Darius & Twig

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Back Ad

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  chapter one

  High above the city, above the black tar rooftops, the dark brick chimneys spewing angry wisps of burnt fuel, there is a black speck making circles against the gray patchwork of Harlem sky. From the park below it looks like a small bird. No, it doesn’t look like a small bird, but what else could it be?

  At the end of a bench, a young man holds up a running shoe.

  “It doesn’t weigh anything.”

  “That’s the thing,” Twig said. “There’s going to be nothing keeping me back except gravity. When I hit the track in these babies, I’m going to be flying!”

  “The heel is flat. Why doesn’t it have a heel?” I asked.

  “Because this shoe doesn’t want my heels touching the ground,” Twig said, smiling. “This shoe doesn’t play. This is eighty-five dollars’ worth of kick-ass running, my man.”

  “You paid eighty-five dollars for these shoes?”

  “Coach Day got them for me because I’m on the team.”

  “Looks good, I guess,” I said, handing the track shoe back to Twig.

  “Hey, Darius, my grandmother said you should come by this weekend,” Twig said. “I told her that you were really Dominican but didn’t want to admit it.”

  “Why did you tell her that?” I asked. “I’m not Dominican.”

  “Right, but she thinks she’s a detective,” Twig said. “When you come over, she’s going to break out into some Spanish in her Dominican accent and see how you answer. She thinks you’re going to come back in Spanish, and then she’s got you!”

  “Why do you do stuff like that?”

  “Because it’s fun,” Twig said.

  “It’s stupid,” I said.

  “A little,” Twig said, smiling. “But it’s fun, too. You saw Mr. Ramey today? You said you were going to talk to him about a scholarship.”

  “I saw him,” I said.

  “Didn’t go too good?” The corners of Twig’s mouth tightened.

  “I ran into the numbers,” I said. “He asked me what my grade-point average was, as if he didn’t already have it. I told him it was about three point two, and he just shrugged and said it was closer to three even.”

  “You show him the letter from Miss Carroll?”

  “Yeah, she already spoke to him about me,” I said. “The thing I couldn’t get around was that she was saying I’m smart—”

  “You are, man!”

  “Okay, but what he’s saying is that when you send a transcript to a college, they want to see the numbers written down that say you’re smart. Two point five isn’t going to make anybody jump up and down unless you’re six nine or can run a ten-second hundred yards wearing football cleats.”

  “Man, you got too much on the ball not to get a scholarship to some school,” Twig said. “You tell him about the letter you got from that magazine?”

  “How if I revise my story they might publish it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I showed it to him so he could see it was real,” I said. “He got right to the bottom line. He said that right now I wasn’t scholarship material. If the Delta Review actually published the story, I should come back to him and he’d call a few colleges. I don’t think he thought I had a chance. The Delta Review is a college quarterly, Twig. It’s got a lot of prestige, and everybody who’s a serious writer is shooting for it.”

  “He’s a cold dude, Darius,” Twig said.

  “No, man, it’s a cold-ass world. When you open the refrigerator and you get cold coming out, you should expect it.”

  “That’s all he had to say?”

  “No, he said that maybe I should drop out and do my junior year over again. He said he wasn’t recommending it but that I should maybe think about it.”

  “You going to do that?”

  “No. I could run into the same thing I ran into this year and then just not finish high school,” I said. “This way at least I’m on the track to graduating.”

  “You tell him why your grades were messed up?”

  “I started to get at it, but he didn’t want to hear it,” I said. “He wasn’t bitchy about it or anything like that, but he laid it out straight. He said that what I needed, a full scholarship in a school away from Harlem, just wasn’t going to happen.”

  “So what you going to do?”

  “Hope I can fix up the story so that they’ll publish it,” I said.

  “You can do it, bro,” Twig said. “I know you can do it!”

  “He called up Miss Carroll when I was sitting there,” I said. “He asked her point friggin’ blank if I had a chance to get published. She said I had a chance, but the way she said it—”

  “He had her on speakerphone?”

  “Yes. The way she said it was like . . . she didn’t much believe in it,” I said. “She told him that they probably had hundreds of submissions and mine had to be one of the better ones if they were even considering it. She was pushing for me, but she was being realistic.”

  “What did Ramey have to say about that?”

  “He said that the colleges wanted to know what happened, not what could have happened.”

  I watched as Twig laced on his new running shoes and tried them out on the track. He looked happy as he ran. I was watching him, but in my head I was replaying the conversation between me and Mr. Ramey, the school’s guidance counselor. He had said a lot of things about how well I had tested when I entered the school, and how much promise I had. Then he went on about my chances for a scholarship. That was the short part of the conversation. I had figured it would be.

