Oh, Snap!

  “If you hang up we’re sending a squad car to pick you up!” Bobbi, in her lowest voice.

  “Man, I didn’t do anything,” Phat Tony said. “I’m innocent!”

  “I’ll think about running the article,” I said, and hung up.

  Then I called the Cruisers and asked them how come they had busted the plan. They all had some kind of a lame excuse but they all seemed confident that Phat Tony was telling the truth. And we had all worked together. The Cruisers were back in business.

  THE PALETTE

  Is Education Optional?

  By Cody Weinstein

  On the PBS channel there was a show on how well an inner-city school in Detroit was doing. From what I saw the school was doing okay but not that great. What came to my mind is, Why is it newsworthy that a school has improved from doing badly to doing not so badly? Doesn’t that mean that we have accepted that some parts of our population will not be well educated?

  In England they are talking about allowing students to opt for a vocational track from the age of 14 on. This is at a time when nobody knows what “vocations” will even exist in 5 years. If 10,000 students choose training as carpenters, how do we know that there will be work for them in 10 years? And if there’s no work, what do they do?

  If I were a teacher I think that I would advise my students to stick with an academic approach simply because it gives students more flexibility over a lifetime. Perhaps we need to look at the schools that are doing okay and the students who are just getting by and take a different approach than either sending them away from the more difficult courses into job-related tracks or pumping them up for doing just-get-by work. I don’t know what to do, so don’t ask me, but I do see what’s going wrong.

  She was looking good!

  I guess, in sort of a technical kind of way, all women have breasts. I mean, my own mom has them. But I didn’t expect Caren Culpepper to show up at the police station wearing makeup. Okay, back to the technical stuff. Caren is a girl and most girls can look good when they want to look good. I know that. But Caren doesn’t usually have breasts that you would, like, notice. Only when she came down to the police station they were, like, you could see them!

  Kambui was there, with his grandmother.

  I was there, with Bobbi and LaShonda, so we had a full crew of Cruisers down at the 32nd Precinct Station House on West 135th Street. Getting Caren to come down came to me at the last moment, and I knew it was either going to work big-time or get me in a huge mess. I knew Caren would jump at the chance to get involved in anything that her father didn’t like, and especially if it was with the Cruisers. I also remembered something that Benjamin Franklin said: “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” I didn’t think Mr. Culpepper would hang everybody if one of the bodies was his own daughter. I told Caren it was all hush-hush and I would understand if she couldn’t make it.

  “Don’t tell your father,” I said. Actually, I was begging.

  “Don’t worry about it, babe,” Caren said.

  Babe?

  Sergeant Mike Lardner was tall, at least six feet, with red hair, blue eyes, and a kind of a crew cut that was going white around the edges. He looked like he knew a lot.

  “As you all know, we had a robbery of a store at the mall a few weeks ago,” Sergeant Lardner said. “Actually, we get a lot of robberies at the mall and we solve most of them pretty quickly. This week we received a message from Scotland Yard in London that told us that a school there had corresponded with Da Vinci Academy in Harlem about the stickup.”

  “Is this, like, one of those crimes we see on television?” Kambui’s grandmother asked. “Because if this is something about running around from one country to the other I need to tell you right up front that my grandson has never left the United States of America.”

  “No, ma’am,” Sergeant Lardner said, smiling. “This is a homespun stickup with homespun stickup guys. But as a courtesy to Scotland Yard we are doing a follow-up on their message to us, and as a courtesy to the community and to the young people at Da Vinci Academy, we have asked you down here tonight.

  “What we would like you to do is to review the videotape of the crime and make any comments on it that you would like,” the sergeant went on. “And if you would rather not comment, that’s fine, too.”

  I felt my stomach tighten up twice, once when Sergeant Lardner reached for the remote to turn on the video and once when Caren reached over and put her hand on mine.

  She looked like she could have been sixteen. Easy.

