No Place Safe (10 page)

I was wondering whether I’d be able to get in some basketball after I finished my homework. This, and having safely reached my street after my two-hour bus trip from school, is what kept me from being as observant as I would have been downtown. I was walking on the wrong side of the street like I always did (that way, you can see what’s coming and makes it tough for someone to pull alongside and snatch you into his car, Ma would say) when I paid only the slightest attention to a car driving slowly by, going in my direction.

The car disappeared over a hill and I’d already forgotten about it when I saw it crest the hill again, coming toward me. Like many streets in the south, ours had no sidewalk, so I stepped onto the curb and walked along the edge of someone’s yard. As the car approached, I saw a man at the wheel – I didn’t expect otherwise – and he was alone. He drove by me slowly, shouting something about how good I looked.

I started walking faster once he passed, worried that I was still a quarter mile from my house. I wondered what I’d do once I got to the empty house. Ma had taught me never to go into the house if it was unlocked, and never get trapped someplace alone if you think someone’s after you. Always go to a public place, preferably a police station or firehouse. I realized I didn’t have these options, but I kept walking quickly toward home, hoping he’d had his say and moved on. I knew every neighbor within three houses of my home in any direction. I’d go to one of their houses.

He hadn’t moved on. I heard his car coming from behind me again, and I started to run toward home. Before I could get any speed going, he turned left into the driveway ahead of me, cutting me off from home and neighbors I knew would help me. It’s true what they say about how much the mind can process in a very short time when fear kicks in. In less than a second, but what felt like minutes, I recalled everything Ma taught me to do if something like this ever happened. Don’t get into the car even if he shows a gun. Once you get into the car, you’ll never get back out. Run. Scream. Fight (remember a man’s balls and eyes are weak points).

I dropped my books and did all of those things—ran toward the house of the driveway he’d pulled in to, screamed, readied myself to fight if he got out of his car and pulled me to the ground. The house was the most grand on the street, white and looking like something from a plantation. It must have been on an acre of land because it sat far back from the road, though I never knew how far until that moment. A stand of trees separated it from the house on either side, unlike all the other houses on the street. I knew nothing of its owners, other than they were an old couple and one of the last two or three white families on the street. I prayed they were home.

I never had to find out. As soon as I took off yelling and running, the man backed out of the drive and burned rubber getting away, heading away from me and my house. I took off for home, and once inside, checked the locks twice and watched out the window to see if he had doubled back, grateful that Copper was a chow and bred to do nothing but guard his people. I was still shaken up when Ma and Bridgette got home, and didn’t realize until then that I’d left my books in the yard where I’d dropped them. Ma walked down with me to pick them up.

“You think you could describe him?”

“I only heard him—I couldn’t really see him. And I barely heard him over the car’s engine.”

“What about the car?”

“It was brown, I think. American.” Not a helpful description. I wasn’t sure of the color, and everyone around here drove American models.

“Do you remember the plates? Maybe a couple of the numbers?” If Ma had her report book in her hand instead of my algebra text, I’d have felt exactly like one of her alleged victims and not at all like her daughter. “Without that, we can’t do much about finding him.”

“No, I didn’t get any of the plate. I forgot to look.” I felt guilty, like I’d been neglectful.

“Well, you did the right thing. You didn’t end up in his car.”

This made me feel better. I’d accomplished the main goal, even if I hadn’t gotten the plate or a description. I was safe, still here to talk about it. Maybe he was only interested in getting some time from a fourteen-year-old girl. Not to say I was so special to look at, but much of the downtown segment of my commute between school and home was saying no to the men who called to me on the street, taking care not to offend them in my rejection. No need in making one of them angry and forcing him to save face by saying something even nastier to me, hurling threats and put-downs—
You ain’t all that, no way
. Maybe he was like those freaks on the transit train that got off on scaring young girls, staring at them while touching themselves underneath open newspapers or folded trench coats. I had run into those, too. Maybe he was the one snatching kids off streets.

