“What did Ramey have to say about that?”
“He said that the colleges wanted to know what happened, not what could have happened.”
I watched as Twig laced on his new running shoes and tried them out on the track. He looked happy as he ran. I was watching him, but in my head I was replaying the conversation between me and Mr. Ramey, the school’s guidance counselor. He had said a lot of things about how well I had tested when I entered the school, and how much promise I had. Then he went on about my chances for a scholarship. That was the short part of the conversation. I had figured it would be.
The thing was that I needed a scholarship that would get me out of my house, away from my mom, away from the hood, and most of all, away from the crap that was going on in my head every day. Mr. Ramey was right. It didn’t do any good being smart. If you were smart and if the world had been right side up, then you would be rewarded for being smart. But the way the world really worked, the way it went down especially when it came to dudes like me, was that you had to walk a path to show you were smart, and it didn’t have anything to do with what you had in your head or in your heart. It had to do with what you scored on tests, the grades you got, and what grades they could send to a college.
It was a struggle for me to stay in high school. My dad was living somewhere on the Lower East Side, drugging himself to death, and Mom was struggling with a string of cheap jobs that never paid enough to get by on. She was depressed and about a heartbeat from giving up. I had seen her like that previously. Before my father stepped—back when he was really reaching out to her—she had withdrawn inside and hidden away from the world. My father couldn’t take it and moved out one Friday evening. Mom cried herself to sleep for the next few days and then went even deeper into her shell. She even talked about killing herself.
Up until then, I had done well in school. When crap came my way, I just pushed back and got by it somehow. It got harder. I had to look out for my brother, and for Mom as well. Then I just wanted to be away from the whole set.
At first I began to think of myself as a bird, flying high over the rooftops, or even a plane just passing from LaGuardia Airport on its way to Europe or Africa. But then, as the anger rose in me, I started thinking of things I would like to do to people who messed life up, who could take an ordinary day and turn it into something nasty and screwed up. That was when I began to think of birds of prey.
Twig didn’t know it, but he kept me sane. In my darkest moments, when I was feeling really, really shitty, I could think about him and his running and feel better about life. It was always good to see him smiling and trying to win his races. He had talent, so winning was possible. And if winning was possible for him, I felt I might cap a break, too.
chapter two
There is a slithering in the grass. The movements of the shadowed patterns are almost invisible in the small patch of bush, except from where I hover far above the earth. On the other side of the patch, a small brown animal moves away from the green carpet and along the winding edge of a stream. It is a paca. The paca stops near the base of a tree and lifts its head to sniff the heavy, humid air. Suddenly it stops, frozen in the moment, listening to whatever is moving through the dewy grass. The paca feels a sense of doom, knowing that whatever it is that moves so silently will surely kill it.
Then a diamond-shaped head arises, hesitates for a moment before it resumes its tracking, looking for a meal. It is a moment too long. I begin my flight downward, faster and faster, my eyes fixed on the colorful skin of the snake, which is now free of the tall grass.
My downward flight turns into a dive as I fold my wings. I am a streak across the gray Andes skies. I am a black dart screaming to the earth. I am death.
And now I strike. My talons just behind the head, crushing the flesh within them. I lift my wings and rise as the snake thrashes wildly, its tail swinging around my legs. I strike the head, pulling the flesh away from the small skull.
We go up and down, no higher than the height of the paca that stands transfixed against the high grass. I tear away more flesh, this time from the eyes.
This time from the skull that breaks beneath my beak.
The grip around my talons eases. It is over. I have my meal.
All is well.
I am living on the dark side of the moon. Pretending to be in another place, sometimes another time, and always in another light, I walk among my friends and the people I know as if everything is as it should be. Nothing is as it should be.
One of the things that scare me, that wake me up in the middle of the night, is that I am too conscious of my thoughts. It’s as if there is a talk show in my head that I’m constantly watching. I wonder if everyone has a talk show in their head. Or if they have voices laying out their future.
Never mind my address. Never mind that my mail comes to 145th Street, or that I live in a place called Harlem. It is really the dark side of the moon. In the mornings, I walk past guys a little older than I am. They stand on street corners or fill up the old gray stoops on my block and watch the world go by.
“They’re not smart,” Twig said when I mentioned them. “Half of them didn’t even finish high school.”
What I know is that it doesn’t matter if they did or didn’t finish. High school doesn’t mean anything anymore. If you want to invent your own life, you need to have more than a high school diploma.
