Heart or Mind

by Patrick Jones

  Copyright © 2016 by Patrick Jones

  All rights reserved. International copyright secured. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc., except for the inclusion of brief quotations in an acknowledged review.

  Darby Creek

  A division of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.

  241 First Avenue North

  Minneapolis, MN 55401 USA

  For reading levels and more information, look up this title at www.lernerbooks.com.

  Front cover: © choreograph/123RF.com (rose); © iStockphoto.com/pzRomashka (smoke background).

  Main body text set in Janson Text LT Std 12/17.5.

  Typeface provided by Adobe Systems.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  The Cataloging-in-Publication Data for Heart or Mind is on file at the Library of Congress.

  ISBN 978-1-5124-0003-8 (LB)

  ISBN 978-1-5124-0091-5 (PB)

  ISBN 978-1-5124-0092-2 (eb PDF)

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 – SB – 12/31/15

  eISBN: 978-1-51240-092-2 (pdf)

  eISBN: 978-1-51240-521-7 (ePub)

  eISBN: 978-1-51240-519-4 (mobi)

  To Ali, Chioma, Nasteho, Olivia, and Sabrina

  —P.J.

  1

  RODNEY

  “Abdi Warsame, Abdi Ali,” Marquese says in a monotone. “Abdi Omar, Abdi Aynte, Abdi—”

  “You’re losing it. Whatcha doing?” Rodney asks as he, Marquese, and Bryant enter the cafeteria.

  “I’m countin’ Somalis,” Marquese says, then points across the crowded room at Minneapolis’s Northeast High. Bryant, a former football teammate of Rodney’s, snorts like a pig with laughter. Rodney puts in his earbuds to drown out Marquese’s nonstop blathering and the roar of a room housing twice its hundred-student capacity. After the silence of too many nights in a CIU cell, the packed cafeteria seems louder than the school’s football games. No matter, Rodney has eyes for only two: his ex, Aaliyah, and her new boy, Antonio. She dumped Rodney by letter when he was doing time at County Home School.

  “Bro, that’s racist,” Rodney snaps at Marquese. “I mean, given some of the—”

  “Listen Rod, it ain’t like it was before you went inside.” Marquese speaks to Rodney but never takes his eyes off of the assembly of tall, thin, and neatly dressed Somali teen boys. Like most Minneapolis schools, Northeast’s diversity isn’t about black and white but about kids of many different colors. The only colors lacking at Northeast are green and gold—the colors of money.

  “The Somalis are taking over our turf,” Marquese continues.

  Rodney says nothing. Like Marquese, Rodney spent many an hour standing on a street corner, sometimes making more in a week than his mom did in a month. But that was before his six month placement at the CHS (County Home School) spent STAMPing (Short Term Adolescent Male Program) and doing CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy), which at the start seemed like real BS. A lot of letters, but it turned out OK.

  “Somebody’s gotta take ’em down before we lose all our business. Get me, Rodney?” Marquese asks.

  “It ain’t gonna be me,” Rodney answers as they get in line for food. Rodney’s never been into hating for the sake of hating. He cares about his mom and his friends, but mostly about getting Aaliyah back. Hating wastes his time. “I got other stuff to do.”

  “Not playing football,” Bryant says, before stuffing his mouth with fries covered with bacon and cheese. Bryant wears a Northeast High letter jacket like the one Rodney used to wear.

  “I’ve got to study.” Rodney slams his heavy book bag off Bryant’s shoulder.

  “You ain’t wearing the purple and white of the team and—” Bryant starts.

  Marquese cuts him off. “Or ATK colors. Rodney, you ain’t even black, you acting white.”

  Rodney feels his face flush with the toxic combination of humiliation and irritation. Beneath his dark black skin, his cheeks grow red. “I thought you guys were my friends. I thought you—”

  Then it happens. In the center of the cafeteria, the two rival groups smash together like atoms in the supercollider Rodney hopes to study in college. It starts with Devonte and his crew jawing loudly with Farhan and his crew: the descendants of slaves versus the offspring of Somali war refugees.