Ma didn’t throw her arms around me, kiss away my tears and all that. I didn’t cry, and that wasn’t her style. Mine either. But she did make one of my favorite dinners that night—chicken smothered in cream of mushroom soup with fluffy biscuits from a can.

The next morning, Ma gave me a ride to the bus stop, but I still had to walk home alone. There was nothing we could do; I had to go to and from school, and she had to work. But from then on, I saved daydreaming for another time. My side of Jonesboro Road was no different than the other side, except for it being more green, a bit more quiet. Turned out that’s what made it dangerous, what lulled me into thinking I was safe. After that day, I focused only on getting home, and walked a few feet away from the street, daring people to scold me about walking in their grass.

*

In mid-May, the seventh child was found dead just hours after his family reported him gone. He went missing and was found in Southeast, and this time I didn’t tell myself all the ways his life was different than mine even if we lived only six miles apart. It seemed I had more similarities to Eric Middlebrooks than differences. He was fourteen, his bike found near his body. The last time anyone saw him alive he was riding his bike around ten or eleven at night. Like the others, he was doing something he did all the time—riding a bike, leaving a skating rink, running an errand—but this time he never made it back home. One thing different between us was that Eric had more courage than I did. He had provided evidence to police that led to the arrest of a school gang on robbery charges and was going to testify. Police had looked for a connection between the gang and his murder, but added him to the missing and murdered list after clearing the boys of suspicion.

The growing list began to impact even the smallest events of our day-to-day lives. We were shopping for a dress at Southlake Mall. I sat on the only chair in the dressing room area, making Bridgette sit on the floor because that’s the way it works when you’re the biggest. We waited for Ma to emerge in what seemed the hundredth dress so we could say it looked fine and she could disagree.

“I need a size larger.” Ma always took in a size too small, hoping she could still wear a size eight.

“Bridgette, go find this in a size ten,” I instructed. She was happy to play grown-up and help out, and I was happy to let her.

Ma slid the curtain open and looked like she wanted to put the mojo on me. “You know better than to send that girl out there by herself, she’s only ten.” When the curtain was pulled closed again, she added, “You just never know.” That was her newest one-size-fits-all explanation since the killings began. Before the killings, it had been,
Because I’m your mama and I said so.

After Ma stepped out of the dressing room to model the dress I’d just been dispatched to find, I asked whether I should be worried about the similarities between the latest victim and me. She looked under the other stalls before answering, because you never know.

“Worrying won’t help a thing, but you should always be aware.” I think as much to reassure herself as me, she added, “Whoever it is, he seems to want boys.”

“What about Angel?” I’d forgotten the rule about not discussing the murders around Bridgette, but Ma must have, too.

“I don’t think it’s the same person, whoever killed her.”

“So now there are two killers looking for kids?”

“No. I think Angel shouldn’t have been included with the boys. I think her murder was a one-time deal for whoever killed her, but it looks like the same killer or team of killers is going after the boys. They don’t want a girl, for whatever reason.”

Ma may have thought this gave me comfort, knowing that girls weren’t wanted, but it didn’t. Maybe Angel was only the first of the girls to be killed. Already six boys were dead. I didn’t tell her that her words hadn’t reassured me, knowing it made her feel better to think she’d put my mind at ease. Bridgette had been quiet while we talked, aware of a rare chance to hear about the case. When Ma requested a size ten in a different style, Bridgette didn’t remind us of her ability to pick a dress and safely return to the dressing room, offering instead to put the tried-on dresses back on the hangers.

I was grateful for the end of the school year, even though it didn’t look like I was going to have much of a summer vacation.

“You may have to go to public school in the fall.” Ma broke this news to me while she drove down I-75 as though it was an inconsequential matter and just a
by the way
.

“Why?”

“I can’t afford it. That scholarship you got from the Knights of Columbus was for only one year. As it is, I’m working extra jobs to make ends meet.”

