Not only does Mar still want to go to Harvard, he’s more determined than ever, like he wants to prove everyone under that tent wrong. He’s been acting mad serious—superstitious, too. He stopped swearing and stepping on cracks, and he has this whole routine every time we go to the library. He doesn’t even browse the shelves anymore, just goes right to the table in the back, sharpens three pencils, lines up his homework, card stacks, and prep book in a neat row, and starts in on the studying. Even if he finishes early, he won’t leave and keeps going through his stacks until the clock strikes four. Anytime I suggest doing anything other than going directly to my house after the library, he refuses, and once we’re there he always wants to do the exact same thing. First we play best-of-three H-O-R-S-E on the nasketball-level hoop. The winner gets to “own” the Bird-Magic card for the day. After H-O-R-S-E, we watch C’s tapes with Benno till six, and then Mar bounces.
The routine seems to be working for Mar, because his practice scores keep going up. Mine are barely budging, and I’m starting to get shook about what might happen to me if I don’t get into Latin. I keep thinking about what Jabrina said on our Harvard tour—the way she made it seem like it was either Latin, upstate, or underground. And these little things keep happening that make the stress even worse. The other day Ms. Ansley was absent and our sour old sub, Mr. Timkins, showed us a documentary called Scared Straight! about a bunch of delinquents who take a field trip to jail. I guess he didn’t realize we were the advanced class, because when he introduced it, he said, “For all you wise alecks who think it’s all fun and games, I hope this serves as a wake-up bell.” At one point in the video, a giant, tank-topped inmate barked like a pit bull as the juveniles passed his cell, and two of them got startled and clutched each other like Scooby-Doo characters. Some of the kids in our class laughed. Mar didn’t and neither did I.
Today our janitor Rawlins stops by our lunch table to chat Celtics. We’re peeping Sports Illustrated—there’s a big article about Reggie Lewis—and Rawlins asks if he can check it out. When I pass him the magazine, I notice one of his fingernails is all wrinkly and mangled.
“You bite your nails?”
I ask because I’ve been biting mine since second grade. At this point all of my nails are ragged stumps, but one is way worse than the others: my right pointer. I’ve gone at that thing so hard, it’s not even a nail anymore. Some other semisoft mutant flesh grew back where the nail was supposed to be. It hurts whenever it gets pressed, so basically, anytime someone gives me some love, I writhe inside.
“Nah,” says Rawlins, chuckling. “You don’t wanna know how I got this.”
“Biting’s how mine got like this,” I say, showing him my pointer.
“Dag, Dave,” he says. “You did that to yo’self?”
“Most people think I jammed it in a car door,” I say. “That’s what happened to yours?”
“Nah,” he says, smiling. “To be honest with you, I got this in the pen.”
“You mean, like…”
“The penitentiary,” he says without glancing up from the magazine.
After a few long seconds, he says, “Some people mind talkin’ ’bout it, but I don’t. I did my time and that’s all behind me now.”
I want to ask him how his finger got like that. Did someone shiv it off in a brawl? Did he try to scratch his way out of his cell? I know that’s not a move, so instead I ask, “What’d you go in for?”
Mar’s nose curls, like I just ripped record-book wind.
“You know you shouldn’t be askin’ people that, right?” Rawlins says.
“My bad,” I say.
“It’s aight. You didn’t know. Anyway, like I said, I did my time. So I don’t even mind tellin’ y’all. Same thing pretty much everybody else in for: slingin’.”
He flips the page, pauses on a Drakkar ad, and sniffs the fold-out sample.
“You wanna know somethin’ funny? I used to buy these off other dudes in the pen. Not the magazine—just the ripped-out ad. Sounds funny, right, but when you inside, you got nothin’ to do all day but sit on your butt and think, and it’d drive you crazy if you didn’t find somethin’ to distract you. So I’d save up just to buy one of these sample cologne strips. And I’d rub it on my upper lip and just sit there for hours, smelling my lip, you know what I’m saying?”
We nod uneasily.
After Rawlins moves on, Kev takes a thick wad of ones and fives out of his pocket and says, “Who wants tacos? Shit’s on me.”
