Who's 'Bout to Bounce? Read Free

one good foot, to my apartment building.
    “Hi, Dorinda! How come you limping?” asks Pookie, who is sitting in the courtyard. See, there are a lot of buildings in the Cornwall Projects, but only two of them have a courtyard, so all the kids hang out here.
    Pookie is sitting with his mom, Ms. Keisha, and his sister, Walkie-talkie Tamela. We call her that because she never shuts up.
    “Heh, Pookie,” I respond, huffing and puffing. “Can Man hit me with his cart and knocked me over.”
    “You know he’s crazy. You better stay out of his way, Dorinda, before he really hurts you,” mumbles Ms. Keisha.
    “I know, Ms. Keisha, but I didn’t see him because he was behind me. Is Mrs. Bosco home?”
    “Yep,” she says, nodding her head at me. See, Ms. Keisha is nosy, and she knows that
we
know she’s nosy. She sits outside all day, with a head full of pink hair rollers and even pinker bedroom slippers, talking about people’s business like she’s Miss Clucky on the gossip show.
    Not that her motormouth doesn’t come in “handy dandy,” as Bubbles would say. See, if you’re in trouble, and you wanna know if you’re gonna get it when you get upstairs, you just ask Ms. Keisha. She knows if your mother is home—
and
if she’s mad at you.
    The courtyard isn’t much of a playground for all the kids who live here, but it’s better than hanging out in front with the “good-for-nothings,” as Mrs. Bosco calls the knuckleheads who hang around all day and don’t go to school or to work.
    Some of the people who live here try to make it look nice, too. Once somebody tried to plant a tree right in the cement, but it was gone the next morning. So now there are no trees—just a few po’ little brown shrubs that look like nubs. And there aren’t any slides, swings, or jungle gym to play on, either—just some big old “X” marks scribbled with chalk on the ground, for playing jumping jacks.
    I used to jump double Dutch rope out here all the time when I was little. I was the rope-a-dopest double Dutcher, too, even though Tawanna, who lives in Building C, thinks
she’s
the bomb. She’s such a big show-off, it just looks like she’s got more moves than she
really
does.
    It’s getting dark out already. I know I’ve missed dinner, but Mrs. Bosco will still have something waiting for me. Hobbling on my good ankle, I open the door to the building, and get my keys out of my sweatpants. After dinner, I think, I’d better go see if Mrs. Gallstone down the hall is home. She’s a nurse, and she’ll know if my ankle is broken or not.
    I hope little Arba is over her cold, too, I think, as I limp to the elevator. Arba is my new little sister. She’s almost five years old—the same age I was when I came to live with Mrs. Bosco. She doesn’t speak English very well, but we’re teaching her.
    Arba is Albanian by nationality, but her mother had her here, then died. Mrs. Bosco says a lot of people come to the Big Apple looking for the streets paved in gold, but instead they get “chewed up and spit out.”
    Most of the time, the caseworkers never say much about where foster kids come from, or what happened to them. They just drop them off, sometimes with bags of clothes and toys. Anyway, someone took Arba to the Child Welfare Department because she had no family, and they gave her to Mrs. Bosco to take care of until somebody adopts her—if anybody ever does.
    You could say our house is kinda like the United Nations or something. My seven-year-old foster brother, Topwe, is African—real African, from Africa. He speaks English all funny, but it’s his native language. They all talk like that over there!
    Topwe gets the most attention, because he is HIV-positive, which means he was infected with the AIDS virus. His mother was a crack addict, Mrs. Bosco told me, but I’m not supposed to say anything to Topwe or the other kids. I’m the only one, she says, who can keep a secret. It’s true, too. I really can.
    Like I said, the