I thought of the fur coat she got last winter though we live in a climate that made it impossible to wear fur ten months out of the year. When she’d brought it home, she said she got a big discount at the nice clothing store where she worked security, and besides, it was only fox. Our car was bought the year before, a brand-new Buick Regal. When Ma would pull up to my school in the West End wearing the fur coat and driving the new car, I felt good knowing my mother was the prettiest, best dressed of all the mothers, and sporting the nicest car. Her store discount and salary from extra jobs allowed her to buy me nice things too, and I loved showcasing them as much as she did. But now all I could wonder is whether the car note and the fur were all that separated me from the public school in our neighborhood.

“But I can’t just leave the new school in the middle of everything.”

“What everything? You’re between school years. I didn’t think this would be such a big deal. You’re always complaining about how you can’t stand those kids, how they’re all stuck-up and rich and racist. So what’s the problem?”

“I’m just thinking about getting into college.” I was also thinking how the high school in my district served not only the kids from my neighborhood, but from the nearby projects, too. How it had one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the school system. I wasn’t exactly sure what this meant to me, but it was a statistic cited whenever TV news and newspaper articles gave proof that an inner-city school was both dangerous and ineffective. I thought about how soft I’d gotten in the last year, and how the hard kids would read my softness from a mile away.

“Well, if you want to go, you’ll have to make it happen.” Ma drove through traffic like she always did, weaving and speeding as if she was on a call and there was a blue light affixed to the roof of the Buick. Normally I didn’t much notice it, but that day it bothered me.

“Why me?”

“Don’t get smart.”

“I’m not getting smart, but I don’t see what I can do about it.”

“You can get a job.”

I didn’t say anything, but went silent so that Ma knew I was going into a funk. She stopped that right off.

“You like living in a house with a pool in the backyard, having your own bedroom, being seen by your friends in a nice car.”

Silence from me.

“You don’t have to answer, I
know
you. You got champagne tastes, and I got Kool-Aid money. If you want to keep going to the private school, you’ll have to pay for half of it.”

A year earlier, I’d have thought Ma was right, even if I didn’t admit to it. But after a year spent with kids who drove new cars more expensive than ours, kids who came to school wearing ski jackets with the lift tickets still hanging from the zipper to broadcast where they’d spent Christmas break, I thought it was a bit much to say I had champagne tastes. All I wanted was a decent education. Besides, where did she think I got my champagne tastes? She had the same affliction.

A decent education wasn’t the whole story. I’d convinced myself that the private school in a rich, white suburb of Atlanta was safer for me. No one was stealing kids away from that part of town. Whoever was doing the killing didn’t want white kids, and they wouldn’t come to Ashford-Dunwoody looking for black children. Around there, we were rare as snow in a Georgia winter. True, I lived just a few miles from where the kids were being taken, and I had to ride the city bus through downtown in darkness for most of the school year, but I figured that going to the private school kept me safer for at least half of my waking hours. This line of thinking led me to my first paying gig.

Ma had a friend who owned several McDonald’s restaurants and he offered me a job. Kids were supposed to be sixteen to work in a restaurant, or fifteen with a work permit. I was fourteen, which meant I had to lie to get mine. Ma was an accomplice in my birth certificate forgery. Even though she was cop, she’d bend a few minor rules occasionally. My experience taught me that some cops did. They wouldn’t do anything that would make for a TV movie, or get internal affairs into their business, but there was the occasional fudging of the lines. In the case of the forged birth certificate, I guess lying about my age in an effort to improve my collegiate prospects was allowable.

I worked in Five Points, literally the crossroads of downtown Atlanta, at the busiest McDonald’s in the metro area. Across the street from the store was the main hub of the rapid rail system, which later grew new lines all over the city and beyond, like fissures spreading through sun-dried Georgia clay. I loved Five Points; for almost ten years it was the center of my world as I passed through it twice a day between home and school—through elementary, high school, and into college—a kind of border crossing as I traveled from one of my lives to the other.