The school I go to, Phoenix, is the old Powell School at 128th and Amsterdam Avenue in Harlem. Red bricks are piled on top of red bricks to make an old New York building. Behind us, on what was once called Old Broadway, an overhead train whines and creaks its way through Harlem. A short distance away, the george Bruce branch of the New York Public library squats like a homeless woman with many stories to tell and few ears to give them to.
The library is where I live, really live. On 145th Street, I eat and sleep and go to the toilet, but it is only in that library, among the books, that I feel comfortable. I go inside, climb the steep steps, find a book, and lose myself for hours. I feel safe—as when I imagine myself flying over the square and rectangular Harlem rooftops, a predator looking for something evil to consume. But if the demons have been too much with me, even the books can’t shelter me completely and I stop my reading to fight against them. It is always the same fight: I am the predator, they are the lowly tormentors, and in the end, I destroy them.
Sitting in Mr. Ramey’s office, knowing what he was going to say long before the words fell between us, I could feel my balls shrivel up and my throat go dry. I wanted to plead my case to him, to say that if I didn’t get a scholarship, it would mean taking my place with all the other guys on the block who look like me. Young, black, dangerous unless proven otherwise.
Twig rarely reads. But he told me that when the demons bother him, he puts them on a track. He watches them run ahead of him and then slowly and surely runs them down, catches up with them, and then speeds past, imagining how they feel knowing that they are losers. I think Twig is at his best when he is running, when he is dreaming of being in races, when he dreams of winning, when he dreams of holding a trophy above his head.
In a sane world, we would be heroes. Teachers would applaud as we walked into the school. There is the smart one, the one who wants to be a writer. And there is the runner.
But we have enemies. In our separate ways, we have moved away from the mob. They have settled for less and we are still hoping to be more. We haven’t created a huge space, and we haven’t escaped the huge shadow they cast. Our scent is no different from theirs, but we have separated ourselves. I think Twig is on the brink of being a great runner. One day, I hope, I will write a poem, or an essay, or a novel, that will change hearts. But the mob doesn’t want us to be different. They want us to find our spots on the corner, or on a stoop. They beckon to us and tell us that everything will be okay.
But I’m terrified to be like them, to drift off into a world that is so unreal. I watched too many times as my father slurred his wor
ds and mumbled about the life he had once hoped for. I see my mom sitting in the darkness wondering what has gone wrong with her life.
“You’ve got a good head on your shoulders, Darius,” Mr. Ramey said. “But you haven’t really been doing the work, have you?”
I didn’t answer. What did he want, an admission? Should I have bowed my head and said, “Oh, I know I don’t deserve anything, sir”?
“And why do you have to go away to college?” he went on. “You could work during the day and go to school at night for a while.”
“No,” I wanted to say. “I can’t take care of myself and my mother and my brother and still wrap my head around the books. I’m not that strong. The only thing I have is a mind, and some writing ability. Shouldn’t that be enough?”
When I left Mr. Ramey’s office, I saw Midnight and Tall Boy down the hall. Put faces to my misery and they would have them.
Midnight, from his incredibly stupid heart to his heavy-legged walk, more stumble than stride, is garbage. He is slow, mean, a bully. If he can make anyone’s life miserable, even for a few minutes, he jumps at the chance. The teachers hate him but give him as much room as they can so they don’t have to deal with him. They look away when he hits a smaller kid in the hallway or takes someone’s money. His eyes, almost the same color as his skin, make him look like a child’s drawing of a “brown” teenager.
Tall Boy is his homey. Dull-faced, slow, with light, mottled skin that looks like he might have some kind of sickness, he has only his record of being in juvenile detention to brag about.
“I been in jail in Jersey City, and in the Bronx!”
Idiots don’t know they’re idiots, which is unfortunate.
Tall Boy is crappy, a follower, but nobody is as much of a shithead as Midnight.
The bell rang and the juniors were going to have an assembly. The auditorium was noisy as we shuffled in. I didn’t want to sit with Twig because I felt so bad, so close to crying. I sat a few rows behind him.
I watched as Midnight and Tall Boy looked around for a place and then settled behind Twig. We had just finished saying the Pledge of Allegiance when Midnight started kicking the back of Twig’s chair. I knew he would do it all through the assembly. Twig turned once and Midnight mean mugged him. That’s the kind of stuff he does. Just bother people. Just add some annoyance to another person’s life. Just remind Twig that there’s nothing he can do about it.
