A Star is Born Read online

  The truth was that I was as proud of LaShonda as everybody else. And I was proud that old stuffy butt Mr. Culpepper had to acknowledge that the Cruisers had their stuff together. When he first called us into his office he was ready to kick us out of Da Vinci Academy, saying we weren’t the kind of students fit for a gifted and talented school. He got on our case for not being in any extracurricular activities, and we made up our own club, calling ourselves the Cruisers. That was supercool, but our newspaper, which Mr. Culpepper liked to refer to as our “adventure into the writing trade,” had found its place in our school. All the kids picked it up as soon as we published it, and Ashley Schmidt, the editor of the official school newspaper, The Palette, even said that it made that paper better.

  Bobbi McCall was sharp. She was good at math and chess and was up on anything that dealt with women. Da Vinci Academy was in Harlem, but a lot of the kids at the school were white, including Bobbi.

  Kambui Owens was my main man and into photography. Kambui was the kind of guy who had your back if things got wrong, but he would also let you know if he thought you weren’t taking care of business.

  LaShonda Powell did design, sewing, art, fashion, and anything connected with clothing. If you could wear it, she could hook it up. So when Mrs. Maxwell asked the Cruisers to do a short sketch of some kind for assembly, I wrote a one-act play based on Romeo and Juliet, and LaShonda designed the costumes. The costumes were smoking, too. She had everybody wear dark pants and then did individual tops for all of us. I liked mine because I looked good in it. The wide sleeves made me look like I was in an old movie or something, and I liked that.

  Okay, I’m Alexander Scott. I think Mr. Culpepper likes me the least of any kid at Da Vinci because I’m the one kid he can’t stare down. For one thing, I’m six feet and he’s only five ten, and also because I’m good at staring people down. It’s just something I can do. It’s, like, a gift or something. What Mr. C. wants are kids who are grateful for walking in the door of Da Vinci and working hard every day to get a handful of A’s. That’s not me, and that’s not Kambui, and not Bobbi, and not LaShonda. We cruise along, but we’re smart and we know it.

  Still, I was happy with the piece in the paper because LaShonda was right. College is a piece of cake if you have the money. My dad is a weatherman and pulls down good money, even if he is doing it out on the West Coast with his new wife. My mom is a model and sometimes an actress and we do okay. I would like to get a free ride to college just so I don’t have to ask my father for anything. That’s a different trip from where LaShonda is coming from and I know it, so I didn’t say anything when she mentioned it. I know LaShonda’s cool. She’s all heart and fights better than Kambui.

  On the way home I wondered what Mr. C. was thinking when he called us down to his office. Deep down inside of his stuffy butt I bet he was disappointed that he had to tip his hat to us.

  THE CRUISER

  I DON’T WANT TO BE NO LADY

  By Bobbi McCall

  Okay, like everybody else at Da Vinci I am glad for my homegirl LaShonda Powell. But I can’t get with this “lady” business. Every time somebody puts a label on you they are restricting you in some way. A “lady” is supposed to do this or that, but in reality they are talking about what you are not supposed to be doing. If Rosa Parks had been a “lady,” she wouldn’t have gotten herself arrested. If Harriet Tubman had been a “lady,” she wouldn’t have been doing the illegal act of leading her people to freedom.

  Virginia Woolf said that for a woman to write, she had to have her own money and her own space. In other words, she had to move away from what she was supposed to be doing as a “lady” and toward what her heart told her she needed to be doing.

  And since I’m riding my high horse (Godiva-style if I so choose!), I will add one more thing. Only certain people in our society have been historically considered “ladies.” Others were not allowed to reach that status. If the term “lady” can be given to you, it can also be taken away. Think about it!

  And as for Ashley Schmidt and The Palette — I think she should work a little harder to keep that stuffy newspaper locked up so it doesn’t leak any more hot air. The Cruiser will take care of itself.

