“Watch it!” Elton cried.
A boy on a skateboard had veered out in front of the car.
Elton hit the brakes, and Thomas’s face slammed into the dashboard. He felt the pain mainly in his nose. It was like a bright red flame in the center of his face.
His eyes were closed, but he heard Elton open his door and then scream, “What the fuck is wrong with you, boy? You almost got killed!”
He yelled for a while, and Thomas held his nose trying to keep the blood from spilling out onto Elton’s car seats. He knew that his father would not want blood in his car.
“What happened to you?” Elton cried when he tired of screaming at the skateboarder and came back to the car. “You bleedin’?”
At th e e m e rg e nc y room the nurse asked Thomas if somebody had hit him.
“No, ma’am,” the boy answered. “I wanted to look out the window, so I sat up on my knees instead of putting on my seat belt.”
The nurse’s name was Stella. She was sand-colored and had 8 1
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straight black hair. She had big breasts, and Thomas wished that she would let him sit on her lap so that he could lie back against her and close his eyes.
O n th e ri de home Elton complained about the two hundred thirty-seven dollars and sixty-two cents that the emergency room visit cost.
“Why you got to go an’ break your nose, boy?” he asked.
“That was our spendin’ money for the next three weeks.”
By now Thomas knew that Elton didn’t expect an answer.
He only wanted to complain about whatever there was in front of him. So the boy simply held the ice pack to his nose and closed his eyes, thinking himself around the pain.
This was another trick Thomas had learned — to concentrate on some part of his body that wasn’t hurting when he was in pain. If his head hurt he thought about his hands and how they worked. He looked at his hands, grabbed things with them, anything to keep his mind off the place that hurt.
At home Elton gave Thomas a pill that made him dizzy. So he went out into the back porch and lay down with the ice pack on his face. He couldn’t sit on his knees, but he could lie on his back and listen to the baby chicks and the mur-muring drone of hornets. Every now and then a bird would cry or a dog would bark. Cats in heat battled in the yards, and people talked and laughed, called out to one another and played music.
Thomas felt good about his new home. He wasn’t afraid of Elton anymore. The big car mechanic just needed to be left alone to complain and shout.
That was on a Wednesday.
On Thursday and Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Thomas 8 2
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stayed in the house mainly and ate peanut butter and tuna fish. He went through the porch screen door into the backyard and found out that there was an abandoned road, an alley really, on the other side of the chain-link fence at the back of the property. Across the alley there were the backyards of other houses and buildings, some of them abandoned.
Thomas didn’t try to go into the alley because there was enough to see in the yard. There were weeds and proper plants, a wild rosebush that had small golden flowers. A gopher had pushed up half a dozen mounds of earth here and there, and a striped red cat passed through now and then, alternately crying and hissing at Thomas.
The boy didn’t try to climb the tree because he often fell.
But he did sit underneath it listening to the crying chicks. Hornets hovered above him, but he wasn’t afraid of their stings.
He’d been stung many times and had no fear of the pain.
From under the tree he scanned the skies and listened for traces of his mother in the world. He missed Eric, his brother, but he knew that Eric and Ahn and Dr. Nolan would all be fine. And he was about to go to school.
Elton had enrolled Thomas in Carson Elementary, only a block and a half away from the house. On Monday morning he would walk there with Elton, and then he’d finish the first grade.
Thomas liked school. There were so many people with so many different kinds of voices. And there were books and sometimes pictures of animals, and teachers who wore nice clothes and smelled good.
Thomas wasn’t afraid of the new place. He had not often felt fear. He couldn’t fight and he couldn’t run very well, but he’d learned to skirt around pain and bullies and anger.
So he looked forward to the new school.
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*
*
*
I t was a big salmon-pink building with red and dirty green unglazed tiles for a roof. When he was led into Mr. Meyers’s first-grade class, the children were all laughing at something, and the bald-headed teacher was trying to make them quiet down.
“Everyone be quiet. Back to your seat, Maryanne,” the teacher was saying when Miss Andrews from the Registrar’s Office brought Thomas through the back door of the classroom.
The children got louder.
Miss Andrews waved at Meyers. He pointed at an empty chair, and she said, “Sit here, Tommy. Mr. Meyers will introduce you later.”
And so he entered the first-grade class with no one noticing, no one but the boy who sat in the other chair at the two-student table.
“I’m Bruno,” the husky boy said. He stuck out a chubby hand, and Thomas shook it.
“I’m Tommy. I just moved here last week. Why’s everybody laughing?”
“You talk funny,” Bruno said.
At first Tommy thought Bruno was saying that the class was laughing at him, but, he thought, they couldn’t be because they were laughing before he got there.
“Mr. Meyers farted,” Bruno said then.
He giggled.
Thomas giggled.
Then they were friends.
Thomas gazed around the room filled with laughing black children. One girl jumped up out of her chair and ran from 8 4
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one desk to another while waving her arms in the air, all the time laughing. A boy made a farting sound with his mouth, and the whole class broke down. Several kids rolled out of their chairs and laughed on the floor.
