“Leonard, no one has identified me yet,” she says.
“The feds tracked almost all your friends down, Summer, and each one of them disappeared, along with their families. It’s just you and Angela Benningford now. We can’t take the risk.”
My mother winces like she’s been slapped. “Am I going to miss her graduation?”
“You’re being ridiculous, Summer.”
“What about when she gets married?” she groans.
“Summer.”
“Are you going to let me see my grandchildren?” she cries.
My father throws up his hands. “You’re not a prisoner here. We can always leave, Summer. If we left, we could have normal lives. I have friends at the blockade who could help us get out even without identification. We could start over in Denver, or—”
“Shhhh!” I point at my bedroom door, quietly dreading that Bex will burst through it with a million questions. It’s a miracle that she hasn’t figured us out yet; the girl who hides in ugly clothes, the mom who never leaves the house, the father who lives on the edge of panic. I wait, but there is no burst, no million questions. She’s probably too busy liberating more of my clothes.
“I’m sorry,” my father whispers. “I saw Terrance Lir last night. He’s escorting the children to school and acting as a spokesperson.”
“Is Rochelle with him? And Samuel?”
My father nods. “They’re all back. There are men with them too. They look like Secret Service.”
“Where have they been?” I ask.
My father looks at his feet. There are rumors of prison camps, detention centers, mass graves even, but no one knows for sure. All we know is that most of Mom’s friends have vanished, and if we’re discovered, so will we.
“I don’t know, but they look horrible—skinny as sticks and wearing the same clothes they had on the day they disappeared.”
“Have you spoken to him?”
“Summer, I can’t! If someone saw us talking, they might make the connection.”
“But he can tell us about my family,” my mother begs.
My father shakes his head. “It’s best if we keep our distance, especially you, Lyric. He’s going to be in the school every day. He’s probably going to reach out to you, but you have to avoid him. You can’t let anyone think you know him.”
“You want me to ignore him?” This hurts my heart. Terrance Lir was like an uncle to me when I was little. When he and his family disappeared, we cried for days. I can’t imagine turning my back on him, especially if he’s been suffering.
My mother pulls me into a hug and squeezes like I am never coming home again. Her kiss leaves a wet ring of electricity on my cheek. “Be careful, and don’t forget to breathe.”
“You too.”
She smiles at me. It’s a crumpled thing, too small for her face. I remember when it used to shine like a star, fueled by her endless joy, but now it’s running on fumes. She can’t even muster enough power to bring her eyes along for the ride.
My father goes to his room and returns with his gun. While I eat cereal, he checks the clip to see that it’s loaded, reinserts it, and clicks off the safety. He double-checks the charge on his Taser and gives two canisters of pepper spray good shakes before putting them in his pockets. Then he turns to me.
“Get Bex. It’s time to go to school.”
Chapter Three
As soon as the elevator doors open, I wish we had taken the stairs. Mrs. Novakova, short and squat, is lurking inside, like a creepy garden gnome peering out of the brush.
“Getting off?” I ask.
She frowns and shakes her head. Of course she’s not getting off. How else will she interrogate us? I press the button for the lobby and hold my breath when the doors slide shut.
“You take these girls to the school, Leonard?” she asks my father in her thick, growly accent. She’s been in our building for fifty years, ever since emigrating from Eastern Europe—maybe Hungary, maybe Russia—I can’t remember. It’s someplace where the neighbors used to spy on one another for the government.
“Yes, Mrs. Novakova,” my father says as he watches the floor counter blink from four to three to two . . .
Mrs. Novakova’s mouth curls in disapproval, revealing her lipstick-stained teeth. “You never catch me near that school today. Mixing with us is wrong, especially the children. They are animals, and filthy, too! Always digging in trash cans, making too many babies, and living in filth. Like gypsies back home. Only good gypsy is dead gypsy. You stay away from them. You get disease. Who knows?”
“If they had a disease, I think we’d all have it by now,” my father says. “They’ve been here awhile.”
