Philadelphia Noir - Carlin Romano [16]
“Come off it, Aja. I just said I didn’t know about it.”
“I just think if you live right here … maybe your mom knows about it?”
“Look, is there a story here?”
“Well, it’s crazy. There’s this wooden gate with a towing sign on it like it’s just a parking lot, but behind it is this massive pool and these brand-new lockers and everything. And it was so crowded!”
“Any black people there?”
“Zingha, why you have to make everything about black and white?”
“Maybe because people are starting all-white pools in my neighborhood.”
She sighed. “There was a black guy there.”
“Janitor?”
“I think he was the security guard.”
I snorted.
We watched a black Range Rover crawl down the block. The windows were tinted, and LL Cool J’s “The Boomin’ System” erupted from the speakers.
“Wow,” I said, in mock awe. “That’s boomin’ from his boomin’ system.”
“So ghetto,” said Aja.
“Um, because this is the ghetto,” I said, though my mother forbade me to use the word.
“He spoke to me,” Aja said suddenly. “The pool security guard. He wasn’t that much older than us.”
“Was he cute?” I asked without much interest.
“Tell you the truth, he’s a little creepy. Like maybe he was on that line between crazy and, um, retarded.”
I laughed and then she did too.
“So you been hanging out with Jess a lot this summer?” Jess, a gangly brunette with an upturned nose, was Aja’s entry into the clique to which she aspired. But Jess sometimes ignored Aja for weeks at a time, and had repeatedly tried to date guys who Aja liked.
“Well, not a lot. She was at tennis camp earlier,” Aja said, glancing away from my face. She could never fully commit to a lie. I imagined my older brother Dahani a couple of nights ago, spinning a casual yarn for my mom about how he’d been at the library after his shift at the video store. He said he was researching colleges that would accept his transfer credits. Dahani had been home for a year, following a spectacular freshman-year flameout at Oberlin. That memory led me to a memory from seventh grade when Dahani said he’d teach me how to lie to my mother so I could go to some unsupervised sleepover back when I cared about those things. I practiced saying, “There will be parental supervision,” over and over. Dahani laughed because I bit the inside of my cheek when I said my line.
“You mean the pool at the Y?” my mom asked me later that night. We had just finished eating the spaghetti with sausage that she had cooked especially for my brother. She had cracked open her nightly can of Miller Lite.
“Not that sewer,” I said.
“Poor Zingha, you hate your fancy school and you hate your community too. Hard being you, isn’t it?”
“Sorry,” I muttered, rather than hearing again about how I used to be a sweet girl who loved to hug people and cried along with TV characters.
Dahani, who used to have a volatile relationship with our mother, was now silent more often than not. But he said, “I know what you’re talking about, Zingha. Up on 47th Street.” Then he immediately looked like he wanted to take it back.
“You been there?” I asked.
“Just heard about it,” my brother said, tapping out a complicated rhythm on the kitchen table. When he was younger it meant he was about to go to his room. Now it meant he was trying to get out of the house. I wasn’t even sure why he insisted on coming home for dinner most nights. Though of course free hot food was probably a factor.
“So what are you up to tonight?” my mother asked him brightly.
“I was gonna catch the new Spike Lee with Jason,” he said.
My mother’s face dimmed. She always hoped that he’d say, Staying right here. But she rallied. “You liked that