There was a chalkboard with the letters A, B, C, and D
written upon it. There was a carpeted corner filled with toys and books.
The children were laughing and the sun was shining in, and for some reason Thomas began to weep. He put his head down into his arms, and the tears flowed onto his hands and then the desk.
If someone had asked him at that moment why he was crying, Thomas wouldn’t have known, not exactly. It had something to do with one new room too many and the sun shining in and all the children laughing at a joke he hadn’t heard.
“Shut up!” Mr. Meyers shouted in a deep, masculine voice.
The children all stopped in an instant. Now that the rest of the class was silent, Thomas’s soft weeping was the only sound.
“Yo, man,” Bruno whispered. “They could hear you.”
“Who’s that?” a girl asked.
“Why he cryin’?” another girl added.
Thomas wanted to stop but he couldn’t.
A shadow fell over Thomas, and the deep voice said, “Stop that.”
Didn’t he know that you can stop laughing but not crying?
“You, boy,” the voice said.
A hand pulled his shoulder, and the sun lanced Thomas’s eyes. The tears ran down, and he cried out from the attempt to stop crying.
“Who are you?” short, pudgy Mr. Meyers asked.
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“Thomas Beerman,” the boy said, but nobody understood him because of his sobbing.
“Do you know this boy?” Meyers asked Bruno.
“That’s Tommy, Mr. Meyers,” Bruno said proudly.
“Take him down to the nurse’s office, Mr. Forman.”
Thomas felt Bruno’s hands on his shoulders. He got to his feet and, blinded by tears, allowed h
is new friend to guide him into the darker hallway.
Thomas breathed in the darkness, and the sadness in his chest subsided.
“I’m okay now,” he told his burly friend.
“Yeh,” Bruno said, “but now we got the hall pass.”
He held up a wooden board that was about a foot long and half that in width. It was painted bright orange, with the number 12 written on it in iridescent blue.
“That means we don’t have to go back to class,” Bruno said. “We could go to the nurse’s office an’ hang out.”
Thomas didn’t want to go back to the room of sunlight and laughter.
“Do we have to go outside?” he asked.
“Naw,” Bruno replied, and then he ran up the hall.
Thomas ran after him. Even though Bruno was big and slow, he got to the end of the hall before Thomas.
“Why you breathin’ so hard?” Bruno asked his new friend.
“I was in a glass bubble when I was a baby. ’Cause of a hole in my chest. Ever since then I get tired easy.”
“ A nd what ’s w rong with you?” Mrs. Turner, the school nurse, asked Thomas.
The boy just looked up at her thinking that she had the same skin color as his mother but her voice and face were different.
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“Well?” the nurse asked.
“He was cryin’,” Bruno, who stood beside the seated Thomas, said.
“Crying about what?” Mrs. Turner asked Bruno.
“How should I know?” the fat boy replied, folding his arms over his chest.
The nurse smiled instead of getting angry at Bruno’s impudence.
“Why were you crying, Tommy?” she asked.
“They were laughin’ and the sun was too bright — it, it pained me.”
Bruno giggled, and Mrs. Turner cocked her head to the side.
“It hurt?” she asked.
“In my heart,” the boy said, “where I had to heed.”
Thomas touched the center of his chest.
The nurse gasped and touched herself in the same place.
Bruno had stopped his laughing. Now he was staring goggle-eyed and astonished at his new friend.
“Would you like to take a nap, Tommy?” Mrs. Turner asked in a most gentle voice.
Thomas nodded.
“Can Bruno take one too?”
“No. He has to go back to class.”
“Dog,” Forman complained.
After Bruno left, the nurse led Thomas to a small room that smelled slightly of disinfectant. There were built-in glass-doored cabinets on the right side and there was a small cot against the opposite wall. When she pulled the shade down, Thomas realized that it was made from clear green plastic so the sun still shone in but not so brightly like in Mr. Meyers’s classroom.
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Thomas took off his shoes and put them under the cot.
Then he got into the bed, and Mrs. Turner pulled the thin blanket over him.
“What happened to your nose?” the school nurse asked.
“My dad put on the brakes so he didn’t hit this kid on a skateboard.” Tommy liked it when she put the flat of her hand on his chest.
“Is this your first day at school, Tommy?” Mrs. Turner asked the boy.
“Uh-huh.”
“Where is your family from?”
“My dad lives down the street.”
“But then why is this your first day?”
Thomas told the nurse the story about his mother dying and his father coming to take him. He told her about the police and his grandmother’s TV and Eric, his white brother who lived in Beverly Hills.
“I’m so sorry about your mother,” Mrs. Turner said.
“She looks over me,” Thomas replied, and the nurse gasped again.
Nurse Turner shared her lunch with Thomas. After that he returned to Mr. Meyers’s class. The sun still bothered him, but he kept from crying by looking at the floor.
