With the Fire on High Read online

  This stuff is complicated. But it’s like I’m some long-division problem folks keep wanting to parcel into pieces, and they don’t hear me when I say: I don’t reduce, homies. The whole of me is Black. The whole of me is whole.

  The Read

  “Who was that you were talking to?” Angelica pops a big wad of red gum into her mouth as the bell rings after English and everyone hustles down the hallway to their lockers.

  “Who?” I ask, stealing a stick of gum before she can drop the pack back in her purse.

  “Don’t play dumb with me, Emoni,” she says, poking me in the rib. “You don’t talk to any of the guys at school and I definitely saw one fine-ass dude walk you to class. He new?”

  Caught. “Oh, we have Advisory together and the culinary arts class. Malachi. Transferred from somewhere in Newark or something.”

  “Newark? Oh, he a brave soul bringing his ass over here. A very cute brave soul. . . . So, how did that class go? You seemed nervous when I saw you at lunch.”

  Angelica is looking at me, oblivious to the mob of lost-looking freshmen coming her way. I pull her to me so she doesn’t get bumped. “It was okay. We talked about butter knives. Did you talk about tools in your art class?”

  Angelica gives me a puzzled look before stopping in front of our locker. She turns the dial that opens up her top half.

  “Tools? We went over the different design programs we’ll be using. We won’t start actual projects for a week or two while we learn the systems.”

  Huh. Maybe Chef was right; it’s a different kind of tool, but sounds like Angelica wasn’t just jumping right into design either.

  “Tell me more about this Malachi person.” She pulls her books out.

  “Gelly, please. And move your big ole behind.” I bump lightly against her and open my bottom locker. Put a textbook back and then shut it.

  “I’m just saying. He would be a cute prom date,” she says, popping her gum right in my face.

  “And I’m just saying,” I say, walking toward the school exit, “that unless they let in two-year-olds or middle-aged women, I don’t plan on going to prom at all.”

  Salty

  “Welcome to the Burger Joint. What can I get for you, ma’am?”

  “Well, let’s see. What burger do you recommend?”

  My manager, Steve, walks over, stands right at my shoulder, and immediately begins running his mouth. “All the burgers are delicious here, ma’am. You might want to try the Joint Special. It comes with extra bacon and cheese.”

  I think I should get points for the fact that I keep my face stoic. Steve is always trying to warm up to customers and jumping all in a cashier’s space. I can feel his hot breath on my neck, and it takes everything in me to not shoot him the dirtiest look. Thing (1) That frozen slice of a mess infused with caramel coloring is not bacon. Thing (2) I don’t know why anyone would want cardboard-flavored, fake-news cheese calories on their sandwich. Thing (3) If he wants to do my job for me, why did he hire me at all?

  The woman nods along, then looks me straight in the eye. She seems like a professor. Her glasses sit low on her nose and she has the kind of presence that makes me thinks she’s used to commanding attention in a lecture hall. “And you, young lady? What’s your preference?” Her no-BS gaze never leaves my face.

  I turn my lips up into what I hope is a believable smile. “The vanilla milkshake is good. It’s made with real ice cream. And the number six is, um, popular?” I wasn’t made for BS.

  She nods again. “Thanks, honey. Not sure I’m craving a burger after all.”

  She walks out and a guy I know from school walks in. We aren’t too far from Schomburg so I’m not surprised to see someone I recognize. I take his order and when I turn around to grab his fries, I bump straight into Steve.

  “Sorry,” I mumble, but he follows me into the prep area.

  “Why didn’t you back me up there, Emoni? We just lost money with that last customer.”

  “I just wanted to give her choices, Steve.” I scoop some fries into a carton. The salt crystals gleam on them like some rapper’s diamond-crusted chain.

  Steve doesn’t let it go. “You sabotaged a sale. You didn’t even answer her question.”

  I give him a small shrug and what I hope is an apologetic smile. I load a tray with the fries and an apple pie, and walk over to the shake machine. Steve shuffles along with me. “What is your favorite sandwich, Emoni?”

