Into the Dangerous World

by Julie Chibbaro

  “I tried! You said you’d kill yourself. You think I want that?” Trey said, his voice breaking.

  All the air emptied from the room.

  Nessa’s eyes went wild. “You think you the only male wants me?”

  “No, go, fuckin’ please go out with someone else!”

  “Fine, I will!” She folded her arms. “You’ll see, I will.”

  “Good.” Trey folded his arms and snorted.

  “I guess you don’t need me for Friday night,” she said sarcastically.

  He dropped his arms, and they hung loose at his sides. His voice went limp. “No, I do. We planned this. I want you to stay with the crew, Ness. Please.”

  His begging bewildered me.

  “We all do,” Reuben said.

  “Yeah, don’t go.” Kevin.

  “I don’t think so.” Nessa snapped her fingers like she could make us vanish. Then she did. I heard her clattering down the stairs.

  Reuben started after her, but Trey said, “No. Let her go.” He took a deep breath. “That’s what I always do, go after her ’cause I know she’s gonna hurt herself. I stop her, yeah, but then what? It’s like we stuck in the same groove.”

  “What about Friday night?” asked Reuben.

  “Yeah, she’s fierce,” Kevin said.

  “You keep going back to her for the same old reason,” I threw in. “She’s what you know. Me, I’m something different.”

  Kevin and Reuben looked at me—they were even more pissed.

  Trey stared into his flashlight with his eyes wide open.

  The boys watched Trey.

  He raised his head, a decision made. “We got Ror now. Yeah, so she’s different, but she’s fresh. We done murals before with just one girl.”

  “Mural?” I echoed.

  “Part of the battle is painting a mural.”

  Kevin and Reuben turned, expectant, like I had to prove myself all over.

  I stared back. “Shit, you didn’t tell me there’d be a mural, too!”

  Screw them, I thought. I’ll show them. I can do it. “Okay, well, where’s it going to be?”

  “Neutral turf. Down in the City Hall secret station. And that information is classified, so keep it on the down low,” said Reuben.

  “Underground?” I asked, feeling the familiar wave of queasiness.

  “Yeah,” Kevin said. “Like we been saying, it’s an all-city underground extravaganza, man. Ain’t you payin’ attention?”

  “No. I mean, yeah. Right,” I said. Shit.

  “Lotsa crews comin’,” Trey said. “The MoFo’s’ll be there—Charlie with his boys, on our side.”

  “We got RTW from around the way, and TFF from Hell’s Kitchen comin’, too,” Reuben added.

  “Man, I heard they got BC from Staten Island and crews from the Bronx, and PXB from Queens,” Kevin said.

  It was going to be big, really big, and it was going to be underground. After what happened with Nessa, there was no way I could back out.

  “What’s the mural? What music we dancing to?” I asked.

  Kevin took a drawing out of his pocket. The design for the mural—I saw that the four of them had been seriously planning this whole thing all along without me. Were they ever going to tell me? And now was I just supposed to step into Nessa’s place and take over whatever part was hers—like one girl was any girl?

  “What’s my part?” I asked.

  “You know how to paint ass?” Reuben said. Kevin laughed.

  What the hell?

  Then I really looked at the drawing. The mural said: NOISE INK—WE KICK ASS.

  “Sure,” I said, feeling better. “But I do it my own way.”

  “You gonna use that stencil shit?” Kevin said.

  “I might.”

  They looked at each other, then at Trey. Then back to me. “Can you even dance, Ror?” Reuben was daring me again. Kevin, too.

  “You got music?”

  The two of them exchanged glances with sly grins this time. “No, but we can make it.”

  Kevin started some beats with his mouth. Reuben sang, and I recognized his voice. It was the song they’d played in the park, after I got over the fence that first time. Were they in a band? I smiled; they were really good.

  They whirled the beams around the room like lights at a concert. I let my muscles go loose, nodding my head to the rhythm. The twins said, when I used to dance with them, Give us a fever, girl. I let myself bounce and clap now, humming along, getting into it. I closed my eyes and pictured the bonfire, the boys keeping time, watching as I swung my hips, left, right, left, right, feeling the music in me, hot like a fever.

