Maizon at Blue Hill (2 page)

“And then what? You're too smart for the schools here in Brooklyn.”

“What if I just skipped a grade, Grandma? Then I'd be okay.”

Grandma frowned. “I want you to learn with children your own age, Maizon. I don't want you to grow up before you need to.”

“I
won't
grow up before I need to, Grandma. Promise! I'll just go to class and do my work. Then I'll come home and be with Margaret and Ms. Dell and Hattie and Li‘l Jay. That's all.”

“You'll start wanting to do the things your classmates will be doing. Maybe they'll be able to stay up an hour later than you do. Then you'll want to stay up late because they'll make fun of you if they know your bedtime. Then you'll want to go out with them and stay out late. It won't be good.”

“But if I'm smart like the older kids then why can't I go to school with them and do the things they do?” I pressed my hands together in my lap to keep from getting mad. Grandma was stubborn. She said that's where I got it from.

“You grow up faster than you need to, Maizon, and trust me, you'll be dragging your feet to slow your growing up down.”

I got up and walked over to the window. Outside, the sun was yellow-orange against Grandma's shrubs. I leaned against the sill and pressed my hand to the glass.

Grandma had made me the shorts set I was wearing. The top was blue-and-red striped and the shorts were all blue with only a little bit of red around the pockets. At Blue Hill I wouldn't be able to wear shorts sets Grandma made me. I wouldn't be able to sit beside her on the couch and argue with her while she knitted. At Blue Hill, I knew, I wouldn't be able to do
anything.

The lump was back in my throat again. I didn't swallow this time, and soon tears were pushing against the back of my eyes.

It had been decided.

2

Y
o! Margaret!“

Margaret raised her window and stared down at me through the metal slats of her fire escape. “Shhh, Maizon. Li‘l Jay's sleeping.”

“Come outside,” I whispered as loud as I could, because she lived on the sixth floor. That's why I had screamed in the first place.

“Come up,” she whispered back. “Mama's still working. I gotta watch Li‘l Jay until she gets home.”

I pushed open the first door and waited for Margaret to buzz me through the second one, then raced up the five flights of stairs to her apartment.

“That's nice,” Margaret said, pointing her chin toward my outfit.

I rolled my eyes and plopped down on the couch. “Three more days in civilian clothes,” I mumbled. “Three stupid days. Seventy-two hours. Four thousand three hundred and twenty minutes.”

“Two hundred and fifty-nine thousand two hundred seconds,” Margaret finished, sitting down beside me.

“Cheese and crackers, Margaret,” I said, because that's what Grandma wanted me to say instead of saying “Jesus Christ.” “That's not any time at all. Even God got seven days.”

Margaret nodded. “And God wasn't even going away.” She handed me a stick of gum and took one out of the pack for herself. “You learned how to make sounds yet, Maizon?”

I pressed the gum into my mouth and shook my head. “I haven't practiced.”

“I heard this girl down the block. She was clicking her gum a mile a minute. Click, click, click. It was something.”

“Somebody told me you had to have a cavity to click it.”

“I heard you had to have a filling, but I have a filling on my left side,” Margaret said, pointing to her left cheek. “I've been trying for a long time and still, nothing.”

“Anyway, Grandma says that's impolite, Margaret.”

“Hattie can do it. She does it with any kind of gum.”

Hattie, Ms. Dell's nineteen-year-old daughter, wasn't exactly my favorite person in the world.

“Hattie's impolite.”

“She's nice, Maizon.”

“You think everybody's nice.”

A pitiful look moved across Margaret's face. I glared at her, mad that she always broke so easily. But when the look settled in her eyes, I was sorry. Her father had died this summer. I didn't want to make her hurt any more than she was already hurting. After all, we were best friends.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, putting my arm around her shoulder. “I'm just all mixed-up inside.”

Margaret looked down at her fingernails. After a moment, she started picking at the skin around her cuti cle. I smacked her hand away gently. “Don‘t, Margaret. You'll get yourself all scarred up.”

