At-Risk by Amina Gautier Page A

intermediate school with the free lunch program and Miller Park across the street from it, the bodegas on Bradford Avenue, the row on Pitkin Avenue, which included the candy store, take-out Chinese, video rental, discount store, and stores that were fronts for people playing the numbers, and a smaller row on Van Siclen Avenue with the pizza shop, liquor store, and dry cleaners. Across from the three main streets were our three blocks of Fiorello projects, which we called first, second, and third. Our projects were stubby, only going up to the fourth floor. There were four projects per block. We lived on Miller between Pitkin and Glenmore.
    We were young that summer that our father left us. Julian was almost twelve and I was nine and a half. The weekend after their last fight, we were in our usual spot, seated directly in front of the TV , watching Saturday morning cartoons when our mother called to us.
    She came when we didn’t answer. “Come with me,” she said, standing in front of the TV . She was wearing a cotton dress that hung off her. Our mother had been a good-looking woman, butin less than a week, she became a skeleton of her former self. She seemed slighter, her smooth brown skin now splotchy. Overnight, she seemed to have aged. Lately, the corners of her mouth were always drifting downward.
    â€œGet up!” she said sharply, pulling us up from the floor by the scruffs of our necks as if we were kittens. She took us into her bed-room. With grim determination, she opened Dad’s side of the dresser and the left side of the closet so that we could see that all of his stuff was gone. She lifted the edge of the dust ruffle from where it hung to the floor and forced us to peek under the bed. No brightly polished loafers peered back. Our father was truly gone. All of our father’s toiletries that usually lined the left-hand side of the dresser were gone. Small circles of clean wood where the toiletries had sat stood out among the dusty, watermarked surface.
    â€œI’m not gonna say this but once, boys. Your father is gone,” she said. She released our napes and turned us so that we were face to face.
    â€œNow, I want you to take a good look at each other,” she said, her voice a command. So we did.
    Julian looked like a miniature version of our father with his high forehead, wary eyes, serious mouth, and stubborn chin. His peasy hair was uncombed, sleep rimmed the corners of his eyes, and his mouth hung slack. His elbows and knees were white with ash and his bony arms were dwarfed by the huge Spiderman T-shirt he’d slept in. The shirt didn’t cover his knees—like little knobs they poked out and made his bony giraffelike legs more pronounced. I rubbed my eyes and we stared at each other, unable to comprehend our mother’s strange request. Julian looked at me and wriggled his finger near the side of his nostril, pretending to dig in his nose. Grinning, he reached toward me as if to wipe the imaginary booger on my Transformers shirt. I jumped back and our mother grabbed us.
    â€œStop that!” she said, slapping our arms and clamping down our wrists with a viselike grip. “Be serious now. I want the two of you to understand what I mean. Julian, you take a look at Joseph. Joe, you take a good look at Julian. I mean it!” she snapped.
    So we stopped fidgeting and looked again. I looked Julian dead in the eyes and he looked right back at me. It was as if we were playing chicken with our eyes. Neither of us dared to be the first to look away. Looking this time, I didn’t see the imaginary booger or the Spiderman T-shirt. I saw the boy who gave me first pick of books at the public library when we went on Fridays to get our books for summer reading. He was my partner for watching the late late shows and all the horror flicks. In my eyes, he was the someone who always had an extra quarter so that I could buy a bag of barbecue potato chips after I had spent all