Yeah. So, this was back when he was scrounging around between Berkeley and Oakland, the borderland there like a tease. He was 14 then, still a yard rat, still garbage diving with Adeline. He was tall for his age but she was taller. Skinnier, darker. She taught him to check the recycling bins first: if there were scraps, at least they’d be contained. Less rotten.
Adeline. She said her name with the hauteur of a drag queen, eyelashes swooping down and brushing back up like palm fans for the Queen of Sheba. But she got it from a street sign, because she was always hanging round that one corner by Ashby BART. She’d stand there in her garbage-bag poncho, with her 7-Eleven cup. (She’d caught him pissing in it once and nearly torn his earlobe off.) She’d hold it straight ahead, chanting at the commuters. Care to share care to share care to share. Cheerful in its way. Sometimes he’d find her squatting on the sidewalk, clothes torn, blood strung over her thighs and crudding her nails. Whimpering. Could somebody help could somebody could somebody. Just another kind of song, but it spooked him.
It was like everybody around there was inside out. Bedrooms laid out in storefronts, bathrooms where-the-fuck-ever. The crazy you’re supposed to keep inside always on the verge of bubbling out. The townies were saner but hella snooty. Mostly white—or tattoo-gray—sprawled on the sidewalk outside Rasputin or Amoeba, playing their own music on boomboxes, leering at the Cal students skittering past. He limited his dealings with them to weed and made survival alliances with the older folk. Lox, who lived in the cave of the Berkeley BART stairwell. Black Jesus on Sproul. Mexican Jesus on Bancroft. Adeline.
At night, he’d peel away from her and sneak alone into this spot on Stuart Street. The back garden was overgrown. Lofty grass, wildflowers, an apple tree in the corner pummeling a shed with fruit. There was a ruin of a brick oven in the middle, framed by two cacti that looked like an old couple: a thin man with reaching limbs and a fat woman with spiky curves, both tangled with spiderwebs that aged them. The house itself was being renovated. When the sun fell, he would hop the rickety back gate and camp out next to the oven, its bricks still warm from the day. He’d curl around his stuff and crash till dawn, slipping out just as the construction workers pulled in. The only bother with sleeping there was the cats, who stalked him unafraid, then scampered at his slightest move, their burnished eyes like marbles rolling off into the dark.
It was September, a warm East Bay night, cloudy enough to muffle the chill and halo the moon. He’d been asleep for a couple of hours when the sounds came over the fence: ricochet laughter and every once in a while, a pistol-shot shout. It was coming from the neighbors’, a three-story house with velvety brown shingles and lime green trim. He’d seen them and they’d seen him—both sides staring as if across a moat—but they’d never spoken.
He listened to the conversational fuzz growing over the night. Another shout. He crept over to the weathered fence between the yards, too janky to keep out anything but kindness, and peeked between the slats. It was a party. A bunch of people were standing around on the patio behind the neighbors’ house, red Solo cups in their hands. They were all wearing white or . . . he peered closer, then startled back. What the—? He drew close. They were naked.
He shifted to the next gap in the fence to catch another angle. That’s when he saw the girls. A heavy heat swept into his crotch. The closest one was thick, a fedora casting her face in shadow, her breasts bigger than her head, the nipples like soft-spreading stains. The girl beside her was sickly-thin, her pubes triumphant, almost windswept. Behind them, some dudes were wrestling—or pretending to. He looked for hard-ons but it wasn’t easy to tell, what with the blotchy skin and the shadows and the shreds of costume—a chain here, a hat there, a cloak. A laugh fizzed in his throat but he felt oddly at peace. The variety of bodies was comforting, like remembering exactly where you’d put something that you thought you’d lost.
The back door to the neighbors’ house opened and a backlit shadow sauntered out holding a speaker, Bob Marley murmuring alongside. Come on and stir it up. The dudes started to jerk and hitch their limbs. Little darling. The girls raised their liquid arms, singing in unison, their notes splattered around the true melody. C’mon baby. He shifted from slat to slat, staring. It wasn’t like porn, exactly. It was more like the zoo—the same quiet watchfulness. He could have spent the whole night just looking, marveling at the legs and hair and skin.
But then someone saw him. Someone saw, through the crack in the fence—a gap the width of a finger—the coin-sized eye of the kid who’d been sneaking into the yard next door for three weeks straight, no problem. The girl gasped. She shrieked. When she pointed, he ran off to crouch behind the brick oven.
A clunk shut Marley down. The party frayed: naked guys clamoring at the fence, trying to see over it. Naked girls screaming “ohmygod” through giggles. Half a minute later, the back gate to his yard chuckled open. He tensed.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” a deep male voice sang. Then a clean whistle.
“Shut up, Pete,” a girl muttered. “Hello?” she called. And again: “Hello?” Her voice came closer, low and swarmy. “Where are you?”
The hinges of the gate snarled.
