It’s a lie, though. The bed she’s lying on is new, with a fancy European-style mattress and one-thousand-thread-count sheets, but it’s still her old bedroom. And as Brooklyn settles in to rest, having cracked open the window so she can listen to the night sounds of the city—crickets and passing cars and the soft laughter and music of a house party somewhere on the next block—she finds herself needing comfort, too, and finding it in the familiarity of the old walls, the old ceiling, the old scent of the place that’s still there, ever so faintly, underneath the new paint and hardwood floors. Back in the day, her room would’ve been sweltering; they couldn’t afford air-conditioning units or the resulting electric bills, just fans. And Brooklyn would’ve been looking at the night sky through burglar bars, which everyone needed at the height of the crack epidemic. Still. Back then she had been a teenage girl so full of dreams, whose only real worries were passing the Regents and not getting knocked up by her boyfriend of the time. (What was his name? Jermaine? Jerman? Something with a J. Lord, she couldn’t even remember.) She hadn’t yet become MC Free, vanguard of a movement; she was just a kid trying out freestyle lyrics in the dark, forgetting half the best ones because she kept falling asleep in the middle of composition.
And back then, she sure hadn’t been expecting to transform into a goddamn living embodiment of this wild, incredible, stupid-ass city.
But there is a kind of poetry to the whole situation that Brooklyn accepts—because this wild, incredible, stupid-ass city has given her so much. That’s why she ran for city council, after all: because she believes that only people who actually love New York, versus those merely occupying and exploiting it, should dictate what it is and becomes. Becoming a borough is just the literalization of something she’s always done, so she’s okay with it. More than she ever expected to be.
She knows who it is as soon as the phone rings. “Are you coming home?” asks Jojo, in a carefully bored tone so as to let Brooklyn know she doesn’t actually care. It’s cool. She’s fourteen, which she thinks is almost grown, so she absolutely resolutely does not miss her mama.
“I’m right next door.”
“Which is why I asked if you were coming home.”
Brooklyn sighs, although it’s fond. “I told you. This place still feels like home to me, baby. Just let me have this for a little while, okay?”
Jojo’s sigh is almost a match for her own, but Brooklyn hears the amusement in it. “You’re so weird, Mama.” Then, in the background of the phone, Brooklyn hears her getting up and doing something involving a grunt and a wooden rattle—oh. Opening her window, too. “I guess you used to look out at this view and think up lyrics?”
“Mostly I just looked at the sky. Did you finish that paper you were supposed to do for English?”
“Yes, Mama. Five paragraphs, just the way the SAT likes it.” Singsong boredom. “I miss Ms. Fountain, who used to let us write interesting stuff.”
Brooklyn agrees. Jojo has gotten into one of the coveted specialized high schools of the city, Brooklyn Latin. It’s a more old-fashioned school than Brooklyn likes—actual classes in Latin and uniforms and other stuff that would’ve made Brooklyn herself vomit at that age, but Jojo chose it, and she’s mostly thriving there. The beloved Ms. Fountain, like a lot of teachers in the city who don’t want to squeeze in with roommates for the rest of their lives, decided to accept triple the pay from a tony private school up in Westchester—and Brooklyn can’t blame her one bit for that. She feels sorry for Jojo, though, and the other public school kids who’ve lost a good thing.
“Well, that’s why I proposed that program I told you about,” she says to Jojo. “To help public school teachers get affordable housing.”
“Mmm-hmm.” It’s not really disinterest. Jojo is usually more invested in Brooklyn’s current life as a politician than she is in Brooklyn’s past life as a rapper, which makes Brooklyn very happy. The girl is distracted now, though. Over the phone, there’s another sound: the cell phone bumping up against a window screen. “I can’t see anything.”
“You gotta open the screen, baby.”
“Ew, Mama, mosquitoes will get in! I’ll get West Nile malaria.”
“Then you better kill them. The sky over the city has too much light, baby. You can see the stars a little, but you gotta work for them.” Brooklyn grins. “Can’t let anything stand between you and what you want.”
“Is this another lecture about goals? You said you were gonna stop lecturing me about goals.”
“It’s a lecture about the stars.” And also goals.
There is a moment’s pause while she hears Jojo rattling the screen and finally getting it up. “Oooh. I do see… three stars in a row. That’s Orion’s belt, isn’t it?”
“Probably.” Now it’s Brooklyn’s turn to go wrestle with her bedroom window. Fortunately she had the shitty, paint-crusted old single-panes replaced during a gut renovation a few years back; the new double-paned windows are much easier to open. Once she’s raised the screen and poked her head outside, she looks up. “Oh, yeah. Definitely Orion.”
Then she looks over. The two buildings have flush back ends. In the dark, her daughter’s silhouette waves at her, and she waves back.
Then Brooklyn pauses as she notices something else in the dark, down in the paved backyard of the other building, where her father sometimes likes to barbecue for the family. At other times of year it’s mostly just occupied by an old ironwork table and some uncomfortable chairs, and a lot of dead plants in pots. (Her father gets after her for those, but she’s busy. Green thumbs take time she doesn’t have.) She keeps meaning to get a landscaping company in, have them do something interesting with the space.
Right now, however, there is a strange glowing thing stretched over one corner of the yard.
She leans farther out the window, frowning as she tries to figure out what that is. Did somebody string up a tangle of neon tape? Do they even make such a thing? But this does not have the slightly yellow glow of things made with luminescent dye. It’s untinted white and ghostly, and seems to waver a little as she looks at it, as if it isn’t quite there.
Then it moves.
Brooklyn jerks violently, and there is a terrifying instant in which she tips a little, where she’s balanced herself against the bottom windowsill in order to lean out. It would only be a one-story fall, but people have died from less. She catches herself, fortunately, and gets a grip on the window frame, though her hand has gone sweaty and numb with chill.
Because now that she’s gotten a good look at it, there is something like a three-foot-wide spider moving around the backyard that her daughter leans out over. It has only four legs—if those even qualify as legs. They don’t taper. They don’t bend as they come away from the tiny central body; the whole creature must just be lying on the ground, spread out along the concrete flagstones in a flat cross. That’s all it is. But when it moves, it is vaguely spiderlike, contracting into a single flat line and then scissoring out into four lines again, all joined at a small rounded hub. An eldritch daddy longlegs, brought to you by the letter X.
And then another scrabbles over the chain-link fence, between tendrils of her neighbors’ gone-wild grapevine. The creature pauses for a moment, one leg sticking straight up as if to test the air.