Under the Bridge (7 page)

Mrs. Smith asked him if he'd come in with Syreeta and talk to some of her students about being a couple. A nonviolent couple. “I see you two as role models,” she said.

“Really?” he asked, and he smiled. Dimitri, Marissa's boyfriend, thought being a role model was pretty lame, and he knew that Erik and Rich, his fellow Crips, would think it was lame too, but the idea appealed to him and he didn't want to let Mrs. Smith down. Syreeta really liked Mrs. Smith as well, and she said that she would like to be a counselor when she was older and be like Mrs. Smith, just there for everyone.

At lunch hour, they'd all hang out in the smoke pit. The Five did not consider themselves more popular, but would acknowledge that, in comparison, girls like Josephine and Kelly “didn't get much attention.” Josephine was barely ever at Shoreline, and when she showed up, she was usually really mouthy and was considered by The Five to be “devious.'” Syreeta felt a little sorry for Kelly and Josephine, because it seemed to her that their mothers hadn't taught them to be ladies. Kelly and Josephine wore baggy pants like boys. Their lipstick was dark and garish. Boys called Kelly “Grubnut” and she was rarely, if ever, called “hottie.” Syreeta felt bad for the girls, and grateful that her mother had taught her how to put on makeup and to always wear nice clothes. Sometimes her mother would say, “Rita, you're not leaving the house like that. Go brush your hair.” Syreeta was, her friends agree, always “well put together.”

After school, their little group would all walk the short little walk to the home of Mrs. Fox. Grace was usually working, and as Syreeta noticed, “Warren and Chris pretty much had the run of the place.” Grace worked long hours at the hospital. Marissa would sit on Dimitri's lap, and Dimitri would want to watch sports because he was, at heart, a jock, and the only one to actually join a team. He was always boasting about how he was going off to join the NBA.

Sometimes they'd all start spontaneously singing when a good song came on the radio. They listened to the Seattle hip-hop station, which played commercial rap, like Puff Daddy and R. Kelly, not hard-core rap, but cooler songs than you'd hear on Victoria radio stations. Warren would look around at all his friends and know that he'd made the right choice to stay in View Royal.

Grace was a big lady, heavy, and she corresponded with men in prison. One in particular was named Reginald, and he was a member of the West Coast Players. This surprised Warren, because when Grace found out that he'd become a Crip, she got all motherly with him. In an
odd coincidence, she warned him about the dangers of gangs, with the same warning Raj offered to Reena. “You're either going to end up dead or in jail.”

•   •   •

Warren was not worried about death or prison because in his future, he imagined Syreeta as his bride. One day after school when they walked together along the beach, the swans seemed pure and bold and strange, and they gave him the courage to propose. She'd only laughed and then smiled, languidly.

He'd tried so hard to be respectful and not be in the way of Grace. He listened to her romantic worries and offered her advice. “Be careful of that guy Reggie,” he said. “I saw his picture, and he looks like a crackhead. You can do better than him.” Grace just laughed. She was in love, and besides, Reginald had told her she was a very special lady. When he was away from Grace's home, Warren tried hard to please the Crips, selling a little weed on the side and acting the tough badass around Erik and those guys so they would like him. And sometimes he felt like he was living a double life, but not a false life, since the innocent schoolboy and the badass were both true and part of him. He was not acting when he was polite around Mrs. Hartley or Mrs. Smith or Mrs. Fox. He genuinely loved them all like they were his mothers. And when he was tough, like when he yanked a necklace off Erik's neck, he got this adrenaline rush and released some anger he didn't even know he had. Erik was just pissing him off, and he came up behind him and just yanked the green cross on a gold chain and from that day on, Warren wore Erik's cross around his neck and there wasn't much Erik could do, because in the rule of the ghetto, you got what you took and what you took was yours. On the day of his initiation, when Erik, Rich, and D'Arcy jumped him in, there was blood all over his face, and he came up off the concrete, blood rushing to his head, blood rushing to his heart, and he felt so alive and part of something and just for a second, when Erik gave him his hand to lift Warren up and say, “You're part of the gang now, bro,” Warren wanted to kick Erik right in the gut, but that wasn't part of the ritual. Sometimes things made him angry, like when he had to ask Syreeta to do his laundry at her house because he didn't want to bother Grace for quarters, because any mistake, like asking for four quarters to wash the dirt off his white jeans, might be the mistake that led her to love him no more.
Anger
wasn't really
the word, though he did not know there were words like
humiliation
or
shame,
so he thought it was maybe anger, this emotion that he felt when he did things he would later regret. Once he grabbed this dye that Chris Fox had, and he dyed his hair blonde and all the girls were “really choked.” Syreeta didn't look too pleased. His hair was sort of this sunflower color, but a parched and dull sunflower. He didn't understand why he'd dyed his hair—just so suddenly, and on a whim. He wasn't exactly vain, but he kept his white jeans bleached and clean, and he folded them neatly every night and put them in his duffel bag, which he kept on the floor next to Chris Fox's dresser.

