Korê in New York

What happens when a kid refuses to leave the past behind? What happens when the past won't go away? Read on and don't worry about the emotional damage.

1. Rope Shreds

   I let Larisa take me home Tuesday afternoon, after going through the motions with Nervy and my studies Monday. I needed a break. I needed to recharge. I felt as if I had left something behind on those third level battens Saturday night and I was not able to get it down. I felt as if Anthony had stolen something long ago before I ever met RoAnn, when he and RoAnn were still husband and wife and lived in Ithaca, New York where they both were graduate students. I felt that the something was lost in all the living around the world RoAnn had done and her adventures for which her female relatives reproached her.

   RoAnn told me those stories to cheer me up in the summers during middle school when I came to visit and needed cheering up or filling in or something. I needed a new school, a new past, a new me. I got the second item on the list, and it has helped but only so much. RoAnn settled down, and now the child is gone. Houghton and Friends have fallen. Mom is lost in the fight. Dad is lost supporting all of us and RoAnn doesn’t think she is lost, but like me, she is lost in the past.

   The future is supposed to be Young Achievers, but the real future is gone. It’s a brick wall. I know that. I woke up to knowing it Monday and I couldn’t tell a soul except you, dear reader. I made Nervy dinner. I played sentence pieces with her and we made sentences. We practiced penmanship. She read to me since she can’t read silently yet. I found my little sister very amusing. She too has a brick wall for a future. No one has talked about where she will spend the summer, or where she will be in September. I’m going to lose my sister! I’m going to lose my sister and nobody gives a flying fuck!

   I’ve all ready lost my parents, but every kid kind of loses their parents when he or she realizes they are real people. Piper says all adults are failures. I say that is harsh, but I can live with my parents being gone. I just can’t live with what happened to my siblings and worse yet, what I know will happen soon.

   Monday night I dreamed about having to go to some kind of benefit at the New York Botanical Gardens in the Bronx. Ivanna was there talking with the Fast Crowd from Houghton who were arranging for her to return to New York. When Rachielle tried to sing with the boy who always got to wear leather pants instead of dress code clothes as the boy played the piano for her, the ECBAS kids made cat calls.

   I was glad to open my eyes. In the semi dark, my wristwatch said it was four in the morning. I decided to catch up on my studying and have tea. Then I wrote a note that I was going to group study with Larisa.

   Larisa asked if I had permission. I told her I had noblesse oblige. I even called in on my Blackberry and got my permission. I just needed a break, and Nervy’s relish tray was ready. Nervy would have her one of each sandwiches, relish tray, and her made to order breakfast of Cracklin Oat Bran and her favorite cranberry juice cocktail from the juice rotation (Yes we have a juice rotation just like we have a soup rotation and a vegetable rotation. Our food life is never dull! Neither Nervy nor I want a dull food life!) every day and she’ll have them right until Mom comes to carry her off like property or leaves her dumped. When you think about it, both options suck.

   I don’t have a family left. Larisa does, so I’d go visit hers. Actually, though, Larisa’s family is not my family. It can’t be. They’re religious, but I think they go through the motions most of the time since the Bible is fresh stuff to me and praying is an act of desparation. I can really talk to God. He says “take a number,” but that is better than “fuck off.” Yes, God knows all the curse words. That is what being omnipotent means. Of course God also has an infinite imagination.

   It was still light when we reached Coney Island. Yes, Day Light Savings time and spring were here. I wanted to walk on the beach. That meant we ran on the beach. The ocean was twenty times better than the Susquehanna or even the Hudson. I needed to run by the sea. I needed the silvery sky and opalescent waves and the screaming gulls, and the battered boardwalk. I needed to skirt the horizon as far as I could go, all the way to the new apartments and the remains of the old amusement park. “

   “They’re building a new amusement park,” Larisa told me was we walked back over the boardwalk so we’d return to civilization and the real world and not just some surreal place on the boarder of my mind and something else.

   “Will it be ready in our lifetimes?” I asked.

   “You mean before we leave for college?” Larisa was determined to bring me back to earth.

   “Yeah…I guess. I can always go home from college and go.”

   “We can take the kids from IS-179 as a field trip. We need to get those kids and make YouTubes.”

   I did not answer. “Do you think they’ll have the park ready before we graduate from college?” I asked, determined NOT to talk politics.

   “Who knows?” Larisa finally came out with the truth.

   “What’s happening with your runaway sister?” Larisa was not afraid to ask about Ivanna.

   “RoAnn has to go to Ithaca and talk to the judge April 18th. Dad will have to stay in town to take care of Nervy. That means He’ll be gone a long time in May.” There I said it all.

   “Do you think RoAnn will get her daughter back?” asked Larisa.

   “Ivanna is not RoAnn’s posession!” I all but screamed.

   “You want Ivanna to stay in North Carolina?”

   “No, I want everyone settled into a family where they are happy and if they can’t be happy, then we can get shuffled around, but then let’s all stay put, and it can be stable after that.”

   “Shit,” sighed Larisa.

   “I’ve had a very different life from you,” I confessed.

   “You don’t have to cry,” Larisa told me.

   “Do you miss your mom?” she asked, “Your real mom?”

   “No,” I told my friend. “I ran away from her because we fought all the time. I love her a lot and admire her, but I’d rather live with my Dad and stepmother.”

   Larisa shook her head. “I’m part of the problem,” I to confessed. “I know that. No one is innocent, but it still hurts and I’m still scaird.”

   “Why are you scaird?”

   “Because I’d like things to be stable. I’d like everyone to have the place where they are going to live until they go away to college whether it’s with one parent or no parents, but I’d like for all four of us kids to know it. Then we can get back to politics, and we’ll fight until we die.”

   Larisa and I leaned out over the boardwalk. We stared at the waves under a sky that was turning the color of ball point pen stains and light pollution. It was easy for the sky to go the bluish glow of emergency lights backstage.

   I was splicing wires when I slipped. Any one can slip. Any one can fall. If you fall once and you are not afraid, you are never afraid again. I fell and then the cord broke. The stage was below me. “Open the fucking trap door!” screamed Javnonovitch not caring if the audience heard above the music. They were playing “Pre-pare Ye, The Way of the Lord!” It’s one of my favorite songs.

   Javonovitch opened the trap door so I would not hit the stage, so I could keep falling without hurting myself. I was still falling. The rope had snapped but I was not hurt. Once you fall you are not ever afraid again. I opened my eyes and looked for the frayed end of the rope, but instead, I found only my backpack straps that were tired but still a good tight harness.

   “You OK?” asked Larisa, which of course was a rhetorical question.

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