Secret Saturdays (14 page)

“Yeah,” she said. “Both of you, sit down and watch this. Yo, see how this one girl from Harlem dribbles! I'm going to learn how to play like her. Then the coaches of the girls' basketball team will sweat me at the next tryouts.”

We ended up watching Vanessa's b-ball DVD for thirty minutes. Just when I got tired of watching this dunking contest, Vanessa said, “You guys think we should call Sean?”

I was glad she suggested it.

“Yeah,” Kyle said. “It feels weird without him.”

I guessed they stayed thinking about him too.

We crowded around Kyle's bedroom phone.

“Okay,” Kyle said. “Say Merry Christmas, then our names, on the count of three. One, two—”

“Wait,” Vanessa said. “Kyle, you say your name first, I go second, then Justin.”

“Fine,” me and Kyle said.

Sean's voice mail picked up after one ring. Kyle counted us off and we yelled, “Merry Christmas!” into the phone. “It's us, Sean. Kyle, Vanessa, and Justin.”

That felt good.

Then the three of us started playing Rock Band. We played until it was time for me and Vanessa to go home.

 

New Year's Eve, around seven o'clock at night, Ma sent me to the store. New Year's in Red Hook was the opposite of Christmas. Heads wilded, and outside, firecrackers exploded everywhere. The halls were extra crowded on every floor with people smoking weed, drinking, rolling dice, and messing up everything. Half the guys I saw, I didn't know. Some of them were there to start trouble because that was as much fun to them as getting high or drunk.

“What's your name?” this one kid maybe two, three years older than me asked when I passed through a crowd on the second floor. “You look mad familiar.” He stepped toward me, and his crew of boys stopped laughing with each other to eye me.

“What's your name?” I said back, hard. If he thought I was soft and I gave up my name easy, then what else would he try to make me give up easy? My money? Or worse, if his boys thought I was a punk, they might try jumping me. “I've lived in this building forever,” I told him, “and you don't look familiar.”

He just stood there looking at me for a second like he was thinking about what to do next. Then, out of nowhere, Glenn from the fifth floor stepped forward to give me a pound. “Yo, Justin, what's good.” He turned to his homeboy. “Chill. He's all right.”

The guys, one by one, nodded what up to me then and slowly went back to joking with each other. I left for the store.

Every year, on this day, I had to deal with or see drama. That's how come me, Kyle, and Vanessa didn't hang on New Year's Eve. Going straight to the store and back was one thing, but us walking through different blocks to visit each other wasn't so safe. Sometimes, Sean and me chilled. Only because we lived in the same building and walking from floor to floor was safer.

On New Year's Eve, right before midnight, there were a bunch of gunshots out my window. Drug dealers blasted to celebrate. While they did that, me, my mother, and people in their apartments banged pots and blew horns. Then, at exactly twelve o'clock, the guys busting guns, me and Ma, and all of Red Hook yelled the same thing over and over: “Happy New Year!”

The day after, me, Vanessa, and Kyle promised to meet at my place to try and figure out more about where Sean's father was.

As soon as Vanessa walked in, she jumped on the Internet and said, “Let's Google the words
Clinton Co.
”

“Oh snap!” Kyle said. “How dumb were we for not doing this sooner?”

We stood behind Vanessa and a few seconds later mad stuff about Clinton County popped up on the screen. Some sites had words so big we needed a teacher to even say them. Vanessa clicked on one thing and people in business suits showed up. She kept hitting any link with Clinton in it. But none of the sites had anybody in it who even looked like me, Sean, Vanessa, Kyle, or Sean's father.

“Mmm.” Vanessa said to herself.

“We could be doing this forever,” Kyle said.

“For real,” I said.

Me, Vanessa, and Kyle still didn't know what the words on the envelope meant and we agreed we couldn't just ask anyone. What if it was a bad place? We might've gotten in trouble.

After a couple more minutes of randomly clicking and finding nothing, we all were frustrated and quit.