  Give it to them. I opened my eyes. Trey watched me. I rolled my hips at him, lifting my arms up so he could see my whole body. I danced toward him. Without touching him, I circled my hands around his head, spinning and leading him into the center of the room with my fingers. Reuben sang harder and Kevin clapped to the beat. I shook my shoulders and rocked back and forth as I shimmied and boogied around Trey until he started to jam with me, his light catching the window ledge, a slash of wall. Finally, like he couldn’t stand it anymore, he grabbed me close and we moved together, our thighs and knees pressing, the heat of us grinding to the tempo.

  I broke free, flew like a spark in the air and landed on glass with hardly a sound.

  Trey jumped after me, making freaky arc shadows along the walls with sweeps of his arms and light. We tangled and swayed. Trey dipped me. We threw our hands up, laughing while Reuben and Kevin clapped and sang like it was the Great Lawn in Central Park and they were onstage.

  Finally, we stopped to wipe our sweat and catch our breath.

  “I guess the girl can bust a move,” Trey laughed.

  “So, am I in the crew now?” I asked.

  Reuben looked at me with warm eyes. “All’s we gotta do is teach you some of our steps.”

  “You in,” Trey said.

  I let out a whoop and rubbed my hands together like I could ignite a Noise Ink flame. “Let’s get busy!”

  47

  MA SAID TO tell our story to Lawyer Jones, that he was a good man trying to help us, to just tell him everything we could as simply and clearly as we could: how hard we all worked, what we had built. When I sat across the desk from the bald guy writing in his yellow legal pad, a map of Staten Island beside him, as he talked about strategically planning the takeover of the King Kennedys land, I couldn’t help spacing out. I didn’t want to conjure up dead details about the past. I just want to think about dancing with Trey.

  “You may have to return to the property to take possession to lay a claim of rights to the land,” he went on.

  I’d spent the ride downtown white-knuckled on the subway. Is there some drug I can take to get through the tunnels so I can dance and paint without puking?

  “As you know, the land is currently owned by the borough of Richmond, and it’s an overlap between park land and landfill, and we may not be able to claim the whole four acres, depending on the boundaries we turn up. . . .”

  We’ll each have a backpack full of spray. I had spent the afternoon in the art room trying out ideas, stenciling letters onto a two-foot-wide roll of paper I found there. It was brown butcher paper, like what Dado had brought me. My letters got bigger and bigger until they became huge enough for a billboard.

  I asked Mr. Garci how to mix wheat paste. He came over and looked at what I was doing and sniffed me out real quick.

  “You could’ve gotten killed in that fight. You never know what weapons those guys carry in their pockets.” He wasn’t going to help me.

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “Can you? You keep up with Trey and you’ll die or just plain fade out, Ror.” Garci sounded so sad and urgent, I met his eyes. I thought of that night in the tunnel, the trains
at top speed an inch away from my face. I’ll have to do it again on Friday—

  “—rora?”

  I shook myself. “What’s that?”

  “I said, tell me about this house you built with your father.”

  Ma and Marilyn looked at me expectantly; the lawyer’s pad was full of writing.

  “The dome?”

  He nodded. “Yes, Aurora.”

  “Um, Dado and me, we built it from scrap wood we got from abandoned buildings and the landfill,” I said, trying to go back in time with my words. “He always thought there was enough unused wood and nails in the world that we could live our whole lives and never have to buy anything, and we didn’t. Except maybe some wire and light bulbs. Things that fray and break,” I said.

  Jones was writing as fast as I spoke. “Was there a foundation?” he asked. “Did you break ground?”

  Dado had dug the foundation about a year before we built the dome. Everyone but Hawk had left, and it was clear that he was going soon. It was just as well. Nobody could talk to Dado by that time—nobody but me, because with Dado, you didn’t use words so much as just be there by his side and see what came up.

  “It wasn’t that deep. Just a crawl space. We lined it with cinderblocks,” I said now. “He could carry two on one arm.”

  The lawyer nodded. “We’ll have to take a trip out to Staten Island, get some pictures. See what’s left.”

