run-ins with Kali or Ty might mess up his plan for their study group meeting after class. School was letting out early for a teachers’ meeting: sign number two that this might just be a perfect day. Soon, everything would be put right. After all, he was the one who had been chosen team leader. Today, Ty and Kali would see the cool, calm, confident style that would make their team the one to beat. Today, things would change.
“What’d you find out, Theo?” Ms. Levy whispered loudly as Trace entered the media center. With one arm loaded with books and a coffee cup in her other hand, she was using her hip to nudge along a cart that held a computer and a projector. Ms. Levy was an accident waiting to happen. Clusters of students, some studying, others bent over cell phones, filled the library.
“Let me take those,” Trace offered, relieving the librarian of both the books
and her coffee cup. A group of girls near the photocopier on the far side of the room began arguing loudly. A shout erupted from a pair of guys waging battle in a game on their phones. Quiet Zone signs, placed strategically around the library, were covered with comments and provocative drawings, although Ms. Levy refreshed them daily and it was barely noon.
“About the Colored Orphan Asylum fire, I mean?” the librarian asked, still whispering. Parking the cart, she took her coffee cup back and cleared a spot on her desk for the books.
Trace smiled. “Nothing definite, Ms. Levy,” he answered quietly. “I did see what you were talking about, though. There are some stories about a nine-year-old girl being killed, but not by the fire. The crowd beat her to death.”
The anguish on Ms. Levy’s face made Trace instantly regret that he had rolled off the information so casually. He had actually been relieved to read that it was a nine-year-old girl and not a four-year-old boy who had died. Suddenly realizing how twisted that thought was, he flushed with embarrassment.
“I . . . I thought you already knew that . . . when you told me about a child . . . ,” Trace began.
“No,” Ms. Levy said softly. “That’s awful.” She sat at her desk looking up at him. “I remember seeing some reference to a child being killed during the riot, but I didn’t see any details. That’s horrible. That’s . . .” She trailed off.
“There were only a couple of references about it, Ms. Levy. Most of the sites and those books I took out don’t mention a girl at all,” Trace offered. He glanced at the clock, then took a quick look around, satisfying himself that the others had not arrived. His plan had been to come early, spread his notes over the table near the copier, and impress the others. But the arguing girls seemed to be on the verge of throwing punches, so he decided that using a different table near the window would be just fine.
“No worries, Theo,” Ms. Levy said. “It was a long time ago, poor thing.” Giving him a sad smile, she took a sip of her coffee. “But let me know if you do find out anything more about the girl, okay?”
Trace nodded. As he turned to set up at the window table, he nearly stepped on Kali. She stopped short, sniffed, and headed for the table closest to the copier. The noisy fussing over who was taking too long, what the limit should be on the number of pages copied at one time, and who had really gotten there first suddenly stopped. Kali spoke to the girls so quietly that Trace, only steps away, heard nothing. But the girls suddenly packed up their books, papers, and purses and hurried to a table across the room.
He watched Kali carefully arrange four color-coded sets of index cards in rows before her, take out a notebook and pen, and flip open an iPad. So much for impressing everyone with his organization, Trace thought, quietly pulling out his books and sliding into the seat opposite her. The scrawled pages in his notebook seemed amateurish now. He should have thought of index cards. Ty and Presley arrived just as he sat down.
“As a thespian myself,” Presley was saying, “I just can’t fathom how innervated Mrs. Lincoln must have been, you know? Like she goes out to be titillated by an evening of regalement and divertissement and then, BLAM! there’s all that consternation and her husband is, like, totally extirpated right in front of her, splattering gore and viscera all over the—”
“Shhhhhhhh!” Ty hissed. “This is a library, you know. We’re supposed to keep it down, Presley.” He rolled his eyes at Trace and for a second, Trace thought things might be back to normal. But no. Ty took a seat at the side of the table and pulled out a notebook, index cards, and a pen. “Hey, Kali, nice to see you’re so prepared,” he said, pointedly not speaking to Trace.
“Let’s just do this, Tiberius,” said Kali wearily. “We’ll have fifteen minutes for our presentation, so I figure we should plan on three minutes each. With three or four topics apiece, that’s not much, but we’re supposed to leave time for Q and A.”
“Want me to make a poster board for all of us?” Presley asked. She upturned her book bag next to Trace’s notebook on the table, spilling forth Post-it notes, a Day-Glo highlighter, magazine clippings, one pencil box and sharpener, two MetroCards, a tattered sketchbook, lip gloss, her dog-eared copy of Word Power Made Easy, and what appeared to be a partially eaten granola bar. “I’ve already started mine ’cause I found this really cool picture of John Wilkes Booth on an old Wanted poster and you know what they say—”
Kali leveled a withering look her way, but Presley, busily picking pencil shavings off the granola bar, missed it.
“A picture’s worth a thousand words,” she chirped. “Which is kinda weird because a thousand’s like five pages of words . . . and what point size is that anyway? . . . unless you don’t double-space, which I think we’re supposed to do unless—”
“Shut up, Presley!” Kali hissed. “We don’t need your endless chatter. Good grief. Everybody else will have nearly five minutes apiece, but Mrs. Weaver had to go and stick you on our team, so we’re already limited. The very least you can do is keep your ranting down while we’re trying to work, okay?” Kali waved a hand around her head like she was warding off mosquitoes and then started itemizing the three topics she had decided to cover.
