As soon as the elevator doors open, I wish we had taken the stairs. Mrs. Novakova, short and squat, is lurking inside, like a creepy garden gnome peering out of the brush.
“Getting off?” I ask.
She frowns and shakes her head. Of course she’s not getting off. How else will she interrogate us? I press the button for the lobby and hold my breath when the doors slide shut.
“You take these girls to the school, Leonard?” she asks my father in her thick, growly accent. She’s been in our building for fifty years, ever since emigrating from Eastern Europe—maybe Hungary, maybe Russia—I can’t remember. It’s someplace where the neighbors used to spy on one another for the government.
“Yes, Mrs. Novakova,” my father says as he watches the floor counter blink from four to three to two . . .
Mrs. Novakova’s mouth curls in disapproval, revealing her lipstick-stained teeth. “You never catch me near that school today. Mixing with us is wrong, especially the children. They are animals, and filthy, too! Always digging in trash cans, making too many babies, and living in filth. Like gypsies back home. Only good gypsy is dead gypsy. You stay away from them. You get disease. Who knows?”
“If they had a disease, I think we’d all have it by now,” my father says. “They’ve been here awhile.”
“Make no difference! You have crazy cow disease for ten years, then kaput! A man walks around, not even knowing he’s dead. That’s their plan. They spread sick to us, wait for us to die. I try to tell people. No one listens to old woman. Don’t you bring one of them back here!”
“I won’t, Mrs. Novakova,” I say.
Bex looks like she’s going to laugh, until I shoot her a look. Mrs. Novakova is old-school evil who rats on anyone she deems suspicious. Neighbors who have found themselves on her bad side have been dragged out of their beds and questioned by cops and gang members alike. I’ve learned to let every word I say to her roll around in my mouth to dull the sharp edges first.
“What are police doing to get rid of them, Leonard? I pay taxes for beach and I’d like to go down and take a walk,” she barks. “My husband and I spent every Friday night strolling along pier, until the coloreds and the Polacks took over. They bad enough. Now it’s those things.”
It takes every ounce of self-restraint for me not to roll my eyes. When her husband was alive, they fought day and night. An hour didn’t go by without her screaming to everyone who would listen about what a disappointment he was, how he had never amounted to anything, how she should have married Pavel, a very well-to-do tailor who had the common courtesy to die young and leave his widow a fortune. Her husband passed away two years ago. He choked on some soup. Really. I mean, who chokes to death on soup? Someone who’s looking for a way out, that’s who.
By the time we reach the lobby, Mrs. Novakova has given us an advanced-placement class on “the Chinks,” “the Spics,” “the Japs,” “the Kikes,” and “the towel heads,” all of whom she describes as filthy and “up to no good” and plotting to kill us all. My father has a patience with her he never has with me. He says “Good day,” and when the doors slide open he leads us outside.
“Someday she’ll die,” he promises when she’s out of earshot.
“I wouldn’t bet on it,” I reply.
Unfortunately, outside it’s even more oppressive than inside. It’s ninety-frickin’-eight degrees with a thousand percent humidity. Welcome to the early morning ugh of Coney Island, a sauna trapped inside an aquarium locked in a carwash next to a water park in hell. I sweat from every pore. My jeans glue themselves to my legs. My bangs drip like I used maple syrup to get just the right look. Awesome. I’m going to look like I swam to school, and because the universe hates me, here come the reporters to show the whole world my shame. They pounce like dogs on a pork chop, running across streets and through front yards, scampering over parked cars and surrounding us with microphones and questions. Their eyes are wide and eager. They flash smiles full of chalk-white teeth. Their spray-on tans have dyed their faces a rusty orange.
“Are you students at Hylan High?” one of them asks. Her hair is so motionless, it could actually be a helmet. I ignore her just like my father coached me. Keep your head down and they’ll go away. It usually works, but there are hundreds of them blocking the sidewalks and a dozen more racing in our direction. The neighborhood has been swarming with reporters for three years. They have a free pass in and out of the Zone, but I haven’t had to deal with this many in a while. Even my father is thrown.
“Can you tell our viewers your names?” one of them shouts.
“My name is Officer Leonard Walker,” he says, stepping between Bex and me and the cameras.