“Make no difference! You have crazy cow disease for ten years, then kaput! A man walks around, not even knowing he’s dead. That’s their plan. They spread sick to us, wait for us to die. I try to tell people. No one listens to old woman. Don’t you bring one of them back here!”
“I won’t, Mrs. Novakova,” I say.
Bex looks like she’s going to laugh, until I shoot her a look. Mrs. Novakova is old-school evil who rats on anyone she deems suspicious. Neighbors who have found themselves on her bad side have been dragged out of their beds and questioned by cops and gang members alike. I’ve learned to let every word I say to her roll around in my mouth to dull the sharp edges first.
“What are police doing to get rid of them, Leonard? I pay taxes for beach and I’d like to go down and take a walk,” she barks. “My husband and I spent every Friday night strolling along pier, until the coloreds and the Polacks took over. They bad enough. Now it’s those things.”
It takes every ounce of self-restraint for me not to roll my eyes. When her husband was alive, they fought day and night. An hour didn’t go by without her screaming to everyone who would listen about what a disappointment he was, how he had never amounted to anything, how she should have married Pavel, a very well-to-do tailor who had the common courtesy to die young and leave his widow a fortune. Her husband passed away two years ago. He choked on some soup. Really. I mean, who chokes to death on soup? Someone who’s looking for a way out, that’s who.
By the time we reach the lobby, Mrs. Novakova has given us an advanced-placement class on “the Chinks,” “the Spics,” “the Japs,” “the Kikes,” and “the towel heads,” all of whom she describes as filthy and “up to no good” and plotting to kill us all. My father has a patience with her he never has with me. He says “Good day,” and when the doors slide open he leads us outside.
“Someday she’ll die,” he promises when she’s out of earshot.
“I wouldn’t bet on it,” I reply.
Unfortunately, outside it’s even more oppressive than inside. It’s ninety-frickin’-eight degrees with a thousand percent humidity. Welcome to the early morning ugh of Coney Island, a sauna trapped inside an aquarium locked in a carwash next to a water park in hell. I sweat from every pore. My jeans glue themselves to my legs. My bangs drip like I used maple syrup to get just the right look. Awesome. I’m going to look like I swam to school, and because the universe hates me, here come the reporters to show the whole world my shame. They pounce like dogs on a pork chop, running across streets and through front yards, scampering over parked cars and surrounding us with microphones and questions. Their eyes are wide and eager. They flash smiles full of chalk-white teeth. Their spray-on tans have dyed their faces a rusty orange.
“Are you students at Hylan High?” one of them asks. Her hair is so motionless, it could actually be a helmet. I ignore her just like my father coached me. Keep your head down and they’ll go away. It usually works, but there are hundreds of them blocking the sidewalks and a dozen more racing in our direction. The neighborhood has been swarming with reporters for three years. They have a free pass in and out of the Zone, but I haven’t had to deal with this many in a while. Even my father is thrown.
“Can you tell our viewers your names?” one of them shouts.
“My name is Off
icer Leonard Walker,” he says, stepping between Bex and me and the cameras.
“And you’re a dad. Do you feel safe sending your girls to school today?”
My father nods. “The National Guard, United Nations, U.S. Army, Coast Guard, Homeland Security, and the Sixtieth and Sixty-First Precinct SWAT teams will be on campus to make sure things are safe. The NYPD Anti-Terrorism Division has done a great job as well. The students will have better protection than the president of the United States today.”
“How do you feel about sending your daughters to school with the—”
“I think it’s a big step forward for everyone,” my father interrupts. He doesn’t believe it, but that’s what the mayor wants all the police to say.
“Are you worried about violence?”
“Not from them. Our neighbors on the beach are pretty relaxed when they are unprovoked,” my father says as he continues to push us forward.
“Have you heard that Governor Bachman has threatened to block the doors to prevent the new students from entering?” another reporter asks.
“Then I hope I get to be the one that arrests her,” he says.
The reporters laugh and eye their camera operators happily. They’ve got their sound bite, and it looks like I’m going to be on the news after all.
