Into the Dangerous World Page 5

  “Aurora. People call me Ror.”

  “Roar? Like a lion?” He smiled; I didn’t. “Just a joke. I’m Jonathan. You could really do something with these, Ror. You got any more?”

  “I lost—I lost a bunch of things,” I said.

  Jonathan reached under the counter and pulled out a new sketchpad and a pencil, thick like a stick of charcoal. “Take these,” he said. “You don’t need no can of spray paint. Trust me.”

  I stared. I didn’t take handouts.

  “It’s a gift. Consider it a contribution from a fan,” he said.

  Warmth pressed down hard in the palm of my hand as I held the pencil. I took the pad warily, watching his eyes. He said, “Come back, when you done some more work, come back and show me.” He was giving it to me. For keeps. What could I give him in return?

  14

  SCHOOL WAS THE last place to find space or privacy. Girls with braces bunched together, boys with pimples snapped bras and laughed maniacally, smooth kids in tight jeans and suede sneakers crowded on the steps with their boom boxes and skateboards, punks clung to the gated windows and smoked. Kids messed around in the dark staircases, smoking pot, making out. I’d already read all the books for English class, I lost the text for Spanish, and I stuck holes in everything with the pin on my compass.

  Everywhere, I saw the writing like from the abandoned building. Did Trey do it? But there were distinct inks, assorted handwritings—so it was lots of kids who wrote on the walls. I glanced in notebooks and got glares back. What you lookin’ at? How could I ask them what I wanted to know? Are you one of them?

  In my coat pocket, I carried the spray can like a talisman. I rehearsed it in my head—what I’d say when I got up my nerve in art class. I’d take it out, say, “Trey, you know anything about this?”

  Wait, no, that was dumb. I wouldn’t say anything about the can at all. Just the painting. No, I wouldn’t say anything about that either; I’d wait for him to talk. But he wouldn’t talk, because we had a fight over that drawing. Why had I even drawn him in the first place?

  Trey took his seat beside me and rubbed his forehead with both hands and sighed heavy. His leg bounced furiously under the table as we listened to Mr. Garci talk about this field trip we’d be taking to the Con-Mod Art Museum in May, something about getting permission slips signed.

  I’d wrapped the spray can in cloth so no one would hear the click click it made when I walked. I thought maybe I’d tell him how great I thought the painting was, and we could be friends. He could teach me how to do it.

  The way his leg bounced, I couldn’t open my mouth.

  “Okay, folks, let’s get back to our still lifes. Those bottles aren’t going to break no matter how much you draw them, so get to work,” Mr. Garci said.

  I took out my new sketchbook. It fell open to a Fire Pop. Trey’s leg stopped moving. I closed the book real quick. Had he seen it? I tried to control my heartbeat, the wild thrill inside me that I had done something illegal on something that might be his.

  I chanced a peek at him; now he was glaring at me.

  I jutted my chin. “’Sup? You look like you’re gonna explode,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I got a score to settle.”

  “Oh, yeah? What happened?” I asked.

  “Somebody went over my painting,” he growled.

  A stab of fear iced me. That was like a week ago. “What painting?”

  “Never mind. I find out who it is, I’ma cut ’em up.”

  Is that the way he got that scar? I thought.

  Mr. Garci came over. “Oh, you two going to draw each other again?”

  Trey said, “Yo, Mr. G, I got her the first time. Don’t need to do her again.”

  “Come on, Trey. You know the perfection of art is in its repetition,” Garci said.

  “Repetition! You know how many throw-ups I done?”

  “I’m not talking about your Neanderthal markings. You know what I think of that.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I heard it,” Trey muttered.

  Garci said, “This time, why don’t you focus on her eyes?”

  I looked into Trey’s face, and he stared back. Tension strung his body tight. With one finger, he pushed up the brim of his green fishing hat. He didn’t blink. He just kept looking, like something had clicked inside his head about me. The force of him so strong, it shoved me back.

  We picked up our pencils.

