The Twelfth Card

They started for the school.
    *   *   *
    Lakeesha Scott sat on the bench in Marcus Garvey Park, where she’d been for the past half hour, after she’d come back from her counter job in the restaurant downtown.
    She lit another Merit, thinking: There are things we do ’cause we want to and things we do ’cause we gotta. Survival things.
    And what she was about now was one of those had-to things.
    Why the fuck didn’t Geneva say that after all this shit she was booking on out of town and never coming back?
    She was going to Detroit or ’Bama?
    Sorry, Keesh, we can’t see each other anymore. I’m talking forever. Bye.
    That way, the whole fucking problem’d be gone for good.
    Why, why, why?
    And it was worse than that: Gen had to go and tell her exactly where she was going to be for the next few hours. Keesh had no excuse to miss the girl now. Oh, she’d kept up her ghetto patter when they’dbeen talking a while ago so her friend wouldn’t hop to something going down. But now, sitting alone, she sank into sorrow.
    Man, I’m feeling bad.
    But ain’t got no choice here.
    Things we do ’cause we gotta . . .
    Come on, Keesha said to herself. Got to get over. Let’s go. Bring it on . . . .
    She crushed out her cigarette and left the park, headed west then north on Malcolm X, past church after church. They were everywhere. Mt. Morris Ascension, Bethelite Community, Ephesus Adventist church, Baptist—plenty of those. A mosque or two, a synagogue.
    And the stores and shops: Papaya King, a botanica, a tuxedo-rental shop, a check-cashing outlet. She passed a gypsy cab garage, the owner sitting outside, holding his taped-together dispatch radio, the long cord disappearing into the unlit office. He smiled at her pleasantly. How Lakeesha envied them: the reverends in the grimy storefronts under the neon crosses, the carefree men slipping hot dogs into the steamed buns, the fat man on the cheap chair, with his cigarette and his fucked-up microphone.
    They ain’t betraying nobody, she thought.
    They ain’t betraying the person was one of their best friends for years.
    Snapping her gum, gripping her purse strap hard with her pudgy fingers tipped in black and yellow nails. Ignoring three Dominican boys.
    “Psssst.”
    She heard “booty.” She heard “bitch.”
    “Pssssst.”
    Keesh reached into her purse and gripped her spring knife. She nearly flicked it open, just to see ’em flinch. She glared but left the long, sharp bladewhere it was, deciding she’d have a world of trouble when she got to the school. Let it go for now.
    “Pssst.”
    She moved on, her nervous hands opening a pack of gum. Shoving two fruity pieces into her mouth, Lakeesha struggled to find her angry heart.
    Get yourself mad, girl. Think of everything Geneva done to piss you off, think of everything she be that you ain’t and never gonna be. The fact the girl was so smart it hurt, that she came to school every single fucking day, that she kept her skinny little white-girl figure without looking like some AIDS ho, that she managed to keep her legs together and told other girls to do the same like some prissy moms.
    Acting like she better than us all.
    But she wasn’t. Geneva Settle was just another kid from a mommy-got-a-habit, daddy-done-run-off family.
    She one of us.
    Get mad at the fact that she’d look you in the eye and say, “You can do it, girl, you can do it, you can do it, you can get outa here, you got the world ahead of you.”
    Well, no, bitch, sometimes you just can’t do it. Sometimes it’s just too fucking much to bear. You need help to get over. You need somebody with benjamins, somebody watching your back.
    And for a moment the anger at Geneva boiled up inside her and she gripped the purse strap even tighter.
    But she couldn’t hold it. The anger vanished, blew away like it was nothing more than the light brown baby powder she’d sprinkle on her twin cousins’ buns when she changed their diapers.
    As Lakeesha walked in a daze past Lenox Terracetoward their school, where Geneva Settle would soon be, she realized that she couldn’t rely on anger or excuses.
    All she could rely on was survival. Sometimes you gotta look out for yourself and take the hand somebody offers you.
    Things we do ’cause we gotta . . .

Chapter Thirty-Seven
    At school, Geneva collected her homework and wouldn’t you know it, her next language arts assignment was to report on Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem, the 1928 book