“You think I'll still be a ladies' man?” he said when he was at peer counseling, and he took off his baseball cap and showed Mrs. Smith his newly dyed curls.

“Oh no,” she said, shaking her head. He smiled. “Don't worry,” he said, because she looked suddenly sad. Outside Mrs. Smith's office, old Grubnut Kelly Ellard was pacing around, and he didn't know it, but Mrs. Smith wanted to speak to her about swearing at a teacher. He left the office sure he was going to go ahead and do that peer counseling role model thing with Syreeta. Mrs. Smith wanted them to talk about how they worked out their problems nonviolently.

He saw Syreeta in the distance of the hallway, leaning against his locker, dressed in a red T-shirt that matched the red laces on her white shoes. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and when she saw him coming, she smiled even though she rarely smiled lately because of her braces. “Warren G,” she said, and she kissed him right there, in front of everybody.

Maybe it was that day, though he blanked out the date because it was not an occasion he wanted to memorize. The occasion of his expulsion, that is. After school, he and Syreeta went down to the beach and then to her house for dinner, and he talked to Syreeta's step-dad for a while, just about man stuff, and then he went home to Christie Point, cheerful as always, past D.J. and his sister Ashley. He saw this great blue heron that lived on the bird reserve. The heron always reminded him of himself, the way he was in Estevan. The heron was all alone and strange in the bird sanctuary with the flocks of geese and swans. And so when he returned home, he was going to ask Grace what she knew about herons. She sat by the TV, a grim, determined expression on her face. She said, “Warren….”

He didn't really listen to the words because the words sort of blurred, but she said something about how Reginald was getting out of prison in December and he was going to move in here, and so there wouldn't be enough room for Warren anymore. He sure didn't want to be in the way again, overhearing the bitter words of adults, so he said, “Yeah, sure.” What was he going to say? He said
yeah, sure,
when she asked him to leave her home. “Don't worry, Grace,” he said. “Don't worry about me.”

O
N THIS SAME DAY,
Josephine also received some distressing news.

“Hey, I just got a phone call,” a freckled boy named Justin told her. When he called, she thought he must be wanting to invite her to a party or tell her she was beautiful. Instead, he said, “Some girl just called me and told me you had AIDS!”

“What the fuck!” Josephine screamed.

Only an hour later, she was seeking comfort in the arms of a boy named Tyson Bourgeois. Tyson's friend Johnny, a BMX rider with a scarred lip, said, “Hey, Josephine. I just got a phone call.”

“About me?”

“Yeah, some girl was talking shit about you. She asked me if I'd seen you lately and she said you weren't so pretty anymore.”

“Are you serious?” Josephine said. Tyson and Johnny were cracking up, so amused by the pettiness of the adolescent female.

“Yeah, she said her name was Reena, I think. I have no idea who she is or how she got my number.”

How could this be? How did Reena get the phone numbers of her friends? It occurred to Josephine then that she was victim of a second humiliation, as vile as the phone calls: Reena must have
stolen
her address book. Josephine was the one who stole, who took, who had. She was distraught and could not bear the thought that something had been taken from her.