  The video was black-and-white and grainy but we could see the inside of the shop and two customers looking at jewelry in a case. They were a young Latino couple and had a baby in a stroller. Then a young dude came in wearing a hoodie that could have been any color. He looked around, and I could see the clerk behind the counter getting fidgety. She walked over to an edge of the glass display case and I figured that was where the alarm button must have been.

  The young couple walked out, the man first and then the woman pushing the stroller. I tried to imagine what they were saying.

  The clerks in the store relaxed after the hoodie dude left. Then. Three guys in hoodies walked in. One looked like the same guy who had been there before. They walked quickly to the girl clerk, and one reached over the counter and pushed her along toward the cash register. The stickup was going down.

  I saw one of the guys pull something from under his shirt and it looked like a gun.

  “Oh, sweat!” This from Caren.

  I’m looking and looking but the whole film is too grainy to really see that much.

  “They’re not children!” Kambui’s grandmother said.

  Just about then one of the guys in hoodies jumped up on a chair or maybe the counter and covered up the camera.

  “He put a sock over the lens,” Sergeant Lardner said. He reached over and turned off the television. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t think I know those guys,” I said.

  “Me, neither,” LaShonda said.

  Bobbi and Kambui were shaking their heads no and I looked at Sergeant Lardner and he seemed relaxed.

  “Ma’am, what was your name again?” he asked.

  “Mrs. Marie Owens.” Kambui’s grandmother sat up straighter.

  “As Mrs. Owens said, these were not kids,” Sergeant Lardner said. “They dressed in hoodies and they wore sneakers, but they weren’t young people. We picked up all three of them the day after the stickup.”

  “You could see who they were in that video?” Bobbi asked.

  “No, but good police work is not just looking at obvious clues,” Sergeant Lardner said. “We began asking around, picking up a few people who were caught in the wrong place at the wrong time with either stolen goods or drugs, and we began squeezing. Eventually we got a name of one of the guys who had bragged about pulling off the holdup. He even bragged that the police were going to think that teenagers did the crime.”

  “That’s cold,” LaShonda said.

  “It is. But once we got him and he saw what kinds of time he was facing he began to cough up other names,” Sergeant Lardner said. “And once we got those names we squeezed some more and solved quite a few crimes in the neighborhood. Now, this is where you guys come in.”

  “We didn’t do anything,” Caren said. “Honestly.”

  “I know, but you started an international investigation,” Sergeant Lardner said. “Now what we need you to do is to keep quiet about this video and keep quiet about us knowing who did the stickup so we can go through the crime chain and see what else we can pick up. Can you guys do that?”

  “Yeah, we can do that,” Kambui said, obviously relieved.

  “How about Scotland Yard?” I asked.

  “We’ll take care of Scotland Yard and they’ll just tell the kids in London that everything is under control,” Sergeant Lardner said. “That work for you?”

  We all nodded, even Kambui’s grandmother, but I had o
ne more piece to get in.

  “Could you tell the kids in London that the Cruisers were keeping things under control?” I asked.

  “What are the Cruisers?”

  “We four.” Bobbi pointed to the Cruisers, one by one. “And Caren is sort of Zander’s —”

  “Woman,” Sergeant Lardner finished Bobbi’s statement. “Consider it done.”

  Okay, so I’m looking at Caren and she’s grinning ear to ear and I’m feeling great because none of the Cruisers are in trouble and Kambui doesn’t have to snitch on anybody.

  I got home and Mom was making grilled mozzarella and spinach salad. It looked terrible.

  It tasted worse. Maybe because it was different. I’m not a big fan of different.

  “So what happened at the precinct is that we saw a videotape and we didn’t recognize anybody on it,” I said to Mom.

  “Kambui’s grandmother called me and told me,” Mom said. “And that some girl came along and she’s your woman.”

  “That’s Caren Culpepper, but she’s not my woman,” I said.

  “Then how did she get down there with your gang?”

  “It’s not a gang, it’s the Cruisers,” I said. “And she got down there because I invited her.”