“You get a raise from your mom?” I ask.
“Nah,” he says. “Been hustling.”
“Babysitting?” I ask.
“Nope.”
“Cat-feeding?”
“Fuck no,” he says. He looks over his shoulder, slowly turns back to me, and grins. “Slingin’.”
Chronic? I’m pretty sure he’s started doing it with Simon.
“Come over after school,” he says. “I’ll show y’all.”
“I DON’T EVEN wanna know what he’s up to,” Mar whispers to me on the bus ride home.
“You’re not, like, curious?” I say.
“I’m not trying to accessorize,” he says. “I thought you were done with Kevin anyway.”
“I am,” I say. “We’ll see what’s up, grab some snacks, and bounce.”
“Eff that,” he says. “I’m not trying to sniff magazines. I’m going to the library.”
“We’ll go right after,” I say. “Kev’s mom usually has Fresca in the fridge.”
Mar sucks his teeth and says, “Five minutes.”
On our way to Kev’s, me and Mar get back into this debate we’ve been having.
“Whales don’t even have teeth,” I say.
“Oh my goodness,” he says. “They got mad teeth!”
“Not the ones I saw. Just had long liney bones under their lips.”
Kev gets bored right away, puts on his headphones, and walks ahead of us.
“I’d be down to go on a whale watch,” Mar says. “Sounds mad fun.”
“Nah, it got old quick. Just whale, ocean, whale, ocean. I kept hoping some sharks would come and feast on one of ’em.”
“You sick sometimes, Green. Besides, sharks can’t mess with whales.”
“What’s a whale gonna do? Head-butt a shark? Swallow it? The shark would just bite its way out the belly.”
“Whales don’t even need to head-butt. They can just do their thing. They’re too big to mess with. Nothing steps to whales.”
When we get to Kev’s, Simon’s waiting on his porch, smoking a Newport.
“I thought Latin didn’t get out for another hour,” I say.
“I cut, Corky,” says Simon.
Simon passes the cig to Kev. He takes a drag and tries to blow a smoke ring. It comes out like a limp lasso.
“What’d you bring Dave for?” Simon says. “You know he’s gonna snitch.”
“I don’t snitch,” I say.
We head up the stairs toward Kev’s bedroom. This is the first time Mar’s seen the rest of Kev’s crib. I can tell Kev’s trying to rush us through the living room, just like I did when Mar came to my house for the first time. There’s stuff from Kaleem’s family’s store, Zanzibar, all over the place, including a five-foot ebony statue of a pregnant woman. She has a huge belly button and two long pointy tits aimed out of her like Scud missiles.
Kev boots up his computer. His dad does high-tech shit for work, so Kev always gets the latest, hottest PC compatibles.
“You heard of bulletin boards?” Kev asks Mar, not waiting for an answer. “Peep this.”
The computer screeches and gurgles like a dying eagle.
“We’re on,” Kev says.
He clicks on “pamela anderson.” The screen loads from the top, line by line, and after an eternal minute, we get a glimpse of gold: wisps of blond hair. A thousand trickling pixels later, some bronze: a sliver of forehead.
Mar asks where the bathroom is and I point over my shoulder, eyes locked to the screen. The slowness is agony, like watching honey drip down the bear bottle. Finally, I see shoulder. There’s no strap.
“Is she gonna be, like, actually…,” I say.
“Butt-fuckin’ naked,” says Kev. “Titties, pussy hair. Todo.”
I cross my legs as casually as I can.
“You’re getting wood already?” says Simon. “We haven’t seen shit.”
“I’m the only one allowed to nut in this house,” says Kev.
Two breast tops slowly emerge, like rising suns.
“So you can just…all of this is, like, free?” I say.
“It’s the Internet, stupid,” says Simon. “There’s a billion more titties. Stuff way better than titties—open pussies, dicks in pussies…”
“I’m good with titties for now,” I say.
It wasn’t a joke, but they both roll.
“Here comes the nipple,” says Simon. “Watch out, yo. Dave’s about to shoot some sap.”