He scowls. “It’s time to move on, people. You’re blocking the sidewalks. If you don’t disperse, I will have you arrested.”
“You can’t arrest us. We’re the press! We have rights,” they cry.
“Not in the Zone,” he says.
The reporters drift away, grumbling about the Bill of Rights, and when we can move again, I turn to my father.
“Remind me to give you a lecture about keeping your head down,” I say, hoping it stings.
They call our neighborhood lots of things—the Zone, the DMZ, Fish City. It’s two square miles of Coney Island that the military, government, and police keep under constant surveillance. The territory spans the western part of the peninsula at Surf Avenue, swallowing up the gated community of Sea Gate and Leon S. Kaiser Park. It travels east to Stillwell Avenue, and in the north it borders Neptune Avenue, a block from where I live. To the south is the ocean. There are two heavily fortified borders. The first, the north, has tanks, two armed guard towers, and a barbed-wire fence meant to keep us inside. If you want out, you need to have proof of who you are: driver’s license, birth certificate, and Social Security card. If you can’t provide all three, you aren’t going anywhere. The second border is the boardwalk, once the home of Luna Park, the Cyclone rollercoaster, Nathan’s Hot Dogs, and the Wonder Wheel. Now it’s the home of a massive tent city inhabited by thirty thousand immigrants who call themselves the Alpha, or the First Men. They have a similar fence, guarded by two hundred National Guard members. In the middle is a collapsing slum with frequent, and violent, clashes. You get used to walking around the bloodstains in the street.
So, why don’t we all move? Trust me, anyone with two pennies to rub together is long gone. Within six months of the Alphas’ arrival, the neighborhood lost ten thousand residents. They packed up, broke their leases, and never looked back. Many of my friends were dragged by their parents to points north—Bushwick, Sunset Park, Brownsville, East Harlem—essentially trading one span of urban blight for another. They’re the lucky ones. The rest are stuck without the money to move on. Sure, there are some who stayed out of loyalty. They grew up here and aren’t going to surrender their neighborhood, but most live in the housing projects and have nowhere else to go. The city doesn’t help poor people move unless rich people want their homes.
And then there are my parents and me. We’ve got our own screwed-up reasons for staying, but hopefully it won’t be for much longer.
“No way,” Bex cries when we turn the corner that leads to our school. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of locals are here to ogle. They mill about, taking pictures and uploading our lives onto Instagram or Tumblr. Hot dog carts are parked along the road; people sell bottles of water out of coolers. There’s a guy making balloon animals, and another running around with T-shirts commemorating today’s historic event. It looks like a street fair, but there is nothing festive about the mood. Something threatening and dangerous is in the air. It brushes past your arm, nudging you into an uncertain stride. It pokes at your frustrations, reminds you that you’re an animal in an overcrowded cage.
Beyond the looky-loos is an angry mob of hundreds, shouting, chanting, bellowing threats into the air. Their words wear brass knuckles. They carry signs, too. freaks! monsters! animals! satan’s spawn!—all the classics, and, not surprisingly, a lot with scribbled Bible verses.
“Stay close,” my father says as he takes my hand. In turn, I grab Bex and we squirm into their numbers. I’m elbowed and jostled until one of the protestors blocks our way. He’s wearing a T-shirt with an eagle ripping through an American flag on it and those jeans with the elastic waistband I didn’t know they made for men. He’s as tall as he is wide, sweaty and red, and ten minutes from a stroke. His sign misspells the word abomination.
“You don’t have to go to school with monsters!” He sprays spittle all over me.
“Actually we do,” Bex says. “It’s the law.”
“Don’t engage with them,” my father barks as he drags us onward. “These people are on the edge. The slightest thing could make them erupt. Use your head!”
As we get closer I see soldiers in green camouflage uniforms. Each carries an assault rifle strapped to his or her chest. Some stand on street corners watching and waiting, their fingers resting on triggers. Some cruise slowly by in black jeeps with high-pressure water cannons mounted on top. Others lurk on rooftops and talk into radios. One is on horseback. He trots back and forth behind a barricade, barking a laundry list of rules into the air.
