THE GIRLS LIKED Erin, but not his name. So they called him E. He liked it, especially when Ona called him that.
E’s boys teased him about Ona. She lived in the suburbs and couldn’t even get phone calls from boys. But she liked E, even though he came from the part of town that everybody called Death Row.
“Ona think she better than us,” E’s boy Noodles said. They were at E’s house, lying on his bed—a pile of thin woolly blankets on the floor.
E thought about Ona’s pretty smile and her apple-butter brown skin. “She’s all right,” he said.
“Invite her to your crib then.”
“One day,” E said, rubbing his gloved hands together.
Noodles stood up and looked through the thick, clear plastic covering E’s bedroom window. “Man, when your momma gonna get the heat cut back on?”
Even with the plastic, E could see frost on the windows and his breath sometimes when he breathed out. “You got heat?”
“Well, we . . .”
“Then shut up.”
For a long time, they talked about girls. Then E said they should go to the mall. “It’s warm there.”
“They got girls there, too,” Noodles said. “And girls always got some dough.”
On the bus, Noodles talked about how he was gonna get some girl to buy him pizza. “And hot chocolate, too.” He wasn’t lying. E knew that. He once saw Noodles talk a girl into paying his way to a $60 rap concert. Saw him get girls in school to lend him bus money, even though the school already gives every student a bus pass.
“Don’t be hustling girls around me,” E said, getting off the bus and heading for the mall.
Noodles shook his head. “I was born broke, but that don’t mean I have to stay broke, especially when so many girls got so much money.”
E ignored Noodles. He rubbed his big toe against the hole in his sneaker, then walked over to the pharmacy and put in a job application. A half hour later, E saw Noodles with his arms hanging over some girl’s shoulder. E stood nearby while Noodles took her over to a cold concrete seat, sat her down, and talked . . . till she took him to the food court and bought him two slices of pizza and a supersize drink. Noodles came back and told E he shoulda come, too. “She had long dollars. Shoot. I coulda got me a shirt out the deal if I wanted.”
E’s stomach was growling. He hardly ever ate at the mall ’cause he didn’t ever have the money. “Let’s go,” he said. Then he told Noodles how he put in three job applications while Noodles was gone.
Noodles pulled out five bucks. “Here,” he said, stuffing the money in E’s pocket. “She went to the ATM machine. I told her I’d pay her back, when I could.”
E shook his head. Told himself to give the money back, but he didn’t. He bought a piece of pizza and a drink, then listened to Noodles say how he was gonna get that girl to buy him some new sneakers and take him out a few times.
On the bus ride home, E wondered what Ona and her family did on weekends. On Mondays, she always seemed to have on some new outfit or a new piece of jewelry. E always looked the same: jeans, run-over sneakers, and a coat with sleeves much too short.
“That’s how it is when you got eight brothers and sisters,” he once told a boy after he’d cracked on the hole in his shirt. Two days later, E stole some jeans off a clothesline in the backyard near his school. Now every year before school started, he stole one pair of jeans. Even so, kids still teased him about his clothes. But not Ona. She never seemed to notice. E never told his boys, but he dreamed about that girl at night. The dreams always ended the same, too—with Ona and him kissing and holding each other tight.
Ona knew better than to be making eyes at a boy like E.
“Dirt poor,” her friends called him behind his back.
But Ona liked him anyway. Figured you could always make a nice person look like something. But a no-class knucklehead like Noodles is gonna be just that, no matter how much you dress him up, she thought.
Over the weekend, she finally did what she’d been wanting to do. She got her sister Brenda to drive her past E’s house. She’d never seen anything like it. “A shack,” Brenda called it. Her boyfriend said the fire marshal should condemn the whole block, then strike a match and keep on walking.
“See?” Brenda said. “You never know who you’re gonna sit next to when you go to a public school.”
Brenda was in her second year of college. She’d gone to private school all her life. So had their older brother, Melvin. By the time Ona came along, her parents had softened. They told her she could go to high school wherever she liked, as long as the school had a good reputation and a scholars’ track for really smart kids.
E wasn’t in the scholars’ program. But he and Ona still had a few classes together: art, music, and civics. Since their last names started with the same initial (hers was Bleton, his Boven), they always ended up sitting next to each other. She liked him right away. When she slipped and fell the first day of class, he was the only one who didn’t laugh.
She noticed him at lunch. Not eating or drinking. Stuck over in the corner reading, unless Noodlehead Noodles was messing with him. She saw his outdated clothes and high-water pants, his perfect teeth and chestnut-brown skin.
“Loser,” her friends had said, when she’d first said she liked him.
“He’s cute,” she’d told them.