Trace watched the air go right out of Presley, and now she sat staring at her pile of stuff as if it had crawled up onto the table by itself and done something awful and rude and embarrassing.
“Look, Kali,” he said firmly.
Kali paused. Ty looked up expectantly.
It was time for him to act like the team leader. “We’re a team and we need to work like one. So the first thing you need to do is to apologize to Presley.” Kali turned toward him, eyes narrowed, clearly ready to fire. But, having started, Trace realized that he actually had a whole list of things to tell Kali she needed to do. How could he have possibly thought that she had been looking forward to seeing him at the library? She had just been furious about him wasting her precious time. Furious and mean. So she had taken her anger out on Ty and Presley.
“I don’t need you sticking up for me!” Presley suddenly snapped, her face turning a hot pink. She began shoving the mess on the table back into her bag.
“Huh?” Trace jerked back in his seat, confused. Ty frowned and even Kali looked surprised. “What did I do?”
Presley’s chair screeched as she pushed it back. Yanking her book bag onto her shoulder, she scraped granola crumbs off the table into her palm and then glared at Trace. “I did a lot of work. I know you guys don’t want me on the team, but you’re not even speaking to one another, so I try to be nice to all of you so we at least can communicate. But we’re not friends. I get it. And I’m not ranting!”
“Geeeeeeeeesh,” Kali muttered under her breath.
“Shut UP,” Trace barked at her.
“You, too,” Presley continued, looking at Trace with such hurt that he felt a crushing guilt. But for what he did not know.
“What did I do?” he said softly.
“You pretend we’re friends and we have hot chocolate and cookies and everything and I meet your aunt and you’re all nice and we’re gonna work together and then you just walk right past me and don’t even say hi when I speak to you, like you don’t know me outside of school and—”
“Wai . . . wait a minute,” Trace said. “I do too speak to you, what are you talking about? When don’t I speak to you?” Now he felt impatient. This was his day to set things right, and now this? Presley was the only one he had not been worried about. Girls were a trip.
“I’ll have my end of the report done, don’t worry. But I don’t need to work with her,” Presley said, sticking her chin out at Kali. “Ty, you’re okay, I guess,” she added. Ty smiled weakly.
“But you? You walked right past me yesterday on Myrtle,” Presley said now to Trace. “Don’t act like you didn’t see me. I was at the vegetable stand right on the corner of Vanderbilt and I even spoke to you and you guys just sailed by me like I wasn’t even there.”
“Wha . . . ? I got home late, Presley, and it
was kinda dark. Maybe you saw someone who looks like me, but I swear, I didn’t see you.” It was true that the walk home yesterday evening had been a blur. His mind had been stuck in 1863—up under the New York Public Library. But enough of this. Trace felt uneasy. It was time to get back to the report, time for him to be team leader, and time for Ty and Kali to drop the attitudes. He watched Presley zip up her jacket, spilling the granola crumbs down the front as she did. Fine. So maybe his team would be short one member for today. Presley would calm down. This had to be some kind of girl thing.
Trace watched as she wound a scarf around her chin. “It was you,” she said hotly, staring him in the eye. “You were with a wild-haired little kid in a creepy rag costume.”
Trace turned to ice.
“Oh—and if you take him out on Halloween like that,” she added, “make him wear real shoes, you jerk.”
Trace’s mind went blank. And by the time he could think again, Presley had left the building.
The cold air helped. Trace walked along Clinton Avenue, keeping an eye on everyone he passed. He was trying hard to pay attention. Because he knew he had not seen Presley, not even heard her. Maybe she was mistaken. Maybe there really was someone who looked a lot like him. Someone who was with a kid who was dressed like . . . like . . . Well, it was just stupid. There had been a few kids in costumes on the streets last night. What was the deal with people in Brooklyn? Why the dress rehearsal? Couldn’t parents make their kids wait until it was really Halloween? Presley had just gotten confused. Probably.
She probably had just had her feelings hurt. She probably wanted to snap at Kali for embarrassing her but had taken it out on him instead. It didn’t have to make sense. The way she babbled, Presley probably got her feelings hurt on an hourly basis. There were a lot of probablys.
More than once as he walked, Trace jumped at the sound of footsteps behind him, making his heart race. More than once, he looked behind him, afraid he would see that boy. It was early afternoon and the sun was shining. But everything felt somehow unreal. That sun was too bright. Glaringly red maple and neon-yellow oak leaves fluttered against a sky that looked a bit too blue. Emerald-green hedges glistened behind jet-black railings, deep-orange pumpkins lined steps that all seemed to be the exact same shade of gray . . . Trace closed his eyes. The colors seemed exaggerated. It was as if they were trying to exactly match the ones in a box of Crayolas. Trace felt his head spinning. How could he ever know what was real? Could he really trust his own eyes? Looking down, he realized that even his own sneakers looked exactly like sneakers in a magazine ad: glossy, perfectly tied, and practically outlined against the sidewalk. Like the special effects in that movie they had watched, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Everything now looked glittery and shiny and . . . fake. The world was trying too hard to look real.