  Rodney freezes as a roar drowns the room like a tidal wave. He won’t fight. He watches first the talking, then the yelling, and then the shoving. Next comes food flying, and then comes fists being thrown. A normal loud lunch hour turns to a manic war zone in minutes. Trouble, Rodney thinks, follows me like a rumor.

  Somali boys rage against black boys. Kids from the other groups—Latinos and whites and some of the girls who aren’t in the fight—watch from the sidelines. Some laugh, some take cover behind tables, some run for the exit.

  Teachers run for help, for safety, for their lives. The security guards near the door are yelling into their walkie-talkies and motioning to each other.

  Food and punches fly, and cafeteria knives are wielded like weapons.

  Marquese picks up Bryant’s tray filled with bacon-covered fries and hurls them in the direction of a group of charging Somali young men. “Eat pork!” Marquese yells.

  In response, one of the Somali students, a thin but hard-looking boy, hurls a saltshaker at Marquese.

  Marquese ducks, and the saltshaker sails past. Rodney hits the floor. Behind him, he hears a clank and then a yelp, like someone who’s been kicked. He turns and sees a Somali girl in a long grayish dress but with one of those white head scarves. She’s lying on the filthy floor. Another Somali girl crawls to the girl’s aid. From the corner of his eye, Rodney sees the fight coming toward the Somali girls. Teachers drop back; gang girls surge forward.

  A group of four black girls starts toward the two Somali girls, who seek shelter under a table on the dirty cafeteria floor. Rodney hears their muffled crying. Turning his back to the mob, Rodney bends down. “Are you okay?” he asks the wounded girl. That girl says nothing, while the other, wearing broken glasses and a hearing aid, stares lightning bolts at him. “Is she okay?” Rodney asks the girl with glasses.

  “Let’s kick their—” a girl starts to yell, but she’s cut off by a roar of crowd voices. Rodney looks at the girl on the floor and then up at the charging crowd. He can see that one of girls in the crowd, well under five feet tall, displays a knife.

  “Back off!” Rodney yells as he positions himself between the crowd and the girl. Her white scarf is soiled with drops of blood. “Don’t mess with them or me. Hear me?”

  The girls turn away, not so much afraid as irritated, Rodney thinks. They start toward another group of Somali girls. Chairs, books, and anything else not nailed down sail across the room like a zero-gravity space chamber. Rodney sees Farhan and Devonte in a UFC-style brawl on the top of a table. One of the teachers trips an alarm, which only adds to the panic in the room.

  “The police have been called!” a voice booms over a loudspeaker, but everybody seems unmoved by words, only motivated by actions. It’s hard to tell which kids started the fight, because the entire cafeteria seems in motion. Everyday cafeteria items fly through the air or are brandished as assault weapons.

  “Are you okay?” Rodney yells to the Somali girl on the floor holding her head. “Let me see.” She takes off the scarf, and Rodney sees the big cut on her forehead from where the saltshaker smashed into her flawless face.

  The girl nods and blinks her soft brown eyes, the corners of her mouth forming a hurt smile.

  “You need to move! Run to the
door!” Rodney tells her. “Can you move?”

  The girl tries to say something but then clutches her forehead and passes out, face first on the floor. With debris flying over him, Rodney turns the girl to face him. Amid the chaos of the cafeteria and beneath the ruckus of the riot, Rodney grows light-headed and feels his heart race.

  He’s felt this twice before: once in ninth grade when he got shot, and again in tenth grade when he fell in love with Aaliyah. Rodney pulls the girl’s head closer to him and the feeling grows deeper. Stronger.

  The lights of the cafeteria turn off and on, but Rodney can see glowing spots like a thousand fireflies from cell phones videoing the melee. Rodney covers his face; his PO won’t like this.

  “You’re safe with me,” Rodney tells the unconscious girl. In the cafeteria, the October armageddon continues, but holding the wounded young Somali girl in his arms, Rodney has never felt safer. Stronger. Better.

  2

  JAWAHIR

  “Get your thug hands off her,” Ayaan yells at the young man shielding Jawahir.