Margaret shrugged. “Everything's all settled now, isn't it, Maizon? You're truly, surely going away, right?”

“We sent my trunk today. Mr. Parsons was just at my house. He had more pictures to show Grandma.”

“But you and her already looked at all those slides. And she met some of the teachers and everything. Why do they have to keep coming back with more stuff and more stuff and more stuff?”

“Because Grandma can't go up to Blue Hill. They want to make sure she understands about the school and everything. I guess they want her to feel like she's been there.”

“Oh,” Margaret said, staring down at her hands again.

“Plus, they want me to get kind of used to the idea of being away at a place like that.”

“Schools are schools. It's still teaching and learning and doing a ton and a half of homework instead of being able to watch a good movie.”

Margaret looked at me and crossed her eyes. I laughed. Then Margaret started laughing too. After a moment, we weren't even sure what we were laughing about. Sometimes it felt so good just to be together that we couldn't help but giggle and act silly. Even if people stared at us and frowned. We didn't care.

I stopped laughing and leaned back against the couch.

“Here,” Margaret said, handing me a small throw pillow, which I stuffed behind my head.

“I'm all crazy mixed-up inside,” I said again, only whispering this time.

Margaret moved toward me, bringing her knees up and leaning her chin on them. “Because you're going away?”

I shrugged, pressing my palm against my mouth the way I do when I'm thinking. “It's more, though. It's going away, but it's more too.”

“Like what?”

“Like, you remember how we used to sit under the tree when we were little and talk about the things we wanted to be?”

Margaret nodded. “Little, Maizon? We did that a month ago.”

“It seems longer than that to me.”

“I wanted to be a lawyer and a doctor and a writer.”

“And I wanted to be a lawyer and a movie director and a writer.”

“We could still be all those things. That's not going to change any.”

“But those are the things I wanted to be here, on Madison Street. I might want to be somebody a whole lot different when I go away.”

“Why?”

“Because there won't be a Ms. Dell at Blue Hill or you or Grandma or Junior—I mean, Li‘l Jay—or Hattie. There won't be any of the people from this block. And those are all the people who have always been around me, saying Do it,
Maizon!
Do it! Now they're all singing a different song. They're all saying
Go to Blue Hill, Maizon!”

“But that's them showing you the way to be who you want to be.”

I looked at Margaret, all of a sudden wanting to cry. Her hair was pulled back away from her face and braided down the back of her neck the way it usually was and her skin was the same dark brown it had always been. She was right there in front of me—not even half a foot away. But even as we sat there talking, something was already moving in between us. We were slipping away from each other. It was like we had begun to speak different languages.

“You know how you hear a song, Margaret,” I said, “and it could be about the dumbest thing, but when you hear it, something clicks inside of you and all of a sudden you want to cry?”

Margaret nodded.

“That's what this moment feels like to me.”

“I'm feeling kind of choky, too, Maizon. But I don't really know why. I'm going to write you all the time.”

“And I'm going to write you back. All the time. Maybe two letters a day.”

Margaret shook her head. “You won't have time to do all that writing. You better think about doing a little studying, girl. Blue Hill is going to teach circles around your head.”

“Shoot,” I said, waving my hand. “That dumb school isn't
even
ready for me.”

Margaret looked up at me and raised her eyebrows. But she didn't say anything.

3

E
eny Meeny Miney Mo. Let's catch Li‘l Jay by his toe. If he hollers, don't let him go. Eeny Meeny Miney Mo,“ Ms. Dell sang, pulling on Li'l Jay's toes. He squealed, wiggling his feet away from her. Margaret's brother, Li‘l Jay, would be sixteen months soon and he could walk almost anywhere.

We were sitting on Margaret's stoop, because it was too hot to stay upstairs. Ms. Dell and Hattie had joined us, folding out lawn chairs at the top of the stoop. They lived right downstairs from Margaret and loved our company. At least, that's what I heard Ms. Dell telling Grandma a while back. Margaret and I sat at their feet, on the top step. The stoop was hard and warm underneath me. A lawn chair of my own would have been nice.