Maria whispered, but she’d meant for E to hear. “He lives on Death Row. Gonna be on Death Row for real one day, too.”
Every night Ona took out E’s picture—the one she’d taken from his notebook when he wasn’t looking—and kissed him good night. “Ask me to the homecoming dance,” she’d say to the picture. “Ask me, and just watch if I don’t say yes.”
In civics, E leaned over and asked Ona if she had a pencil. She gave him one that her dad had bought from a New York City bookstore for $8. “Keep it,” she said, twisting her hair.
E sniffed. Ona smelled good, like always. He touched the tip of her soft brown hair and wondered what it would be like to dance with her. Slow dance. In a nice place, not in the basement of the school where the kids stank with sweat and danced like they were already in bed.
Ona tried to be cool. To act like she wasn’t about to jump out of her skin ’cause E was so close to her. But she couldn’t help it. Her fingers were shaking. Her eyes blinked more than they should. “I . . .” Ona couldn’t get the words out. “I . . .” She promised herself all the way to school she was just gonna come out and say she liked him. And that she wanted him to call her sometimes, even if her dad didn’t want boys calling the house. “I . . .” she said again. But it was too late. The bell rang.
Noodles almost knocked Ona down trying to get to E. E pushed Noodles so hard his books fell on the floor. “Man. Ain’t you got no manners?” he said. “I’m with somebody.”
Noodles wanted to fight E right then and there. He didn’t like being embarrassed. But he kept his hands at his side ’cause E was his boy. He would let him slide, this time, he thought.
Ona was so happy. He likes me, she thought. Then she brought up the homecoming dance. “You going?”
E bit down on his lip and watched Noodles slink away. “Naw. I don’t do stuff like that.”
Ona waved to her friend Maria. A few minutes later she was sorry, though, ’cause right away Maria asked Ona whom she was going to the dance with. Before Ona answered, Maria turned to E. “For sure you’re not going with him. Unless you got a dress that matches holey jeans and dirty sneakers.” Ona grabbed a hunk of her friend’s arm and pinched.
“Ouch!”
Ona’s eyes dared her friend to say a word, then she and E headed for art class in silence. When the teacher turned off the lights to show them a film, Ona apologized to E. He played it off. Said he’d already forgotten about her bigmouthed friend. “Anyhow, I could go to the dance if I wanted.”
Ona felt sorry for him.
“You going?” E asked her.
She moved her desk closer to his. “You wanna take me?”
E didn’t say a word at first. But his head was full of excuses. I ain’t got no clothes, no ride, no money for the dance tickets. But when he spoke, the word “Yes,” came out strong and clear, like it had been sitting on his tongue for years, just waiting to give Ona whatever she wanted.
Ona’s head turned around so fast she heard her neck bones crack. “Okay. What color are you going to wear?”
E couldn’t open his mouth. All he kept thinking was how stupid he was for asking Ona to go to the dance when he knew his mother didn’t have any money to get new clothes, and he didn’t have a job.
Noodles popped E upside the head when E told him what he’d done. E sat in his bedroom window. Pushed at the puffed-out plastic filled with wind. “Maybe I can still find a job or something.”
Noodles asked E how many applications he’d put in over the last six months.
“Thirty.”
“Well, ain’t you figured it out yet? They don’t want you,” Noodles said.
E looked scared. Embarrassed, too. “The jitney station might give me a few dollars for cleaning up.”
Noodles came over to E. Pulled out a chocolate bar. “Only one thing to do,” he said, breaking the candy in two. “Steal it.”
E was quiet for a long while. “Steal what?”
“Whatever you need. Clothes. Shoes. Socks.”
E watched the crap game going on across the street.
“Steal the money, or steal the clothes,” Noodles said. “Shoot. I need me some clothes, too.”
E’s sisters came into the room and started digging through a tall brown box in which they kept their clothes. “I need to put another shirt on. It’s cold in here,” six-year-old Erie said.
E stared at the gloves on her hands. Looked at his sister in a torn jacket, and heard Noodles’s words loud and clear. “Steal it.” So that’s what he did.
Noodles just wanted to go to a store, try on some clothes, and walk out. E wanted the money. Said his sisters needed stuff, too. And his mother needed help with the bills.
“What you planning to do? Rob a bank?” Noodles laughed.
E smiled.
“A bank. For real? Cool,” Noodles said.
“Get a brain, Noodles.”
“We could rip off teachers. Take the money right out their purses,” Noodles said.
E liked that idea but turned it down. He didn’t want to be kicked out of school if they got caught. Then he thought about something Ona had said. People around her way rarely locked their doors and windows. He was telling her about his neighborhood with women walking the street in hot-pink furs and no underwear. She was talking about hers, where people kept big dollars in upstairs drawers for hard times that never seemed to come.
