CHAPTER 10 #2
Shay stiffened as she regularly did but she didn’t pull away. Well, not right away.
As we left, the cold hit harder after the heat from the rink. It attacked you fast, stealing whatever warmth you had left. Shay walked ahead with her friends, their voices ringing, laughter bouncing off the buildings. Shay glanced back once. At Mama. At us.
Mama trailed behind the pack, holding the twins with a firm grip.
I studied Shay from the back. Thirteen didn’t only come with cake and candles.
It came with choices. Pulls. Temptations you committed to without awareness.
Seeing Shay dissolve into the midnight shadows, I could see that we was walking the same streets, but we wasn’t headed in the same direction anymore.
BLIZZARD
Shay’s birthday candles was barely cold before the air turned lethal.
The ice storm of January ’94 encased West Philly in a layer of frozen glass.
We bottomed out at 17 degrees below zero, the first time the city ever saw a temperature below the zero mark.
The sky had turned a metallic gray that stayed low, pressing the cold into the brick until the walls started to sweat icicles.
The power lines was the first to go. They snapped with more force than a gunshot, whipping across the slick asphalt of Parrish Street.
When the power blinked out, the silence that rushed in was heavy.
Mama didn't panic, she shifted into a different gear.
She dragged our mattresses into the kitchen, the only room with enough space for all of us.
She grabbed every blanket she could find and we huddled together.
We ate cold Spam straight from the tin and drank lukewarm Swiss Miss.
I spent the hours pressed against the window, watching the block transform into a graveyard of frozen cars.
A '88 Cadillac Seville was entombed across the street.
Every few minutes, a branch from the lone maple tree on the corner would give up, the ice-smothered wood hitting the sidewalk then shattering.
It was beautiful in a way that felt like a threat.
By the second night, the cold was a physical weight.
Mama had us all pressed together, in the center of the kitchen.
She whispered stories about the summertime, about heat so violent it could melt you, trying to trick our blood into moving.
I looked at Shay, who had finally pulled the headphones down around her neck.
She looked less like the girl who wanted to own the block and more a kid who realized just how thin the walls between us and the cold really was.
The third morning, the silence finally cracked.
The sky was still that bruised, heavy gray but the temperature increased just enough for the world to stop being a tomb and start feeling like a challenge.
Mama gave the nod of approval. We layered on all the clothes we had left.
I wrapped a thrifted faux-fur coat over two of my hoodies, looking like a neon-pink cloud.
When we finally opened the front door, the wood groaned, shedding a skin of ice that shattered like diamonds against the porch.
Philly was gone, and in its place was a kingdom of spiked, translucent glass. The air was so cold it felt like inhaling needles, but the silence was the real killer. No cars, no bass rattling the windows, just the eerie, groan of the city under a million tons of ice.
Mia was buried under a massive, oversized puffer and a scarf wound so tight only her eyes was visible, but I know that stance anywhere. For the last three days, the phone lines had been nothing but dead static, and the distance between our homes, barely a hundred feet of asphalt, was a frozen ocean.
"Summer!"
Her voice rolled out in a frantic white cloud.
She didn't walk, she skated, her boots sliding dangerously over the glazed sidewalk.
I didn't care about the black ice. I lunged off my stoop.
We collided in the middle of the sidewalk, next to that glass coffin Cadillac.
I grabbed her shoulders, my fingers digging into the thick fabric of her coat to make sure she hadn't turned into one of those ice statues on the corner.
"I missed you girl," my voice sounding raw even to me.
"Mama wouldn’t let me come see you cuz of tha storm. I been so bored." she whined, her eyes wide and watery from the sting of the wind. She pulled her scarf down, her face flushed a deep, wind-burned red.
"Girl Mama had us in tha kitchen sleepin’ togetha’. It was so cold and quiet Mia. I thought tha whole world ended witout us."
She reached out and squeezed my hand, her grip surprisingly strong despite the shivering. We was just two girls standing in the middle of a frozen wasteland, realizing that as long as we could see each other's breath, we was still here.
The twins looked like two overstuffed marshmallows.
Mama had them in so many layers of wool and mismatched puffer vests they couldn't put their arms down.
Saiyd saw the world turned into a diamond and wanted to break it.
He lunged off the bottom step, his boots sliding out from under him immediately.
He hit the ice with a dull thump, bounced up, and started laughing, a high, bright sound that was crazy loud in the dead still of the block.
"Look, Summer! I'm a penguin!" he shrieked, scrambling up only to slide another three feet down the sidewalk, his breath trailing behind him.