  Uh-oh. Girl, I do not eat the burgers here. I struggle to eat anything I can make 100 percent better in my own kitchen. But I need this job, so I quickly swallow and say, “I mean, everyone likes the number six, right?”

  Steve narrows his eyes. “Emoni, I’m really going to need you to figure out how to be a team player. Or maybe this isn’t the team for you?”

  And with that, Steve huffs off to his office, his attitude as dry and stale as his fries.

  Tantrums and Terrible Twos

  “‘“Have a carrot,” said the mother bunny.’ The end.”

  I close the picture book and kiss the top of Babygirl’s head. She’s snuggled against me with her thumb in her mouth.

  “Babygirl, I told you to stop sucking on your thumb. It’s a bad habit,” I say, taking her hand in my own to get it away from her lips.

  She waits a second after I let go before sticking her thumb right back where it’d been. “Read ’gain, Mommy.” She speaks around the finger I gently pull from her mouth.

  “Not tonight, babes. It’s time for bed. Mommy has to do homework.” I don’t know what hit these teachers over the weekend, but every single one of my classes gave an hour’s worth of homework today and I know I have a long night ahead of me. I swing Babygirl’s legs around my waist and walk up the stairs to our room.

  “I want read it ’gain!” she screeches, and I know she’s going to interrupt the Eagles game ’Buela is watching. It’s the first week of season games and ’Buela gets grumpy if she can’t watch her team.

  “Emma Santiago,” I say, using her government name because it’s the only way to get ahead of her tantrums. “Yelling won’t work. I know you want me to read it again. But we’ve already read it three times and you have to learn you can’t always get what you want.”

  Some days I’m convinced Babygirl has an old soul, the kind of spirit that makes me imagine she was meditating and holding yoga poses in my belly. I’m less convinced of that these days, when she’s started spending more time away with her dad. I don’t know if they’re spoiling her over there, or have jumbled up her whole routine, but it sure is an adjustment to get her back to the Santiago way of doing things after the weekends she spends away. So when she starts wailing, crying, and throwing her stuffed animals out of her crib, all I can do is sigh and count under my breath.

  “You were the same way, you know? When you wanted something, you let the whole world know.”

  I don’t turn to ’Buela, who stands in the doorway. She doesn’t enter the room. ’Buela lets me handle the tantrums by myself. At first, I used to get mad at her: What the hell did I know about making a baby stop yelling? But I’ve learned to appreciate her lack of intervention. She lets me be the mom.

  “Babygirl,” I say, walking up to the crib. “We can read the story four times tomorrow. I love that you love reading. But right now, it’s time to go to sleep.” She responds by throwing a doll at me.

  “That’s enough, Emma,” I say. I don’t use my no-nonsense voice often, but I bring it out now. “Just because you’re angry doesn’t mean you throw things at people.”

  She curls up, still crying loudly but clearly exhausted. Her small body heaves with sobs, and everything inside me wants to run my hand down her little head and just read her the damn story again. Just give her what she wants to stop her from hurting. But I keep still until she quiets down, until her breathing turns heavy. Once she’s asleep I pick up the stuffed animals and place them neatly at her feet, then wipe the wetness off her cheeks. I turn her night-light on and close the do
or to our room. Thirty minutes wasted and it’s all the bunny’s fault.

  ’Buela follows me downstairs into the living room, where I replace The Runaway Bunny with Applied Mathematics: Equations in the Real World.

  “I’m sorry we interrupted the game,” I say, and sit on the couch.

  “It was halftime, nena. And we are looking terrible; I sure hope my boys can get it together soon.” She sits down next to me and removes the book from my hands. I sigh and put my head on her shoulder. She pats my face and I snuggle more deeply into her side.

  “You want me to read to you?”

  “I don’t think the Applied Mathematics textbook will allow you to practice your character voices,” I say, closing my eyes. She shifts a bit and I hear her pick up the book.

  “‘Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away.’”

