The Residue Years Read Online Free PDF Page B

with their father.
    I loll in the hallways, peek into my friend’s rooms, coax them into long-winded good-byes.
    You wait so long to leave and when it’s your turn you wait as long as you can to leave.
    I am not alone
.
    I am capable of change
.
    I am the change I want to see
.
    At last, I end up under a covered bus stop with my duffel slung and my suitcase squatting by my side and my cherished birthday picture tucked in the pocket over my heart. There’s only one other person down here with me, a rugged-faced man wearing a stained work shirt and thick-soled boots. The man pats his pockets with an unlit filterless cigarette teethed between his lips. He asks for a light and I offer my Bic and he cups his hands againsta gusty wind. He gets it lit and takes a drag that must be Zen, and though it wasn’t on my mind, I tamp out my slim menthol and light up myself. The bus arrives before long and I crush my cig under my foot and lug my duffel and suitcase on board and haul them to the back, where a boy—he got to be somewhere between the ages of my youngest two—with spiked green hair is slumped in a seat with a battered skateboard laid across his lap. It’s fall, but the boy’s wearing a T-shirt that, without even looking, you can see right through it, cutoff shorts, and dingy tenny shoes with no laces. He thumps his board and jerks his neck to what must be a song in his head, oblivious until we reach Northeast, where he signals his stop, leaps into the street, and skates off against traffic.
    Stops later, a bad wind blows a familiar face on board—Michael. Well, well, well, I’ll be gotdamned, he says, swaggering my way. Ms. Corporate America in the flesh. Fuck a month, ain’t seen you in a year of Sundays.
    Hello, Michael, I say. Please call me Grace. Those jobs were years ago.
    Once in corporate America, always a corporate American, Michael says. You know how it is, most times it ain’t where you at, but where you been and with who. Michael smiles, unveiling missing teeth and a wrong-colored tongue. He rubs an unshaven cheek and stabs his cake cutter deeper into his kinky afro. The man smells as if he should bathe in hot bleach.
    Say, where you been hiding? he says.
    Hiding, I say. Haven’t been hiding nowhere. More like laying low.
    Sheeit, ain’t nothing wrong with that, he says. Come to think of it, somebody tell me, I forget who, that you was in diversion.Judge sent my black ass there when I caught my first possession. But after living a coupla months with all them rules and regulations, I told em, fuck it, send me to the penitentiary. He picks something out of his teeth and flicks it on to the floor. He plops in the seat next to mine.
    Now, they cuisine, he says. From what I recall, they cuisine wasn’t all that bad. Indeed it lacked a certain je ne sais quoi, but every blue moon you’d close your eyes and that shit was damn near fine dining. Michael chuckles and scratches his head and checks the bed of black gunk under his jagged nails. You finish all them phases, or they still got you leashed on that paper? he says.
    I give him my back and watch the blocks scroll—the apartments, the duplexes, the record store, Check Mart, a black-suited Muslim hocking papers outside the beauty supply.
    Oh, oh, I got it, Michael says. Cool, didn’t mean no harm. You know me. Might get it fucked up every now and then, but a brother mostly means well.
    There’s a spotted run of days between this man and me. So many times of us stumbling into a plasma center at the end of a week run, and blowing, with no qualms whatsoever, the few dollars they paid, plus whatever change we had in our pockets, of us striking with smirks, buying from the nearest dealer, and racing to get loaded: in an alley or abandoned building or, in a bind sometimes, the unisex bathroom of a resturant in Old Town.
    Michael looks at me and I look at him and we trade blame, pit against each other our