"She black," said Mack.

"We want to be black our way," said Miz Smitcher. "Decent, regular, ordinary people. Not show black like those hippity-hop rippety-rappers and that girl on her bike."

Mrs. Tucker spoke into her coffee cup. "She's a little bit old to be calling her a girl."

"How do you know she isn't a decent, regular, ordinary person who happens to ride a motorcycle?" demanded Mack.

"And why do you think I didn't go to that meeting last night?" answered Miz Smitcher.

"Well if you're against what they doing, why are you arguing with me?"

"Because you judging and condemning people you don't even understand. What they doing to that girl, you doing to them. Everybody judging and nobody understanding."

"You were talking about property values," said Mack.

"I was explaining why somebody like that comes here, it makes us all feel like we getting invaded. Like the neighborhood maybe starting to turn trashy. Plenty of places for trashy people to live. They don't have to live here. This neighborhood is an island in a sea of troubles. Somebody young and loud like that, she's some people's worst nightmare."

I know what their worst nightmares are, thought Mack. Or at least what they might be, if they got their wishes.

Out loud, he said, "Well, she's not trashy, she's nice."

Both women raised their eyebrows, and Mrs. Tucker set down her cup. "Oh ho, sounds like love."

"She's ten years older than he is if she's a day," said Miz Smitcher.

"It isn't love," said Mack. "But I did something nobody else in this whole neighborhood bothered to do. I talked to her."

"They did not talk to her, they talked at her, told her what she got to do or else."

"Oh, were you there?" asked Mrs. Tucker.

"I'll tell you about Yolanda White. She sees a kid running to school cause the bus driver took off without me like she always tries to do, and she pulls up in front of me on that bike and gives me a ride to school."

Mrs. Tucker gasped and Miz Smitcher looked at him for a long moment. "You been on that bike?"

Only now did Mack realize that they might not take the right lesson from his experience. "My point is that she's a kind person."

But Miz Smitcher wasn't having it. "She's riding along and she sees a schoolboy and she gives him a ride?"

"It was a nice thing to do," Mack insisted.

"So you had your arms around her and you were pressed right up against her back and tell me, Mack, did she drive fast and hard so you had to hold on real tight?"

This was not going the way Mack intended. "We were riding a motorcycle, Miz Smitcher, if you don't hold on you end up sliding along the street."

"Oh, I know what happens if you don't hold on to a motorcycle, Mister," said Miz Smitcher. "I see motorcycle accidents all the time. Skin flayed right off their body, these fools go riding in shorts and a t-shirt and then they spill on the asphalt and get tar and stones imbedded in their bones and the muscles torn right off their body cause the pavement's like being sandblasted. And that woman took my boy and put him on the back of her bike so he rubbing up against her and she drove him along the streets like a crazy woman so she put him at risk of ending up in the hospital with a nurse like me changing the dressings on his skinless body while he screaming in spite of the morphine drip—oh, don't you tell me about how nice she is."

Mack knew that anything he said now would just make things worse. He dug into his cereal.

"Don't you sit there and eat that Crispix like you didn't hear a word I said."

"He just trying to think of an answer," said Mrs. Tucker.

"Just trying to finish breakfast so I don't miss my bus," said Mack.

"You're not to go near her, you hear me?" said Miz Smitcher. "You think you're friends with her now—"

"I know we not friends." They'd be friends when she let him call her Yo Yo.

to kill her or you or both, and if you get on her motorcycle again, I'm kicking you out of this house!"

"So I'd be dead and homeless," said Mack.

"Don't make fun of what I'm telling you!"

Mack got up, rinsed out his dish, and started to put it in the dishwasher.

"Don't! Those are clean in there!" shouted Miz Smitcher.

"You're right," said Mack. "Wouldn't want a dirty dish to spoil the property values in there."

"That's exactly my point!" said Miz Smitcher. "That is exactly my point. One dirty dish and you have to rewash the whole batch."

"Well, this whole neighborhood better start rewashing, cause Yolanda White bought that house and I don't think she going to pay any attention to a neighborhood vigilante committee." He stalked off to get his backpack out of his bedroom.

Behind him, he could hear Miz Smitcher talking to Mrs. Tucker. "She already setting parent against child. She is divisive."

Mack couldn't let that go. "She isn't divisive! She just minding her business! You and me the ones getting divisive!"

"Because of her!" shouted back Miz Smitcher.

Mack stood in his room, holding the bookbag. In all his years in this house, this was the first time he and Miz Smitcher ever shouted at each other in anger.

Which wasn't to say that they never disagreed. But up till now, Mack always gave in, always said yes ma'am, because that was how things stayed smooth. Mack liked things to stay smooth. He didn't care enough about most things to yell at anybody about them.

But suddenly he did care. Why? What was Yo Yo, that he should get so mad when somebody dissed her? Why was he loyal to her?

He almost walked back into the kitchen and apologized.

But then it occurred to him: About time I stood up for something around here. Always doing what other people want, well maybe I'm ready to fight for something, and it might as well be Yolanda's right to live here and ride a motorcycle and give a lift to a seventeen-year-old man who's probably really more like nineteen anyway.

He was ten yards from the bus when the driver started to pull away. She hadn't been stopped there for two whole seconds and he knew she saw him cause she looked right at him. And today he was pissed off, at Miz Smitcher, at the whole neighborhood, and he was not going to take any shit from a bus driver.

Mack landed on his feet and ran directly in front of the bus and stood on the front bumper and yelled through the windshield into the driver's face. "Open the damn door and take me to school like they pay you to do!"

Mack couldn't see his own face but there must have been something new there, because that driver looked at him with real fear in her eyes.

The door opened.

Mack got off the bumper, hoisted his book bag over his shoulder, and sauntered to the door.

He stepped up, taking his time, and kept his eyes on her the whole time he walked up the steps and past her. She never looked at him once, just kept her eyes straight forward. She closed the door and the bus started forward with a lurch.

Mack turned toward the back of the bus, looking for a seat. All the other kids were looking at him like he was an alien. But not just any alien. He was the alien who had faced down the devil driver.

Plenty of them had been left behind, too, over the years, and Mack was the first person to make her stop and wait. So what he saw in the other kids' eyes was awe or delight or amusement, anyway.

They were all kids, so they were used to having to take crap from adults whenever the adults felt like dishing it out.

When Mack sat down, Terrence Heck gave him a hood handshake and Quon Brown called out from two rows behind him, in a voice pretending to be a girl, "You my hero, Mack Street."

Mack turned around and grinned. "That be Mr. Super Hero to you, Quon."

When they got to school, the bus driver was still fuming, and when he passed her, she muttered,