  “So she’s not in the gang, or the Cruisers, she’s just your — what?” Mom was putting eggs in water and I was hoping she didn’t add them to the cheese and spinach.

  “Mom, you wouldn’t understand,” I said.

  “Of course not, I’ve only been a girl all my life,” Mom said. “Ask me why I’m making this dish tonight.”

  “Why?”

  “The whole question.”

  “Why are you making — Mom, I don’t care why you’re making it.”

  “Because from now on I’m going to cook for you on a regular basis,” she said. “No more fast food every night.”

  “So all we’re going to have for dinner tonight is spinach and cheese and eggs?”

  “You want to order something else?”

  FROM THE PAGES OF THE PALETTE

  Cruisers to the Rescue!

  by CAREN CULPEPPER

  Heroes! Scotland Yard has sent a letter of commendation to the New York City Police Department praising Da Vinci and especially the Cruisers for helping to keep their investigation of local crimes under wraps. Who knew that the much-maligned staff of The Cruiser would stand up and be counted when it most mattered? This is not Thug Life or sloppy journalism, it is international cooperation at the highest level!

  And thanks to Ashley for being BIG enough to recognize it!

  Okay, so there’s no girl in the world that I think can beat me. Unless maybe she’s into karate or aikido or like that girl in Kill Bill who went around chopping everybody up. And maybe I wouldn’t want to have to fight LaShonda or anybody as wild as she is. Okay, so maybe there are a lot of girls I don’t want to deal with, but one girl who doesn’t look very tough or fierce is Bobbi McCall, but she’s sneaky. So when LaShonda decided to go up against Charles Lord by occupying his front stoop, I thought it was cute and he’d have his people just move us off his stoop and forget us. That’s when Bobbi stepped in.

  “Girl, we are hot right now!” she said. “We need to step to that and show Mr. Lord we are not playing!”

  “Which is why I want the Cruisers to occupy his stoop,” LaShonda said.

  “If I amp it up, will you back it up?” Bobbi asked.

  “All the way!” LaShonda said.

  The truth was that this was getting down to a gender thing. Girls are ready to max out sometimes when the brothers (this time the brothers being me and Kambui) are ready to chill. Kambui was so relieved when he found out that Phat Tony wasn’t involved in the mall stickup that all he wanted to do was back off. I was ready to chill with him. We had gotten over without getting shot or anything, we didn’t have to snitch out our friends, and Caren’s piece in The Palette had made the Cruisers look like All World Heroes.

  Mr. Culpepper wasn’t really happy. He was still giving me the steel eyeball when he saw me in the hallways at Da Vinci, but that was more about what I might be doing with Caren than about the mall stickup.

  Bobbi was right, though. The Cruisers were on fire! So when me and LaShonda and Kambui showed up at Mr. Lord’s weekly press conference in front of Abyssinian Baptist Church we were pretty confident.

  Charles Lord has two bodyguards. One is a really, really black dude whose neck is as wide as his head is high. He is one funny-looking man, but you can’t say anything to him because he looks like he would eat you if he could find some mustard.

  The other bodyguard is a skinny little Latino guy who never learned how to smile. He is just evil-looking.

  “You okay?” I asked Kambui.

  “Yeah,” he said. “This is all working out.”

  I hoped he was right, but I wasn’t sure. Grown-ups have a way of making sure things don’t work out.

  But then ALONG CAME BOBBI. So what Bobbi brought along was the whole school! She had rounded up twelve kids to come occupy Mr. Lord’s stoop, and the rest of the school had caught on and they all came. I loved it. There were at least fifty thousand Da Vinci kids in front of Mr. Lord’s stoop. Okay, maybe fifty, but they were looking fierce!

  Along came Charles Lord. He looks around and his eyes grow wide. His first bodyguard — big black dude — looks around and his eyes grow wide. Latino dude looks around and doesn’t move. Everything is wonderful.