I’ve never seen a real nipple, unless you count those two-second flashes in R-rated comedies. Or the time I accidentally walked in on Ma getting out of the shower, but I quickly Control-Alt-Deleted that from my memory. The screen loads all the way to the hay strip between Pam’s legs, but I’m still focused on the top half.
Breasts. Not freakish wood spear tits but soft, squeezable roundies—real ones. I can already tell I’m addicted for life. I want to smear my face across the screen.
“Click on the bubble-bath one real quick?” I ask.
“Chill out, Hornelius,” says Simon. “We got business to do.”
Kev prints five copies. They’re black and white and the ink’s running low, which makes it look like you’re seeing her through blinds.
“I told you to re-up the fuckin’ bubble jet,” Simon says.
This is their hustle: slinging printouts to Latin kids for a dollar a pop. Kev’s the one with the Internet hookup, so he gets half of the haul. Simon claims they each made fifty last week. That’s a new Machine in two weeks.
“Let’s load some harder shit,” says Simon.
“I gotta be out,” Mar says from the hall.
I’m actually relieved. I’m not down for the triple X.
“Yo, Green,” Mar says. “I gotta do that practice test. You comin’ or what?”
“Before you bounce, you wanna cop?” Simon asks me. “Since they came out chopped, I could go two-for-one on these Pam pics.”
“I’m straight,” I say. “I don’t feel white shorties.”
“I could pull up some white dudes for you,” Simon says.
“Nah, Dave likes girls,” Kev says. “Just ones with mustaches.”
“Carmen doesn’t have a ’stache,” I say.
“You know she has a ’stache,” says Kev. “Dresses like a librarian, too.”
“I’m out,” Mar calls from the hallway.
I follow him outside and say, “Never seen a porno before. That was kinda…”
“You shouldn’t be peeping that stuff.”
I was about to say kinda dope.
“I didn’t know that’s what they were up to,” I say.
“You knew they weren’t selling carnations,” he says. “You’re Christian, right?”
I was afraid he’d eventually ask. Technically, I’m half atheist, half secular Jew. Ma was raised Christian, but she can’t stand her parents because they’re crazies who kicked her brother out of the house when they found out he liked dudes. Ma never talks to them, and I’ve only seen them like twice in my life. The only thing we really do that’s Christian is Christmas, because me and Benno forced it on my parents. We don’t do much on the Jew side, either. Pops hates religion even more than Ma.
Anyway, I’d definitely rather be Christian than Jew. I mean, pretty much everyone at the King rocks a cross—everyone at the Trotter did, too. Whenever people asked me if I was Christian, I just nodded and left it at that. Being white was enough drama already.
“Yup,” I say to Mar.
“My youth pastor says porno’s the devil’s bait. He said once you bite, you could get reeled right in, and before you know it something happens to you—like, before you get a chance to repent and stuff—and you wake up in hell. And you know the worst thing about hell, right? You can’t get out—ever—and the devil pokes you with a hot rod, in your ears, your eyes, up your nose, and down there, too.”
“Damn.”
“What church you go to?”
“St. Thomas?” I say. It’s the name of Kev’s church, the only one I can think of off the top of the dome. Once, I tagged along with him on Easter.
“They got food there?” asks Mar.
“Just those wafers,” I say. At Kev’s church, the priest was popping snacks in people’s mouths and I wanted to see what they tasted like, so I got up in line and stuck my tongue out like everyone else. The wafer was pretty wack—like a saltine minus the salt—and I didn’t think anything of it. But once church got out, Kev told me it was the body of Jesus, that only confirmed Christians were allowed to eat it and I’d probably end up in hell unless I converted. So I asked my parents if I could convert and they didn’t let me go back to Kev’s church. I eventually stopped stressing about hell, at least until now. I’m not trying to get dick-pokered for eternity.
“At my church, after services, we do this big lunch in the basement,” Mar says. “My grandma usually cooks up her bomb mac and cheese. From scratch, too—none of that powdered bull.”
“Word?”
“You wanna come through sometime?”
“To your church?”
“You could come this Sunday if you want.”
“I’m down.”