  I was happy because Culpepper finally had to admit that the Cruisers were the real deal, but when I got home Mom was even happier.

  “Guess what happened today?” She looked at me all bubbly, like she was going to bring out a cupcake or something from behind her back.

  “Yo, I don’t know what happened today, and I don’t think you should be throwing your television commercial smile at me,” I said.

  “I am not throwing my television commercial smile at you,” she said. Then, with one motion, she flopped down into a cross-legged sitting position on the floor. “This is my television commercial smile.”

  Mom’s a model and knows how to act and look pretty. When she threw her television smile at me it was good. The woman was real good, and I could see why she was getting over on the tube. She had been working commercials for the past six months and raking in some heavy paper for a change. We spent it all real fast, but at least we had something to spend.

  “So what happened today?” I asked.

  “Two things.” Mom held up two fingers like I wouldn’t have understood the words. “The first was that I tried out for the part of the Gecko’s girlfriend.”

  “The Gecko?”

  “You know, the Gecko that sells insurance?”

  “Yeah, but you’re going to be his girlfriend?” I asked.

  “It depends,” she said. “They’re going to run it by some good-doing black organization to see if they object to the Gecko having a black girlfriend. If they don’t, I’ll be his girlfriend and make a gazillion dollars.”

  I couldn’t exactly wrap my mind around my mother being the Gecko’s girlfriend, but the gazillion dollars sounded cool. I asked her what else had happened.

  “Your father called me with an idea,” she said. Now she had on her wait-until-you-hear-how-stupid-this-is expression. “He wants you and him to have face-to-face meetings once a week so he can mentor you. He’s going to send us some equipment and you can see him on the Internet every Wednesday evening.”

  “I can see him on the net just by tuning in to the weather in Portland,” I said. “Why do I want to see him on Wednesday evenings?”

  “He said he wants to have eye contact with you so the two of you can talk about man kind of things,” Mom said.

  “What does he mean by man kind of things?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Maybe his new wife has taught him something.”

  That was cold. My parents have been divorced nearly five years and they’re still sniping at each other. My dad, who is the super-duper black weatherman out in Portland, Oregon, is always trying to do the right thing. Sometimes I think he’s got a book called Corny Things That Fathers Need to Impose on Their Kids After the Divorce. He’s really all right, I guess, but if they’re going to have a battle I’m always going to be on Mom’s side. In any fight I always pick a side. That’s just the way I am.

  The Algebra homework sucked big-time. Mr. Manley (I should introduce him to my father), who was a substitute last year, is now teaching Algebra and he wants to make it a Black History class. Probably because he’s black. The first thing he did was to waste an entire period with the big news that the word “algebra” is from some Arabic word, and we were supposed to get excited about that. Phat Tony, one of the Genius Gangstas crew, asked if the dude who invented algebra was from Africa, and Mr. Manley said he was either from Africa or the Middle East.

  “Probably a terrorist,” Phat Tony said.

  Everybody was agreeing to that, and Mr. Manley got really mad, which made the day a huge success.

  Okay, I did the homework, checked my e-mails, ran through Facebook, checked out some blogs from Frederick Douglass Academy, answered some comments from Lower Canada Community College about American education, ate some meatball sandw
iches (my mom’s best supper next to mac and cheese), and was just about to hit the sack when Mom knocked on the bedroom door.

  Usually when my mom wants to come into my room, she just throws the door open and bursts in, apologizing about how sorry she is to disturb me, et cetera, et cetera. She’s never really sorry. She just doesn’t care about my privacy, which she describes as an “issue” between us.

  “The police are on the phone,” she said. “Your friend LaShonda has a problem.”

  It was after eleven at night when we got a gypsy cab on the boulevard and took it downtown to the Port Authority building on Eighth Avenue and 41st Street. Mom stretched her legs out and told me what the police had told her.

