We do. And maybe an hour later, we do it again. And when we can’t hop from table to table anymore, he says we’re getting food and going back to our projects to find a roof to stay on until school is dismissed.
I think that sounds boring but it isn’t. The feeling we have in Starbucks—we just bring that to the roof. We sit, we read, we snack, we draw, and it’s chill. There is no coffee. There is no music. But it’s chill. And there is no rock throwing.
At one point, I look at Mike, and I think something I’d never tell him because it sounds soft. I think that I’m lucky that Pa left Mike for me. Pa couldn’t introduce me to my three real brothers, but he introduced me to him and he feels almost like a real brother. Doing this up here on the roof feels like what brothers would do.
CHAPTER 21
We wait a few days to cut school again.
The second time we cut we go back to the train station. This time I follow Mike more smoothly.
Soon, we’re walking to the last car.
“Don’t get on,” he tells me.
“But I thought we riding it downtown,” I say.
“We. Are. Just listen and don’t get on.”
I try to figure out what he’s up to. I watch people get off and on the train. I hear the recorded man’s voice say, “Stand clear of the closing doors, please.” I hear the BOOP! BOOP! letting everyone know the doors are shutting. I watch them shut.
I ask, “How we riding this train if—”
Mike goes to the back of the outside of the train and starts climbing on! First, he stretches to reach for these handles. Then, one of his feet leaves the platform. Then, his other foot. Now, he’s completely on the outside of the back of the train. My eyes shoot down to the track. Nothing is between him and that five-, six-foot drop.
“Climb on!” He snaps me out of my thoughts.
I step back on reflex. “Nah.”
The train huffs, shakes, and inches forward.
“Stupid!” he barks at me. “Once this train moves, you ain’t getting on! GET! ON!”
And . . .
. . . I . . .
. . . stop thinking.
I. Do. What. He. Did.
First, I reach for one of those free handles I saw him grab. My heart beats so hard. The train picks up speed.
Then, real quick, I swing both of my feet off the platform. I can feel my hands sweat from my nervousness and I try gripping the handle harder, but my hands are too slick from sweat. I’m afraid I’ll lose my grip once the train zooms fast. And the train is zooming, faster and faster.
My eyes shoot down to the track.
I’m completely on the outside of the back of the train and there’s a five-, six-foot drop to the tracks. The tracks are a blur. I look at the platform. Everything on it is a blur too. That’s how fast the train speeds. Nothing is between me and the tracks. Nothing can catch me if I fall. I look at my sweaty, slippery hands and hold on for my life.
I have all these scared feelings and I’m bugging out.
Then I look at Mike and he has the biggest smile.
He yells something at me, and I think it’s WOO-HOO! but I can’t hear nothing with all this outside train noise hurting my ears.
But his face and eyes.
This is the happiest I’ve ever seen him.
Until his face disappears as our train zooms into the tunnel.
* * *
• • •
For a few seconds, everything is pitch-black. Then my eyes adjust. So does my hearing.
Bright white sparks like fireworks spark on the train’s rails.
There is a rhythm to those sparks.
One, two, three: CRAAACK!
One, two: CRAAACK! CRAAACK!
One, two, three, four: CRAAACK!
Sometimes, the rhythm is off.
It’s like I’m hypnotized and I keep staring at the sparks behind me when I should focus on holding on. I readjust my grip.
The sparks of light reveal flashes of graffiti and piles of trash along paths of the tunnel. It all makes it feel like I’m in a dark underground fantasy world of monsters, trolls, demons, and half-human, half-animal creatures from comics. A world I’m glad I’m not walking through.
The outline of Mike’s smiling face flashes at me.
“WOO-HOOOO!” I yell at him, knowing he probably can’t hear me over the tunnel and train sounds. But I yell again anyway. “THIS IS CRAAAAAAAZEEEEEEEE!!!”
* * *
• • •
When the train stops in the next station, Mike motions for me to rush onto the platform.
I start but first peek real slow up and down the platform to see if grown-ups or cops will bust me climbing off the train’s back.
“Hurry up!” Mike’s elbow shoves my back over and over. “Get off!”
“STOP! I don’t want to get caught.”
“Then I’m climbing over you!”
I scoot onto the platform. He does too.
“Act normal,” he says on the DL, “but walk quicker to blend in with heads going upstairs.”
Me and him catch up and flow with people until we’re near the MetroCard booth.
I’m already jumpy, but then get jumpier because I swear that the booth worker looks dead at us. I want to turn around and go back downstairs. “She looking here?”
“Who?” Mike asks.
“The lady in the booth,” I tell him.
“You bugging.”
When we pass the booth worker and she says nothing, I feel my whole everything relax.
Soon, we’re upstairs, outside, and Mike congratulates me.
“You’re what’s up, bruh! Nobody soft would ride outside a train like that! C’mere. You gangsta.”
He wraps an arm around my neck and noogies my head with his knuckle.
It feels so good getting props from him that I decide not to say half of what I want! Like, You almost got us killed. Like, A few times I almost lost my grip. Instead, I say, “You did that before?”
“Train-surfing,” he says, like everyone but me knows what that means. “I been doing that. That’s why I said trust me. You wouldn’t get hurt.”