“Listen,” the girl called out. “My name’s J. You’re safe. You can . . . ow, fuck.”
He peeked out. The moon was behind the clouds but he could see the girl standing on one foot, her other ankle netted in her fingers, hair curtaining her face. As she brushed off whatever had jabbed her sole, the moon soaked through and turned her skin silver. She lowered her foot and tossed her hair over a shoulder easily, casually. She was wearing an eye patch and at the sight of it, the beat of his fear shot to his crotch and pulsed there, dumb as a bell.
“Hey,” she said directly to him.
His muddy sneaker was in full view. He pulled it back behind the oven again.
“Come,” she insisted. “Join us.” She was smiling. There was a gap between her front teeth. A guy stepped forward from behind her, his cheeks and his chest painted with streaks of red, his eyes narrowslits. J glanced over, then turned back to say, almost apologetically:
“You have to take off your clothes, though. Party rules.” She flashed the gap at him. “You can leave ’em in the kitchen.” She pointed over the fence at a glowing window. “Come.”
And so he did, spellbound by the unlikelihood of it. He met her at the gate and she escorted him across the driveway to the back door, the whole party seeming to shift on its axis to look. She left him inside the kitchen, smiling slyly but with eyes averted when she closed the door behind her, as if he were the naked one. He blinked around, scoping the food-smeared dishes in the sink—barbecue, looked like—and the bulky brown grocery bags scattered over the floor. He crouched and opened one—it was stuffed with clothes. Here and there between the bags were neat little pairs of shoes. It reminded him of kindergarten, and he realized he remembered that: going to kindergarten. The fridge grunted and began to hum.
He took off his jeans and sneaks and sweatshirt, moving quickly to keep from smelling himself. He grabbed a paper bag from the flat stack on the counter and was stuffing his clothes inside it when the back door flung open again. He jumped and crossed his hands over his crotch like a soccer player. An Asian girl wearing only a translucent mermaid’s tail shuffled past him, careening over to the sink, where she puked sobbingly over the stack of dirty dishes, then staggered into the house beyond the kitchen. He glanced down at his skin, the planes of him rough with goosebumps. Then he breathed, turned, and stepped out into the sea of pastel.
At first, he eased his way in from the side, heading toward a tree in the middle of the patio. It had displaced two concrete slabs and was buckling the others around it. Standing under its moon-mottled shadow, he watched. The party’s voice had thickened with talk and laughter and Marley’s plaintive croon. He caught the eye of an athletic looking girl wearing a slanted belt and a ruffly collar—no shirt, just the collar. His dick was still bobbing before him like a docked pit bull’s tail and he covered it with his hand, then changed his mind and tried to play it cool. The girl pressed her smiling lips together as her eyes flitted off. He turned his attention to the girl beside her, who had only one hand. She was dancing too fast and he stared with dread as her hook began to slide off. Fingers blossomed from underneath.
They all breathed, panting in the night.She shoved the hook back on impatiently. A costume. He looked around for a while, gathering, until all of the costumes finally clicked into a coherent theme: Pirates.
And then J was at his side, with her gappy smile and her shine and her eye patch, which made more sense now. She handed him a Modelo and introduced him to a dude with a stuffed parrot on his shoulder and a handlebar mustache. The guy was vaguely brown. Chicano? Indian? J said something about embarrassing herself.
He smiled at her. “I don’t care.”
And he didn’t, because she was here. J was more here than anyone else at the party—more here than anyone he’d ever met—but maybe that was just because she didn’t talk to him like he was 14. Her sheer presence was already wicking people off the crowd, guys and girls seeping close, their costumes clashing with the traces of their real, clothed lives. A grass bracelet. Colored thread in a braid. A glinting toe ring. The music changed to Solange and J yelled, “Yasssss!” and danced away again. The people around him gangled and swung, baring their armpit hair, which looked and smelled like mold. He shuffled a little, cowed by an enthusiasm that sizzled and swelled and then, after a while, receded as the music evaporated into some floaty Björk-y song and the smell of pot drifted into the air. He leaned against his tree and tracked J as she wandered around the naked party, taking tokes like she was picking wildflowers.
He took one himself from a sweet-faced boy wearing only a septum ring and a shell bra, who swung by the tree and gave an air-kiss to a white couple, both dark-haired and wiry. They each took hits of the spliff, too, then continued their hazy argument.
“Uh, no, the intestine is definitely the largest organ.”
“Think about it. The intestine also has skin, so if you add it all up . . .”
“Skin isn’t an organ, Megan—”
A fat dude with a strategically placed holster interrupted them. “Guys, what do you think this place would go for now? With this real estate market?”
“The housing bubble’s gonna burst,” the girl said, taking a drag from what smelled like an American Spirit. Who were these people? They seemed too old for Cal but too young to be homeowners. Without clothes, it was hard to stack them in the money shelves in his mind.