“You got any more soda?” I asked Margaret, tipping her glass to my mouth. It was as empty as my own.

The block was noisy as usual with kids running up and down, darting between cars and hiding behind rows of garbage cans. Margaret and I were too cool to be bothered with silly neighborhood kids. But as I watched them round everybody up for a game of kick the can, I thought maybe I should join them, just one last time, since my days on Madison Street were numbered.

“Sing, Maizon,” Margaret said, yanking my arm. “You have a good voice.” Then she turned back toward Ms. Dell and Hattie, and started it up again. “Let's go. Hey let's go ... Hey let's go ... Eeny Meeny Miney Mo. Catch that baby by his toes ...” Margaret sang at the top of her lungs.

“That's a dumb song,” I said.

Ms. Dell cut her blue eyes at me. In the near-darkness, they looked even stranger against her dark skin. “Humph,” she said. Then she gave Li‘l Jay a shake and stood him on her lap. “Look at this baby's pretty little legs,” she cooed.

“I've seen better legs on a table,” I said.

Ms. Dell looked over at me again, then over at her daughter, Hattie, who was working the hem of a dress as she sang. Hattie would be twenty in December and Ms. Dell had told Grandma that Hattie couldn't move out of her teenage years fast enough. I knew what she meant. Hattie was downright evil sometimes. And besides that, she didn't like me much.

“Up with it, already, Maizon,” Hattie said, moving the dress across her lap and picking up the stitch again. The skirt was white, that kind of stretchy material Grandma didn't allow me to wear because she said I was too young to be trying to show off curves I didn't even have yet. The minute I got a curve, I was going to use my money to buy a dress like Hattie's. “What's nipping your nerves and making you so evil tonight?”

“She's got the Blue Hill blues,” Margaret said.

Sometimes I wondered if somebody had passed Hattie over in the brain department. “And I sure don't feel like hearing anybody's bad singing tonight,” I said.

Ms. Dell reared back in her chair like she had seen something scary. “You
are
evil.”

“I wish,” I said, holding up a finger. “I wish there was just one person on this crowded stoop who could understand what's going on inside my head. Just one. I'm not asking for a hundred people, I not even asking for fifty or ten. Just one person.”

“I understand, Maizon,” Margaret said. “I'm your best friend. So of course I understand.”

“And Maizon,” Ms. Dell said, “you know I understand.”

“That's different, Ms. Dell. You have special powers.” Ms. Dell had been born with the gift of clairvoyance. She could look right into a person's head and know everything that was going on there. Some people were scared of her. Not me and Margaret though. There wasn't much we wouldn't give to have her powers. I folded my arms across my chest and glared out into the street. The streetlights flickered on, casting a yellow glow out over the block. “Eavesdropping right inside a person's brain doesn't count.”

“Well, don't expect
me
to understand you, Maizon,” Hattie declared.

“Don't worry,” I said. “I don't.”

If anyone had asked, I'm sure neither of us could have said what it was we didn't like about the other. Ms. Dell said we were too much alike. She had a hard time understanding how we could like ourselves, let alone each other. “You're both so hateful at times,” she said. Hattie once said I thought I was cute and I'd said back, “I think, therefore I am,” which she thought was a smart aleck remark. For a teenager she didn't have much of a sense of humor. Too bad she was pretty. It's kind of a waste.

“Don't you two get started,” Ms. Dell warned, shifting Li‘l Jay on her lap. “Now, Maizon, I know you're all full of confusions about this school. But don't worry your pretty head over anything. I'll be with you.”

“That's what everybody says, Ms. Dell. ‘I'll be with you.' ‘I'll be with you.' But when I get up to that school, it's going to be me. Maizon Singh. A-L-O-N-E.”

“Never,” Ms. Dell said softly.

“What?” I thought I hadn't heard her right.