Riot Baby

II HARLEM

STIFLING, suffocating. Even with the windows open, sweat pours, pools, soaks bedsheets through to the mattress to leave stains that Ella’s gonna say is just me peeing the bed again. A rat scurries. KEEEVVV! KEVIN DUQUAN RAY MOTHERFUCKIN’ JACKSON like an alarm clock. And me stirring on the other side of the room, my fugitive big toe tickling Ella’s ear, and Ella swats me away, and it’s this and not Mama that wakes her. The rat skitches and skitters. I open my eyes, catch a glimpse, and shriek.

“Ella,” I whisper, “the rat.”

Ella knows instantly where to look. Without a frown or a squint or even a smirk, she stands, arms tensed at her sides. Then, the soft puff of an animal head exploding. Trails of red spurt out from the shadows. The door creaks open just as the rat’s brain erupts, so Mama doesn’t hear it; one sound covers the other, but she sees the blood and knows instantly that it’ll be another mess for her to clean up but at least Ella didn’t do her Thing out of the house.

Rats don’t scare Mama, but folks catching Ella doing her Thing scares her, what they’d do if they found out she could do things like make a rat’s head explode without touching, that scares her, so she smacks her upside the back of the head anyway. A just-in-case.

Mama shakes her head back and forth but is relieved at least she didn’t have to deal with the animal herself, that I screamed only the once and didn’t risk waking up the rest of the apartment. Ella catches my look, and conspiracy rides the rails between us. I turn out of habit, so that she can change into her day clothes and I won’t see her shame.

Some of the older kids outside the bodega talk about Regents like it’s some sort of monster they can’t ever hope to beat while the others just shrug it off. And it’s this second group that talks the loudest as me and Malik join them. Malik’s quiet and confident the way a lot of the older kids are, and maybe that’s why Ella likes him so much, and I’m starting to think “quiet” is the most attractive thing in the world, because the girl who sometimes works the counter of the bodega barely says two words to me when everybody’s hanging out in the hallways between classes. Ella doesn’t tell me why she has Malik walk me back from school every day, but I figure it’s because summer’s coming and even though gang shit never really stops the heat starts it back up again, like the motors we learned about in science class. Kinetic energy. Thermodynamics.

Somebody’s blasting “Dipset Anthem” so loud through their speakers that I feel the crackling bass in my sternum.

“Ay, lil nigga,” one of the older cats with Adidas sweats and Tims hollers while the others dap up Malik and talk softly about stuff I’m not supposed to know about. Malik gets me in with this crew, and I don’t mind too much, but my bag’s heavy with homework I gotta get done before dinner.

“Hey,” I say back, wishing my voice wasn’t so small.

“Whatchu learn about today?” Adidas asks me. “See this kid?” he tells the others. “Smartest fuckin’ kid in the hood, yo. He a cyborg or something. Could fix any computer on the block. I’m tellin’ you, this nigga goin’ to Harvard on some shit. That’s facts.”

“In history, we learned about George Washington Carver.”

Adidas holds in his weed smoke. “Word?” Then he looks to the others. “Yo, fam, George Washington Carver woulda been that nigga in jail.”

A chorus of “What!” and “Who. You. Tellin” thickens the air, then they’re all doubled over with laughter, and even Malik’s chuckling.

“Nigga was the chef up north, woulda got left up north,” says a light-skinned cat everyone calls Havoc after the rapper from Mobb Deep.

“He woulda made C-4 outta peanuts. Nigga would throw down a peanut, it turns into a ladder like fuckin’ Inspector Gadget!”

They laugh until pain scrunches up their faces.

“They woulda had the wild Peanut Break,” Arian says, coughing after taking a puff of the blunt Adidas passed him. “Like, they get to a dead end. And George Washington Carver takes off his shirt, he’s got a map of the prison on his back, and it’s just the wild allergic reaction to peanuts!”

Adidas: “The COs is chasin’ after him, he spreads the wild peanut oil on the floor, they start slippin’.”

Everybody mimes a Looney Toon stepping on a banana peel: “WHOA WHOA WHOA!”

Havoc waves his arms to get everyone’s attention. “His old lady like, ‘George, you fuckin’ with them peanuts again?!’ and he’s like, ‘Ma, you don’t understand my vision!’ You know the scene in Do the Right Thing when Spike Lee puts the ice cube over Rosie Perez’s nipples?”

Arian jumps in. “HE DOIN’ THAT WITH A PEANUT!” And that destroys everybody, even Malik.