  His pencil scratched my surface. I drew for my life, the paper too small, like it couldn’t contain the entire Trey, like there were pieces inside I couldn’t fit. I worked hard and fast like him, focusing on his keen eyes. Every time they flicked up, I wanted to catch them, make them stay forever on me so I could understand him.

  I thought again of the spray. I wanted to take out the can, ask him: Where did you get this?

  I felt other kids starting to watch, taking sides.

  Mr. Garci noticed; he came near. “This isn’t a competition, you know,” I heard him say.

  “Yeah, ’cause we know who’s gonna win,” Trey muttered.

  “Yeah, me,” I said.

  Behind me, jingles of laughter.

  Trey slashed hard, dark lines, and ripped out the page. “I’m done with this,” he said. I took a sharp breath—my eyes filled every inch; underneath, the circles, looked like smoke.

  I put my drawing down. He stared at it.

  “Very good, Ror,” Mr. Garci said.

  Trey collected his stuff and left. Garci didn’t stop him.

  I won. Trey’s whole body said I did. I closed my book, dread sinking in me. Damn, after this, he would never talk to me again. That wasn’t what I meant to do. When Garci turned away, I slid Trey’s drawing between two pages, keeping a shred of him.

  15

  NOW IT WAS stuck in me—his drawing, his painting, him, like I’d consumed an arrow and felt it leading me. I had to go look at that painting again, even if it meant I might get caught. I had to figure out his letters, copy them into my pad, have them, keep them. Get them right.

  There was something about Trey and me that was alike, and I had to figure out what.

  I snuck into the building and quietly felt my way upstairs. Outside the room, I heard voices and stopped. They were there, just as I suspected they’d be. I stepped next door and put my ear near a hole in the wall. I wished it was me in that room.

  “. . . whoever did this, we gotta kill him, we can’t let him get away with it,” a guy said.

  “I bet it was fuckin’ Frankie,” said a deep voice.

  “I don’t think so. This don’t look like Frankie,” said Trey.

  I heard, “Yeah, it’s Poison Crew, let’s get ’em all.”

  “They pinching our stash again.”

  “The person did this, they gonna die,” Trey said. There was calm in his voice, a kind of killer calm. “Spray my piece with my best can? That don’t fly.”

  They were talking about what I did. Only they were blaming it on some guy named Frankie. Some poison crew.

  Trey spoke again. “Now I have to hit up Jonathan’s store and get more,” he said. “He’s the only one carries that ebony black Krylon.”

  Jonathan’s?

  “Man, ain’t no free ride at Jon’s no more. He’s a paranoid freakazoid,” a voice said. The deep voice with a crack in it. I tried to see who it belonged to through the hole. I glimpsed that kid with long, curly brown hair.

  “Yeah, I was in yesterday, and he went all store detective on me,” said a guy I couldn’t see.

  “I got a feeling it wasn’t Frankie, just like you, Trey.” A girl’s voice. A girl? I almost lost my cover trying to see her. “I got a feeling there’s somebody else, some skinny-ass addict or something.”

  “Nah, they don’t spray like that. They too busy gettin’ high. I think it was somebody tryin�
�� to prove they better than me,” Trey said.

  My legs felt watery. I breathed quietly next to the hole, wishing my heart wouldn’t beat so loud.

  “Ah, shit, let’s go bomb that fuckin’ Frankie’s territory,” Deep Voice said. “Let’s finish this war.” The voice cracked on war.

  War? They were talking about territory. This was bigger than I thought.

  Trey walked back and forth past the hole. Finally, he said, “Yeah, okay, let’s go.” I heard something being thrown into a bag, their footsteps going away, out the door, down the stairs. The building silent, the sound of traffic in the distance.

  I looked at the can of black. What were they going to do? Fight with spray?

  I put the can on the ground, and left it there.

  16

  TREY’S SEAT WAS EMPTY. Mr. Garci started class with a talk about urinals.

  “Who can tell me what’s so special about a urinal?” he asked.

  A wild giggle flared up. Once, we found a Dumpster of urinals, and Dado built a sculpture with them. That’s when I started calling him “Dado,” after the Dadaists from the 1920s, these artists who made sense with nonsense. They were so far out, they were in, Dado said.