 

We were back in school before we knew it. Walking through the halls on Monday without Sean cracking jokes felt weird. But by Wednesday, it was kind of nice not seeing him dis kids and make them deflate. I still missed him, even though he still hadn't called any of us. But that also meant he didn't know we took his rhymebook. Believe me, if he knew, we would've heard from him.

Friday, Advisory came.

When I walked into class, three grown thug guys stood in the circle with Ms. Feeney. They looked scary but familiar. Two were giants and built like wrestlers. One wore a do-rag. The other had a cheese grin on, a gold front, and a green hoodie. The third guy was short. Almost my height. But he was diesel too. He had frizzy cornrows. I glanced at them like “I'll be way over here. Nowhere near you.”

The giant with the gold front must've caught my reaction.

“Little man,” he said to me. “Come sit over here. I won't eat you.” He laughed like he was lying about that.

Was he trying to play me? He shouldn't play me, he should play lotto. I sat in the chair right next to him. He smiled at me. I nodded hard at him like I wasn't a punk.

“Attention, class,” Ms. Feeney said. “To welcome you all back from winter recess, I have a special Friday Advisory for you. Today, we have three guest speakers instead of one. Each man here did jail time. They'll tell you how it was.”

Before the break, Ms. Feeney had said no more speakers for my class because of Sean's fight with Manny. I guess she had changed her mind.

 

“I'm Davon,” the giant with the do-rag said. His voice boomed and bumped like a car speaker. “Raise your hand if you been in a prison.”

Nobody raised their hand.

Suddenly he barked, “Raise your hand when I speak to you! Raise 'em!” I jumped. Everybody jumped. Even Ms. Feeney.

That's when it hit me. I knew these guys from TV! These three dudes were on this ABC show. They went from school to school scaring kids into behaving. To keep kids from ending up in jail.

The gold-toothed giant with the hoodie said, “My name's Reese. Ms. Feeney told me you had a fight in this room.” He switched his voice to whiny. Teasing us. “She said you acted like little monkeys yelling, ‘Fight! Fight!' ”

Kids made faces like Ms. Feeney was a liar.

“You think fights are funny?” Reese barked at one kid smirking next to him.

“No,” the kid said, and shook his head real fast.

The giant started undressing! He took his hoodie off until he wore a wifebeater. We watched him, wondering what was wrong with him.

Because he had just a tank top on, I could see he had a scar like a brown snake going from his throat to his shoulder and down to his forearm. Reese breathed in deep like a monster that ate scared kids. “See this?” he said all soft, and showed his scar to some kids.

They nodded.

“It's from fighting!” he shouted at them. “I can't even use my arm good! You think that's funny?

“My housing project was no joke. Traps everywhere. I don't mean fake trapdoors like you see in movies. I mean real-life traps. Drugs. Fast money. All types of things that'll kill you. Kill your future. Me and my brothers made the wrong moves. Fell in them traps. That's why we all did jail time. I'm not talking about these cats up here. I'm saying me and my real blood brothers did bids.”

Davon, the other giant rocking the do-rag, said, “Me and the guys you see up here, we could've done different. Could've been different. But we was taking shortcuts. Following the easy road. With everything. I wasn't real with school. I wasn't real with my friends. I wasn't real with my girlfriends. Here and there, older people who did right tried talking sense to me.

“One time, I'll never forget. I was a junior high student and one friend told me he'd be in college someday. I laughed and called him a nerd. So bust it, that same year we was in his apartment and his father, out of nowhere, gave us this quick lecture. ‘Don't cut corners,' he said. ‘The corners you cut might come back and cut you.'

“He meant stay in school, be our best around everybody. To me, that was garbage. Why? I admired Gs, thugs. In my mind, him and any older, do-right dudes in my neighborhood were soft. So I didn't follow his advice.

“I kept going the wrong way, chasing fun.

“If it was easy, I did it.

“If it was hard, I didn't do it.

“I should've listened to my friend's pops. My friend didn't cut corners. Guess what. He ended up in college. And me? Just like his father said.

“I dropped out of school, and with no degrees I couldn't get work. I was shady with my friends and backstabbed some of them too. They stopped trusting me. Stopped looking out for me. One guy I was really foul with called the police on me when I started selling drugs. That's how I first got locked up.”