  Fickle Fatherhood

  My father has always loved to read to me. I may question a lot of his actions, but his phone calls from San Juan and his attempts to instill a love of knowledge into me aren’t among them. Even my earliest memories include his voice in my ear reading a passage from whatever book he was currently into. Julio didn’t believe in children’s books. He believed whatever he read, he should read to me. Always nonfiction, and rarely fit for a child, but I loved listening to his voice.

  These days, he doesn’t read to me when he comes to visit, and he visits at the same time every year. Julio arrives at the beginning of July, usually with a full agenda. This past summer he rented a chair at the barbershop down the block and cut a couple of heads in the morning, volunteered at the cultural center in the afternoon, and attended summer lectures and readings at whichever one of the universities in the city was having an event.

  Every day he invited me to come with him on his afternoon adventures, but I’m not one for lectures and my relationship with my father is complicated. Not to mention my new job didn’t allow me to just drop work whenever he asked.

  In the evenings, he was the perfect houseguest.

  He helped wash the dishes even though he was always too late to eat dinner with us. He picked up ’Buela’s medicine at the pharmacy or anything we needed from the grocery store. He played with Babygirl and pretended he was going to buzz-cut her hair until she squealed with laughter and batted at his clippers. He was one of the few people who could stop her from crying when she was throwing a tantrum. I had a glimpse into the kind of father he might have been if my mother had lived.

  If he had chosen to stay.

  But Julio never stays long and he never gives notice. At some point when August starts rearing its head, Julio begins rearing his toward a flight back to Puerto Rico.

  At the end of July this year, when ’Buela and I got home from the supermarket, all his stuff was gone from the living room. His suitcase wasn’t in the corner. His blanket was neatly folded over the couch. The case with his barbering tools was nowhere to be seen. Babygirl was at Tyrone’s house that weekend, so not only did he not say goodbye to us, he didn’t even say goodbye to her. And by that point she’d gotten attached to “Pop-Pop,” as she called him.

  But poof! Houdini in the flesh. Or rather, in the disappearance. He didn’t leave a note, he didn’t text goodbye. He called a week later like nothing had happened and asked if I could send him Angelica’s Netflix password so he could watch a documentary on the Young Lords.

  And maybe because I struggle to learn certain lessons, this one has taken me years and years to learn: You can’t make too much space for a father like mine in your life. Because he’ll elbow his way in and stretch the corners wide, and when he leaves all you have is the oversized empty—the gap in your heart where a parent should be.

  Exhaustion

  “Santi, you were really quiet in Advisory today,” Malachi says. I don’t know when he decided he had a right to nickname me. But I’m too tired to correct him. It’s only the middle of the second week, and although we see each other in class, we haven’t spoken much.

  “Yeah. I was up late doing work. And Ms. Fuentes gave me a shi—crapload of edits on the college essay draft.”

  He raises a questioning eyebrow at my curse correction, but drops it. “What are you writing yours on?” he asks.

  I cut around the corner on my way to my next class. “We don’t have Cul Arts until later in the day, Malachi; where are you going?”

  “Just walking you to class, Santi.”

  I stutter to a stop near a water fountain. “Malachi, we aren’t friends. We can be friendly, but I don’t want you to get it twisted. I know you’re new and I’m not trying to be mean. But I just want to be clear . . . we, you and me? Aren’t friends.”

  I wouldn’t always have been able to say that to someone. I was so quiet and shy and surprised to get any attention at all. But the toddler books all suggest moms practice direct and clear language, managing expectations, giving explicit instructions, et cetera. Sometimes I think boys are just like babies when it comes to something they want—and they need to be told no, firmly and without qualification.

  Malachi reaches up and pulls on one of my curls. “Okay, Santi. We aren’t friends. Can I walk in the same direction as you until you get to your class?”

  “Won’t you be late for yours?”

  He shrugs. “‘We, you and me, aren’t friends,’ so don’t you even worry about my attendance record, Santi.” He flashes his smile, and at the sight of his dimples I almost melt. “Plus, you are one of the few kids I’ve had actual conversations with. Why don’t you tell me some things I should make sure to see in the city?”