“You gotta wear a suit, though,” he says. “Not, like, a Machine suit either. Like, a actual suit.”
PROBLEM IS, I don’t own a suit. I’ve never rocked one in my life. Even at Morgie’s, a suit would set me back at least a twenty, and that’s a lot of empties to snag. Pops owns a raggedy brown suit that he wears a couple times a year, when he’s forced to, for conferences. I try it on and it’s even baggier on me than the Machine was. I’m kind of feeling the look. When Pops gets home, I ask if I can borrow it.
“What could you possibly need a suit for?”
“Church,” I say. I figure I may as well be straight up. He’ll be down when I tell him Mar invited me.
Pops laughs. “This again?”
“Not Kev’s—Marlon’s. I already told Marlon I could go.”
“Well, tell him you can’t make it.”
“How come?”
“Because you’re Jewish—that’s how come.”
“I thought we were atheists.”
“We’re secular.”
“So what does it matter if I go to church?”
“Because Jews don’t go to church.”
“Even secular ones?”
“Especially secular ones!”
“Well, what if I don’t want to be secular—or Jewish?”
“You don’t want to be secular? No one’s stopping you. But the Jewish thing? You’re stuck with it.”
“Can’t I just go and watch?”
“Look,” he says. “Why don’t you ask him if you can go another time? Cramps is coming over for dinner Sunday. He’d flip if he found out you were coming from church.”
CRAMPS IS MY grumpy-ass grandfather. When I was little, I called him Cramps instead of Gramps by accident and he thought it was hilarious, so the name stuck. Cramps has two modes: joking or not at all joking. One second we’re trading puns or doing our favorite comedy scenes (he’s obsessed with comedies, everything from the Marx Brothers to Bill and Ted). The next he’s screaming in my face about the Holocaust and how I need to study harder. He’s been sweating me nonstop about test prep, especially since I made the mistake of telling him how Latin’s a feeder school for Harvard. Now he wants me to go there to make up for Pops dropping out.
Cramps shows up to dinner on Sunday in his usual outfit: tight blue sweatpants and a T-shirt with one of his own catchphrases printed on it. He has about a dozen of them, which he gets from those carts at the mall. Today’s says, HOW DOES IT LOOK LIKE I’M DOING? Cramps has muscular dystrophy, so he weighs about a hundred pounds and has the posture of a chimp. He grimaces as Pops lowers him into his chair, takes his hat off, mats his three remaining strands of hair over his liver-spotted head, and steadies his bloodshot blue eyes on me.
“So?” he says.
“Can we talk about something else?” I say.
“What else is there to talk about?”
“Dad, why don’t you eat something?” says Pops.
“Not hungry,” Cramps says. “I’ll take a doggie bag.”
He’s always asking for doggie bags, always saving things for later. He flies all over the world for math conferences and has two trash bags full of plane snacks in his closet. We got him a cheesecake for his birthday once. He put it in the freezer and chipped away at it for a whole year.
Pretty much every wack thing that can happen to a human has hit Cramps, and he loves to remind us of it all: how he got his ass regularly whooped by his Nazi teachers, how he got booted from school even though he was the valedictorian, how he had to get on a boat by himself at fifteen while the rest of his family got left behind and holocausted, how he had to work in a sweatshop to afford a single lousy kraut dog each night before he went back to the rat-slum apartment he shared with a zillion other sweaty Jews, how he had to fight in some mud pit in the Philippines and got deuced on by the Jew-haters in his battalion, even after he took a chunk of shrap in his shoulder, and how—after all that—he came back, got his hustle on, got married, saw his son off to Harv, and just when it seemed like everything had finally panned out for him, my grandma suddenly died in an accident and Pops dropped out. By the time the MD diagnosis came, it was just the sour cherry on top of his suck sundae.
“So?” Cramps says. “How’d you do on the last practice test?”
“I haven’t taken one since that last time you asked,” I say.
“You don’t have a lot of time left,” he says. “This is serious stuff.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t know. This is serious stuff. If I hadn’t studied my tuches off and aced my exams—”
“Dad,” Pops interrupts. “He knows. He’s heard it a thousand times.”
