Staten Island Stories by Claire Jimenez

Author:Claire Jimenez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

This One Kid Douglass Got Jumped

After a while the cops didn’t like us hanging out after school at the ferry terminal because Yesenia and Toya started doing too much, shaking and spraying their bottles of soda at the boys who pretended to like them, while Eddie ordered french fries off the ninety-nine cent menu and I begged to please just have one. Meanwhile, the loudest of us would practice the words bitch, motherfucker in our fourteen-year-old mouths so that everybody would notice who we were trying to be. Then we’d chase one another around the terminal or smack the boys in the head with our book bags, music playing off our phones, earbuds dangling from our pockets, or we’d sit on the railings of the sloping ramps to the bus exits to smoke.

The cops, they had to think of something.

To stop us they used bullhorns at first, and if you stood in front of the Dairy Queen and weren’t in line to buy anything they aimed the bullhorn at your face and shouted for you to leave, until it got worse.

This one kid, Douglass, got jumped at the terminal by the S74 ramp by some kids who teased him in computer class: tenth grader Ryan Rodriguez, white Allen (not the Spanish one), and Christopher Andrews, who used to be good until his brother got locked up. If anybody asks who jumped him, we didn’t tell you, though. Outnumbered, Douglass pulled out a Taser from his book bag. The cops, who had come to stop the fight too late, drew their guns and aimed them at Douglass, who lifted his skinny wrists in the air, confused, until they arrested him. One of them, shaking from having to draw his weapon, said “How could you do something so stupid?”

The next week the cops found something new to do to us. Every day at 2:45 p.m. they blasted this alarm that was so loud we left the terminal in search of somewhere else warm to hang out, somewhere that we could hear ourselves.

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