Sinceer, as always, was the shadow to Saiyd’s light.
He stepped onto the ice like he was walking on eggshells.
His oversized mittens pressed against the frozen brick of the house for balance.
He didn't scream. He stood there, his big eyes wide and dark, watching.
There was a single frozen bubble trapped in a sheet of ice on the railing.
He reached out a finger, touching the crystal surface.
"It's so cold, Sin,"
Saiyd yelled, throwing a chunk of shattered icicle at him.
"Move around before you turn into a popsicle!"
Sinceer didn't flinch. He looked at the ice, then at the sky, his small face unreadable under a heavy knit cap.
"Ugh, did tha universe really have to deliver winter wonderland,"
Shay snapped from the doorway. She was propped against the frame with her arms crossed tight over her chest.
She had decided the storm was a personal insult to her social life.
She looked at the twins, then at the graveyard of frozen cars, with a rehearsed boredom that she used to mask the fact that she had been huddled by the stove, freezing and just as scared as the rest of us.
"Sai, leave Sin alone before I throw a snowball at you,"
her voice dropping into that authoritative grown tone she had been practicing her whole life. She tucked a stray braid back under her headband, glancing over the block.
"And stop eatin’ the icicles yo’. That’s prolly gutta’ water."
She stepped onto the ice, her movements sharp and calculated, trying to maintain her cool while her boots did a frantic dance on the glaze. She wasn't playing, she was supervising. Or at least that’s what she wanted us to think.
"Y'all betta stay close,"
She added, her eyes flicking toward the dark mouth of the alley.
"Mama said the pipes are busted three streets ova’. Dis ain't a playground, it’s a freezer."
Down the block, a figure was hacking away at the sidewalk.
It was Tyrone from a few doors down. He wasn't using a shovel, he had a chunky tire iron, swinging it with a beat, clink-clink-clink that echoed off the frozen bricks.
He was wrapped in a massive, oil-stained parka, a cigarette dangling unlit from his lips because the wind was too harsh to catch a flame.
"Watch ya step, lil’ ladies!" Unc called out, his breath was billowing dragon smoke. He didn't look up, kept chipping at the thick slab of ice wrapping his stoop.
"The 52nd Street bus ain't comin', and tha salt trucks are stuck somewheres in Jersey. You wanna move out here, you move slow, or you gonna end up wit’ a broken tailbone and no ER to fix it."
We kept moving down the sidewalk, our boots crunching into the crust. Mia grabbed my arm to steady herself.
"Where you goin’ Unc?"
my voice muffled by a wool scarf.
He paused, leaning on his iron rod. He pointed toward the corner bodega, where the metal security gate was frozen halfway up, draped in icicles, like a jagged set of teeth.
"Gots to do my community check," Unc said, his eyes scanning the street with a grim sort of authority.
"Tha corner store got tha only generator fa six blocks. We gonna see who's got milk, who's got heat, and who's freezin’ in tha dark. Now y’all move easy out here, stay close to tha brick. Tha ice on those power lines is lookin' real heavy."
The sidewalk was a skating rink but the block didn’t stay down.
It couldn't afford to. West Philly doesn't wait for the city to plow, they forget where 52nd Street is when the white stuff starts falling.
By noon, the ecosystem was buzzing in the cold.
It was a broken, shivering machinery, but it was moving.
And Unc was the engine. He stood on his porch, like a frozen guard.
His fingers cracked and stained gray from the kerosene heater he had been hauling from house to house.
He didn't ask if you had money. He looked at the frost on your windows and knew.
"Summer! Mia!" he barked, his voice lashing through the brittle air. He tossed a huge, salt-stained burlap sack toward us. It hit the ice with a dull thud.
"Take dat to Miss Pearl at 5102. She lives alone and she got tha arthritis bad. Tell her if she tries to shovel her own stoop, I’m comin’ ova there to clip her ear."
Mia grabbed one end of the bag with her designer gloves.
"Wus in here, Unc?"
"Rock salt n’ hope," he grunted, turning back to his makeshift workshop on the stoop. He was breaking down a wooden shipping crate with a crowbar, the wood splintering with screams that sounded like gunshots in the dead quiet.
"We burnin’ tha crates in da alley barrels tonight. Tell yo’ Mama to bring tha twins down when tha sun drops.”
The bodega wasn't open, not really. The metal gate was frozen, but the side door was cracked.
Inside, the smell of damp cardboard and old floor wax hit us.
There was no light, just the gray winter sun bleeding through the clouded glass, but the ‘hood was there.
It was a silent trade. Nobody had a full wallet, but everyone had something.