  “I don’t really want to deal with no children because the issues are not children’s issues!” Mr. Lord’s voice seemed strained.

  “Suffer the little children to come unto me!” This from a woman who was just passing by.

  “I am against the oppression of the poor!” Charles Lord was spitting into the microphone. “Are these elite little children — and I want to call them what they are, children — for the exploitation of the poor?”

  “You are against the students of Harlem!” LaShonda had a handheld mike. “You have always been against us, against senior citizens, against senior workers, and now you want to attack all of us at the same time!”

  That confused Charles Lord. That also confused me.

  And it confused most of the people and the kids from Da Vinci Academy. But after a while I began to understand LaShonda. She was going someplace where no one knew she was going. She was in another place and, in a way, almost in another time. Away from the beaten path, away from what was expected. She was being a Cruiser on the high seas of Life.

  People were looking at Charles Lord as if he was something weirder than the real Charles Lord actually was. An old woman, squat and heavy in her green dress with a scarf tied around the middle, walked up to Lord, put her double chins close to his chest, and asked him what did he have against students.

  “What did they do to you?!” she asked. “And why are you against these babies?!”

  Lord didn’t have anything to say, but when he saw me he waved me over.

  “Don’t talk to him,” Kambui said.

  “We got him!” This from LaShonda.

  I walked over to Charles Lord and looked him in the eye.

  “What do you people want?” he asked.

  “That you treat us as people who want to help this neighborhood,” I said. “And we’ll treat you the same way.”

  The thing with Lord is that he hadn’t expected any resistance. What he thought was going to happen was that a television camera or a reporter would show up and he could spout off whatever stray thought drifted through his big head. Me and the Cruisers really didn’t beat him down so much as take away his chance to spit more stupid stuff.

  In the end he finally huffed a little and puffed a little, and then stormed into his house. Good. I didn’t think he was going to mess with us again.

  So they’re holding a summer tennis camp on Saturday morning and there are two professionals in the middle of the street teaching kids how to hit a tennis ball. They’re supposed to be there for an hour before moving to another
part of the city. All of the Cruisers are there and we’re watching from a distance because none of us know anything about tennis. The only one who is really interested is LaShonda, and she’s thinking about designing something to wear that would be a really cool tennis outfit. She’s doing sketches like crazy and that’s pretty cool, but I’m getting ready to leave when Bobbi nudges me in the ribs.

  “Hey, isn’t that the kid who got kicked out of Da Vinci?” she asked.

  I don’t know any kid who got kicked out and I look to where she’s pointing. She was talking about Syed Nolan, the boy who was being mentored and pushed Shirley down.

  “Yeah, that’s him,” I said. “He’s not interested in tennis, either.”

  “I wonder what he’s reading,” Bobbi said. “If he couldn’t read at Da Vinci, what’s he reading now?”

  “I don’t know or care,” I said.

  “I’m going to find out.”

  I was going to say don’t do it, but that wasn’t right because I didn’t have anything against Syed, really. He just seemed like a mixed-up kid who probably needed a lot more help than we could give him.

  Bobbi started over and I went with her to make sure that Syed was going to be cool with her.

  What had looked like a book from down the street turned out to be some papers that Syed had folded.

  “What you doing?” Bobbi asked, turning sideways so she could see the papers on the box Syed was using as a table.

  “I ain’t talking to you!” Syed looked from me to Bobbi, and I could see his face harden.

  “That’s a right triangle over a pyramid,” Bobbi said, sitting next to Syed. Syed moved away about a foot, as if he didn’t want Bobbi that close. “You trying to figure out the height of the pyramid?”

  “No, just how tall it is,” Syed said. He moved his papers away.

  “I can do that!” Bobbi was getting excited. “You want me to show you?”

  Nothing from Syed. He looked up at me, and I nodded. “She’s good at that kind of thing,” I said. “Really good.”

  Syed shrugged and pushed the paper to Bobbi.