We went inside, and I sat down to take my shoes off. No one else was home. Our dad was at work, our mother was probably doing some grocery shopping, and Goh Goh was just now getting off from school.
My sister leaned back against the front door, her hand on the doorknob, her lips pressed tight. She wore overalls, and her bangs fell below her eyebrows. ’Dullah and Sameerah were still singsonging our names. Ga Jeh didn’t lock the door. We had four locks, including two chain locks, which Bah Ba had installed, one high, one low. It was also Bah Ba who’d installed the wire mesh that guarded all our windows, as if the thick steel bars weren’t enough protection. “A burglar will need weeks to cut through,” he’d told me. I wondered how we’d escape in a fire.
Ga Jeh opened the door and stepped out into the courtyard. “Sa-meer-ah and ’Dul-lah, ’Dul-lah and Sa-meer-ah!”
The two of them upstairs erupted in laughter, and my sister slammed the door.
“Let’s go in the living room,” I told her. I figured the best thing to do was ignore them.
Ga Jeh stomped past me to the sink and reached behind the cutting board, thick and circular, a piece of wood that seemed sliced directly from a tree trunk. My sister held my mother’s cleaver.
“Grab a knife!” she said, raising the cleaver in the air as if it were Excalibur.
She was nuts. My mother wouldn’t let me handle a steak knife.
“You’re going to be a scaredy-cat your whole life?” she said. She got in my face and gave me an eye-level glare.
I saw myself in her dark brown pupils, trapped in their spheres.
“Pick. One. Up. Now.”
I proceeded to the dish rack—my mom always told me to listen to my Ga Jeh—and found the chef’s knife in the back. My image was distorted in the blade as I flipped it back and forth.
Ga Jeh shook the cleaver at me. “After this, they won’t bug us.” She was too small for the knife, which only made her appear more menacing. She wasn’t unfamiliar with knives. My mother let her help in the kitchen, chopping garlic or vegetables.
“They’ll run,” Ga Jeh said. “Watch.”
I tilted my knife up.
“Look crazy. Like you’ll really do it.” She stuck her tongue out and made an ugly face.
I narrowed my eyebrows, trying to slant them like the angry faces I doodled in class.
She looked confused. “Just stay behind me.”
It was hard to act wild carrying the knife. My clumsy hands would knock over glasses of soda onto the living room carpet. I didn’t want to slip with a knife while I was pretending to slash someone.
Ga Jeh put her hand on the doorknob and turned back to me.
I nodded, tightening my grip on the knife.
She yanked the door open, and it banged against the wall. She burst out of the kitchen onto the courtyard. Her ponytail flapped behind her. I leaped through the door, stumbling forward when I landed.
Ga Jeh waved the cleaver toward the patchy sky. Sunlight gleamed off the knife. ’Dullah and Sameerah leaned over the railing on the second floor, but they didn’t flee. They observed us from above like we were animals in a zoo, so focused on us that they hadn’t realized we were racing to the staircase at the end of the floor to confront them. From their vantage point, it might’ve appeared we were about to run past them.
My sister let out a high-pitched shriek. The force of it sent them running. I screamed, trying to match my sister’s intensity. She was sprinting, but the point was to frighten them, not catch them. I didn’t recognize this volatile Ga Jeh. I thought of her as more Hello Kitty than anything else.
I realize now that this took place after the abuse began. It could have been my father that sent my sister charging, knife raised.
We skipped steps up the staircase. The plastic beads in Sameerah’s hair clicked as she ran. She trailed behind ’Dullah. Years later, me and ’Dullah would run after buses we’d just missed. His face would harden and nothing seemed more important than his next step. We’d catch up with the bus, and tourists would clap when we got on.
They jumped into the stairwell that led to the third floor. We followed, though our mother had warned us not to wander around in our building. I smelled urine trapped inside the stairwell. A dried-up stream snaked down the steps. The words North Beach Posse were written in a block font on the wall.
The third floor presented three choices. North Beach was a labyrinth. One path led to a walkway wrapping around our side of the projects, another to the next project complex, and the last walkway led to a dead-end around the corner.
“Which way?” I asked.
Ga Jeh ran toward the next project building, and I tried to keep pace. Shards of glass peppered the floor, broken bottles. My sister peeked over the railing when we reached the next building. A steady stream of cars flowed below. I looked into the stairwell. No sign of our prey. Mission accomplished.
When we came home and returned the knives to the kitchen, I remember thinking that my sister had discovered the secret of life. When you get picked on, grab a knife. Charge after your tormentors, and they won’t do it again. It was a simple recipe, except we didn’t count on their mother.
Cassandra pounded on our front door. “Open up!” The walls shook with each thump. I felt the vibrations