  The thing was that I needed a scholarship that would get me out of my house, away from my mom, away from the hood, and most of all, away from the crap that was going on in my head every day. Mr. Ramey was right. It didn’t do any good being smart. If you were smart and if the world had been right side up, then you would be rewarded for being smart. But the way the world really worked, the way it went down especially when it came to dudes like me, was that you had to walk a path to show you were smart, and it didn’t have anything to do with what you had in your head or in your heart. It had to do with what you scored on tests, the grades you got, and what grades they could send to a college.

  It was a struggle for me to stay in high school. My dad was living somewhere on the Lower East Side, drugging himself to death, and Mom was struggling with a string of cheap jobs that never paid enough to get by on. She was depressed and about a heartbeat from giving up. I had seen her like that previously. Before my father stepped—back when he was really reaching out to her—she had withdrawn inside and hidden away from the world. My father couldn’t take it and move
d out one Friday evening. Mom had cried herself to sleep for the next few days and then went even deeper into her shell. She had even talked about killing herself.

  Up until then, I had done well in school. When crap came my way, I just pushed back and got by it somehow. It got harder. I had to look out for my brother, and for Mom as well. Then I just wanted to be away from the whole set.

  At first I began to think of myself as a bird, flying high over the rooftops, or even a plane just passing from LaGuardia Airport on its way to Europe or Africa. But then, as the anger rose in me, I started thinking of things I would like to do to people who messed life up, who could take an ordinary day and turn it into something nasty and screwed up. That was when I began to think of birds of prey.

  Twig didn’t know it, but he kept me sane. In my darkest moments, when I was feeling really, really shitty, I could think about him and his running and feel better about life. It was always good to see him smiling and trying to win his races. He had talent, so winning was possible. And if winning was possible for him, I felt I might cap a break, too.

  chapter two

  There is a slithering in the grass. The movements of the shadowed patterns are almost invisible in the small patch of bush, except from where I hover far above the earth. On the other side of the patch, a small brown animal moves away from the green carpet and along the winding edge of a stream. It is a paca. The paca stops near the base of a tree and lifts its head to sniff the heavy, humid air. Suddenly it stops, frozen in the moment, listening to whatever is moving through the dewy grass. The paca feels a sense of doom, knowing that whatever it is that moves so silently will surely kill it.

  Then a diamond-shaped head arises, hesitates for a moment before it resumes its tracking, looking for a meal. It is a moment too long. I begin my flight downward, faster and faster, my eyes fixed on the colorful skin of the snake, which is now free of the tall grass.

  My downward flight turns into a dive as I fold my wings. I am a streak across the gray Andes skies. I am a black dart screaming to the earth. I am death.

  And now I strike. My talons just behind the head, crushing the flesh within them. I lift my wings and rise as the snake thrashes wildly, its tail swinging around my legs. I strike the head, pulling the flesh away from the small skull.

  We go up and down, no higher than the height of the paca that stands transfixed against the high grass. I tear away more flesh, this time from the eyes.

  This time from the skull that breaks beneath my beak.

  The grip around my talons eases. It is over. I have my meal.

  All is well.

  I am living on the dark side of the moon. Pretending to be in another place, sometimes another time, and always in another light, I walk among my friends and the people I know as if everything is as it should be. Nothing is as it should be.

  One of the things that scare me, that wake me up in the middle of the night, is that I am too conscious of my thoughts. It’s as if there is a talk show in my head that I’m constantly watching. I wonder if everyone has a talk show in their head. Or if they have voices laying out their future.

  Never mind my address. Never mind that my mail comes to 145th Street, or that I live in a place called Harlem. It is really the dark side of the moon. In the mornings, I walk past guys a little older than I am. They stand on street corners or fill up the old gray stoops on my block and watch the world go by.

  “They’re not smart,” Twig said when I mentioned them. “Half of them didn’t even finish high school.”

  What I know is that it doesn’t matter if they did or didn’t finish. High school doesn’t mean anything anymore. If you want to invent your own life, you need to have more than a high school diploma.

  The school I go to, Phoenix, is the old Powell School at 128th and Amsterdam Avenue in Harlem. Red bricks are piled on top of red bricks to make an old New York building. Behind us, on what was once called Old Broadway, an overhead train whines and creaks its way through Harlem. A short distance away, the George Bruce branch of the New York Public Library squats like a homeless woman with many stories to tell and few ears to give them to.

  The library is where I live, really live. On 145th Street, I eat and sleep and go to the toilet, but it is only in that library, among the books, that I feel comfortable. I go inside, climb the steep steps, find a book, and lose myself for hours. I feel safe—as when I imagine myself flying over the square and rectangular Harlem rooftops, a predator looking for something evil to consume. But if the demons have been too much with me, even the books can’t shelter me completely and I stop my reading to fight against them. It is always the same fight: I am the predator, they are the lowly tormentors, and in the end, I destroy them.