  “They found LaShonda and her brother on a bench at the Port Authority and the kids wouldn’t give their names or address,” she said. “When the police told them that they would have to take them to a shelter, LaShonda gave them your name and number.”

  “They have no idea why they were there?”

  “No,” Mom said.

  “Did they say that LaShonda was … you know … all right?”

  “I think she is,” Mom said. “The police didn’t sound angry or anything, just concerned.”

  We got to the Port Authority and it was crowded with people just milling around. Some looked as if they might have been waiting for buses, some looked homeless. The police are on the second floor, all the way back toward Ninth Avenue and in a corner. We went there and a round lady sergeant met us at the door.

  “This is not the place for young kids to be by themselves,” she said. “You know them?”

  Mom said we did and we went into a room where LaShonda was sitting on a bench. Her arms were around her brother and he had his face turned away from us.

  “You okay, baby?” Mom asked LaShonda.

  LaShonda’s head shook yes, but her eyes were saying no. Mom sat down on one side of her and I sat on the other, next to her brother. When Mom put her arms around her shoulders, LaShonda began to cry. I didn’t know what to do except feel bad. I tried to take her hand, but her brother pushed me away.

  Mom cradled LaShonda for a while, not saying anything, just patting the back of her head as my friend leaned against her shoulder. Sometimes — maybe most of the time — I didn’t think much of just having a mother, but I was appreciating her as we sat there in the police station.

  LaShonda and Mom talked quietly. I heard LaShonda saying how foolish she had been to think things were going to change so easily for them. Mom wasn’t saying a lot, but she was comforting LaShonda. Most of all, I was looking at Chris.

  Chris was, like, really good-looking. He had soft brown eyes and a nice mouth that made him look younger than I knew he was. He looked around the precinct room at the cops who passed by or at the clock on the wall. Occasionally, he glanced at Mom, but only from the side, as if he didn’t want her to see him looking at her. What got to me most was his hands. They were always busy, moving from his chest to the tops of his thighs, and then to his knees before returning to his chest. The moves were merely touches, as if he had a thing — a ritual — he had to go through. And LaShonda, talking quietly to Mom, also moved with her brother, keeping his hands in the tight pattern he had set up, and away from Mom.

  Once, a bell went off, and I watched Chris quickly put his hands over his ears. To me the bell hadn’t been that loud, but I could see that Chris was in a different world than I was.

  “You okay?” I asked him.

  He looked away from me, down toward the floor.

  “He’s okay,” LaShonda said, interrupting the sentence she had started to Mom.

  LaShonda and Chris together, he going through a secret dance that only he knew about, she silently dancing with him, keeping him within the small space that only they understood, was something I had never seen before. It pulled at my gut, and I felt helpless and a little stupid.

  LaShonda and Chris had been living in group homes for children — first Little Flower and then St. Francis, where they were now, and I wondered how long they had been going through this bit of her trying to keep him calm, and how much it was taking out of her.

  “You need us to arrange transportation to a shelter?” the round sergeant asked. “The best we can do tonight is a shelter or have them sleep in the back of some precinct until morning.”

  “LaShonda goes to school with my son,” Mom said. “Can we take them to our house?”

  The sergeant knelt down in front of LaShonda and smoothed back my friend’s hair.

  “Baby, you haven’t done anything wrong, but I don’t want you to go anywhere you don’t feel safe,” the sergeant said. “Are you all right with going home with these people?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “How do you know them?” the sergeant asked.

  “Zander and I go to school together,” LaShonda said. “He’s good people.”

  Yo, that got me all teary eyed.

  The sergeant got my name and Mom’s name and address and then said that LaShonda could go home with us. She asked how we were going and Mom said we’d take the train, but the sergeant went into another room and came back with enough money to take a taxi back uptown.

  “What they said was that if I went into the Virginia Woolf program, then me and Chris would have to be separated,” LaShonda whispered. “I can’t let that happen. I just can’t let that happen.”