While everyone’s distracted, I sneak into the cool air of the air-conditioned bodega and nod a hello to the bodega cat on the plastic-wrapped rolls of toilet paper by the far wall. It’s safe in here, and when I see Jamila behind the counter, the sleeves of her sweatshirt rolled to the elbows resting on the glass with a magazine splayed out in front of her, I know nothing bad can ever reach me here.

“Whatchu buyin’?” she asks without looking up.

“It’s me,” I tell her, which breaks her away from her photo spread.

“Your friends are loud.” And the disapproval is thick in her voice. Her curls seem to hang everywhere except over her face, and she’s got those wide brown eyes that make people forget that she can frown straight through you.

“They not my friends.”

And Jamila smirks. She folds up her magazine and crosses her arms over the counter. “Ahmed’s not here but he’ll be back soon. You tutoring tonight?”

“I mean… I could, but I wasn’t—”

Ahmed walks in, all harried and bothered. “Ugh, I hate when they just hang out there without buying nothing,” he mutters.

“That’s the neighborhood,” Jamila tells him with an accent that’s already thick with uptown, even though they moved here not long ago.

“Hey, Kev,” Ahmed says before disappearing in the back. “How’s Ella?”

Ella’s last episode had her falling off the couch and onto the floor, her left arm limp while the rest of her seized up, and wind that came out of nowhere started flinging everything around, the furniture rising like it was being pulled on a string and Ella’s eyes rolling up into the back of her head while she convulsed. Then there was Ella coming back to us, just as Mama had finished soaking the blanket in the bathwater, getting it ready for us to wrap Ella in and cool her down while she got herself better.

“She’s good,” I say back.

Commotion outside. Someone says, “Ayo, put it out put it out!” And someone else mutters, “I ain’t puttin’ out shit.” Then the smack of flesh against flesh, “Fuck you talmbout, toss it. I can’t get jammed up again, you know a nigga out on parole right now.” Then low, familiar voices. Cops. Through the glass, I see the crew all spread out in a line with their hands up against the walls and the windows, legs spread too far apart, then I hear the click of handcuffs closing around wrists and cries of protest and “Officer, we ain’t do nothin’” and I wonder who’s going to jail this time, but the cops just wait around while one of the guys lies face-first on the sidewalk, hands cuffed behind his back. Ahmed’s watching too, and I see the emotions play across his face: vindication that the loiterers are getting what they deserve, guilt that maybe he’s the cause of this, anger that the police are going this far when they don’t need to. Somebody calls a cop “Jackie Chan,” then there’s a thud, and more handcuffs.

“What, you goin’ pull out your gun? Pull out your gun!” It’s Adidas. “You scared?”

“Ahmed, quick, go in the back,” Jamila whispers, then reaches underneath the counter for what I know is a gun.

“You was about to, Officer. You feel threatened?”

I remember there’s like eight of them out there, and there might not be as many cops, but some of the cops are laughing.

“Get the fuck outta here, bruh!” shouts Havoc, and I can tell from the muffle in his voice that he’s the one on the ground.

“See them laughin’?” This from Arian. “See your partners laughin’ at you gettin’ straight cooked right now, my nigga? They ain’t your homies.”

More yelling, shouting, but this time, more laughter. And I sneak a little closer to the door to see a crowd gathered outside. Backup.

“Kevin, what are you doing?” Jamila in that harsh whisper. “Get the fuck away from the door!”

But I can’t get enough of what’s going on outside. My body warms with it, like a space heater in my bones. One of the cops reaches down and uncuffs the guys on the ground, and Havoc gets back up as the cops back away, shouting, “You see the address! Come back later, pussy!” And it’s not this, but the growing crowd, some of them with cameras, that makes the cops shuffle away. And it feels like victory.

Still feels like victory afterward when Malik comes in to fetch me, says an apologetic hi to Jamila and Ahmed, then walks me back to Ella. The look on her face, that’s what tells me today wasn’t no kind of victory. That when people joke and call me Riot Baby for being born when I was, it ain’t with any kind of affection, but something more complicated. The type of thing old heads and Mama and other people’s parents tell you you won’t understand till you get older.

