Buck (19 page)

“Write your thoughts,” she tells everyone.

“I’m trying,” the short girl next to me, Ellen, says. “The only problem with writing my thoughts is that sometimes I don’t know what I’m thinking.”

I turn the page over. It’s blank again.

The blank page is the starter pistol that fires and triggers my mind to sprint.
What will I write? What will I say? Will I say what I write, write what I say? Something funny? Something
serious? Something about my family? Something about Amir? Ryan? How will I start? Whose story will I tell? My story? Something made up? A story about a boy from Philly, a lost boy, who wants to find himself but doesn’t know where to look, who wants to tell his story but doesn’t know where to begin … or end, who searches anyway and discovers something about himself, the world?

Stacey reads from
The Pillow Book:
“ ‘There are times when the world so exasperates me that I feel I cannot go on living in it for another moment and I want to disappear for good. But then, if I happen to obtain some nice white paper … I decide that I can put up with things as they are a little longer.’ ”

I stare at the blank page, an ocean of white alive with possibility.

I hear myself take a breath, then exhale—deep, like I just rose from underwater. It’s like I’m at the free-throw line again. Foul shots. Like the game is on the line … again. I remember something my dad told me:
Shoot to make it
.

My hand shaking, trembling like it’s freezing.

Then it hits: a silence louder than all the music I’ve ever heard in my life.

All the light in the world, in one beam, before me.

Pens dance to the beat of Stacey’s voice: “Picture yourself writing … your mind moving … notice what you notice … catch yourself thinking … the purpose of writing is to stop time … what is the sound of one hand clapping?… writing synchronizes the mind, body, and spirit … open your mind and your mind’s eye … only emotion endures … picture yourself writing …”

I grip the pen and something shoots down my spine, sits me straight up. The pen feels heavy, like it’s made of stone.

I stare deep into the blank page and see myself. I feel something I’ve never felt before: purpose. I don’t know what my exact purpose is yet, but I know it has something to do with this pen and blank page. I am a blank page.

Holding the pen this way, snug and firm in my fist, makes me feel like I can write my future, spell out my destiny in sharp strokes.

But I can’t write. So many things I want to write, but my pen is stuck, trapping my words like water under an ice block. The distance between my mind and the page feels like it could be measured in light-years.

“It’s like there’s a wall.”

“Every wall is a door.”

“You don’t need to be great to get started, but you need to get started to be great.” She sees my pen in the block of ice. “Try writing the first word that comes to your mind.”

B-U-C-K
.

buck (n.): a fashionable and typically hell-raising young man. 2 racial slur used to describe black men. 3 a young black man:
what’s up young buck?
4 the act of becoming wild and uncontrollable:
he went buck wild
. 5 a dollar. 6 to fire gunshots:
buck shots in the air
. 7 to go against, rebel:
buck the system

After free write, we share. She calls it the circle of love—you get a chance to read what you wrote. It kind of feels like what I imagine a campfire feels like, or an AA meeting.

We move around the circle.

SHAWN:
“Orange-hued rainbow skies, eternal stormy summer nights, and stellar angel cloud dancing …”

SARAH:
“If I were me, talking to me, I’d smack me already … It’s funny how the intimidating are usually the intimidated …”

JOHN:
“He’s a politician. It’s like being a hooker. You can’t be a good one unless you can pretend to like people while you’re fucking them.”

RACHEL:
“You raped my body but not my soul / Once broken, now I’m whole / You raped my body but not my mind / Can now see, was once blind …”

BECCA:
“Feeling all alone / All alone at home / Going to school / Not acting very cool / Happy, sad, mad, no dad. Poem writing, lots of typing …”

AARON:
“Rest my eyelids on the ride / Or get caught in riptide / If you like it french-fried / Be my bride. Seagulls dropping left and right, all night. All right. Okay, twine frays, repeated phrase, ruffled Lay’s and sun rays in a haze …”

KATE:
“There’s hell in hello, good in goodbye, lie in believe, over in lover, end in friend, and ex in next so what’s next … A true friend stabs you in the front … I have a shooting star on my wrist, means to go far. I have a heart on my hip it means to always love …”

TARA:
“Amidst a hidden green hill / Tucked behind brass barriers far away / A figure is played on a windowsill / A daunting paragon of Irish beauty lay / Her pristine pale skin and soft pink cheeks / Frame large abyssal eyes / Which tell of the adventures she seeks / And imagines in the skies / Each cloud stretches and reaches / Satisfying her imagination / Natures she beseeches / To animate her creation.”

GEOFF:
“Money can’t buy you love, but love can’t buy you hookers … I would read my words but I’m being sued by Webster for plagiarism so …”

MALO:
“I don’t want to share.”