Whatevs. What would he’ve done if I fell off the train? Dive onto the tracks like he could fly and scoop me up?
I’m so shook from train-surfing and so not believing that we just did that that I’m quiet while we walk the block. I can’t explain it, but my feet feel funny standing on solid ground. After watching the train’s tracks blur real fast under my feet, it feels like the ground should be moving. I look around at people walk or jog and everyone looks . . . slow. Even fast passing cars look slow.
This past summer, Ma took me to Luna Park on Coney Island and I rode this roller coaster. It moved so fast that I got off and wanted to get on again and again and again and . . . But Ma had money for just one ride. Train-surfing is free. I could train-surf all day if I wasn’t so scared of falling and dying.
“You ever get hurt train-surfing?” I ask Mike.
“You serious? I’m here, ain’t I?”
* * *
• • •
Later, at night, me and Mike chill in my room. We watch The Flash on the CW.
We’re on the edge of my bed, not making a sound and not moving a muscle. It’s like we don’t breathe when Flash is on because this show is that fuego.
Right now, Flash faces off with an evil speedster, the Reverse Flash. Zoom is another evil speedster that Flash sometimes has to stop.
Flash is the man. No doubt.
I wish I could move like him. Maaan, the stuff I would do!
Flash and Reverse Flash stare at each other for a second, but it feels mad long. Then CRAAAACK! Electric sparks fly off Reverse Flash, and he disappears out of sight. He is a bolt of red light blurring faster than fast through the city.
Flash’s body crackles a blinding electric spark, and soon, he’s a yellow blur right behind Reverse Flash. All these sparks spark off them as their arms and legs blur the way things blurred when we train-surfed.
“You see those sparks?” I point at the TV screen.
“Yeah.”
“That’s how that train track lit up today.”
“Word.” Mike grins. “I never put that together.”
“That’s me and you, bruh.” I nod at Flash. “We were moving like Flash.”
He gets competitive for no reason. “But in a real race, I’d body you.”
“You killed it. I’m just having fun, comparing.”
He stays competitive and the look on his face matches Reverse Flash on TV. His smile reminds me of when I waxed him in Ms. Pac-Man at the arcade. Back then, I wasn’t sure if he was fake-smiling, but right now, I’m sure he is. He’s all teeth with serious eyes. He says, “Yeah, Bryan, I know you just comparing us to the show. But you know you dumb slow, right? And I’d body you in a race?”
I feel myself get annoyed. I practice Ma’s advice. I take a deep breath and change the subject. “How much electricity was in that train track?”
“More than six hundred volts.” He chuckles. “I could picture you touching it and it frying you. Zaap.” He laughs at his wack joke. “Ha! You’d be Kentucky Fried Bryan. Zaaaap.”
I deep-breathe again.
I stand and grab my remote and crank up the volume to The Flash.
CHAPTER 22
Right after we play handball the next afternoon, me and Mike sit on the sidelines and kind of watch some men play. He dribbles the handball between his legs.
“Bryan,” he says, “let’s play You Get Annoyed When . . .”
“I don’t know how to play.”
“I’ll go first. I say, ‘You get annoyed when . . . ,’ then you finish my sentence with something that annoys you. You start it off, and I’ll tell you what annoys me.”
“You get annoyed when . . .”
Mike says, “When I’m on a toilet and I think the stall door is locked, then someone opens it and catches me there with my pants down. You get annoyed when . . .”
“The milk carton says the milk is good, then I sip and it’s sour,” I say. “You get annoyed when . . .”
Mike stops dribbling the handball. “Let’s switch it up. I’ll say, ‘You get annoyed when . . . ,’ then I’ll add a subject like ‘Gross,’ ‘Serious,’ or ‘Funny,’ and you say something gross or serious that annoys you. Bet?”
I shrug. “Go.”
He says, “You get annoyed when . . . FUNNY!”
“When cross-eyed dudes try to be bullies. Cross-eyed dudes can’t even see who they bullying. Once, this cross-eyed dude tried to bully me and I ran left. Dude didn’t even know where to look. Anyways, you get annoyed when . . . GROSS.”
Mike makes a disgusted face. “When people spit on handrails in staircases. Once, I put my hand on a rail, and the eggiest glob of spit smeared all over my palm. Yuck! You get annoyed when . . . SERIOUS.”
“When I’m home and everybody is in my space.”
He squeezes the handball in his hand and looks at it, flattening it. He says, “Yo, wanna play another game?”
“Sure.”
“Same game but I’ll say, ‘You get hyped when . . . ,’ then you’ll say something that you think is dope.”
“Go first.”
Mike says, “You get hyped when . . .”
“When I draw a superhero and it looks almost like the comic. You get hyped when—”
We get interrupted by rap beats so loud it feels like a block party just drove onto our street. Mike’s head swivels so much to see where the music comes from that he looks like an owl I saw on TV that made its head do a complete three-sixty turn. It’s a black Jeep with tinted windows like the whips Jay-Z and famous people get driven in. As it passes by us, Mike’s eyes are so wide he looks hypnotized.