Toward the end of the day, Mr. Meyers called on a tall black girl named Shauna Jones. He pointed to the letter R, written in dusty yellow on the dark-green chalkboard.
“Are,” Mr. Meyers said clearly.
“Ara,” Shauna repeated.
“Are.”
“Ara.”
“Are.”
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“Arar.”
“Thank you, Miss Jones,” Meyers said. “New boy. Your turn.”
Shauna sat down, showing no sign that she had failed the white teacher’s test.
Thomas tried to stand up, but somehow his feet got tangled and he tripped and fell.
The children all laughed, except for Bruno, who helped his new friend to his feet.
“Shut up!”
Thomas turned to face the angry teacher.
“Are,” Meyers said.
“Are,” Thomas repeated, raising his voice and using the same angry tone.
“Are.”
“Are.”
Meyers stared at the boy suspiciously. It was almost as if he thought that this slender black child was pulling a joke on him.
“Constantinople,” the first-grade teacher said, suddenly jutting his head forward like a striking snake.
“Wha’?” Shauna said.
“Constantinople,” Thomas said easily.
“Sit down,” Meyers said.
As Thomas did so he noticed that many of the children were staring at him with the same concentrated frown that the teacher had on his face.
“You talk funny,” Bruno whispered.
A f te r th e f i nal bell Bruno showed Thomas where the big front door was. But when the new boy got out in front of 8 9
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the school, he found himself in the midst of a thousand running and shouting children. In all that confusion he didn’t know which way to go.
“Where you live at?” Bruno asked him.
“I don’t know.”
“You’ont know where you live at?”
“My dad walked me here today,” Thomas said. “He was tellin’ me how I shouldn’t be in trouble and I didn’t look.”
“Where you near?” Bruno asked.
Bigger children were pushing by them. They were laughing and yelling, and the sun shone down from the western sky. Thomas felt his heart beating, and he clenched his jaw to stem the onset of tears.
“There’s a gas station that’s closed,” he said. “It’s got a horse with wings in front of a big A. ”
“I know where that’s at,” Bruno said with a reassuring smile. “You go on down that street there.”
Thomas looked in the direction that Bruno was pointing.
There were dozens of children that they had to get through to get to the crosswalk. There stood an old black man with a red handheld stop sign.
“You sure is lucky,” Bruno was saying.
“What?”
“The nurse let you stay an’ you wasn’t even sick.”
Thomas giggled.
“See ya, Bruno,” he said.
“See ya, Lucky.”
H al f way dow n th e block to Elton’s house, Thomas ran into a knot of four boys. They were all dark-skinned like him 9 0
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but a year or two older. None of them smiled, and they all walked with exaggerated limps.
“Who you, mothahfuckah?” one of the boys asked.
He was moving his head from side to side and wore black jeans and a white T-shirt that was at least three sizes too big.
Hearing the anger in the boy’s tone, Thomas didn’t answer, only stared.
“Don’t you heah me talkin’ to you, mothahfuckah?” the boy said, and then he slapped Thomas — hard.
Thomas tried to run, but after only three steps, he felt a fist in his back. One more step and something hit him in the right calf. Thomas fell and the boys set on him. He put his hands up around his ears, and with
nothing else he could do, he counted the blows.
One, two in the back. Three on the ear. Four, five, six on his shoulder. Seven was his head bumping the concrete.
And then it was over. No more hitting or cursing. Thomas looked up and saw the four boys limping away from the battle scene. The smallest one (who was still much larger than Thomas) looked back. Thomas ducked his head, not wanting to make eye contact.
When he got home he had a bloody scrape on the side of his head and pains in his back and leg. His pants were torn at the knees, and his injured nose throbbed.
Elton got home at seven.
“What you mean them boys beat up on you?” he asked his son. “Did you hit’em back? Did you?”
“No.”
“Well then how you evah expect them to respect you if you don’t fight back? An’ look at yo’ pants. I cain’t go out an’
buy you new clothes every time you a coward.”
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The whine in Elton’s voice made it seem as if he was pleading with Thomas, begging him not to make him treat him like a coward.
Thomas didn’t want to talk about his day at school or the bullies that beat him. He didn’t want new pants or respect.
Elton brought home pizza, but Thomas had already eaten tuna on slightly moldy whole-wheat bread with Miracle Whip and a glass of Tang.
He got away from his angry father as soon as he could, going out to his bedroom porch. He moved around on the mattress until none of his bruises or scrapes hurt. He had to breathe through his mouth because his nose was stuffy from the swelling, but he didn’t mind. In a short while he was asleep.
And in that rest he finally found what he’d been looking for all the days since his mother had died next to him in the bed.
He was hunkered down in a room that he’d never been in before. There was no furniture at all, no paintings on the white walls or carpeting on the dusty, dark wood floor. There was a doorway with no door in it that revealed nothing but an outer hallway and a real door that Thomas knew somehow opened onto a closet. He was squatting in the middle of the room, but he didn’t know how he got there.
“I’m just sittin’ here,” he said aloud to himself.
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