  “Without urinals, piss goes on the floor,” a girl said.

  “How would you know? Ever used one?” cracked a boy.

  “No, but apparently neither do you boys, the bathroom stinks so bad!”

  Arguments broke out, who was more stanky, something about opening legs and taking a whiff—

  Garci clapped his hands, shouted, “Fine, fine, this is going nowhere!” until everybody settled down. “Okay, back to the discussion.”

  “Urinals have kind of a cool shape,” someone behind me offered.

  “That’s a start,” Mr. Garci said. “Can we say they’re beautiful? Who’s to decide?”

  I spoke up. “Duchamp.”

  “Do who?”

  “Doo-doo!”

  They all burst out laughing.

  Garci gave them the look and they shut up. He said, “Duchamp? Did you say Duchamp, Ror?”

  I shrugged. I’d said enough.

  “It’s a miracle, someone’s thinking! What about Marcel Duchamp, Ror?”

  “Psycho don’t know nothin’,” a girl behind me muttered.

  I said slow and clear: “He put a urinal in a gallery and called it ‘Fountain.’”

  “Yes, excellent, very good, Ror. Do you remember what he signed it?”

  I said, “R. Mutt.” Snorts and snickerings. I always signed my comix R. Stegall, like the coolest comix guy in the world, R. Crumb. You think I’d ever tell anyone that?

  Trey came in wearing sunglasses. He threw himself into the chair next to me. I glanced over and saw, behind his glasses, that his eye was swollen shut. My heart wobbled. Shit, it was a real war, and he’d gotten hurt. I quickly looked away, picked up my pen.

  “Ah, so nice of you to join us, Mr. Winthrop,” Garci said to Trey, not smiling. He turned back to us. “So, Duchamp exhibited that piece in 1917,” he went on. “He signed it, put it on a pedestal in a gallery, and called it art. A radical, shocking act for that time period.”

  Trey opened his book and held up the side cover so I couldn’t see what he was drawing. I wanted to write him a note. I’m sorry.

  “So, what was the point?” Mr. Garci asked.

  “They wanted to break some stupid rules?” a kid said.

  “Close, very close!” Garci was excited that someone else had taken a decent stab at an answer. “Duchamp thought everyday objects could become art,” he went on. “He named them ‘readymades,’ and started a whole movement of people turning junk into art by putting it into a gallery space and calling it art. It was the space that made it art.”

  All Dado was missing was a gallery, I thought.

  As Garci lectured, Trey finally let go of the cover of his book, deliberately, slowly, so I could see what he had drawn. It was my Fire Pop. Just like the one I’d sprayed on the wall over his painting.

  Except he drew it better than me.

  I opened my mouth, feeling my whole face flame up. Damn this guy.

  He took off his sunglasses, watching me. I turned away and pretended I didn’t see his black eye.

  “You got something to say, Staten Island?” Trey growled low.

  Staten Island—I was so tired of that joke. You came from where? Thought nobody did. The Nobody Island. Unlike Manhattan island, where everybody was somebody.

  Well, I lived here now.

  I growled back, “Don’t call me that.”

  “What are you gonna do?” he said. I felt Garci starting to look—he didn’t like to be interrupted.

  “At least I haven’t been living in a roach motel all my life,” I muttered.

  “What do you know about me?” Trey said. When I didn’t answer, he said, “You know, you think you all butch like Sigourney Weaver in Alien, but you ain’t nothin’ but a soft yellow banana.”

  I heard giggles behind me.

  Yellow? Banana?

  “Trey? Ror? We have a problem?” Mr. Garci asked.

  “Nah, it’s all right, Mr. G,” Trey said. “Me and Aurora here, we just talking about some tropical fruit that can’t stand the heat.” He stuck the sunglasses back on, pulled his leather cap down, and turned a cold shoulder.

  I spent the rest of class with my arms folded against myself, trying hard to ignore what I couldn’t, what I knew—that I was the cause of Trey’s black eye—and he would never let me into his too-cool world. I felt it boiling in me. Soft. Yellow. I wasn’t scared of him. He wasn’t better than me. I didn’t care if I started any goddamn war. Why did they have to go to war if he knew it was me, anyhow?