“Let him hear it a thousand and one times. If I hadn’t aced my exams, there wasn’t a hot chance in hell I’d have gotten my visa. My parents—they applied for my sister, too, and only mine got approved, and you want to know why?”
“All right, Dad.”
“Because she didn’t ace her exams. Because she was out dancing and doing who knows what with her boyfriends while I was in my room, studying under a damned candle. And you know where she ended up? Not on a boat. On a train—to the ghetto.”
“For Christ’s sake,” says Ma. “He’s in sixth grade.”
GROTTO. A SMALL CAVE. If I pass this test, I can climb out of the grotto.
I’m used to Cramps, but still: I’m starting to feel like everything is riding on this test. Pass and I’m on the golden road to Harvard. Choke and I’m on the rusty track to the grotto. Not only will I have two more years at the King, I’ll have to go to a regular public high school, someplace like English, where they really don’t like white boys.
After choking on another practice test, I finally go to Pops for help. He got a 1600 on his SATs, so I ask him to teach me the tricks. Instead, he goes over every single answer I got wrong and even some I got right, and gives me long-ass lectures about the concepts behind each question.
“This is why I didn’t want to study with you,” I say.
“You’re gonna learn it better if you let me explain what it means.”
“I just want the tricks.”
“This isn’t magic. It’s math. There are strategies. You can memorize the formulas. You can eliminate the red herrings. But there aren’t tricks. There are only tactics.”
“Herring sucks,” I say. You can always find a cloudy, onion-clogged jar in my fridge.
“Are you cracked? Herring’s delicious.”
“WHAT ARE THE tactics for reading faster?” I ask at our most recent session. After a couple weeks of studying with Pops, I’ve gotten better at math and vocab, but I’m still swiss at the reading section.
“Actually reading. Like, something other than the sports page. What are you reading in Ms. Ansley’s class?”
“We just started Tom Sawyer.”
“Nice! You liking it?”
“Can’t get into it. Boring as hell.”
“You’re out of your mind. Tom Sawyer’s genius. We’ll read some together tonight.”
After dinner, Pops props a pillow up against me and Benno’s bunk bed and starts reading it to us from the beginning. He gets all excited during the fence scene, where Tom fronts like he’s having fun whitewashing his aunt’s fence when really it’s this swiss chore. Then all the other boys try to get down and he’s like, nah, I got this, and that makes them fiend even harder. So he makes them pay to paint and he ends up with a stash of marbles, firecrackers, and other loot.
“What a great line,” says Pops. He starts rereading the passage, slower. “ ‘He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.’ What do you make of that?”
“Just keep going,” I say.
“No, this is good practice for the test.”
“I don’t know. I guess it’s like my Bird card?” I say. “It’s worth so much because there’s so few of them floating around?”
“Mmm…I’d say it’s more like Nikes,” says Pops. “There’s plenty of them, they’re made for nothing, but Nike decides to charge an arm and two legs and all of a sudden everyone wants a pair.”
I’m pretty sure I’d still want a new Machine even if it wasn’t a hundred bills, but I see Pops’s point. There’s stuff people fiend for naturally—pornos, tacos, crack—and things people fiend for because they’re actually rare. Pretty much everything else is worthless whitewash. But if you sell it right, you can create fiends. At first the idea thrills me. I see multiple paths to moat-lined mansions. But after Pops stops reading and Benno starts snoring, when still I’m up hours later and alone on the planet again, this selling stuff starts to mess with me. I’m dying for loot, but I don’t want to sling the Bird, I don’t want to hawk printouts, and I’m not really down to hustle fools. The more I think about it, those are the only real options: Sell what you love, sell poison, or con. You need to be kind of hard to sell. Sell. Say it in a whisper. It’s got that snake sound. Something like the hiss of the force.
THE ONLY TIME I’m not stressed is when I’m peeping C’s tapes with Mar after the library. We like watching the crowd shots almost as much as the actual games, and we have names for the old-school fans we see over and over, like Arlo, the drunk jumbo whose beer belly pops out while he’s doing the Y on the YMCA dance; or Superfan, a pale, middle-aged guy with neatly parted black hair, who sits alone and wears his shiny green button-up C’s jacket to every game. Superfan never gets emotional. He just stays in his seat, logging stats into his scorecard—even if we’re up thirty with two minutes to go and everyone else has already filed out of the Garden—until the final buzzer blares.