“History admires the wise but elevates the brave,” Dan says.

“And what does history say about assholes, yo?”

“I personally tend to have a lot of faith in assholes. My mom calls it self-confidence.” I like Dan’s sarcastic ass. He’s witty and unafraid like Amir was.

I’m not ready to share, though. I just want to write.

After class I keep writing. School lets out and I’m still going, flowing, writing, writing. No one comes in. I hear Frank, the maintenance man, tell someone, “Yep, he’s still in there, writing. Been in there for hours.”

Next week it’s the same thing: “Yep, he’s still in there.” I keep writing.

I write sentences that flow, like water, then I ride the word waves into new perceptions, new ideas.

I never thought I’d be voluntarily staying at school after school, but here I am. I realize that school and education don’t go hand in hand, that school and education can be as distant or as close as sex and love.

The sun slopes across my face like a blessing. Falling rays light up the page and make my words glow.

I’ve been at Crefeld for a month now. Every day when I come home from school, my mom is out of her chair and off the meds. It’s like watching a flower bloom. Today I come home to a dance studio. I walk in and am swept away—by sweet, sad symphonic strings, by mournful French horns, by a marching snare drum that ushers Amir into my thoughts, and by the silky sandpaper voice of Sam Cooke singing “A Change Is Gonna Come.”

My mom directs two dancers, a guy and a girl, as they float around our little living room on tippy toes like black angels. The duo crash to the floor, then rise, jump in place, kick to the sky, and interlock like long-lost lovers, telling a story with their glistening bodies.

My mom cues their movements. “Ba-da-da ba-de-ba-da-ba-da … Ba-de-da-da-da,” she sings. She’s wearing a leotard and looks good. Her face glows like it’s backlit. She stops the
music and tells me they’re preparing for some big dance competition. I can hear it in her voice—she wants it.

“Cross your fingers,” the male dancer, Kemal, says.

“And … one of these is for you.” My mom hands me two envelopes. I recognize Uzi’s handwriting. I scream, “Yeah!” and jump around like I’m at a Cypress Hill concert.

The other letter is for Ted. I pocket my letter to read later and head out to give Ted his.

Back to 10 Gs.

I spot the crew, standing where they always stand, between the liquor store and the corner store, next to the Fern Rock Apartments fence, under the train tracks, and across the street from Rock Steady, this bugged ngh who sits on a crate all day with a broken radio, rocking his head back and forth to a beat no one else can hear.

Scoop and Ted both look gone. I give Ted the letter.

“Thanks, Malo. Where Uzi at? The crib?” Ted looks horrible. His Afro is dry and uneven, his clothes dirty, his speech slurred.

“He’s locked up in Arizona,” Scoop reminds him, wiping his drippy nose. “You know that.” Scoop looks bad too, like he’s aged ten years since I last saw him.

“Yeah, that’s right … Yo, Malo, can you take us to get some breakfast?” Ted asks.

“Breakfast? You know what time it is?” I laugh.

“You know what I’m talking about.” Actually, I don’t.

“Where?”

“Down J Street,” Scoop says. “Come on, take us down there real quick.” I don’t feel like taking them, something tells me not to, but I do anyway.

Jefferson Street looks like the “Thriller” video, all zombied out. Fiends, as thin as crack pipes, dance—the dancing dead—in the shadows and then, like Houdini, disappear … reappear somewhere else. Everything ghostly. Here—gone. Everybody’s eyes curry yellow or smog gray, dead as sunken ships.

This is where hope gone goes. It pulls hard at my spirit. I wonder what happened to Right Knowledge, to all that shit Ted was kicking last time.

The dealers chant inventory like a chorus:

“Crack out, crack out.”

“Coke out, coke out.”

“Her-ron, her-ron.”

“Ted Money,” one of the dealers yells, and rushes the whip. He pulls out a case with all different pills in it. “What you need?”

“Yo, right here?” I say, tapping Ted and checking my rearview for the jakes.

“It’s cool, Malo, it’s open air out here. Free market. No cops on J Street. Everything goes. Anything goes.”

“Just got off, now imma ’bout to get on.” I hear someone buzzing by. Shadows wipe past in stumbling zigzags.

“Bruce Lee,” Ted shouts.

“Bruce Lee?” I look at Scoop.

“China White, heroin.”
Ted’s on heroin now?
… 
The fuck?

Black windows on boarded-up cribs like hollow eyes.

A fiend taps on my window. She looks like ET.

“I’ll suck ya dick so good make ya ass lock up and snatch off da fitted sheet,” she says … 
The fuck?

I roll the window back up.

In the rearview I catch Snoop snorting a line of coke off his fingernail.