Later that night, E and Noodles figured out just when and how they’d get the money. Come midnight, E put Noodles out of his house. Said he was going to bed. He couldn’t sleep, though. His brothers kept coughing and snotting. “I shoulda stepped up to the plate a long time ago,” he said to himself. “Shoulda been a man long before now.”
They noticed it right away: the houses in Green Oak Park looked like small apartment buildings. People had smoking chimneys and pretty green shrubs, even though it was January and frost covered everything.
Nobody was outside and not too many houses had cars out front. So they walked from house to house, peeking inside, since people didn’t have their shades down or their curtains closed.
“They live right out in the open,” Noodles said. “You do something like that on Death Row, you gonna get shot just for being stupid.”
E liked the beige-and-white house with the statue out front. It had a curved brick walkway and a welcome sign out front with the family’s name on it. He walked around back. The rose-colored kitchen was empty. He tried the doorknob. No problem. “People here don’t lock doors, just like Ona said.”
Noodles went in first. Said if somebody answered, he’d just act like he was in the wrong house. But nobody was home. So they ran upstairs. Dug in the drawers. Made up a rap song when they found $600 in the drawer in the master bedroom. They snatched cupcakes and cinnamon rolls on the way out. Then walked, like nothing was up, all the way out of the neighborhood.
E gave Noodles half the money. Said he wasn’t doing this anymore. But it felt good when he told Ona that he’d paid for the tickets. It felt good wearing new jeans and sneakers and having kids fuss over him. But the money ran out before he gave his mother any. So two weeks later when Noodles said they should do it again, E was game.
“Friday’s our lucky day,” Noodles said. “So let’s do it again on Friday.”
Noodles picked the house this time. They walked in, sat on the furniture, and even watched a little TV. E looked around the room, at the shiny white piano and the fluffy cream-colored furniture. “How some people end up with all the money in the world, and other folks end up poor as dirt? Like us.”
Noodles flipped from channel to channel. “That’s why God gave people a bad gene. So they got the guts to even this money thing out and get some of what other folks got too much of.”
It made sense, E thought. So he picked up a clear candy dish with pink swans for handles and took it with him when he left. “For Momma,” he said.
Ona knew that more girls would like E if they saw what she saw in him. But she didn’t know that it would happen so fast. Since he dressed better, the girls spoke to him more, looked at him longer. Ona asked E how he dressed so fly all of a sudden. He lied. Said his mother finally got herself a decent man to take care of their family. She believed him. Didn’t see anything different in him. He still came to class. Did all his homework. Looked at her like he would die without her. He was still E. So she invited him to her house. “’Cause my father won’t let me go to the dance with anyone he hasn’t met.”
She told him that her dad would pick him up. E said he’d take the bus over. It was weird, showing up at her place. All the houses in that neighborhood were the same inside, so he knew where every room in her house was without even asking.
“You seem like a nice boy,” Ona’s mother said, handing him a plate piled with liver and fried onions, a baked potato, and asparagus spears.
Her dad stared at him. Said he looked familiar. “Ever been around here before?” he asked, playing with his gold pinky ring with a black diamond chip on it.
“No, sir. I ain’t never been around here,” E said.
Ona’s mom corrected his English. Her dad frowned and asked E to take his elbows off the table.
Ona was so embarrassed. Her father was mean to E. He didn’t like boys calling her or coming to their house. And he especially didn’t like boys from Death Row. “When boys from that part of town are born, they don’t give ’em a birth certificate,” he told her once. “They tattoo a prison number on their butts.”
Ona wanted to scream when he’d said that. To tell him that E wasn’t like that. But she saw the clothes. Heard kids say he was selling weed. Wondered what he was up to.
E knew before he left that Ona’s father wouldn’t let him take her to the dance. He tried to be nice. To look up from his plate when they spoke to him, but he couldn’t after a while. And even though he had on new sneakers and an outfit that cost almost a hundred and fifty bucks, he felt like a bum. Ona’s father made sure of that.
“Man, you went all outta your way for that chick, and her dad treated you like that?” Noodles said, soon as E got back home.
E tried to play it off. But Noodles kept saying that E had to get Ona’s dad back for disrespecting him.
“It don’t matter,” E said, taking off his jacket. Sweating from the heat.
“Yes it do matter,” Noodles said, throwing punches in the air. “It matters anytime somebody treats you less than what you is.”
E’s mouth tasted sour. He opened the window and spit. The wind and snow flurries turned his face as cold and hard as the ice on the window ledge.
“Man, do something,” he said. “Don’t be no punk.”
E told Noodles to go home.