  And although I don’t want to encourage Malachi more than necessary, I’m always looking for a reason to big-up my city. “Well, let’s start with cheesesteaks. The spot all the tourists go to? Basura. The best cheesesteaks . . .”

  A Tale of Two Cities

  I come from a place in Philadelphia that reminds me of a Charles Dickens book we read in English. The Tale of Two Cities one that’s set in Paris and London during and after the French Revolution. But the place I come from ain’t nowhere close to Europe. I’m from Fairhill. It sounds pretty, don’t it? And for a lot of outsiders, the name is the only pretty thing about it.

  Most folks are Puerto Rican. Julio tells me this neighborhood has the highest rate of Puerto Ricans outside of the island. I don’t know why, though. It doesn’t look anything like pictures of the island I’ve seen. Blocks and blocks of two-story row houses, concrete, fenced-in yards, and vacant lots. People have had a lot to say about our neck of the woods, but in general, they should probably keep their neck out our business. This part of North Philly has one of the highest crime rates in the city, or at least that’s what the newspaper reports. They call us part of the Badlands, but when you stay here, you know there’s a lot more goodness than is reported in the news.

  Sure, we have gang fights that happen to the soundtrack of gunshots, but we also have dance crews that perform at the summer block parties. We have el Centro de Oro, the strip of Puerto Rican shops where you can get everything from oversized flags to island spices to hand-carved mortar and pestles. We have corner-store owners who hand out candy during Halloween, and the barbershop on the block that keeps a cooler of cold water out front in the summer. We got the rec center where most of us grew up doing our homework, where I received teen-parenting classes and counseling while pregnant, and we got the cultural center a few blocks over that has art workshops, free English lessons, and even brings in live bands for concerts.

  Maybe it’s more than just a tale of two cities; it’s a tale of two neighborhoods. On the one hand, people are scared to come over here because they say this part of town is dangerous, “undeveloped,” and a part of me thinks, good, keep out, then. But everyone knows that the good things like farmers’ markets, and updated grocery stores, and consistent trash pickup only happen when outsiders move in. And as much as it seems our neighborhood is forgotten, change is coming. I’ve been seeing more and more construction sites and lots of houses with S
OLD signs, and more than ever before white people have been getting off at my train stop, eating at Freddy & Tony’s, wearing their fancy college sweaters and looking like they are nervously making their way home. Home. I come from a place that’s as sweet as the freshest berry, as sour as curdled milk; where we dream of owning mansions and leaving the hood; where we couldn’t imagine having been raised anywhere else. People wonder why I walk so hard, why I smile so rarely at strangers, why I mean mug and carry grit like loose change in my pocket.

  And everyone in Philadelphia reps their hood just like me. One of the first things you ask and learn about someone is where they stay. Where we come from leaves its fingerprints all over us, and if you know how to read the signs of a place, you know a little bit more who someone is.

  And me? I’m pure Fairhill, but I also got more than one city, one hood inside me. And anyone who wants to get to know me has to know how to appreciate the multiple skylines.

  Fail

  “Under what conditions do pathogens that contaminate food grow?” Chef Ayden scans the room. “Sharif?” Sharif looks down at his station as if the answer is written in magical ink. He shrugs. Chef Ayden makes a note on his clipboard. Today we were surprised with a verbal pop quiz. In addition to studying the components of a recipe, learning to plate, and learning to serve, Chef Ayden also wants us to prepare for the ServSafe test. He rarely quizzes us like other teachers, with a written-down test. Instead he asks questions out loud and you have to be quick on your feet. He says being able to respond quickly and efficiently is how it will be in a real kitchen. And although we hate the quizzes, we all want to pass the ServSafe test. If we pass that test, not only do we pass the class, but we are also given a certificate by the city that proves we know how to safely handle food and can work at a restaurant. Technically, with that certificate I could apply to take over Steve’s job at the Burger Joint. I don’t want Steve’s job, but I like knowing I have the credentials to take it from him if I wanted to.