  She said that her brother was autistic. I didn’t know what that meant other than he was different. I was hip to not dumping on people who were different or who had things like autism or stuff like that, but I didn’t really know what it was about.

  But I saw the way LaShonda’s brother clung to her. It looked like he was trying to get into her, to bury his head in her chest.

  And she just held him. Like a mother holds a child. That’s what I thought of when I looked at them in the darkness of the cab going through the streets, a mother holding a child.

  Mom called the group home, and they were relieved. They said they would send somebody over to pick up LaShonda and Chris, but Mom said no, that they would stay with us overnight. She said that like she meant it, too. When the chips were down, Mom could man up with the best of them.

  THE CRUISER

  A GUEST EDITORIAL

  By Phat Tony Williams

  Yo, yo! Listen up. Today I had a visit to juvie jail to see what it is all about and to write an essay on what I saw. Well, what I saw was seriously foul. Me, Mr. Siegfried, and Caren Culpepper busted up to the Bronx to check out the facility. When we got in we saw a bunch of brothers lined up and we asked what they were doing. A guard said they were lining up to get their medications. He said, like, sixty percent of the inmates take drugs every day because of their problems. He even spelled it out — psychotropic drugs. I didn’t run it too tough, but Caren asked if they were learning to use drugs, why shouldn’t they use them on the street. The guard said that was just the way things are when you get put away.

  This guest editorial has two things to say. Number one, I didn’t know they had jails just for kids. I should have known that, but my mind really doesn’t go there most of the time. Or any of the time. The other thing I have to say is that it looks like they’re telling kids that sometimes drugs are okay.

  So I was glad when we left, and I didn’t want to write anything about what I saw or what I heard except that it made me feel sorry inside.

  Lastly, there’s some scary stuff happening out there in the world. Bad thing is that I don’t know how to wrap my mind around it yet. Yeah, and peace to the Cruisers’ paper that gave me the chance to say my say.

  I know a lot of people don’t believe in God or Santa Claus or the Easter bunny. I don’t think a lot about Santa Claus or the Easter bunny but I was hoping that God was real. The thing I thought was that there should be somebody enforcing the rules, and that the rules should be fair. When I see kids getting sick I think somebody messed up. When I see kids in jail, like in Phat Tony’s essay in The Cruiser, I think so
mebody messed up really bad.

  LaShonda and Chris needed to be together, and the way things were working out it didn’t look easy. I thought about them being down at the bus station and then at my house and I felt sorry for them. It wasn’t fair, and God should be about fair. That was all I thought that I wanted from life, just for it to be fair.

  They slept on the couch in the living room, LaShonda with her arm around her brother, him not moving as he slept. I looked at them when I went to the bathroom and thought about a picture I had seen of two little children crossing a bridge at night with Jesus watching over them.

  A lot of things must have been racing through LaShonda’s mind. They were racing through mine, too, and I couldn’t think of anything that looked like “something good to do.” Everything looked hard, and maybe there weren’t any really good answers. I thought that if God was real He should have come up with some good answers.

  “So how come they have to separate LaShonda and her brother?” Bobbi asked. We were in the computer lab. She had her notebook on her lap and was doing chess problems. “If they’ve been together this long, why not just keep them together?”

  “She said it’s really a money deal,” I answered. “It’s cheaper to keep the boys in one place and the girls in another. So when this thing came up, with them offering LaShonda a special place —”

  “Everybody jumped on it!” Bobbi looked up at me.

  “Yeah.”

  “And now another sponsor has contacted the school, which complicates things even more,” Bobbi went on. “Fragrance Perfumes is offering to contribute to the school’s scholarship fund, and they want LaShonda to be the first one to get money from them.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I heard.”

  “And Mr. C. wants us to meet with them in his office this afternoon to dance up and down and brag on the school, and your best idea is just to not show up?”

  “Something like that,” I answered, looking at her computer screen. “Try taking the knight.”