After Momma and Daddy got divorced, Daddy moved back to Harlem from Huntsville to start his own business—the auto repair shop and junkyard at the corner. I was only four. A year later, Momma and I visited Daddy for the first time, and for that whole summer, we were like a family again. Until we had to leave because Momma said the schools and streets weren’t very good in Harlem.
When I first met Bianca, Momma had been in this same kitchen—making something really good, I’m sure—when a lady holding a little girl’s hand rang our doorbell. Daddy was standing in the middle of the living room shaking his head at me when he saw what I had done to the telephone. (He once told me it was the fourth phone he’d rented from Ma Bell since I figured out how to unplug a phone cord and turn a screwdriver.) And that’s exactly how Bianca first saw me that day: Phillips screwdriver in my hand, and my legs wrapped in the cord. She pulled away from her abuela to help untangle me.
She stayed for a long while after that and came back the next day. When she brought her baby doll to share, she didn’t mind that I took the little eyes out just to see what made them open and close. Soon, Bianca was breaking things and putting them back together again with me, too.
I’m pulling out the ham and cheese to just eat the Wonder Bread when Bianca starts laughing. “Why are you doing that? Abuela would beat your butt for wasting food,” she says.
“Are you trying to trick me with all that laughing?”
“Huh?”
“The Funkazoids chased E-Grace Starfleet all the way to Planet No Joke City! Did you see the signal the Sonic King sent us?” I say, pulling off the crusts from the bread.
“What signal?”
“The sound waves! The Sonic Boom!”
I watch her face—the brown eyes, the curly jet-black hair, the milk mustache. Her shirt is too tight because she’s blossoming, as Momma would say, and I don’t like all the striped colors on it—the pinks, blues, and purples. I’ll make sure to lend her some of my clothes that I sneaked into my suitcase—my NASA, Superman, and Empire Strikes Back T-shirts. Even the new E.T. one that I got from a boy at my old school. I’d traded it for a Transformers T-shirt. I have to hide all these shirts from Momma, who thinks little ladies ought to dress accordingly.
Bianca just shakes her head as if she doesn’t know what I’m talking about.
So I try again. “We’re gonna have to stop King Sirius Julius from keeping me as prisoner. You have to help me find the Uhura so we can save Captain Fleet.”
She shrugs. “You wanna go in the fire hydrant instead? Then we can go dry our clothes in the park. Or maybe we could jump some double-Dutch. When my sneakers are wet and I’m jumping rope, they make a squishy sound and it’s like music when we sing ‘Jack be nimble, Jack be quick . . .’”
“No, let’s go check out the junkyard instead. Is my old rocket ship still there? The one that made it to the moon? Maybe we can use that to get to the Uhura?”
My very first summer in Harlem without Momma was when I was nine. Bianca and I spent almost every single day in the junkyard behind Daddy’s shop. I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere out of Daddy’s sight. But Daddy’s sight was always under the hood of a car or on some rusty car parts.
On one of those days, I sat by the window of Daddy’s brownstone all morning waiting for a giant storm cloud to ease up from New Jersey and Central Park and sit its wide, cloudy butt right over Harlem. When it finally crossed 125th Street, the hot August sun had nothing else to do but back off and mind his own beeswax.
I pulled away from the window and hurried down three long flights of creaky stairs to the ground-floor apartment. I knocked really hard, three times. Bianca opened the door holding her toolbox and wearing a smile as bright as Venus.
“It’s time,” I whispered. “Come on, we gotta hurry!”
We ran next door to the shop where cars were lined up with hoods open in the front yard. Past the broken cars was the glass door to the shop, left wide-open to let out the heat and all the car grease smells. Daddy was in front of the counter talking to one of the mechanics.
I grabbed Bianca’s hand and raced to the back of the shop where the huge rolling gate was halfway up so we could just run straight into the junkyard.
We’d already set up a blue tarp in the middle of the yard where scrap metal, car parts, broken appliances, and even pieces of a staircase from someone’s building were stacked up along the gate. To the far right of the yard was an old supermarket refrigerator where Bianca and I kept our supplies.
Albert, the shop’s guard dog, was at my legs, wagging his tail, when I opened the refrigerator door and reached down for my toolbox. I petted the old Lab just as thunder ripped through the sky. Albert whined and headed for cover beneath a car door. Bianca and I started setting up on top of the old blue tarp. She pulled out two empty soda bottles, a broken toilet plunger, a wrench, a pair of scissors, goggles, and a whistle.
“What’s the whistle for?” I asked.
“For when our rocket ship breaks the sound barrier,” Bianca said. “But wait. Did you bring earmuffs?”
“It’s not gonna even reach Mach one, Bianca. We gotta get it out of the junkyard, and then out of Harlem first,” I said, shaking my head. I pulled out my supplies—aluminum foil, duct tape, three PVC pipes, and a pack of Granddaddy’s seltzer tablets all the way from Huntsville.
I hummed the theme music from Star Trek. “Space, the final frontier,” I said, deepening my voice as I gathered all my materials in front of me.
“To boldly go where no muchacha has gone before,” Bianca added. “You think it’ll get to the Bronx? Maybe land on the Grand Concourse? I can call my Tío Jorge to catch it for us.” Bianca held a pipe to her eye and looked up toward the sky.
“Who cares about the Bronx when you can get to Jupiter and Saturn and beyond?” I said.
I placed the toolbox next to Bianca and looked around the junkyard for any nosy bystanders, like the boys from down the block who used the junkyard for kickball games. But thank goodness the storm had chased them all into their apartments. They’re not into rockets, anyway.
I glanced up at the dark gray sky—perfect for launching so we wouldn’t go blind from staring at the sun. Plus, when the storm clouds hung so low, it looked as if outer space were close enough for us to just tiptoe and touch. Harlem only got quiet during thunderstorms—no one would be outside getting their hot-combed dos, Jheri curls, and white Adidas all messed up. So it sounded as if the whole universe could hear our countdown.
Another roar of thunder made all of Harlem tremble and a single raindrop landed on my nose. “Let’s hurry!” I yelled to Bianca.
CHAPTER
6