We’re playing on a wooden floor in the apartment. Hot outside becomes suffocating inside. No drapes on the living room window eight floors up, so the sun blasts unabated onto the floor, rectangular hell right in the center, and the room is so small you can’t get away from it. Mama cooking in the kitchen and the smoke and smell drift in, so you really can’t breathe, but Mama doesn’t want me and Ella outside. The heat turns kids violent and she doesn’t need a lot of time for her imagination to get to the place where someone shoots and Ella does her Thing, yet uncontrolled, and more people are dead than need to be and Ella’s unveiled, or even unveiled and dead, and Mama’s left with the pieces and her guilt at not being able to protect her kids. So we’re stuck in the apartment: Ella and me, both still kids. I’m sitting across from Ella as she balances a ball of light on her palm, and I stare at it with wide eyes, and neither of us knows yet that to stare at the thing will ruin our vision forever. It glows and black tendrils of smoke surround it, wind around its belly, and steam up into the ceiling.

“Make it cooler, Ella,” I ask her, three steps away from begging, and she tries and the temp drops a little bit, just enough to feel relief in our sweat.

I sniff at the food Mama’s making and curl my face. “Nigga, did I just catch you havin’ fun?” I ask in my best fifth-grade schoolteacher impression, which isn’t much of an impression at all, just me throwing some rasp and bass into my tinny voice.

We giggle.

“Nigga, did I just catch you tryna make the room colder?”

More giggling.

“Nigga, did I just catch you tryna make my life worth living?”

Giggling, but I hit something serious and sad and Ella stops.

The room gets hot and suffocating again, and we wait a little bit to see what Ella will do with her Thing, but Mama calls us into the kitchen to tell us food’s ready and we don’t get a chance. Except, on the way in, I see Ella’s got one hand behind her back, the ball of light having turned solid and fluffy and cold, something her eyes tell me she’s gonna try to hit me with: a snowball.

“Yo, this bud got me smizz off the bliggedy, y’heard?”

I hear the voices before I get to my floor, and I know from the jump that’s Havoc and some other cat from my building in the stairwell. I’m two floors below them before I smell it. I hate when the elevator’s out, because it means I gotta walk through weedsmoke that fogs the whole place up. You can’t even see out the window when they get going.

It’s a colder autumn than we’ve been getting, and who wants to freeze their fingers off while getting high?

“Yo, pass the blunt, though,” says the other cat.

And when I get to their landing, I see through the haze that he’s got on a Nike Tech hoodie.

“It’s poppin’ in Brooklyn tonight, they’s gonna be mad bitches there.”

Havoc doesn’t see me coming, but I try to play it like I’m not scared of them. I don’t have Malik with me, and even though Havoc has no reason to, he’s still the type to sniff fear through the smoke and pounce. They’re all like that. Suddenly, my book bag’s the heaviest thing in the world.

“Nah, bro,” says Havoc. “We got beef in Brooklyn. It’s slow.”

“Then we out uptown, then.”

“Nah, nigga. We got static up there, too.”

The other cat’s sounding more desperate. “Dawg, let’s hop out to the city then. If your hoodie got a check on the left, and it’s a Tech, they give you neck, bro.”

I can see Havoc shaking his head. “We not vegetarians when it comes to the beef, bro.”

Can’t stop, can’t slow down. So, I walk like I don’t even hear them. The other cat, when he sees my silhouette, reaches for something at his waist, but Havoc puts a hand out to stop him. If I was Housing Police, I wouldn’t be moving this slow.

“It’s just me,” I manage to get out.

And Havoc chuckles, though I can see the other cat ice-grilling me like I’m from the wrong set.

“It’s cool, it’s cool,” Havoc murmurs. Then to me, “You smoke?”

I shake my head. “If I smoke, I’m homeless. Mom ain’t got that kind of energy.” Also, Malik would kill this nigga if he ever found out I got offered weed when I’m supposed to be on my “stay in school” shit.

“Yo, lil nigga.” This from the other cat. “What’s it like outside?”

For some reason, his voice paralyzes me. I don’t know why I’m so scared of him, but everything just feels ominous. Like the feeling you get when you’re about to get into a fight, when all the blood rushes to your face and time runs and crawls at the same time. “What, you mean like cops? Couple outside the building, but—”

“Nah, the weather.” What I said makes him chuckle, and he loosens up. Like he knows I’m cool now. “What’s the weather outside?”

“It’s mad brick out there. I think it’s starting to snow.”

The other cat rolls his shoulders. “I’m good, I don’t get cold.”

Havoc raises an eyebrow. “You goin’ out with a hoodie?”

“Yeah!”

Havoc shakes his head, takes a puff from the blunt he’s still holding. “Oh, nah, you different, bro.” He coughs around a laugh. “You gon’ catch frostbites, my nigga.”

The other cat sucks his teeth. “I don’t catch frostbite. Them shits don’t bite me, I taste like doo-doo.”

