Read Online Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson - Free Book Online Page A

smiled, one side of her mouth went up followed by the other, and the four of us sat on the curb watching her, fascinated.
    At night, when the DJs plugged extension cords into the streetlights, the four of us followed the lineof brown and white cords to the music in the park. We watched neighborhood boys break-dance on flattened cardboard boxes and we screamed when the DJ threw Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke” onto the turntable, and Jerome pulled me away from my girls. In the darkness, with Stevie singing, They can feel it all over . . . I let Jerome kneel down in front of me, pull my shorts to my knees, and put his mouth on me until my body, from neck to knees, exploded. I pressed my back into the cement wall of the handball court, trembling. The DJ had cut a slow song I didn’t know into Sir Duke and I felt tearful suddenly. This was the temple I had promised Sister Loretta I’d protect, and now, cold suddenly, my shorts still down below my knees, I held Jerome’s head a moment, his face soft and wet against my belly, then pushed him down again.

    Temperatures broke the hundred-degree mark and we sweated through the days to get to nightsin the park. Angela found a boy named John who had delicate fingers and spoke with a lisp. Sylvia’s boyfriend was Jerome’s age, pulling Sylvia away from us into the darkness behind the handball courts. Gigi said she was falling in love with Oswaldo, whose older brother had been killed in a gang fight with the Devil’s Rebel’s the summer before. We were afraid of the gangs and the fires that turned the wood-framed houses in our neighborhood to ash. But we had our guys and we had each other.
    We knew the stories. Down on Knickerbocker a girl ran out of her house, her robe on fire. By the time she was safe, she was naked. On Halsey Street, a fireman carried two small children down the fire escape. For a long time, he couldn’t pry their frightened arms from around his neck. I searched for the children’s names in the paper, wondering if they had been Jennie’s children.
    At the end of the night, we pressed against our boyfriends, fingers locked together, slow swayingas the DJ announced, We about to shut this party down, y’all . Still, we held on to them, their skinny bodies as uncertain as our own of what we were moving toward. Please, they begged. And for a long time, we whispered back, Not that. Not yet.

    Charlsetta had been sent away. She was sixteen, captain of the Thomas Jefferson cheerleaders. She had a straightened ponytail and bangs oiled and spiraling over her forehead. For weeks, we asked her younger brother where she’d gone. The whole block had heard the yelling. We had watched her mother leaving the house for work in the morning, stern-faced and stiff-backed. Charlsetta got her behind beat last night, we said to each other. Her mother tore her up .
    And we laughed until the beating became legendary, a warning to all of us that this kind of public humiliation was only one belt-whipping away. There was some Charlsetta buried in each of us.
    She got a baby inside her, her brother finally admitted. She got sent back Down South.
    We pulled our boyfriends’ fingers from inside of us, pushed them away, buttoned our blouses. We knew Down South. Everyone had one. Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico. The threat of a place we could end back up in to be raised by a crusted-over single auntie or strict grandmother.
    Down South was full of teenagers like Charlsetta, their bellies out in front of them, cartwheeling in barren front yards as chickens pecked around them. We shivered thinking of Charlsetta’s belly and imagined her and her boyfriend together while her mother was at work. How many times had they done it? How did it feel? When did she know?
    We sat on stoops looking toward Charlsetta’s house. We thought she’d come home with a pink-blanketed baby in her arms. We imaginedher taking up her spot again on