  “There’s nothing left,” I said. “That’s what they told us.”

  “If he laid cinderblocks below ground, there’s something left.”

  I exchanged looks with Ma and Marilyn. We were running so fast away from that mess, none of us wanted to go back to see. But we had to get that money. That’s what lawyers were for.

  48

  IT WAS ONE O’CLOCK in the morning, a hot June Friday into Saturday, and I was on the Brooklyn Bridge–City Hall platform with a bucket of lumpy homebrewed wheat paste. I’d made it on the hot plate when Ma wasn’t there, and left before she got home. A cheap brush was in my back pocket. Under my arm was the rolled-up, spray-painted, stenciled collage, my part of the mural. In my pack, the gas mask and my share of paint.

  “Come on, go, go, go!” Kevin urged behind me.

  I jumped carefully down into the sewery tracks after Trey, who disappeared, yellow top hat and all.

  “Under,” Reuben cried from above.

  I crouched and saw it there, beneath the platform: an opening big as a refrigerator tipped on its side. I took a deep breath and climbed in, trying to slow the heart that was threatening to beat out of my mouth. Putting my pack down and my poster on top, I pushed my stuff ahead of me as I crawled. The dark tunnel smelled of rat shit and rusty metal. Trey stood waiting, duffel bags slung over the shoulders of his military jacket. He helped me get out; I wished I could find a place to pee.

  Reuben and Kevin emerged with their bags, and we started walking. Caged bulbs dimly lit the heavily tagged walls—we weren’t the first graf writers here, not by decades. Echoes of faraway trains rumbled. I heard voices, music, wing flaps like from some kind of bats.

  Trey was tense and tough. “This way,” he said, heading up a few stairs into another dank tunnel. Water dripped at the far end. I shivered, despite the summer heat.

  Kevin lit up a pot pipe as he walked; Reuben snapped the top of a Bud he pulled from his shopping bag. I wondered if getting drunk would rid me of this feeling—was that why people got wasted?

  A few more turns, and now I didn’t know the way back.

  “Up here.” Trey scaled a thin metal ladder. I followed up after him, and down another tunnel. Down some stairs, into a hole. I could see, at the end, a big space filled with light.

  We came out into an enormous, ancient platform that had long ago been abandoned. I stood stunned for a moment, staring at the high arched walls, the intricate mosaics of dusty Art Deco patterns made back when people cared how stuff was designed. You could still see how gorgeous this place had been.

  Voices shouted from far down; a Chaka Khan song wailed hot and grindy. Behind a wall at the opposite end was another space made of ugly, tagged concrete blocks, a perfect forgotten zone. There, a horde of bodies gathered, and guys and girls in their summer best were coming from above, down metal ladders from grates like the ones in the street.

  “Must be like a hundred bros piling in,” Kevin breathed.

  “Shit, why didn’t we come in that way?” I asked.

  “Cops see you comin’ in that way.” Trey moved his hand nervously over his mouth. “Why they all crowdin’ up like that?”

  Kevin said, “Don’t those skanks know the number one rule? Don’t draw attention to yourself. Be stealthy and slick.”

  “Toys and hos, all a them.” Reuben’s deep voice ricocheted against the walls.

  Trey muttered under his breath, “No class,” and waved us on. We put our stuff away by a whitewashed stretch; Trey slapped palms with the two guys who would guard it.

  My stomach pinched: over there, Frankie in the middle of his boys, all of them in Kangol hats. The sight of him made me wish again I was home in bed. Behind them, girls piled in, dressed for clubbing in black lace and teased hair and fishnet stockings. When they hit the ground, they joined the dancers. The air was thick with weed and cigarette smoke. Against the far wall, a Rasta guy in a saggy blue hat stood near three boom boxes and a couple of turntables, watching the writhing bodies like a scientist ready to add another needed chemical.

  “DJ Capgun,” Trey told me.

  “Tell me again, how do we know when to jump in?” I asked.

  “Cap’ll start it. Between each dancer, there’s a vote. When it’s your turn, I’ma tag you. Then you do that thang we practiced, R.” He reached for my hand and gave it a squeeze. I didn’t want to let him go.

