As for looks, Darius wins for being almost perfect, like a model, as if he’s been Photoshopped with that smooth brown complexion and a symmetrically angled jawline. But he’s almost too pretty and stuck-up for my taste. So Warren takes the prize for overall swag—handsome with a little edge, some rhythm to his walk, bass in his voice, and he laughs at his own jokes.
I pretend to laugh too, but the passing buildings and streets out my side of the window are competing for my attention. I want to ask him about the set of new condos going up on Fulton Street. I want to search the newly rounded street corners for the old Rasta man with the white beard who used to sell colorful rugs, old wooden furniture, and even used pots and pans in an empty lot. I want to know what happened to the row of wood-framed buildings that were sandwiched between a day-care center and a grocer. We’re driving through Bed-Stuy and Clinton Hill, and these neighborhoods are like my face and body when I was in middle school—familiar but changing right before my eyes.
“Personally, I don’t know why they moved to Bushwick in the first place,” Warren continues.
I’m pulled back into his small talk, didn’t realize that it had turned to Darius. “Why does he say he moved to Bushwick, anyway?”
“I don’t know. We don’t chill like that.” He shrugs.
“You’re cool with Ainsley, though, right?”
“He’s cool. They’re both cool. It’s just that there’s not really much we can talk about. We don’t have anything in common. There’s some other brothers in the school that I roll with. But not Darius.”
“I feel you. Trust me.”
“I see Janae’s all up on Ainsley.”
“No. It’s the other way around. My sister doesn’t get down like that.”
“You’re different from Janae, right?”
“Yeah. Wait. What do you mean by different?”
“You wouldn’t go for some dude like Ainsley. Those bougie dudes who think they’re better than everybody. Especially Darius,” he says, smirking. “I can tell you like guys you can relate to. A little hard and with a little edge.”
“You can say that again.” I laugh.
He laughs too, at some inside joke we haven’t even shared. I side-eye him because clearly, he’s got game.
We get to our destination, and I assume we’re going to the movies because it’s just a couple of blocks away, but we’re headed down Montague Street, a part of downtown Brooklyn I’ve never really been to. Brooklyn is segregated like that. There are definitely parts that are not hood, like Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights, but all kinds of people walk through here for whatever reason. I never have. The stores are too expensive, there are no basketball courts or handball courts, no bodegas or front stoops to roll out a barrel grill for jerk chicken, no pastelitos in deep fryers in small, smoky kitchens, and no crowded apartments filled with aunties, uncles, or cousins from Haiti or the Dominican Republic.
“You’ve been to the Promenade before?” Warren asks, taking my hand.
I gently pull away and pretend he didn’t do that in the first place.
I have to decide in a split second whether or not to let Warren know how sheltered I am. There aren’t many places in Brooklyn my family and I have ventured into. A big shopping trip is taking the B26 bus down Halsey Street to the Fulton Mall. And when we do take a cab, it’s to the Brownsville BJs in Gateway Mall or to Costco in Sunset Park. Going to Manhattan is a treat. I can count on one hand how many times we’ve been to Times Square.
Mama and Papi are either always working or always tired—Papi with his two jobs and Mama with us and the housework. So we mostly stay in the hood, where we can just walk around on our own and everybody knows us.
“Yeah, I’ve been to the Prome-whatever,” I say.
“Well, that’s where we’re going. It’s my favorite spot in Brooklyn.”
“Oh, really?” is all I say.
“You know, that’s kinda what I wanna do with the kids in our neighborhood,” he says, almost reading my mind. “Take ’em on field trips. I bet you a lot of them ain’t never been to the Empire State Building or even Harlem. That was the case for me.”
“That’ll be really cool. Make it big and give back to the community,” I say really calm, but my heart is doing backflips. I never had a checklist of what I would want in a boyfriend. That was more Janae’s thing. But as Warren talks, I’m making a mental list and checking it off at the same time. One: fine as hell. Check. Two: smart as hell. Check. Three: dreams, goals, and aspirations. Check, check, check.
Though I should take off points for how he keeps glancing down at my butt.
I wonder if this Promenade is expensive or if we’d both be out of place, but Warren seems like he can handle being anywhere, even with his diamond studs and sneakers. “Next time I’ll take you to my favorite spot, other than the corner of Jefferson and Bushwick,” I say.
“Where’s that?” he asks, walking a little too close to me.
“The corner of Fulton and Hoyt. Downtown. It’s where I buy my books,” I say. “My father takes me there every once in a while.”
“A bookstore is your favorite place?” He turns his whole body to me now.
“It’s not a bookstore. It’s a book . . . spot. This guy sells books on the corner.”
“Why don’t you go to a bookstore?”
“Well, it is like a bookstore. Come on, Warren. You know this already. You’re smart, and if you didn’t go to that fancy school, you’d be getting your books from the brother on the corner too.”
“You like to read?”
“You’re assuming that I don’t?”
“I never said that. I just didn’t think your favorite spot in all of Brooklyn would be a corner where some guy sells books. Why not . . . the library?”
“I like owning my books.”
He pauses for a second. “I like you,” he says.
I only half smile, hoping that he knows that I’m not falling for his game. But still, I kind of don’t mind it. “You a’ight.”
“Oh, I’m a’ight? I hear you, ZZ.”
As he says this, the block we’re walking on comes to an end, or rather, it opens up into a park, and in the short distance is New York City’s skyline against a dim blue sky and faded yellow sun. We walk through the park, and I quickly realize why this is his favorite spot in Brooklyn. This park, or promenade, is right along the river separating Brooklyn from Manhattan.
Benches are lined against a metal fence, and the gray-blue water immediately draws me in. A warm summer breeze blows, and tiny bumps form on my arms. This is what Madrina calls grains of sugar adding sweetness to my soul; the first sparks of love and attraction, of something so new and tender that if I’m too firm with it, it will burst. I tighten my jaw and cross my arms to harden my stance and make everything about me firm and closed off.
This is not a date. This is not a spark of anything sweet, or tender, or shimmery. This is just me getting to know a boy named Warren from Bushwick. And that breeze is just giving me goose bumps. That’s all.
“Want some ice cream?” he asks.
“Yes,” I respond, without even thinking twice, and he places his hand in the small of my back and pulls me toward an old-fashioned ice-cream cart with a white man wearing a white apron and a chef’s hat. I ask for chocolate. He asks for butter pecan.
We eat our ice-cream cones and walk and have more small talk about the program he went to, how he learned to skim through boring books and still ace the tests, the rich white kids he knows, wrestling scholarships, and the connections he’s already made at Easton. I don’t talk. I listen.
And this thing we’re doing, in this place at the edge of a river with buildings and row houses on one side, and the cityscape on the other, is just chillin’. It’s that warm spot on the couch when my favorite show is on TV. It’s a plate of Mama’s food left out for me on the table and covered with a paper towel for when I get home from school. It’s our front stoop on a Saturday afternoon.