“My man, just put on a coat.”

I’m laughing behind my fist, trying to keep them from seeing, because I don’t know if this other cat’s the type to flip his switch mad quick and dead my shit for giggling.

“This hoodie’s my coat!” says the other cat. “My coat, jacket, sweater, shirt.”

“Bro, you wylin’.” Havoc can’t stop chuckling now.

The other cat tries to stay serious, but he knows he’s playing too, so we all have our little weed-filled circle of laughter until I hear something crash upstairs.

Our laughter dies down, and that ominous feeling climbs back into my belly.

“That you?” Havoc asks, gesturing up with his chin.

Mama and Ella been arguing a lot more lately, and I’ve gotten pretty good about timing my absences so that I miss the worst of it, but I can’t go back out now. Not all smelling like weed with the cops by the entrance and the snow beginning to fall outside. So I just bow my head and let out a small “Yeah.”

“Stay up, lil nigga.” Havoc daps me, and, to my shock, the other cat daps me too, though he doesn’t say anything.

When I get to our door, I hesitate, then I pull my key out and nudge it open. I flinch every time I hear something break. But there are new sounds that keep me stuck in the hallway. Maybe if I wait long enough, it’ll stop. But then voices reach me. Someone trying to talk or scream, but something’s choking the words inside them.

My book bag thuds when it hits the floor, and I rush to the bedroom I’ve shared with Ella since we were little to find cabinets shattered and window glass all over the floor and a blanket wrapped tight around Mama’s neck while her feet dangle off the floor. At the center of the storm stands Ella, her eyes glazed over, her teeth bared in a snarl, one hand raised in the air like it’s gripping an invisible neck and squeezing.

She’s going to kill Mama.

“Ella!” I shout.

I go flying backward into the hallway. A yelp comes out of me when I hit the wall and fall to the ground. Now furniture in other rooms starts to hover in the air. I rush in again, but this time winds buffet me, pushing me back. The storm roars in my ears, and I scream, “Ella!” My fingers grip the door posts. The door is gone, ripped clean off its hinges. “Ella!”

Something inside me rips. Thought vanishes; then, for an instant, I glimpse it. Flashes of memory and feeling like mirror shards. An argument about cleaning our room. A white doctor nudging Mama out of the way while Mama attends to a patient. Someone getting onto the hospital elevator before Mama has a chance to get off, blocking her path. Kids getting handcuffed and tossed into the backs of police vans. Burly almost-police roaming high school corridors during the breaks in between classes. Then I’m back, and everything is calm and Mama’s on the floor clutching her neck and coughing and Ella stands in the middle of the room, stunned and soundless and weeping. Mouthing over and over and over, “I’m sorry.”

I rush over to Mama as she tries to push herself upright and fails. “Mama,” I whisper. “Mama, are you all right?” She manages to sit upright and, with her back against the wall, waves me away, taking deep, shuddering breaths. I scan her eyes, as though to know what’s in them is to know what she needs, and I see calm and patience, but there’s fear, too. And I want to kill Ella for making Mama afraid.

But then I turn back and I see my sister on her knees, her hands limp before her, tears racing down her cheeks, and I feel it too.

I’m afraid of her.

It’s late when I come home.

Even though Mama’s still at work, the TV’s on in the kitchen, and Ella’s sitting at the table, staring straight at it like it’s got fishhooks in her. It’s not the same blankness she had during her attack a few months back. This is different. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her like this.

“Ella! You left the door unlocked! Mama’s gonna kill y—”

Red and blue lights flash on the screen. That’s nothing new. News about police or about somebody getting shot, but Ella hasn’t moved once since I stepped inside. Her hair is completely gray. Her fists tremble.

I’m about to cuss her out; then I stop and figure whatever she’s watching must be important.

On the screen, police tape flaps in the breeze behind the newscaster bundled up in a November coat. Friends leaving a nightclub. NYPD on scene. Fifty shots fired into a man’s car. Sean Bell. The newscaster keeps going, but I’ve only got eyes for Ella, who can’t stop staring.

“Ella?”

Tears stream down her face. She’s not moving.

“Ella, what’s wrong?”

I put a hand to her shoulder. Hurt shoots back and forth between my ears. My eyes shut, and all of a sudden, all I see is fire. People in the streets chanting, people throwing bricks, the scritch of handcuffs closing over wrists. I take my hand back. My palm feels like I touched the stove. But nothing in the kitchen moves. I don’t smell any sulfur in the air or feel the ground change beneath me like it always does before one of Ella’s attacks.

