THE STORE

FICTION

Joanne Skerrett

You are here to make bank. That’s what he said. We gotta make bank. So you pull your braids back into a ponytail, pull your hoodie over your head, and try to get your mind right.

“They got cameras everywhere these days.”

He didn’t need to tell you that; you are ready for this. You are here because you, too, believe that some ice on a chain, new J’s, new drip, might set things right in your world in some magical way, might even give you a glimpse of the person you were a year ago.

You hop off the bus after him and wonder how Georgetown and Congress Heights can exist in the same city, on the same day, at the same time. In your neighborhood, the streets are quiet, empty, gaping with fear; good people have no business lingering outside. But here, rich people are moving in a slow, carefree, Saturday kind of way, wandering in and out of stores, drinking coffee, staring into restaurant menus with very serious looks on their faces.

“There’s one right there, on that building.” You point at the camera above The Sandwich Shoppe where dozens of people are lined up outside, as if a sandwich could be that great.

“Keep your head down.” He adjusts his cap. “The camera’s real good these days.”

You already know that from your foster mother’s posts on the neighborhood watch Twitter. She’s been calling the councilman three days now to replace the cameras by the bus stop after the Kings shot it out. She still calls the cops when the Kings start shooting in the alley and laughing, like it’s BB guns they’re playing with, like it’s not real life. They wake her up every night; she complains to the cops. “I pay my taxes, dammit! I deserve a good night’s sleep!” You sometimes wonder how you’ve come to know all these things in just one year, like how a 9mm bursts through the night in staccato pops and how a Draco AK47 obliterates all silence, leaving a thunderous echo in your

ears until the sirens, until she stops muttering about those murderous boys, another funeral she’ll have to attend, another meal she’ll have to cook for their wailing families.

Now, he could stand to learn some things from you if he’d just stop fronting so hard. Those boys on Atlantic Ave. laugh when he walks past them on the way to your house. His head-down-shuffle tells them he’s not from around the way. You and he have that in common. But at least they haven’t messed with him yet.

You feel like a bug in a bowl of Cheerios even from the sidewalk. People say sorry when they brush by you on the sidewalk. He laughs, but you can tell he’s nervous from the way he looks up and down M Street. The only other lost-looking people are taking pictures and asking for directions to the White House, the waterfront, and the C&O Canal Trail. You start to say you don’t know but he grabs your elbow. “Come on, let’s go inside.”

This store is made for rich people that can’t see or something — all these white walls and bright white lights everywhere. You lean on the heavy glass door, but it doesn’t move. He snickers and pulls the handle. Classical music is playing inside. You feel like an alien. Everything around you is so bright, open and honest. You recognize nothing on the display shelves. Where is the jewelry case with the rings and necklaces? You follow him as he strides throughout the store daring the clerk to even acknowledge him. Your neck swivels around, and you fear your head will twist clean off. You don’t see any jewelry.

What the f —” he mutters.

p

You worried things could go really wrong when you settled into the back row of the Circulator bus from Gallery Place an hour earlier. He was corny and annoying, playing his music extra loud. An old lady kept sighing all loud and glaring at you. He bopped his head and rapped louder, and the old lady begged you with her gray eyes. Like you could stop him. The other bus riders melted into their phones. You studied your nails and thought maybe you shouldn’t have paid fifty bucks for those acrylic tips. It was crazy hot outside. But there you were, wearing a hoodie in July. He put his arm around you, and your heartbeat calmed, your teeth unclenched. You looked up

into his brown eyes and his innocent smile. “Everything’s going to work out, you’ll see.” The bus driver kept eyeing him through the rearview mirror, and you want to go up there and tell him to mind his damned business.

p

You took the Circulator to school with her back when things were normal, before the immigration people came knocking that crazy morning. She would make Ugali for breakfast on Mondays. “But that is not the kind of breakfast I would eat growing up in Burundi,” she would say, as if you were so lucky to be eating this African food. Then she would run her fingers along your hairline to smooth the flyaways. She walked you all the way to the school entrance. “I don’t want you talking to those girls from Langley Park, okay? When I get my new job, we will move to Silver Spring and I will put you in the Catholic School.”

Those Langley Park girls? Those girls made fun of her accent, even though their own parents were foreigners, too. Ethiopians. They laughed when you spoke. “Your mother a bush lady and you a bush baby.”

p

The whoosh of the air conditioner disorients you back to the chilly, sparkling present. He is strolling around the store, inspecting preciouslooking things on the white shelves. You follow him a pace or so behind. Finally, your confused eyes meet and silently admit: There is no jewelry case. No rings to be tried on, so the skit you practiced for the last two days will go to waste. You realize this was a stupid idea. Nobody would care if you stole some ice from a fancy jewelry store. Only those boys in his class he was flexing for would. You just want to go home. “Is this the right place?”

He scowls. “Don’t ask dumb questions.”

The salesgirl is bored but suspicious. “Can I help you?”

The kind of accessories they sell here are vaguely recognizable to you, things you saw in the houses your mother cleaned in Bethesda— or was it MacLean? —glassy things that go on a wall shelf

or in the center of a dining table. Or for the spelling quiz word you failed. Credenza.

You told him your mother cleaned houses on the bus ride here, and he laughed. Then you told him the bush baby story, and he pulled you closer into him.

“Maybe we go and find the store with the fancy jewelry,” you whisper. But he only glares at the salesgirl, who immediately shrinks into a back room. He grabs a shiny thing from a display table, a glass fairy with wings holding a baby fairy to its chest.

“We might get something for that.”

You stare at him. Who would want that? The fairy glints in the white light then disappears as he quickly shoves it into your sweatshirt pocket.

You follow him out of the store into the enveloping heat of M Street, into the crush of tourists, into nicely dressed people carrying salads in cardboard bowls.

“We’ll look for the jewelry place now?”

He shakes his head. “Nah, we better get outta here quick before that girl realize her little glass toy is missing.”

On the bus ride home, he tells you his mother OD’d when he was in kindergarten, and that he’d gotten into the system when his grandmother died last year. That’s how you met him in the social worker’s office that first week of school. He had just left group home and moved in with his new fosters.

“Keep it,” he nods at the fairy thing bulging in your sweatshirt.

p

Later, your foster mother comes into the living room, surprising you, and you tell her the glass fairy thing is a present for her birthday. You meant to find a hiding place for it and then mail it to Burundi as a Christmas present. You’d looked at it a hundred times since you’d gotten home that afternoon, the fairy mom with wings holding the baby fairy. Maybe it would remind her of you and her and what your life in America used to be.

The yellow sunlight above the couch hits the fairy mom’s wing, sending a ray across the room. Your foster mother turns the thing over in her hand a few times and eyes you suspiciously. She

asks if you were out with him again and whether you finished your homework.

You remind yourself that in two years you will turn eighteen.

After dinner, you wash the dishes. She is in her room posting on the neighborhood watch Twitter again as darkness falls and the Kings prepare for their nightly battles. She has abandoned the glass fairy mom and baby next to a carton of expired milk on the counter.

You wonder if the cassava leaves back home in Burundi are fresh enough— finally— to her satisfaction. You wonder if she wonders what you are doing with your Monday afternoons.