The short guy with the frizzy cornrows jumped in and said, “My name is Mystic. In jail, guys doing bids look like the thugs you respected in the street. In prison, some of them even got a little juice. They run this or that. You see them and you say to yourself, ‘Oh, he's The Man.'

“But how you a man if you in jail? How you a man when your children are out in the world and they need their father but you far away and can't be a dad? You can't put food on your children's table. You can't protect them. Some things only a dad can teach, but you gone, and you lose that chance. Your kids gotta get their life lessons from wherever they can. You ain't no man in jail. Every day prison guards treat you like a child. You need a cop's permission to use the bathroom. They tell you when to eat, wake up, sleep. In jail, I got older and grew. Soon, I looked like a man but still I wasn't a man. Why? Every day, I was handled like a caged animal. And when they let me out of jail, what did I know? The same stuff I knew when I first got sent to jail. I was a stranger to my kids and I had no real job skills. So I went right back to doing what was familiar to me as a kid.”

Mystic got quiet. His face looked sad. “Don't ever get locked up.” He slapped his hand to his chest. “Do me that favor. If you go to jail, the traps there can kill you or break your spirit. The guards . . . they take your clothes. Your style. Make you wear these green uniforms. In some jails, it's orange jumpsuits or . . .”

Green uniforms
.
Green pants!
Vanessa said Sean's dad wore green pants in the Polaroid. I suddenly wanted to ask the short guy a question and raised my hand without realizing it.

“Whattup, shorty?” Mystic said.

“Did you wear green pants?” I asked.

Davon, the giant with the do-rag, smiled at me. What was he smiling at me for?

The short guy, Mystic, took one finger and tapped it to his cornrowed head. “Yeah. The people who run jails mess with inmates' minds. They make you feel like you have no identity. They take away your name and give you a number. You have to rock the same prison uniform as everybody else. In our jail, it was green.”

“What jail were you in?” this boy Dennis asked.

“I was in a joint upstate,” Davon, the do-ragged giant, answered. “The Clinton Correctional Facility.”

My eyes almost flew out my head.

Clinton Co. I remembered the words that Vanessa saw on the envelope from Sean's dad: “Clinton Co.”

Was Sean's pops in jail right here in New York? Was that “the place” Sean mentioned in his raps? How long had Sean been lying to me about his father? Before his secret Saturdays, I thought me and Sean knew everything about each other. Before those trips, I considered Sean my family. Now, these guys from jail were adding pieces to the Sean puzzle and I didn't know which way was up. Was Sean ever real with me?

I only half listened for the rest of Advisory.

 

When Advisory ended, all the students were almost out Ms. Feeney's door, but I stayed. I wanted to talk with the giant with the do-rag.

I felt uncomfortable, but Ms. Feeney was in the room so I knew it was cool to speak with him. I peeped his two friends chatting near the windows.

“Excuse me, Davon.”

“Whattup, shorty?” he asked me.

“Can I speak to you for a second?”

He nodded.

I wondered how to start. Something told me that he knew Sean's father. “One of the kids that fought in here was my boy Sean,” I said. “Did you know his dad? You were in the same jail as him. Clinton.”

Davon's voice dropped mad levels, all friendly. “Yeah. How come Sean threw hands?” He said Sean's name like he knew him.

“The other kid clowned him,” I said. “He called Sean's father fruity.”

“Fruity?” Davon laughed. “Bro, you haven't met Sean's dad, have you?”

“Nope,” I said.

“But you know some things about Sean's father?”

I decided to lie. He might not hold back about Sean's father if he thought I knew stuff about him. “No doubt,” I said. “Me and Sean tight.”

“Cool,” Davon said. “Cool. When I first got to Clinton, I met Sean's pops and he looked out for me. Now I'm out, and me and him speak on the regular.”

Above Ms. Feeney's desk was our class picture, blown up poster-style. Davon pointed at it and put his finger right on Sean's face. “This is Sean, right?”