“Ella?”

“Something bad is gonna happen.” Her voice is leaden when she says it. That’s the last thing she says to me before she vanishes.

“Kev?”

I turn and Mama’s standing in the entrance to the kitchen. The news about the shooting fills the room. “Where’s Ella?”

But now Mama’s watching the TV and maybe she sees whatever it is that Ella saw, because she’s frozen too. And she stands there for a long time, and I don’t know what to do, so I start crying, and that’s what breaks Mama out of her standing nightmare. All of a sudden, she’s got me wrapped up in her arms, so tight and so warm it feels like I’m melting into her.

“Don’t worry about your sister,” Mama tells me, and she’s got that same certainty in her voice as when she’s praying over us. “Just… try not to be angry. She’s just angry, and she needs to go be with herself for a little bit.”

“She coming back?” I manage when I finally stop crying.

Mama doesn’t answer.

I want to tell Mama about how things were getting better after Ella’s last attack, how I’ve been studying on the side and maybe getting closer to finding out how Ella could do the things she could do and that I’m gonna keep doing that once I get to college and get my degree. I want to tell Mama that we’re healing, that we’re fixing what we can fix and that nothing’s been broken beyond repair and that the only way we can keep whatever’s eating Ella’s insides from devouring her is to stay together. But more sobs come, and I try to get my brain to move toward a solution, figure out what I can build to get her back, to get at whatever’s hurting her, but I can’t think of nothing.

The Bx19 pulls up janky and almost swerving by 145th and St. Nicholas. I shove past all the bundled-up commuters to find the back door closed. Winter air stomps through the open front door, and I shout. “Back door!”

People mill. The bus idles at a light.

“Back door!” Fuck this. “I know you hear me, my nigga! Open the fucking back door!” Slowly, grudgingly, the back doors unfurl, and I hop out. “Suck my dick!” I shout before tugging the fur hood of my coat up over my head and shuffling to the bodega by the apartment. Already, a bunch of them are waiting outside. I hear someone say, “Aight, so boom,” and I’m tight, because I ain’t ready to stick around for another hour and listen to this nigga tell another story about how his chick dogged him yet again.

“Ayo, whatup, slime,” Tone says, as he daps me. Our fingers twist, curl, and with one last shake, we’re finished.

“Whatup, whatup, whatup,” until everyone’s dapped. “Yo, fam, it’s mad brick outside. I’m finna get a sandwich, wait for me.”

“Yo, get me a chopped cheese,” Melo hollers after me.

“Suck my dick!” I shout back, and everyone chuckles.

Inside is warm, dry air and the sound of good-smelling meat on the grill. Some new Dominican dude is on the phone behind the counter.

“Ayo, lemme get a bacon-egg-and-cheese.” I gotta shuffle from one foot to the other to keep from freezing, even though heat fogs the windows. The dude behind the counter doesn’t move, just keeps talking in a low, loving voice to the phone. “Ayo! Can I get a bacon-egg-and-cheese, please.” Like I’m not even there. “Yo, can I get a fuckin’ bacon-egg-and-cheese, my nigga?” I slap the glass to make my point, and five minutes later, I’m back outside, and half the sandwich is gone.

“Yo, you know Jamila’s out of school for Winter Break?”

That line cuts through the cloud of conversation, and I forget the sandwich in my hands. “Word?”

“Oh, nigga, that’s you?” Melo says around the spliff he’s lighting.

“She ain’t my girl, but deadass, you try for her, I’ma fuck you up.” I half mean it, but I don’t know what half they’re chuckling at.

A cop car idles to a stop across the way. Melo stubs out the spliff and tucks it in the space where the sole of his Tim is hanging off. There’s no other reason for the cops to be here than us, so we get ready.

“Officer?” I say, by way of greeting, but they’re angry and they stomp toward us the same way the cold wind stomped toward my face on the bus, and before I know it, I’m on the ground with a police boot on my cheek, and everyone screaming “what the fuck” around me. My body thrills to it. It’s been like this ever since Ella left. Like she took the forcefield protecting me with her. And you hit a certain age and realize the forcefield’s a cage, and that’s maybe part of why I got snow in one eye and dirt from the cop’s Nike boot in the other.

“You got anything that can stick me, you fuckin’ worm?” from the cop frisking me. And he almost gets to the box cutter in the inside pocket of my coat, but I can tell people got their camera phones out, so the cops back off a little bit. They got cuffs on me and twist me around until I’m sitting on the ground, and the others are pressed against the wall with their hands against the windows.

