What Ma says is true. My head is like a vault. Poems, lyrics, all of it gets locked in my head. Ms. Shallowford’s class is the only place I’m rewarded for remembering poems, for loving poetry. For writing my own. I do it only in class because I don’t want to catch it from the other guys, but for Jade, whose hands tremble as the sirens come closer, I’ll do it.
I start with the question that launches Langston Hughes’ famous poem “Harlem,” asking what happens to a dream deferred.
When I quote the line, when I ask the question, Jade lifts her head. I feel stupid. I usually do this alone. I’m usually in my bed when the sound of bullets rips through the air, and the words that calm and comfort me, I’m the only one who hears. But Jade’s with me now, and I taste her fear. It’s bitter like aspirin dissolving on my tongue as I continue, posing Hughes’s questions about dried-up raisin dreams. Jade blinks at me, her tears slowing. She swipes at her running nose. Feet scamper past my open bedroom window, a chase underway. Angry voices bounce off the walls.
“Hands in the air!” Greg’s voice reaches us in the closet. “Chaz, man stop. Come on. Put the gun down.”
Jade’s chest expands and contracts with breaths like she’s about to hyperventilate, her eyes round as plates.
I continue with the lines of “Harlem,” comparing the delayed dream to rotten meat and syrupy sweets. The words barely penetrate my mind, but they keep my heart from falling out of my chest.
I’m not sure if it helps Jade, but the words anchor me, give me something to focus on besides the chaos on the front yard. Besides the threat of violence chilling the air. I blink back tears, but Jade’s flow freely down her cheeks.
“Chaz, no!” Panic and pain wrestle in Greg’s words. “Don’t make me do it!”
Pop!
It’s a silly word for the sound a gun makes. Ms. Shallowford taught our class about onomatopoeia last week, but none of the sounds she used for gunfire seem right.
Pop! Crack! Bang!
If you’ve heard shots as many times as we have, if you live with it, you know the sound a gun makes when it’s fired is a moan. The moan of a mother, a father, a daughter, or son losing someone they love. It’s the sound Jade makes when she runs to my window, her eyes scanning the front yard for both of her brothers. We find them there together. Chaz’s lifeless head rests in Greg’s lap on the patch of grass. Greg’s face crumples, the brows bent with pain, his mouth stretched wide on a wail. He’s covered in the blood spurting life from his brother’s chest.
Jade scurries through the window, rushing across the yard and hurling herself into the grief, pummeling Greg’s shoulders, slapping his head, screaming obscenities. Ma jerks her off, pulls her back and into her arms, eyes full of pain locked on the blood-covered brothers. My Aunt Celia runs up the street and into the small crowd gathering. A cop restrains her, but you can’t hold back a mother’s anguish. We all watch Aunt Celia’s face collapse, her eyebrows buckling over eyes streaming devastation. Her mouth, a gaping hole of torment. She strains, arms outstretched for her dying son, hands clawed to scratch the other. Sobs rack her body, and she is a world of pain.
“You killed my boy!” Aunt Celia’s voice, a dirge, booms over the eerily still street. “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you, Greg!”
His mother’s mournful litany bounces off Greg’s head and shoulders as he cradles his brother, rocks him, imprisoned by his own guilt and pain.
I can’t move. My shoes stick to the thin, cheap carpet in my bedroom. The smell of death invades my nose like an enemy, and my heart trills in my chest, hammering a rapid beat. My breath wheezes from my throat, and my head spins. I grasp for consciousness, searching for the words that calmed me moments ago. Moments before a bullet split our world right down the middle.
I mumble the final lines of “Harlem,” even though I’m the only one listening, and I reach the same conclusion Hughes does.
So here in these streets, in my neighborhood, what happens to a dream deferred?
It explodes.
Grip
IT’S AS QUIET as a morgue when the song ends. I have no idea what the Prodigy team sitting around the table thinks. Verse one of “Bruise” is written from the perspective of a young black man, verse two from that of a cop. I’m the only black man in the room. As much as I love Rhyson, as close as we are, I’m not sure he can understand the indignity of being stopped for no reason by cops on the regular. Being forced to lie on the ground and get searched without explanation. Targeted. Profiled. Made to feel second class. It isn’t his experience, but all my life in my neighborhood, it was mine. I infused every line of that verse with the pain and frustration and resentment brimming over in my community. I hope I told Greg’s story, too, my cousin who became a good cop. Who had to shoot his own brother and probably saved lives that day. I admire him as much as I admire anyone. Instead of running from the police force, he ran toward it and decided to do his part to make things better.
“As much as I think it’s a great social commentary,” Max finally speaks first. “Are we sure this is what we want to bring up given how divided our nation is right now? I mean, will you be alienating half your listeners? I’m not sure it’s the right song for the Target Exclusive.”
I shrug like it doesn’t bother me, but it does. Should I push? The song is special to me. I didn’t even realize how much until now when it sounds like it might not make the cut. I wrote it to unite, not divide.
“I agree with you, Max,” Bristol says, her tone all business and brusque. “It isn’t right for the Target Exclusive.”
“I’m glad we can agree on something this morning,” he says with a chuckle.
“It belongs on the wide version of Grip.” Bristol has that defiant look she gets when she digs her heels in. “If it’s on the Exclusive, fewer people will hear it, and everyone needs to hear that song.”
She meets my eyes for a second before blinking away all softness.
“I agree,” Rhyson says quietly.
My best friend and I stare at each other for moments elongated with the things we haven’t talked as much about. We have so much in common—our passion for music, the video games we play, the books we read, our acerbic sense of humor—that we often haven’t discussed the ways we’re different. But the lyrics of “Bruise” paint a picture he’s never seen up close.
“So what do we need to do to make that happen?” Bristol has shifted from any sentimentality she felt for the song to battle plan, figuring out how to make it happen at this late date.
Rhyson and I break down every step we must go through to get the song on the album in time. She doesn’t blink, but Sarah scribbles frantically, jotting it all down.
“It’ll happen.” She looks at Rhyson and Max before her eyes land on me. “I promise I’ll get it on there in time.”
This is what I keep falling for over and over. Bristol is passionate and determined, one of those rare people who never accepts no for the ones she cares about. And whether or not she wants to admit it, she cares about me a hell of a lot.
We listen to three more songs. Bristol loves them all, but she likes everything I write. I’m not being conceited. I can’t think of one song or poem I’ve ever shared with her that she didn’t love.
“We need to nail this last song down.” Rhyson glances at his watch. “And quick. Kai has an ultrasound today, and I’d much rather see my baby than go through eight more songs when we only need one.”
He points to Bristol, his look only half playful.
“You get no say this time, Bris.”
“What?” She frowns and pushes out her bottom lip a little. “Why not?”
“Because you love everything Grip writes,” he says matter-of-factly. “You’re no help. We’ll be here all day.”
Her eyes flick to mine and then down to her iPad. She knows it’s true. I’ve never been more certain of anything than I am that Bristol cares deeply about me. I wasn’t guessing last night when I said she watches me. She does. I know she wants me, but a lot of girls do. None of them care about me the way Bristol does, though. The same bottomless devotion she has for her brother, for her few close friends—hell, even for her mother, who doesn’t deserve it, she has for me. She hides it in friendship and excuses it with business, but every time I catch her looking, I know the truth.