At-Risk by Amina Gautier

Author:Amina Gautier [Gautier, Amina]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Fiction, General, Fantasy, Short Stories (Single Author), Short Stories, African American
ISBN: 0820338885
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2011-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

They began to whisper things about my brother right before school let out that summer. It suddenly became a big deal that Julian had never had a girlfriend when Sasha, a girl in Julian’s grade, spread the word that he didn’t like girls. Older boys picked on us whenever they saw us around, calling my brother Julie and calling me Josephine. Boys my age that I had previously run around with suddenly wanted to know if I had cooties and if I had caught them from my older brother. No one would let me tag them or borrow their skelly caps and no one would ride the handlebars of my bike. By the end of the summer, I knew that the whispers were fears and confirmations that Julian was what the boys at school called “funny,” what my mother called “nasty” and what the adults referred to as “that way.”

I was too young to understand the various modes of defense we all set up to safeguard ourselves from looking too closely at my brother. I knew only that the kids were shunning him and that their disdain for Julian was trickling down to me. So I turned my back on him, too. That was the summer I began to venture out past our streets and projects, trying to see what was up in the areas close to us. I was an inner-city anthropologist checking out the locals. That summer, I became fascinated with the kids who lived near Livonia Avenue by the three train and with the boys that played in King Park. I was looking for people who didn’t know me, who didn’t know that Julian was my brother. I looked for ways to avoid him without appearing to do so. Before, I had enjoyed our late-night horror show marathons, but now I threw tantrums on the evenings our mother would go out to midweek service and leave Julian to watch over me. I didn’t know what it meant to be that way, but I knew that boys who had once eaten paste with me now brushed themselves off and crossed their fingers if they came into contact with me. I didn’t know if what Julian had would rub off on me. And I didn’t know if it was temporary like the ringworm I had caught once or permanent like our mother’s diabetes.

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