  When Capgun saw us, he lowered the music. A complaint went up, then everybody turned and realized why. Charlie and his guys and some of the crews moved to our side. A space cleared in the center, and I imagined myself an eagle soaring so high above this mob, they’d seem too small to worry about.

  Capgun said, “Yo, yo, yo, make room for Poison Crew goin’ up against the mad Noise Ink in a psycho cypher. Noise’ll school ya, Poison’ll fool ya, put your hands together for the crews that’ll rule ya.” Kids pushed their bodies up into us so they could see. Capgun put on “The Message.” The synthesizer bounced against the walls, and Grandmaster Flash’s words started.

  Trey stepped out. Across from him, Frankie strutted into the circle wearing parachute pants and Pumas. It stopped Trey cold for a second. When they were filling me in on who would dance against who, the boys said Frankie never danced, yet here he was, gyrating his hips, all his muscles rippling, the kids going wild, shouting, “Look at Frankie get down!” Even I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

  Trey stuttered into his robot moves, and I screamed for him, along with everyone on our side, “Trey’s rockin’ it!” I could feel Kevin and Reuben pushing into me, telling me to get ready. They guessed I’d go opposite a guy named Nick. My limbs whizzled with nerves. I ran my eyes over the boys across from me, ready to run Nick over with my moves.

  Trey was picking up speed now, throwing the kicks, dancing in circles around Frankie. Frankie swayed and popped like a useless elephant. Capgun mixed in a new song, a faster rhythm, a smashing cymbal and a screaming girl. Trey finished with a moonwalk, and everyone went wild as he turned and smacked my hand. Boos chased Frankie off the floor. His ranks opened up to let through his dancer just as I jumped to the center.

  Damn. That wasn’t Nick. It was Nessa.

  I stumbled away from her, trying to keep my body moving to the clashing song. She came after me, to catch me in her white Adidas. I let myself feel the music, the beat racing through my blood, heating me all over. I got mad, as pissed as Dado on a night in the forest thinking the spooks were after him. I fli
pped and flared straight for her like hunting a traitor. I met the hate in her eyes with the force of my own. She sideswiped me, pulling away at the last second, then shook her chest at me with that harem-girl bullshit, sending a frenzied howl up from the boys. I jumped three times at her, folding my arms and kicking like a Communist. Then I Backed the Bus Up like Trey showed me until I hit bodies. They pushed me back in.

  She and I sprang into the center of the ring at the same time, our faces nearly touching.

  If we were on fire, we would’ve burned each other.

  The first notes of another beat started. Nessa skipped to the edge of the circle to cheers like fucking Rocky. When I threw my arms out, boos deafened my ears. I saw Kevin reaching for me. A touch-tone phone dialed inside the music, then ringing, then a guy saying, “Yo, B, answer the phone . . .”

  Kevin yanked me out, and I made my way through the herd to catch my breath and wipe my sweat. They thrust me toward my crew. I pushed back my cap and tried to slow myself, my brain flying, feeling Nessa huffing and staring across from me. Clapping made her the winner between us, but to me she was still a loser. What kind of girl would swap crews like that? Especially if it was true, what she claimed about Trey saving her from Frankie. That dumb thug was putting his arm around her, like she was his property—and Trey was glaring at them like a mad dog. Mrs. Hyde percolated in my blood, the green ooze that made me want to rip Nessa’s eyes out.

  Fuck, I didn’t want to be like that.

  Trey elbowed over to Poison’s side. I met Nessa’s eyes, a shit-eating grin across her face that said See, Trey still loves me.

  Kids screamed, “Yo, Nil be smokin’!” Still, loud applause from the throng said the other guy won. Kevin switched off with Reuben to some rap, and a short kid spun in like a top. Everybody hollered their lungs out.

  Trey went up to Frankie and jammed into him. Rage blinded me. What was all this for, if we were going to fight for real?

  I fisted my way around the circle just as Frankie was muscling Trey back. Grabbed Trey’s arm and glared at him and shook my head. It was like something went out of his eyes when he saw me. He stepped away from Frankie, who had raised his hands, ready to fight. Trey came back with me to our side.