At-Risk by Amina Gautier Page B

my money on cheap fireworks and water guns that leaked. I saw my brother.
    â€œNow,” Ma said. “What do you see?”
    Julian looked at me like I was one of those jigsaw puzzles he and our father could spend hours on, slapping me away anytime I tried to point to where a certain piece should go. My face tingled under his inspection.
    â€œI see Joseph. I see my brother,” he said solemnly. Then he began to chew on his lower lip. My mother nodded and waited for me.
    â€œI see my brother, Julian,” I said and shrugged.
    â€œThat’s right,” she said. “You’re the two men of the house now that your dad is gone. You’re brothers—blood—and you’re all each of you has in this world.”
    She squeezed tightly on both of our arms and said, “Don’t ever forget that.” There was an urgency in her voice and her grip that we couldn’t understand. It seemed so important to her that we answered and said the right thing. I couldn’t know that she was preparing us for the hard times to come, that she was trying to both protect usand make us immune to the things beyond our apartment that would strive to pull us apart.
    They began to whisper things about my brother right before school let out that summer. It suddenly became a big deal that Julian had never had a girlfriend when Sasha, a girl in Julian’s grade, spread the word that he didn’t like girls. Older boys picked on us whenever they saw us around, calling my brother Julie and calling me Josephine. Boys my age that I had previously run around with suddenly wanted to know if I had cooties and if I had caught them from my older brother. No one would let me tag them or borrow their skelly caps and no one would ride the handlebars of my bike. By the end of the summer, I knew that the whispers were fears and confirmations that Julian was what the boys at school called “funny,” what my mother called “nasty” and what the adults referred to as “that way.”
    I was too young to understand the various modes of defense we all set up to safeguard ourselves from looking too closely at my brother. I knew only that the kids were shunning him and that their disdain for Julian was trickling down to me. So I turned my back on him, too. That was the summer I began to venture out past our streets and projects, trying to see what was up in the areas close to us. I was an inner-city anthropologist checking out the locals. That summer, I became fascinated with the kids who lived near Livonia Avenue by the three train and with the boys that played in King Park. I was looking for people who didn’t know me, who didn’t know that Julian was my brother. I looked for ways to avoid him without appearing to do so. Before, I had enjoyed our late-night horror show marathons, but now I threw tantrums on the evenings our mother would go out to midweek service and leave Julian to watch over me. I didn’t know what it meant to be
that way
, but I knew that boys who had once eaten paste with me now brushed themselves off and crossed their fingers if they came into contact with me. I didn’t knowif what Julian had would rub off on me. And I didn’t know if it was temporary like the ringworm I had caught once or permanent like our mother’s diabetes.
    We were in the candy store on Pitkin and Van Siclen, a block from our house, getting Italian ices when a crew of boys from the first projects came in and saw us. None of them had their shirts on. Their nappy heads were beady with water, their scrawny chests slick with it, and their swim trunks were wet all the way through from spending the afternoon running through the fire hydrant on Bradford Avenue. Their swim trunks had no pockets, which meant that they had no money and no reason for being in the candy store. Except for us. I was hoping they weren’t there for us.
    They were.
    Will’s face broke into a grin. “Hey, look