“Who I look like, Officer?” I jeer. “What suspect I look like this time? Let’s figure this out. Help me help you.”

“Yo, why you hasslin’ my mans?” asks Cassidy.

I bark out a laugh. “Don’t worry ’bout him, he’s just mad I hit him with the ill crossover at the ballgame last week. Ain’t that right, Officer Ankledicks? So you know he gotta up his arrest quota for the month. Nigga had Sonic rings comin’ outta his ass.”

The cop cracks me across the face, right on the cheekbone, and I spend a stunned second on the ground before sitting upright and spitting blood into the snow, then grinning through my red teeth.

“Take your gun off, and we can shoot a fair one, Officer Handles. NY Play Dead, nigga.”

He’s about to hook off on me again, but one of his partners puts a hand to his chest, and the others throw hushed whispers at him, then eventually one of them, a different one, comes over and unlocks my cuffs.

“Thank you, Officer,” I tell this one, nodding my appreciation. Then, as they retreat, “Have a good night, Officers! Stay warm!”

When the cars peel off I mutter, “Bitch-ass nigga.” And turn around to see my sandwich on the ground. Flattened under a Nike boot print.

When I look back, I’ll know it’s during Winter Break for schools because when I stumble down the street and hit my hip on a trashcan rounding a corner, I’ll nearly slip and fall in dirty-ass snow. I’ll remember just in time to take off my ski mask and stuff it deep into the garbage, then ditch my blood-spotted coat in an alley before nearly smashing through the door to the bodega. I’m shivering in my gray Tech hoodie, and slow to a stop as soon as I’m inside, wandering down the aisle to the back of the store to see if any blood’s gotten on my hoodie or the shirt underneath. Check my face in the glass doors over the sodas. Then the jingle of the bell as two cops come in, and I put my hood up and wander, pretend like I’m just browsing while I make my way back to the front, but the cops are still talking bullshit, so I have to walk back and wait, then try to avoid the one that peels off to do a circuit of the store. And when the blood stops pounding in my ears, I’ll hear faint echoes of a familiar voice. But then, I’ll see an opening and make a dash for the door, and one of the cops will slam into me and pin me against the counter, my face smashing into the top while they hit me twice in the ribs and twist my arms behind me and the other one raises my head and slams it into the glass again so hard it cracks and blood spills out of the cut above my eye.

I’ll know it’s Winter Break, because I’ll fight against the cop’s grip to raise my head and I’ll see Jamila standing there behind the counter, brown eyes wide with horror.

In that moment, I’ll feel a part of the universe split off, like a branch snapped off a tree trunk, and that piece of the universe has me in it with her. I’m standing in front of the counter, and Jamila’s back from Winter Break, and I’m on Winter Break too, because I’ve been busy at school learning things and building things, and we’ll talk about the things people talk about when they know already that they’re gonna fall in love and get married and raise beautiful, brilliant, peaceful fucking kids.

But right now, I just wish she didn’t fucking recognize me. I’d give anything for her not to have fucking recognized me.

One Christmas when we were kids, Mama, seeing what white families got their kids when she would clean their houses between hospital shifts, brought home a shiny train set. Miniature gears and pistons, no chips in the blue and red paint that coated the front car. I would make the chug-chug sounds when running them over the carpet and up the spiral tracks that circled the play-mountain at the end of the course. They’d get to the top, then roll back down, cars crashing into each other, jackknifing, until the whole thing was a tangled mess at the end, imaginary passengers all crying out for help before the whole thing would magically explode and there’d be no one left to cry out. But one time, Ella told me that the train was transporting dynamite to blow up some bridge that existed in some other train set, and she claimed there was a boy, maybe my age, who had been playing with a lit stick, and instead of metal and plastic, the train cars were made out of wood, and the kid had dropped his stick and was running back through the cars like in the movies, climbing a ladder to the top and daringly jumping from car to car. Movie trailer music thumped in our heads. And fire, real fire, broke out in one car as Ella moved the trains up the mountain with her Thing, the first car puffing into a ball of flames and the others blowing up too until there was nothing but a trail of fire winding its way up the mountain, imaginary wind blowing the flames back like a wave of orange-red hair. It was beautiful until Mama came in, smelling smoke, and ordered us both to put it out or Ella would burn the whole place down and it’d be us kids crying out.

Ella had spent the next year, under my watchful eye, trying to put it all back together, trying to un-char the mountain and re-form the train cars. She never did get it all back to how it’d been, not that either of us could see.