When commercials come on, instead of fast-forwarding, we’ll press mute and do voice-overs. The Rogaine ads are our shit. When the sad baldy looks in the mirror, we’ll flail our arms and shout, in British accents, “Where oh where did my lovely hair go?” and then when the hair grows back mad fast, we’ll explode in celebration, run around the room, and scream, “It’s back! Yes! It’s baaaaaaack! YESSSSS!!!!!! ROOO-GAAAAAAINE!” Benno films us doing it, and when we see our faces we roll mad hard, and just when I think we’re finished rolling, Mar will let out a loud squawk and that’ll make me roll even harder, and we’ll roll together for minutes straight—just making eye contact will keep things going for another round—and we’ll keep rolling till our abs hurt and the only way we can stop is turn our backs to each other. It’s starting to hit me: Mar isn’t just my best friend, he’s my first. Up until now I had no idea just how lonely I’d been.
The second Mar bounces, the stress sets back in. Pops makes me go over my practice tests, Cramps calls to check in on my progress, and after lights-out I lie in bed for hours, staring at the fading comets on my ceiling. It’s not just the test that’s keeping me awake. Since seeing those Pam pics, I’ve been plagued by unrelenting wood. I lie there with a tent in my sweats, trying to think of Carmen, but Pam keeps edging her way back in. I swear, I don’t dig white girls, but it’s impossible to get Pam off the dome. It’s not just the tits, either. There’s something about the whole package—the bleach-blond hair, the blue eyes, the little bumpless nose—that’s almost, I don’t know, exotic.
Sometimes the wood lasts so long, it hurts. When I can’t take it anymore, I start trying to bend it back down. I should’ve learned my lesson on that move the first time. When I ask Kev about how he deals with this kind of thing, he starts laughing and says, “Jerk it, jackass!” But to be honest, I don’t even know how. I mean, I have my hand down there on the reg, but I assume that doesn’t count. I don’t even really want to know how. That stuff Mar said about the devil’s bait is still bopping around in my brain. I’m worried enough about the grotto; I don’t need to be stressing about hell, too.
And now I’ve got a new problem where the stress has started causing the wood—at least that’s what it seems like. It’ll happen out of nowhere, when I’m in class or in the halls. Something will remind me of the test—like the motivational posters in homeroom—and the wood will start up and I’ll have to duck into a corner and do this tuck move where I strap it down with my undie elastic. Even after the tuck move there’s usually a trace of tent, so I’ll stretch my tee as far as I can for maximal overhang.
Kev doesn’t have these problems. He can beat off whenever he wants, and besides, he’s not stressed about the test at all. On the off chance that he somehow chokes, he knows he’ll be straight at the King if he has to stay for a couple more years, because he made the basketball team. He dropped fifteen points in his first game, and now he gets fist bumps from seventh and eighth graders in the halls. He has a rally girl assigned to him, and she tapes candy and balloons to his locker. He even gets to sit at his teammate Kaleem’s lunch table.
I’m watching Kev yuck it up with his new homey when Rawlins rolls up to our table—just me, Mar, and Jimmy now—and says, “You still feedin’ on that finger? Stressed, huh?”
“It’s all good,” I say. Of course, Rawlins makes me even more stressed. Every time I see him, I think about the pen.
Lying in bed that night, I’m still thinking about the inescapable. The test is a pen: There’s no way I can scratch my way out of it. Getting older—that’s a pen, too. When you’re little, you play whatever sapien games you please; you don’t give a fuck and no one else does, either. Then you turn my age and you can never be soft again. Your dick gets hard and you start fiending for ripe, round tits. You start acting hard, too, beefing to survive. You start jacking, conning, selling whitewash, even to your boys. You walk around with a hard look on your face and a hard dick in your Hanes, scowling and horny for the rest of your life.