  At the bell, I skipped Spanish and shouldered my loads of homework, weighed down, sick and tired, like I needed a good long vacation on that Virgin Island in that show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

  I didn’t want to go home, where Ma absorbed TV rays on high and fiercely knitted hats she hoped to sell. Instead, I went upstairs to the school library to get some peace.

  Too many kids messed around in the stacks, so I gave up drawing and walked down the stairwell. I threw open the door to freedom, and what I saw made me shout, “Oh, shit!” I did a double take and stared at the door, wondering if I was in the right place, feeling the world turned upside down.

  Spray-painted in two tones right on the door to Cady High was a Fire Pop—only it was me, a perfect portrait of me with dark circles under my eyes. Me running, and from my head, all the way up the door frame, flames and smoke whirling high onto the white brick.

  “Oh, damn.” It was beautiful—he made me see myself.

  “Oh, God.” It was horrible—everyone in school would see me.

  I ran all the way to our building, taking the stairs up by twos, past my own floor to the sixth. Outside 621, I stood heaving in and out, dripping sweat. I raised my fist to knock, ready to give him a piece of my mind, when I heard a thud against the door, from the inside. A woman cried out. Another thud. I stumbled back. Behind the door, I heard, “Stop, stop it, James, don’t do that!”

  A thud, and another thud.

  “Stop it, boy!”

  Thud, thud.

  Something curdled inside me. I backed away, and hurried downstairs.

  17

  I FELT LIKE I was going nuts. Lunchtime, I steered clear of the food fight in the cafeteria. Up on Broadway, the homeless spread themselves over the benches like sunbathers in Hawaii. A solar-powered day near the end of April, and I wore only my sweatshirt. I flipped the hood over my cap. There was nowhere for me to eat my peanut butter sandwich in peace. I went into the Golden Arches and claimed a booth near the door, hoping they wouldn’t send me away. I took out my eats and the sketchpad Jonathan had given me.

  What kind of clown w
ould steal an idea?

  Ideas were so intangible, so pffft. Anyone could pick one up and walk away with it, make it a whole lot better. No fingerprints left behind.

  I was really getting into my drawing when I heard, “Yo.”

  Trey, in his sunglasses. Behind him were the two boys and girl from school, from the abandoned building. The way they were looking at me made my stomach ache. I shouldn’t have come here, where they hung out. I closed my book.

  “Ain’t it sweet of you to save us a place. Now, why don’t you move over,” Trey said. The boys smushed me into the wall. Trey slid into the booth across from me. The girl sat next to him.

  I knew their names from classes. The long-haired, deep-voiced guy in English, Reuben, his eyes dark and round, lived with his grandma in the projects. Nessa, she talked too loud in Spanish, tossed her hair like a Cosmo girl, wore gold hoop earrings. Popular with the bossy girls. Kevin, some kind of white-Asian mutt, long like a string bean, always on a skateboard—he sat drawing at the back of world history and flirted with girls who would never go out with him. I bet they knew all about the painting on the school door. I bet they helped Trey do it.

  “Tell me, Staten Island, you ride here on a horse?” Trey said, putting a fry on my book. The others smirked. He took a bite of his burger and chewed.

  I flicked off the fry and it hit his shoulder. “Hey, I told you, don’t call me that.”

  “Oh, snap!” Reuben said.

  “Dis!” said Nessa.

  Trey smiled, then threw another fry at me.

  “Trey!” she said. “Stop feeding the animals.”

  Some look passed between them. My belly took a flop. They were a couple. I didn’t know what I was hoping.

  Reuben, did he know how to blink? Nessa glared at me. Trey, in his leather cap, watched me as he unfolded a piece of paper, one of my Fire Pops. He must’ve picked it up off the street. “Painted on the wall of our hangout,” he said. “Look familiar to you?”

  I shrugged.

  He went on, “I’m starting a new series. Guys with they head on fire. I call them the Jackson-Pryor Triptychs.”