  “I’m protecting her,” the guy says softly. His mouth is almost against Jawahir’s left ear. Jawahir’s eyes open again, but she can’t make words come from her throat. She thinks he smells nice, not loaded with rank cologne to cover the stink of cigarettes or weed like so many boys at Northeast.

  “We protect our own,” Ayaan says. Jawahir hears a thump. The young man grunts in pain, no doubt from her cousin’s kick. “Get back to your corner selling poison, killing your community, and—”

  “Listen, I don’t want to hear—” the young man starts to speak, but he stops as Farhan, Abdi Ali, and Ayub pounce, fists and kicks flying. He makes no noise, but the others shout curses in Somali.

  “Stop!” Jawahir cries out, but the boys don’t listen. She tries again. “Please stop!”

  “He jumped her,” Ayaan shouts at the attacking boys. “I saw it.”

  “No, that’s not what—” Jawahir starts to speak, but bodies tumble around her as a group of black students, one of them wearing a varsity jacket, comes to help the person who came to her aid. She thinks about her mom’s stories about the homeland, when she felt helpless as young men waged war in front of her.

  Jawahir tries to regain her feet and crawl to safety, but stumbles. She covers her head with her hands and feels the hot blood oozing. She knows her hijab is ruined; her dad will be angry.

  “Follow me,” Jawahir hears the boy mumble. He rises to his hands and knees, head down. She sees the blood dripping from his head. The young man reaches his hands underneath Jawahir’s arms and pulls her to safety under a table. The floor is slippery with spilled food, drink puddles, and specks of blood.

  The riot continues until the doors burst open and a squad of police with clubs, helmets, and shields pushes through the crowd. Jawahir starts to speak to the young man, but he’s ripped from under the table. Along with other black students, he stands by police order with his hands up, casual, as if out of habit.

  3

  RODNEY

  “Okay, who started this?” Principal Evans asks the group of bloodied African American teen boys who are lined up against the wall of the cafeteria. Evans is an older white woman with frizzy short gray hair. She wears an orange, pink, and green dress she must have bought in her hippie days.

  Minneapolis police in riot gear stand behind her and tower over her. It’s just Rodney and his friends lined up: the Somali boys were taken to another room, and Rodney didn’t see any girls detained. Too bad, Rodney thinks. I want to see that girl again.

  “Basically, I need to know what happened,” the principal continues.

  A school nurse hands out towels to wipe away the blood and Band-Aids to cover the cuts. “You have violated, literally, multiple rules laid out in our student handbook, to say nothing of the law.” Evans nods toward the police officers as she says this. Rodney says nothing. Evans quotes the handbook as if it’s the Bible. But the student handbook is only the third most important set of rules to follow: first comes the code of the streets and then the police law that lands you inside. “Really, no one is talking?”

  The police officers, irritated with their silence, get more aggressive. A few start in-your-face questioning. The old white guy in blue spitting questions at Rodney must have had Taco Bell for lunch. He reeks of meat.

  “The woman asked you a question,” the officer says. “Who did that to you?”

  The officer’s finger almost touches the cut on Rodney’s forehead. It will need stiches. He thought he was past police encounters, but it seems history always repeats itself with kids at Northeast.

  “You deaf?”

  Rodney stays silent. The police have a code, known as the blue wall, but so do the streets: you don’t snitch on your friends, or your enemies.

  “Well, here’s the deal. My guess is more than one of you is on probation, parole, or EHM, so being in this brawl violates that. You tell us what happened here or you’ll spend homecoming night at JDC. Talk, you walk. Everybody understand?”

  Marquese starts laughing, and most everyone else follows suit. Rodney bites his bottom lip so hard that blood dribbles down his chin. “Actually, nothing about this is funny,” Evans says.

  “Ally, she’s the riot,” Marquese whispers to Rodney on his left, then Bryant on his right. They call Evans “Ally” because she uses the words actually, basically, really, and literally all the time.