“But when?” the fat dude was pleading, scabbard dancing. “I can’t take it anymore!”
“Probably when the Big One comes.”
“Dude, the tech-bros are gonna flee like rats the second they feel a tremor.” The wiry dude shoved his glasses up. His dick was at a comfortable half-mast, kinda big for his size.
“This place has become so fucking unlivable.”
“Uh”—the girl glanced over again—“Didn’t we do that?” The fat dude frowned.
“Who you mean we, sensei?”
He moved away from them then, wading toward the party’s center. After a while, the churn of dancers broke up, spinning off into couples and trios. Voices strained over the music. The sex in the air felt stronger. He caught sight of J across the party, her eye patch like a hole in the head and before he knew it—he was high now—he was walking toward her. When he reached her side, she smiled, the gap between her teeth like some charming inner dimple.
“Heyyy . . . uh, hey.” She swayed to greet him and then fell forward, her knee’s impact against his thigh too hard to be intentional. He put a hand on her shoulder to steady her. Her skin was as soft as old cash. His gulping heart could have swallowed him whole. Then the tall dude beside her turned—it was the one from before, with the streaks on his face and chest—and gave a low grunt. Two other big dudes turned as if on command, shoulder muscles drawing a wall up around them. He stepped away from them, his vision laddering like a stocking.
The tall dude laughed, the red paint on his cheeks cracking. “I’m just messin’ with you, man.”
“Pete, staahp.” J giggled, her palm sliding sloppily off his arm.
“What?” Pete shrugged.
“Stop being a dick,” she said, half her mouth smiling.
“You can take it, right?” Pete said to him, then stuck out a fist. He blinked at it, then cautiously bumped it.
“Yeeeah!” Pete’s eyes pulsed wide, then narrowed again. “See. That’s my boy!”
“Peeet.” J’s giggles were bubbling over her words now, dissolving them as she began to laugh harder, and still harder, her face growing incredulous that she couldn’t stop laughing. Tears wetted one pink cheek. A stoner’s blind alley. He wished he could join her there.
“Ka mattay! Ka mattay!” Pete suddenly yelled.
The crowd around them muttered backward like a spray of water. Encouraged, Pete leaned forward and yelled louder, in his face now: “Ka ora, ka ora!”
“Yo man, what the fuck?” He instinctively stepped back, right onto someone’s foot.
“Watch it!” the girl yelped.
He looked at her, grit grinding between their skin as he stumbled off.
“Watch out!” the girl said this time, or again.
“Sorry.” He turned away, feeling his dick sticky against his thigh, soft for the first time since he’d arrived. Pete’s head was tipped back with laughter but when he brought it down, he rolled it in a subtle neck-stretch and his pecs clenched briefly, once, like a wince.
“Look, Pete, man”—he shook his head—“I’m not tryna . . .”
“What?” Pete interrupted, dipping goofily toward him, eyes bright and flat.
J’s giggles had finally fizzed out. She was frowning, biting her lips.
“Guys, guys, guys,” she murmured to her collarbone, to her hapless breasts.
He felt the sudden impulse to grab her by the jaw and slap her serious. Instead he fit his teeth together and willed himself to look up and lock eyes with Pete, who was still smiling, chin ever so slightly raised, his boys on either side like shadows under a spotlight. They all breathed, panting in the night. Some techno song zipped and rattled around them like a trapped horde of flies. His ears and neck were staticky and hot. His eyes stung.
He shut them. He felt himself slide, then shuffle off sideways. Time to go. He turned and, ignoring the clamor behind him, weaved his way through the crowd, moving toward the kitchen door. The closer he got, the more impatient he got. He pushed people aside, skin brushing skin, daring them. But no one stepped to him, no one squared up. Just eyes itching up his back as he walked into the kitchen. He shut the door. The party burst to life behind it—laughter and a panicked joy and that terrible fucking music. Hands buzzing, he rifled through the bags on the floor until he found his clothes—they smelled even more rank for having been mashed up together. He put them on and crumpled up his paper bag. He paused and looked around, his eyes washed clean. Then he smoothed his bag open again, whipped it through the air with the sound of wings. He squatted over the scatter of things on the floor and began to fill it up.
Yeah. Wallets, loose change, keys: all the stuff that goes in the plastic bin before you pass through a metal detector. Y’all don’t even know. With all the efficiency and thoroughness that Adeline had taught him, he ransacked those Berkeley Bowl bags, leaving them curled open on the floor like the empty nests in Alien. Y’all don’t know who I am, do you? Eight cell phones, two necklaces, three iPods, a baggie. And from a bag labeled with a swooping black “J,” a bracelet—a silver cuff that he decided to keep as a souvenir. Y’all have no fucking idea. He took it. He took all of it. And he ran.
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From the California Issue of Freeman’s. “Take It” by Namwali Serpell. Copyright © 2019 by Namwali Serpell.
