1
My new tattoo is covered by a Band-Aid, but halfway through recess, the Band-Aid falls off. I’m hanging my winter coat on the hook in our fourth-grade classroom when my teacher, Ms. Davonte, walks by and gasps.
“Della,” she says, “is that a tattoo?”
I hold up my wrist to show it to her. “It’s an ampersand,” I say, careful to pronounce the word correctly.
“I know that,” Ms. Davonte says. “Is it real?”
It’s so real, it still hurts, and the skin around it is red and puffy. “Yes, ma’am,” I say.
She shakes her head and mutters. I am not one of her favorite students. I may be one of her least favorites.
I don’t care. I love, love, love my ampersand tattoo.
* * *
■ ■ ■
I am ten years old. I’m going to tell you the whole story. Some parts are hard, so I’ll leave those for later. I’ll start with the easy stuff.
My name is Delicious Nevaeh Roberts. Yeah, I know. With a first name like that, why don’t I just go by Nevaeh? I never tell anyone my name is Delicious, but it’s down in my school records, and teachers usually blurt it out on the first day.
I’ve had a lot of first days lately.
If I can get it in before the teacher says Delicious out loud, I’ll say, “I go by Della.” I mean, I’ll say that anyhow— I answer to Della, not Delicious, thank you—but it’s easier if no one ever hears Delicious.
Once a boy tried to lick me to see if I was delicious. I kicked him in the— Suki says I can’t use bad words, not if I want anybody to read my story. Everybody I know uses bad words all the time, just not written down. Anyway, I kicked him right in the zipper of his blue jeans—let’s say it like that—and it was me that got in trouble. It’s always the girl that gets in trouble. It’s usually me.
Suki didn’t care. She said, You stick up for yourself, Della. Don’t you take crap from nobody.
Can I say crap in a story?
Anyhow, she didn’t say crap. She said something worse.
Lemme fix that. Suki says whenever I want to use a bad word, I can say snow. Or snowflake. Or snowy.
I kicked him right in the snow.
Don’t you take snow from nobody.
Yeah, that works.
Okay, so back to me. Delicious Nevaeh Roberts. The Nevaeh is heaven spelled backwards, of course. There’s usually at least one other girl in my class called Nevaeh. It’s a real popular name around here. I don’t know why. It sounds dumb to me. Heaven backwards? What was my mother thinking?
Probably she wasn’t. That’s just the truth. My mother is incarcerated. Her parental rights have been terminated. That just happened lately. Nobody bothered to before, even though by the time she gets out of prison, I’ll be old enough to vote.
I can’t remember her, except one tiny bit like a scene from a movie. Suki says she was no better than a hamster when it came to being a mother, and hamsters sometimes eat their babies. It was always Suki who took care of me. Mostly still is.
Suki’s my sister. She’s sixteen.
I’m still on the easy part of the story, if you can believe that.
Suki’s full name is Suki Grace Roberts. Suki isn’t short for anything, though it sounds like it should be. And that Roberts part—well, that’s our mother’s last name too. Suki and me, we don’t know who our fathers are, except they were probably different people and neither one of them was Clifton, thank God. Suki swears that’s true. I believe her.
Can you say God in a story? ’Cause I wasn’t taking His name in vain, right there. I really am thanking God, whatever God there is, that Clifton ain’t my daddy.
Suki used to have a photograph of Mama, from her trial. White pale face, sores on it, black teeth from the meth, pale white lanky hair. Suki says she bleached her hair, but whatever, you can see it’s got no texture to it. Hangs like string. Suki’s hair is soft and shiny, dark brown except when she dyes it black. It’s a prettier version of Mama’s hair, and her eyes look like Mama’s too. My hair has bounce. It tangles up all the time. My eyes are lighter than Suki’s and Mama’s.
Suki’s skin is skim-milk white, so pale, her belly almost looks blue. She burns bright red when she goes out in the sun. My skin’s browner, and I don’t never need sunscreen, no matter what Suki says. So while me and Suki don’t know one single thing about our fathers, we’re guessing they weren’t the same.
Which is good, right? Because if the same guy stuck around long enough to be the daddy to both me and Suki, he should’ve stayed and helped us out of this mess. Otherwise he’d just be a snowman. What Suki thinks, and me too, is that Mama probably never told either of our daddies that she was going to have their baby, so we can’t blame them for not being around. It’s possible they were great guys, fantastic in just every way except of course for hanging out with our mother, who was always a hot mess.
Suki and me gave up on Mama a long time ago. Had to. Not only is she incarcerated, she had what’s called a psychotic break as soon as she got to prison. It comes from the meth, and it means she’s bad crazy in a permanent way. She wouldn’t likely even recognize us were we to walk into her cell, not that we could, since she’s incarcerated in Kansas somewhere, which we have no current means of getting to. She doesn’t write or call because she can’t write or call, not so as she would make any sense. And it would never occur to her to do so. She’s forgotten all about us. I’m sorry about that, real sorry, but it’s nothing I can change.
* * *
■ ■ ■
I got a big mouth. That’s a good thing. It’s excellent. Let me tell you a story to explain. Last week at school—this was a couple of days before I showed up with my new tattoo—Ms. Davonte told us we all had to draw family trees. She showed us what she wanted: lines drawn like branches, mother, father, grandparents. Aunts and uncles and cousins.
My tree would dead-end at Mama, behind bars, with Suki sticking off to one side. Wasn’t no way I was going to draw that, especially since I suspected it was something Ms. Davonte planned to hang up in the hall outside our classroom for the entire school to see.
Ms. Davonte still doesn’t get it. I don’t know why not. I thought she was starting to.
Instead of a family tree, I drew a wolf. I’m getting better at wolves. I made her eyes dark and soft but her mouth open, showing fangs. I borrowed Nevaeh’s silver markers to outline her fur.
Ms. Davonte came past and said, “Della, what are you doing? That’s not the assignment.”
I said, “This wolf is my family tree.” I gave her a look. Ms. Davonte doesn’t know my whole story, but she knows an awful lot of it. Especially given all that’s happened lately. If Ms. Davonte stopped to think, even for just a moment, I bet she maybe could guess why I didn’t want to draw a family tree. Nope. She tightened her lips and said, “I want you to do the assignment I gave you.”