And then, as Josephine recalls, “For three days, people kept coming up to me, saying, ‘Did you tell Reena you hated me? Reena said you did. Some girl told me your eyebrows are fake. Reena called me and said if I slept with you I'd get AIDS.'”

Why would Reena do this to her? It did not occur to her that Reena
may have been trying to show Josephine that she too was tough and badass and hard core, that she too could be a thief and a troublemaker.

Instead Josephine thought,
She is trying to make me unpopular, trying to make people think I'm not really as pretty as I seem.

And her anger at Reena's transgression seemed to Josephine a perfectly normal response, the response John Gotti would make to such disloyalty. “She was trying to ruin my life, so I had a little problem with that. I think anybody would.”

Josephine turned to her best friend for counsel.

“I can't believe she'd do that!” Kelly said.

“She's jealous,” Josephine mused. “She's not doing it out of spite. She's doing it out of jealousy.”

“That fucking bitch!” Kelly said.

“Well, she's not too bright. She's making all these calls and using her first name. She calls them, and says, Oh yeah, this is Reena calling.'”

“I can't believe she's talking shit. Who does she think she is?”

“I know. What the fuck does she think she's doing! Doesn't she know who I am? I have lots of friends and I know lots of people. I'm Josephine Bell! Nobody can fuck with me. I have more friends than enemies.”

•   •   •

The forests around her at Seven Oaks did not still her rage. Seven Oaks was beginning to get to her. Apparently, they were having trouble finding a foster home for her, but Seven Oaks was only a temporary home, so she'd be out of there pretty soon. She did not think of herself as unwanted, though. She believed she was just not living by the rules and was doing whatever she pleased. At school, the principal brought her into the office, and said, “Josephine. We need to speak about your commitment to learning.” Mrs. Olsen wanted her to try an alternative school if she would not commit to the educational environment at Shoreline Junior Secondary.

Josephine did not want to ponder the fact that she was soon to be homeless and uneducated, and so instead she turned to her collection of stolen goods. She herself had stolen a tube of Chanel mascara and Calvin Klein jeans. But her “gophers,” as she called them, had brought her a Guess handbag, Christian Dior eyeshadow, and a black lace bra, size 34C. Her gophers were a group of little girls, some as young as twelve.
Go forth, young bitches!
she might as well have declared, for her
minions scattered through the malls of View Royal, searching for offerings.

She spent a few hours before the mirror, enraptured by her reflection. The forests held the Dangers, and sometimes, if she stared at the trees, she could remember the man's voice and the time he…. She put on her new bra and several layers of eyeshadow. Her arched eyebrows were most definitely not fake, and yet they did appear as inverted smiles, drawn with a black pen. She had this 11:00 curfew, and now the night was getting darker and she no longer had her stolen car and Kelly was probably asleep and safe in View Royal.

Josephine slept in her bed at Seven Oaks. She might have felt distressed and lonely, for Seven Oaks was a bleak and desperate place. Not as bleak as Kiwanis. Kiwanis—the only good thing about that place was she met Dusty. She remembered Reena trying to tag along with her and Dusty, and trying to impress them both by telling them she had a probation officer. “For fuck's sake, Reena, you can't have a PO if you've never been arrested,” Dusty said, and Reena looked so hurt and surprised.

“Leave us alone, Reena!” Dusty screamed.

When Dusty took off and disappeared, Josephine had been sad, for Dusty had the makings of a good sidekick. She knew from her studies of Gotti lore that the best sidekicks were faithful and volatile and heavy-set. Where was Dusty now? Maybe she was in jail but girls didn't usually go to jail for more than a month. If she still had her address book, she could have called around and tried to find Dusty, but fuck, her notebook now belonged to Reena. At the thought of Reena, Josephine turned in her sheets and was forced to listen to the wind through the trees. Had she known that Dusty would soon arrive at Seven Oaks, Josephine might have slept less fitfully.