He finally responds to my asking him what gets him hyped. He says, “I get hyped when I see fat whips like that. Yo, you saw those rims?!”
I’m not into cars like that so I change the subject. “Want to play handball some more?”
“Nah.”
“Then can I borrow the ball to practice?”
He makes a stingy face and says, “Get your own ball.” Then, under his breath, “People never have their own stuff. Gotta beg me for what’s mine.”
What is he even talking about? All the times I’ve shared with him? And he’s making a huge deal of me asking for his handball for like five minutes?
I hate when he acts like this.
* * *
• • •
When I walk in our living room, Ava’s watching TV.
“Where’s Ma?” I ask.
Ava waves at Ma’s bedroom without looking away from the TV like drama is about to pop off.
On Ava’s show, one guy acts grimy to another guy.
“Whoa!” I say. “He’s violating. Why?”
“Shhh. Watch and stop asking questions.” Ava scoots over on the couch.
I watch and see a neighborhood like ours, and the characters remind me of people out here. And it’s crazy timing because I just came from Mike acting foul and not knowing how to respond and the same kind of stuff is happening on this show.
“Can you believe this?” Ava asks.
I can’t take my eyes off the screen so I just give a thumbs-up. “Yeah.”
When the show ends, Ava does something unexpected. She sits crisscross-applesauce facing me and talks to me like she’d kick it with a tight friend. “It’s so real,” she says. “Right?”
I feel like telling her how really real it is for me—that Mike can be as grimy as the dude on the show. But I don’t for a few reasons. First, Ava thinks Mike is cool. Plus, I like how me and her are getting along and I don’t want to kill it. So, instead, I ask, “Why you into this show?”
“This shows is facts.” She starts listing on fingers. “First, it teaches you to always use your head. Second, just because people bug out doesn’t make them all bad. Also, if you cut someone off who is mostly good to you, you won’t have them as backup when you need it. Fourth, always talk it out if you can.”
I sit there, connecting in my head what Ava says to Mike and I realize she’s right, including the part about talking things out. But I don’t even know what to say to him when he flips moods on me. I ask, “You learned stuff from this show you use?”
“Definitely. So, in this show, some guys from the other record company came to jump the main character. They approached him on the street thinking he was alone, and he was, but he pointed up the block at this group of guys and fronted to be with them. The troublemakers left him alone. That’s a trick I used on this girl Maddie. She and her girls tried to mess with me as I passed. ‘Oh, you think you cute. You think you’re all that,’ she said to me. I looked her right in the eye and pretended like the character in the show. ‘Yeah,’ I told her. ‘And you know who else thinks I am?’ I pointed up the block at some girls our age who I know Maddie isn’t cool with. ‘Karina, Stephanie, Lizbeth, and all them.’ And just like that, Maddie started acting all nice and let me pass.”
“That was smooth,” I tell Ava.
She soft-punches my knee. “Right? You should watch this some more with me.”
CHAPTER 23
At dismissal the next day, I don’t wait for Mike on our school’s corner. I just want to go to Ma’s job. Solo. That’s it. That’s how I feel.
“Bryan?”
I surprise Ma from behind with a hug.
Ma’s my heart. The way she strokes my head and cheek. The way she smells the same good smell. The way she hugs me back and her hug makes me not want to leave her. I start to feel like I want to tell her so much ill stuff I’ve done with Mike. But if I told
her, it’d be a wrap. She’d ground me for half the stuff me and him been into. She’d kill me for the other half of stuff we did.
“Where is Mike?” she asks.
“I just want to do homework alone in my office.”
“Okay.” She pats my shoulder. “Go ahead.”
I go into my office, shrug off my book bag, grab my clipboard off my file cabinet, sit in my desk-chair, and look at my clipboard’s notes. My eyes move down the page of what I wrote, but I’m not really reading. I’m just feeling this quiet. I’m feeling being alone.
I look at Ma for a second. Maybe I can tell her some things about Mike. Some things about me.
“Ma?” I call her.
She comes to me. “What’s up, baby?”
“Since you not busy, want to sit in my office?”
Then, out of nowhere, it gets busy. This boy who looks my age with a grown man and woman appear at Ma’s desk.
I tell Ma, “They looking for you?”
Ma turns to them and jumps straight into helping them. She pauses. “Bryan, can you come help me out?”
“Sure.”
Ma introduces me and the boy. “This is Kamau. Kamau, this is my son, Bryan.”
We nod hi.
“Bryan,” Ma asks, “can Kamau do his homework with you while his parents and I go over some paperwork?”
I nod at Kamau to follow me. His gear isn’t like the kids from my projects. Or from any of the places me and Mike visited lately. He looks broke like his fam has even less money than we have when we struggle-struggle. As we head into my office, I ask him, “You live out here?”
He doesn’t speak. He just stares at the floor and shakes his head. Maybe he’s shy.
I wave at a foldable metal chair for him to sit and I go sit in mine. I slide my book bag to my feet, unzip it, and start pulling out my schoolbooks and stuff to get ready to do my homework. As I start stacking that on my desk, Kamau sits straight up. His eyes get all lit and curious and glued to a comic sticking out my pile of schoolbooks.
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