  Sitting in Mr. Ramey’s office, knowing what he was going to say long before the words fell between us, I could feel my balls shrivel up and my throat go dry. I wanted to plead my case to him, to say that if I didn’t get a scholarship, it would mean taking my place with all the other guys on the block who look like me. Young, black, dangerous unless proven otherwise.

  Twig rarely reads. But he told me that when the demons bother him, he puts them on a track. He watches them run ahead of him and then slowly and surely runs them down, catches up with them, and then speeds past, imagining how they feel knowing that they are losers. I think Twig is at his best when he is running, when he is dreaming of being in races, when he dreams of winning, when he dreams of holding a trophy above his head.

  In a sane world, we would be heroes. Teachers would applaud as we walked into the school. There is the smart one, the one who wants to be a writer. And there is the runner.

  But we have enemies. In our separate ways, we have moved away from the mob. They have settled for less and we are still hoping to be more. We haven’t created a huge space, and we haven’t escaped the huge shadow they cast. Our scent is no different from theirs, but we have separated ourselves. I think Twig is on the brink of being a great runner. One day, I hope, I will write a poem, or an essay, or a novel, that will change hearts. But the mob doesn’t want us to be different. They want us to find our spots on the corner, or on a stoop. They beckon to us and tell us that everything will be okay.

  But I’m terrified to be like them, to drift off into a world that is so unreal. I watched too many times as my father slurred his words and mumbled about the life he had once hoped for. I see my mom sitting in the darkness wondering what has gone wrong with her life.

  “You’ve got a good head on your shoulders, Darius,” Mr. Ramey said. “But you haven’t really been doing the work, have you?”

  I didn’t answer. What did he want, an admission? Should I have bowed my head and said, “Oh, I know I don’t deserve anything, sir”?

  “And why do you have to go away to college?” he went on. “You could work during the day and go to school at night for a while.”

  “No,” I wanted to say. “I can’t take care of myself and my mother and my brother and still wrap my head around the books. I’m not that strong. The only thing I have is a mind, and some writing ability. Shouldn’t that be enough?”

  When I left Mr. Ramey’s office, I saw Midnight and Tall Boy down the hall. Put faces to my misery and they would have them.

  Midnight, from his incredibly stupid heart to his heavy-legged walk, more stumble than stride, is garbage. He is slow, mean, a bully. If he can make anyone’s life miserable, even for a few minutes, he jumps at the chance. The teachers hate him but give him as much room as they can so they don’t have to deal with him. They look away when he hits a smaller kid in the hallway or takes someone’s money. His eyes, almost the same color as his skin, make him look like a child’s drawing of a “brown” teenager.

  Tall Boy is his homey. Dull-faced, slow, with light, mottled skin that looks like he might have some kind of sickness, he has only his record of being in juvenile detention to brag about.

  “I been in jail in Jersey City, and in the Bronx!”

  Idiots don’t know they’re
idiots, which is unfortunate.

  Tall Boy is crappy, a follower, but nobody is as much of a shithead as Midnight.

  The bell rang and the juniors were going to have an assembly. The auditorium was noisy as we shuffled in. I didn’t want to sit with Twig because I felt so bad, so close to crying. I sat a few rows behind him.

  I watched as Midnight and Tall Boy looked around for a place and then settled behind Twig. We had just finished saying the Pledge of Allegiance when Midnight started kicking the back of Twig’s chair. I knew he would do it all through the assembly. Twig turned once and Midnight mean mugged him. That’s the kind of stuff he does. Just bother people. Just add some annoyance to another person’s life. Just remind Twig that there’s nothing he can do about it.

  Midnight’s name is Ronald Brown. He calls himself Midnight because, he says, that’s when they execute people on death row. You’re supposed to fall out over that little piece of crap. I didn’t fall out.

  Tall Boy’s real name is Lawrence Lester. He’s a fairly good basketball player but doesn’t have the discipline to play on a team. Everybody keeps talking about how much potential he has, but I don’t think he has anything going on except a lousy attitude.

  Both of them add up to nothing.

  Twig’s real name is Manuel Fernandez, but his grandfather gave him the nickname Twig. When we were in the fourth grade, Twig and I discovered that we did stuff. A lot of people do one thing or another, but Twig was interesting because he did a lot of stuff. We both played ball, he liked to draw, I liked writing, and we both tried out for the tennis team. Twig made the team and I didn’t, but I practiced with him. We were nine when we met and now we’re both sixteen and we’re still best friends.

  Twig can run. He isn’t much of a sprinter, but he started running the 800 in middle school and moved up to the mile and cross-country in high school. He can run really long distances, and over the summer he ran an open cross-country race against people of all ages. He came in third even though some of the men in the race were in college. Mr. Day, Phoenix’s track coach, was knocked out by Twig’s running and asked him to join the track team. They were going to mention him at the assembly, and I was happy about that.