CHAPTER

31

“Hold up, now,” I say, chasing after Pablo. “What happened over there? Didn’t you all win?” His face is sweaty and he looks meaner than when I first met him. He doesn’t say anything as we both head over to Daddy’s shop where some men are sitting around a small table playing a card game.

“You ever been to the junkyard?” I ask as I try to keep up with his furious pace.

His face calms. “Yeah. That’s where we practice.”

“So you know there’s enough junk to build new stuff. Maybe a . . . Genesis Device.”

We reach the shop and he turns to look at me. “I really wanted to battle Bianca Pluto. She’s good. It wasn’t fair that Calvin took over the whole contest.”

“So why didn’t you stop him?”

“Who’s that king you said he was working for?” he asks.

I smile. “King Sirius Julius. But it turns out that he’s really the Sonic King.” I turn to point to my daddy who has on his headphones now and is switching a record on his control boards. “He controls everything. He won’t even let me save Captain Fleet.”

“You think Bianca will let me join their crew?” he asks.

I turn back to look at the 9 Flavas. They’ve walked over to Calvin and them now, and they look like they’re arguing. Diane is trying to break it up, but Monique and Rhonda are the angriest of them all. They point and roll their necks in Calvin’s face. “I don’t think they’re gonna want you in their crew, Pablo Jupiter. Why don’t we form our own crew?”

“You can’t dance, Ebony-Grace,” he says, as plain as Granddaddy’s Saltine crackers.

“No,” I say. “Not that kinda crew. A real crew on a space mission. We need to get outta here, Pablo Jupiter. Either we build another spacecraft, or . . . plant a Genesis Device on Planet . . . Junkyard! Yeah, that’s it. Planet Junkyard!” I smile because I’ve just created a whole new adventure in just a few seconds exactly like how Granddaddy would.

Pablo thinks for a second. Then he says, “Is there any room for break dancing on the spacecraft?”

“Only if it’s to defeat the Sonic King,” I say. “You’ll make him think you’re break-dancing, but it’ll only be to trick him so you could take out his shield generator and destroy his warp drive.”

I motion for him to follow me into the shop where it almost feels like an oven. The lights are turned off in the small space and it smells of engine oil, rusted metal, and sweat.

“Julius ain’t got no cash in the shop, so y’all ain’t gonna find nothing in there,” a man shouts into the shop from outside.

As he says this, I tap my pocket to make sure Granddaddy’s cash is still there. I won’t need any of Daddy’s money anyway.

We head straight for a narrow door at the back of the shop where Daddy throws all the broken, junky stuff he buys from people. I look for that fireplace those two boys were trying to sell him, but instead I spot the old refrigerator that’s been there since I was nine. A pile of car doors are stacked against the rusty tin gate that separates the yard from the next building’s yard, which has overgrown trees and shrubs making it look almost like Alabama.

“Everything here is dead. It could use a Genesis Device,” I say.

“No way,” Pablo says. “Everything here is still alive. People who don’t know always say these neighborhoods are dead, but we’re still here, still living. You know what I mean?”

“That’s not really living, then, if everything around you is broken. Even the music is broken, and everybody does this breaking-bones dance.”

“Nuh-uh. There’s nothing broken about breakin’,” he says, and starts to dance like a robot. “We just fix it up and it becomes something new and different. Nobody dances like this where you’re from? I know they do the Electric Boogaloo in California.”

“I’m from a different planet, remember?”

“But even the planet you’re from gots to have music,” he says, still moving about like a robot.

I think of Granddaddy’s funk music: James Brown, George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic; his soul music: Al Green and Curtis Mayfield; his jazz: Sun Ra and Miles Davis; and even his disco: Donna Summers and the BeeGees. None of them sound like the Sonic Boom. None of them are from a place called Planet Rock with its electric bass and voices that sound like they’re coming from another dimension.

I spot an old record player in the far corner of the junkyard. It’s the kind with a wooden base and horn that looks like a brass flower. I’d have to climb over a motorcycle, a rusty bathtub, and a chipping wooden door to get to it. Before I could come up with a strategy, Pablo was already ahead of me trying to get to it. He lugs it over his head as he leaps over all the junk to bring the record player back to me.

We meet in the middle of the junkyard where he places the chipped and rusted record player on the ground with the broken glass and small car parts. We both crouch down to examine it.

Pablo is standing now, stepping away from the old record player as if he’s about to leave the junkyard any second.

I stand, too, so I can say this to his face. “This is not what a planet is supposed to look like, and this is not what a yard is supposed to look like. All these people bringing their junk to the Sonic King with their torn clothes and missing teeth and all he gives them back is even more broken music.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Outta Space Ebony-Grace. The Genesis Device can go downtown where all the rich folks are and their fancy buildings! They need to come up here where it’s about to be live in ’85. Watch. When the Genesis Ten makes it big, we’re gonna take over all of Harlem.”

“And do what? Be like the Sonic King and blast loud music in the streets in the middle of the day?” I put my whole neck and body into those words.

“Yeah,” he says, and puts his whole neck and body into it, too, but he’s making fun of me. Then he waves his hand at me while saying, “I don’t need this, Ebony-Grace! I don’t need to fix what ain’t broken, rescue what don’t need saving. I just need to rhyme. I need to dance. And DJ Jule Thief ain’t playing fair.”

“Not DJ Jule Thief. The Sonic King. And of course, he’s not playing fair. He’s playing favorites with his minions. And he doesn’t want me to save the captain, so he’s punishing me and the Nine Flavas. But I can get him to change his mind.”

Someone opens the door leading to the junkyard from the shop. Daddy pokes his head out. “Broomstick, get on outta there!”

Pablo rushes ahead of me, but Daddy stops me at the doorway and glares down at me. “Ebony, did you happen’a find a white envelope back at the house? It must’ve fell out of my pocket.”

I shake my head. “A white envelope? No,” I say as sure as the sun, and rush past him to catch up with Pablo. “Hey, Pablo Jupiter. I can ask the Nine Flavas Crew to let you join them.” I follow him out of the junkyard with Daddy still glaring at me.

Pablo stops right in the doorway leading out into the block party. He crosses his arms and says, “As long as I could still be Pablo Jupiter. Then yeah. I don’t mind being with an all-girls crew.”

Before I chase after him again to tell him my plan, Daddy grabs my arm. “You sure, Broomstick. It had the grand prize money for the contest. Was gonna be just fifty bucks, but I raised it to two fifty. I thought I’d do something nice for the kids on the block.”

I pause. I was too deep in the fib now to turn back. That money wasn’t supposed to be for the contest and it sure shouldn’t be going to Calvin and his crew. That money was for me to visit Granddaddy. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Daddy” is all I say before I rush behind Pablo, and into the block party with the music turned down low.

There’s a lot of talk and commotion. People are confused about the contest having no prize. I catch bits of conversation.

“Man, Julius was running game on us!”

“DJ Jule Thief got a lot of nerve doing folks that way.”

“Who does he think he is?”

“He thinks he runs this block, but he’s got another thing coming.”

The minions of Planet No Joke City are plotting to overthrow the Sonic King. And it is all because of me.