  Evans keeps talking, but Rodney and the others don’t listen until she says, “Zero tolerance. That means, gentlemen, all of you are suspended for violating the student code—”

  “Excuse me, Principal Evans, a word,” football coach Martin says. Other than the whistle around his neck, Coach Martin looks, and sounds, a lot like the cops. Rodney and the others stand silently under the angry gaze of the police. Rodney scans the crowd: he’s had run-ins with more than one of these blue suits before. He doesn’t want to get violated. It’s like real-life Monopoly: he’d go directly to jail. It’s not fair, Rodney thinks, but few things are fair about life in North Minneapolis.

  “Bryant, Antonio, Rasheed.” Coach Martin starts calling off the names of the football players and directs them toward the open cafeteria door.

  Bryant looks at Rodney, shrugs his shoulders, and smiles. “Could have been you, bro,” he whispers to Rodney and then joins his teammates by the door. Once they’re all assembled, Coach Martin leads them outside. They’ll avoid the inside, it seems.

  “Now, we literally have a zero-tolerance policy,” Evans says. “So the next time—”

  Evans keeps talking, but Rodney tunes her out. Next time. Another chance. Another chance to talk to Aaliyah. Another chance to see the Somali girl he helped and who, in just one look, bumped his heart. He’s felt nothing but guilt in his life; she seems nothing but innocent.

  “So, do all of you basically understand? This is over,” Evans says.

  Marquese jabs Rodney in the ribs with his elbow. “Ally’s wrong, actually,” Marquese whispers. “This is literally just getting started.” Rodney winces, the promised threat more painful than the poke.

  4

  JAWAHIR

  “I’m going to sue the school!” Jawahir’s dad shouts. She’s unclear, as always, if her dad is talking to her or through his Bluetooth to the person on the other end of the call. They’re in the family’s van driving home from school. Ayaan sits in back next to Jawahir, her left hand holding Jawahir’s hand while her right scrolls through the Twitterstorm about a food fight now being called a race riot.

  “I have a headache,” Jawahir whispers, knowing she’d have to scream to be heard over Dad’s ranting as he switches between English and Somali. It’s clear that her father’s not letting this go. Jawahir figures out that her dad’s talking to Ahmeed Hassan, his best friend and business partner, as well as Farhan’s father. And when, not if, the two dads get their way, Ahmeed will be Jawahir’s father-in-law.

  “Did you see Farhan fighting?” Ayaan whispers. “
He looked so brave and strong.”

  Jawahir nods, but she thinks the boy who came to her aid acted much braver. That the short-fuse Farhan would fight doesn’t surprise Jawahir. She knows her cousin has a crush on Farhan, and Ayaan’s not the only one.

  “We should pull them out of that school,” Jawahir’s father says. “Start our own school to teach the next generation the right values and keep them away from those—”

  Whenever her father talks about the African American boys at her school, Jawahir wishes she wore a hearing aid like Ayaan so she could turn it off and be deaf to his hateful words.

  “Hey look, it’s us!” Ayaan shouts. She thrusts her phone in Jawahir’s direction. Somebody’s posted footage of the fight on YouTube. Jawahir can see the brawl in the background, but whoever shot the video focused on Jawahir, Ayaan, and the boy who helped her.

  “Do you know him?” Jawahir whispers, embarrassed at what she’s feeling. It’s not just that she needs to thank him, but she also wants to see him again. A longing feeling growls in her belly like a hunger while fasting.

  “Serious?” Ayaan answers. “One good deed doesn’t mean he’s not one of them.”

  “But I thought—” Jawahir starts, but it’s hard to talk over her dad’s shouts and under the “don’t think about it” stare from Ayaan. I’m not thinking for once, Jawahir whispers to herself, I’m feeling.

  5

  RODNEY

  “So, that’s basically what I’d like to do,” Principal Evans says. She has gathered a small group of students into the media center after school to participate in a “healing effort” in response to the riot. Rodney’s unsure why he was asked there; he’s a follower, not a leader. That didn’t change in six months. Marquese, a real leader, was not invited and is plotting revenge.

  Two white security guards and one even whiter police officer stand next Evans. Outside the library in the halls of Northeast, those numbers are way higher. Two days have passed since the riot, and tensions remain high.