“Don’t worry. I’ll fix her dad for you, and jack her up too,” Noodles said.
E’s fist slammed into Noodle’s chest, shoulder, and right cheek. Noodles ducked and swung. E’s mother broke up the fight. The next day, Noodles was at E’s house, looking for something to eat— like usual.
Ona tried to tell him nicely. But there’s no way to tell a boy three days before the second-biggest dance of the year that you can’t go with him. So ultimately she just came right out with it. She didn’t look E in the eyes, though. She stared down at a piece of paper on the hallway floor. Grabbed his hand and said that maybe she could meet him there anyhow. “My father doesn’t have to know,” she said, finally looking into his eyes.
E’s mother didn’t ask any questions. She was glad to have the heat, new clothes for the little ones, and some extra change in her pocket. She was glad to ask the neighbors to come over and see how good E looked in a suit. “People go to these kinds of dances on a bus?” she asked when he headed out the door. “You sure?”
E didn’t care if he had to walk. He was going to the dance. Going with Ona. Dressed up in new fancy clothes for the first time since his sixth-grade graduation.
When he stepped on the bus, he smiled. He could see people staring. Whispering. Noticing the boy in the sharp suit, carrying his coat on his arm. “People gonna see what I got on,” he told his mother when she said he’d better wear that coat. “Even if I freeze, they gonna get a good look at me.”
When he got to the school, people clapped. They whistled. They came up to him and touched his clothes and eyed his rings and asked if his mother hit the lottery. It felt good, being popular. Having girls wink and smile and press close to you, just because, E thought.
“No, I don’t wanna dance,” he said to Maria. “I’m looking for Ona. You see her?”
Maria waved her little finger for him to come closer. “She can’t come,” she said, blowing in his ear. “They got robbed.” She told him that Ona’s bedroom got trashed the worst. “Cuss words were smeared on her walls in black Magic Marker.
Her clothes were cut up and her stuffed animals were shoved in the toilet.”
E looked up just when Noodles walked in the room in a powder-blue sweater, black pants, matching black gator shoes, and a gold pinky ring with a black-chip diamond in the middle.
E ran over to him. “What you think you doing, man?”
Noodles smiled. “I told you. Don’t be disrespecting me,” he said, rubbing the ring and walking away. Then, turning back around and leaning against the wall, Noodles talked. His words jumped high over the loud music, then snuck down low when the sax, the drums, and the singing smoothed out, and then disappeared till the next CD took over. “It was nice being there all by myself. Kicking it with her dad’s gin and brew and her mother’s fancy wineglasses.”
E shook his head. Noodles kept talking.
“I smashed the grandfather clock first. Pow!” he said, closing one eye and firing an invisible gun.
E felt sick.
“Glass flies like tiny airplanes, you know?” Noodles looked at the ceiling like he could see planes overhead. “I mean, that stuff was in the yard, the kitchen, the family room—everywhere!”
E blinked and rubbed his eyes like he was seeing somebody else standing in front of him, not Noodles.
“Then I took my boots and spread peanut butter on the bottoms and walked on that dude’s white rugs, and his white couch, and his pretty white bedspreads. That one was for you,” Noodles said.
E hated Ona’s dad, but he clocked Noodles in the chest anyhow. It was dark and the teachers were busy complimenting kids on their clothes and talking to each other, so they didn’t notice.
Noodles always could take a hit, so he kept talking. Telling E how he poured hot syrup on Ona’s bedroom furniture and jerked her curtains off the rods and stuffed ’em into sinks that he filled up with water.
E watched the girls in their low-cut gowns laugh and shake and smile. “Ona,” he said.
“Man, forget her,” Noodles told him. “She home pulling glass out her bed and washing pee off the walls.”
E wanted a knife or a gun. I should cut him, he thought. Or shoot him right in his big mouth.
Noodles knew when to stay clear of E, so he took off. He ran over to a girl and pulled her onto the dance floor even though she didn’t wanna go.
“It won’t matter,” E said. Ona’s never gonna be mine nohow, he thought. So he left Noodles alone.
When the police showed up, Noodles started running before the cops even said who they were looking for. They bent his arms way behind his back and elbowed him when he spit and cussed at them.
E didn’t move. He sipped sparkling pink punch. Broke open a piece of chocolate and sucked the cherry out. He listened for Noodles to yell his name. He didn’t even give the police a hard time when they came for him.
“I told you, don’t be disrespecting me. Not for no stinking girl,” Noodles said to E. Then he laughed.
E didn’t ask the cop why he was hauling him off to jail. And he didn’t say one word to Noodles on the long ride, either. He closed his eyes and imagined himself and Ona dancing—holding tight to each other. Ignoring all those people who wondered what she ever saw in him.