Yearn

African American Review, Spring, 2004 by Amina Gautier

Kiki didn't have anything smaller than a twenty on him at lunch time. He'd pulled out a role of twenties and fifties and told Stephen to meet him at the park when school let out. Stephen had never seen so much money on someone his own age. And even though he knew he was supposed to head straight home, he agreed to meet at the park.

When he got there, he went straight to their spot, a stone house at the edge of the playground that all the kids called the White House. Stone turtles, dolphins, horses in mid-gallop were scattered all around the park, but the White House was where the boys played Spider, where the couples did it, where the teenagers played handball and where he and Kiki met.

That afternoon, they had it all to themselves.

"Look what I got." Kiki had a bag full of fireworks--Jumping Jacks, Cherry Bombs, Butterflies, Ashcans. It wasn't even the Fourth of July.

"Oh snap, where'd you get those? Did you go to Chinatown?"

Kiki was smug, "I got my ways, Steve. I even saw Spearman of Death."

"For real? The one with the Five Deadly Venoms?"

"No, for fake, Mama's boy," Kiki pushed him and laughed.

"I'm not." But even to himself, it sounded whiny.

Stephen imagined Kiki--short, pudgy and Puerto Rican-riding the subway up to Chinatown, buying fireworks and rice candy, and maybe even taking in a kung fu flick, a real one with the English badly dubbed over. He wished he could have gone. Just thinking about all the things that his mother kept him from doing got him upset. He was almost twelve and still being treated like a baby. If it weren't for Kiki, he'd never get to light any fireworks.

His mother was too worried he'd blow his fingers off. His mother worried about too many things. She was worried about where they lived. She didn't like Bed-Stuy. They lived on a block with nothing but brownstones. Even though they didn't live in the projects, she said it was still the ghetto. The boys that lived on the block and in the surrounding area worried her. The way they grew up and began to dot the street corners. The way they took up residence on the corners and glued themselves to the pay phones, rigging them so no one else could use them. The way they wore their jeans so low they seemed to hang off their narrow behinds. And they carried pagers and cell phones as if they were doctors and lawyers even though they had no jobs and nowhere to go. She worried that those boys or boys just like them would kill him. One day, she said, they would turn around and shoot him straight through the head if he said the wrong thing.

But he knew that she was wrong. The older boys were his friends. They looked out for him. She worried over nothing and made him look like a punk in the process.

"I'm not a mama's boy," Stephen said, this time without whining. "I'm not."

"Be cool, Steve," Kiki said.

They started out behind the kiddy swings. Kiki pulled the Jumping Jacks out of their thin red paper and left the dozen twisted together. He lit the whole pack at once and they watched as the pack leapt into the air as one, each firecracker straining against the other, ready to dance, each side fizzing and glowing orange, yellow, and green.

"Yo, that was fresh," Kiki said.

"You gonna waste them, doing them like that."

"It's plenty more where that came from. Chill out. Scaredy."

"I'm not!"

"Then follow me," Kiki said as they began to walk away, kicking paper bags and crack vials out of their path. Kiki to watch a group of girls playing rope from a distance. "Isn't that that puta Maribel you tried to talk to?"

"Yeah, that's her," Stephen said, not sure what a puta was. She was playing Double Dutch with two girls he didn't recognize. Her back was to him and he lost his train of thought for a moment as he watched her denim cutoffs sway back and forth to the rhythm of the rope she was turning.

"--a lot of nerve turning my boy down. I'll show her she can't play with my homey like that," Kiki was muttering. He reached around in his bag until he pulled out a stink bomb.

"Get behind that tree!" Kiki shouted as he lit and tossed the stink bomb at the girls and scampered out of sight.

"Yo, why'd you--"

Kiki was doubled over with laughter, "Stop frontin'. You know you thought that was funny."

He tried to deny it, but as soon as he opened his mouth, he started to laugh hard. It had been funny to watch the girls. They had started sniffing the air, and before they realized it was a stink bomb, the girls had all stared at Maribel with disgust, as if the smell came from her. Red-faced, Maribel dropped her end of the rope and ran.

"Bet you wish you coulda did it yourself," Kiki said.

He wondered how Kiki knew. Stephen had tried to dance with Maribel at her birthday party twice and she'd turned him down. He'd written her a note, asking her to go steady with him and she'd shown it to all the girls in their class at lunch time. When he'd seen the note wafting through the cafeteria, covered in chocolate milk stains, he had wished for some sort of divine hand to come down and smack her silly. But he hadn't done anything himself. It felt good to see her get humiliated for a change.