No Place Safe by Kim Reid Page B

she was on a call and there was a blue light affixed to the roof of the Buick. Normally I didn’t much notice it, but that day it bothered me.
    “Why me?”
    “Don’t get smart.”
    “I’m not getting smart, but I don’t see what I can do about it.”
    “You can get a job.”
    I didn’t say anything, but went silent so that Ma knew I was going into a funk. She stopped that right off.
    “You like living in a house with a pool in the backyard, having your own bedroom, being seen by your friends in a nice car.”
    Silence from me.
    “You don’t have to answer, I know you. You got champagne tastes, and I got Kool-Aid money. If you want to keep going to the private school, you’ll have to pay for half of it.”
    A year earlier, I’d have thought Ma was right, even if I didn’t admit to it. But after a year spent with kids who drove new cars more expensive than ours, kids who came to school wearing ski jackets with the lift tickets still hanging from the zipper to broadcast where they’d spent Christmas break, I thought it was a bit much to say I had champagne tastes. All I wanted was a decent education. Besides, where did she think I got my champagne tastes? She had the same affliction.
    A decent education wasn’t the whole story. I’d convinced myself that the private school in a rich, white suburb of Atlanta was safer for me. No one was stealing kids away from that part of town. Whoever was doing the killing didn’t want white kids, and they wouldn’t come to Ashford-Dunwoody looking for black children. Around there, we were rare as snow in a Georgia winter. True, I lived just a few miles from where the kids were being taken, and I had to ride the city bus through downtown in darkness for most of the school year, but I figured that going to the private school kept me safer for at least half of my waking hours. This line of thinking led me to my first paying gig.
    Ma had a friend who owned several McDonald’s restaurants and he offered me a job. Kids were supposed to be sixteen to work in a restaurant, or fifteen with a work permit. I was fourteen, which meant I had to lie to get mine. Ma was an accomplice in my birth certificate forgery. Even though she was cop, she’d bend a few minor rules occasionally. My experience taught me that some cops did. They wouldn’t do anything that would make for a TV movie, or get internal affairs into their business, but there was the occasional fudging of the lines. In the case of the forged birth certificate, I guess lying about my age in an effort to improve my collegiate prospects was allowable.
    I worked in Five Points, literally the crossroads of downtown Atlanta, at the busiest McDonald’s in the metro area. Across the street from the store was the main hub of the rapid rail system, which later grew new lines all over the city and beyond, like fissures spreading through sun-dried Georgia clay. I loved Five Points; for almost ten years it was the center of my world as I passed through it twice a day between home and school—through elementary, high school, and into college—a kind of border crossing as I traveled from one of my lives to the other.
    There wasn’t much fancy about that stretch of Peachtree—a pawn shop where I bought my stereo, turntable, and speakers on layaway; a Rexall Drugs; two shoe stores that always seemed to sell the same stock—Butlers and Bakers; Kesslers’s Department Store; and McCrory’s Five and Dime as the old folks called it, but I don’t recall anything in the store being either five or dime. McCrory’s is where I’d buy Squirrel Nut Zippers and apple Jolly Ranchers as a sixth grader, and my first set of sheets when I moved out of my mother’s house and into my own apartment at twenty.
    In the middle of that stretch was the only bit of elegance in that area—Rich’s Department Store across the street from where I worked. It was where old ladies who peaked in the fifties still came to dine at a restaurant on the top floor