“Citizens must stay ten yards from the barricades unless they are students, parents, or staff. Violators will be arrested. Anyone can be stopped and searched. Individuals who do not submit will be immediately arrested. Citizens who fail to obey direct orders will be arrested.”
In the crowd is a stocky boy with shaggy brown hair hanging in his eyes. He’s Latino, with milky brown skin and a wide grin. His smartphone scans the crowd in every direction, capturing the protest and the vicious words. When he spots us, he smiles, turning his lens on Bex and me.
“Say hi to the world,” he urges.
“Hi, world. I’m Bex and this is Lyric and this sucks!”
He laughs, as usual. He finds Bex endlessly entertaining, and when they are together, the two turn into a couple of giggling idiots. His name is Tito but we call him Shadow because he’s been following Bex around since the fifth grade, shortly after we found him in our elementary school cafeteria trying to get milk to dribble out of his eyeball. He swore he saw someone do it online, so we watched with disgusted fascination. After three cartons, all he had managed to do was give himself a headache, but Bex saw his potential as a friend and a curiosity. Shadow gradually lost his baby fat and grew into a handsome guy. Thank goodness he stopped trying to do the milk trick.
Now his fascination, aside from Bex, is making movies and putting them on the Internet. There is a lot to document in the Zone and an endless appetite for a peek inside. The Daily News and the LA Times pay to use the videos he posts. I’ve seen some of his stuff on CNN. His website gets a million views a month.
“Are they here yet?” Bex asks him.
He shakes his head and continues to record the crowd with his phone. “Not yet, but I hear they’re on their way.”
My father talks to a soldier who points us toward some blue police barricades that mark off a path to the front steps of the school. He tells us we have to get in line, but I don’t see any other students waiting, so I guess we’re first, or maybe we’re the only kids coming to school today. Many parents threatened to keep their children home when the integration plan was announced, even under threat of arrest. Bex, Shadow, and I might have the whole place to ourselves—well,
except for the Alpha.
When we get to the front of the line, another cop orders us to wait while he shouts something into his radio. He’s a short, stubby fireplug who might as well have the word Irish tattooed on his blotchy, freckled face. His white shirt is soaked through with sweat and reveals way more than anyone should ever see. His arms and hair glisten. Wet thumb stains smear the paperwork on his clipboard.
When he sees my dad, his face falls as he eyes his list, like he’s being asked to choose which one of us will live or die. “Leonard? Your girl goes here?”
My father nods. “Tommy, this is my daughter, Lyric, and her friends Becca Conrad and—kid, what’s your name?”
Shadow grins. “Tito Ramirez.”
Irish Tommy takes our IDs and double-checks his list. “Okay, kids. Keep your identification on you at all times. If you are found in the halls without it, you will be arrested, whether you’re this guy’s daughter or not. Got it?”
I nod my head.
“Once inside, go to your homerooms and stay there until you’re told to move to the next class. The bells don’t mean anything today. Do not linger in the halls or bathrooms between classes. Your lockers are subject to search at any time. If a soldier, police officer, teacher, or staff member tells you to do something, do it. We’re not putting up with any teenage crap today. If you start a fight, argue, or look at anyone cross-eyed, you’re going to the Tombs.”
“No way!” Bex cries.
Even if my father wasn’t a cop, I would know about the Tombs. It’s a jail in lower Manhattan stocked with crackheads, muggers, and rapists waiting for arraignment. It’s notoriously dangerous. People walk out with their noses in different places than when they went in. Sometimes people die in there. Bex’s stepfather has spent more than a few nights inside Hell Hotel. He comes home tame as a housecat, until it wears off and he’s back to being an ass.
Tommy pats us down while another cop waves a metal-detector wand over us in case Tommy didn’t find everything. It goes wild over Shadow’s sack lunch, and when he empties it the cops confiscate his spoon.