Midnight’s name is Ronald Brown. He calls himself Midnight because, he says, that’s when they execute people on death row. You’re supposed to fall out over that little piece of crap. I didn’t fall out.
Tall Boy’s real name is Lawrence Lester. He’s a fairly good basketball player but doesn’t have the discipline to play on a team. Everybody keeps talking about how much potential he has, but I don’t think he has anything going on except a lousy attitude.
Both of them add up to nothing.
Twig’s real name is Manuel Fernandez, but his grandfather gave him the nickname Twig. When we were in the fourth grade, Twig and I discovered that we did stuff. A lot of people do one thing or another, but Twig was interesting because he did a lot of stuff. We both played ball, he liked to draw, I liked writing, and we both tried out for the tennis team. Twig made the team and I didn’t, but I practiced with him. We were nine when we met and now we’re both sixteen and we’re still best friends.
Twig can run. He isn’t much of a sprinter, but he started running the 800 in middle school and moved up to the mile and cross-country in high school. He can run really long distances, and over the summer he ran an open cross-country race against people of all ages. He came in third even though some of the men in the race were in college. Mr. Day, Phoenix’s track coach, was knocked out by Twig’s running and asked him to join the track team. They were going to mention him at the assembly, and I was happy about that.
“Before I begin talking about our expectations for the new year,” Mrs. Nixon, our principal, started, “I would like Mr. Day, our athletic director, to say a few words.”
Mr. Day was about fifty, balding, and walked with his shoulders hunched. He was supposed to be half black and half white, but he just talked and acted like a black dude. He came out and started talking about how good the Frederick Douglass Academy teams were and everybody started booing. Frederick Douglass Academy, or FDA, was our biggest rival in just about everything. The fact was, they had got some kind of athletic grant from the city and thought they were special. Anyway, after the booing died down, Mr. Day spoke.
“We’ve always done well against FDA in track and field,” he said. “We were always neck and neck with them in total point scores, but in the years we were edged out, it was always in the distance races. This year, we are adding a very good young distance runner to our squad, Manuel Fernandez. Manuel, please stand up.”
Twig stood up and almost everybody gave him a hand. Everybody but Midnight and Tall Boy. Both of them put their hands over their mouths and laughed.
Why does laughing replace so much for some people? If something wasn’t funny, why were they laughing? It was as if they could somehow make things less important, or people less important, by just laughing at them. Could I write a poem about Tall Boy? How would I avoid the clichés? How would I avoid such adjectives as stupid and gross? What could I say on Tall Boy’s level that he would understand?
When Twig sat down, Midnight started kicking the back of his chair again. It really made me mad, but I knew I couldn’t beat Midnight in a fight. Neither could Twig.
Mrs. Nixon’s talk was all right—how she expected each of us to do our best and how she knew how good our best was. I was just happy with Mr. Day for having Twig stand up.
If you knew Twig, you would like him. Even if you just met him, you would think he was okay. He looks like an average kid until he smiles, and then his whole face lights up and you just want to smile with him. Twig is two inches shorter than me. He’s five eight and a half and I’m five ten and a half. He’s thin, with light tan skin, dark hair and eyes, and a wide smile that makes him seem always pleased with something. My mom says he would have made a pretty girl. He told me that when he was born, he was premature.
“My mom said she was expecting me in October and I came along in August,” he said. “I guess I couldn’t wait.”
“You didn’t have anything to do with it,” I said. “It’s like . . . nature or something.”
“Too many people are born in October, anyway,” Twig said. “You don’t hear about a lot of people being born in August.”
“I saw Midnight and Tall Boy kicking your chair in assembly,” I said.
“They don’t bother me.” Twig’s voice was low as he looked away.
“They bother me,” I said.
“Yeah, they’re like a blister on your foot,” he said. “Even if they don’t hurt when you start a race, you know that sooner or later they’re going to show up.”
About the Author
Photo by Constance Myers
WALTER DEAN MYERS is the New York Times bestselling author of MONSTER, the winner of the first Michael L. Printz Award, the current National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, and an inaugural NYC Literary Honoree. Myers has received every single major award in the field of children’s literature. He is the author of two Newbery Honor Books and five Coretta Scott King Award winners. He is the recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in writing for young adults and is a three-time National Book Award Finalist as well as the first-ever recipient of the Coretta Scott King–Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement. He was the 2010 United States nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen Award, and is considered one of the preeminent writers for young people. You can visit him online at www.walterdeanmyers.net and www.who-is-america.com. Walter lives in Jersey City, New Jersey, with his family.
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