I said, “The assignment is snow.”
* * *
■ ■ ■
I got in trouble for saying snow.
I knew I would. It’s why I said it. I got to take a little trip down to the principal’s office. The principal and I are practically friends by now. Her name is Dr. Penny. (Penny is her last name. I asked.)
Dr. Penny said, “Della, to what do I owe the pleasure of seeing you this time?”
I said, “I’m not doing that assignment. I can’t fix my family tree, and it’s nobody’s business but mine.”
“Oh,” said Dr. Penny. Then she asked what I was doing instead of the assignment, and then she agreed that drawing a wolf seemed like a reasonable compromise. She said she’d have a word with Ms. Davonte.
I said, “Luisa doesn’t want to draw her family tree, either. Or Nevaeh.” Nevaeh’s dad left a few years ago. Luisa, I didn’t know her whole story, but I saw the way her eyes emptied out when Ms. Davonte told us what she wanted us to do. “Ms. Davonte is still not listening until she has to.”
Dr. Penny sighed. I don’t know who she was sighing at. She said, “I’ll talk to her, Della.”
I said, “She ought to be paying better attention.” I’m only ten years old, and I noticed Luisa’s eyes and the way Nevaeh’s shoulders tightened. Ms. Davonte is the teacher.
Francine says you can trust some people, but not all of them. I didn’t think I would ever trust Ms. Davonte.
Dr. Penny said, “It might be helpful, Della, if you quit using words like snow.”
I said, “Probably not.” I wasn’t trying to give her lip. I said, “When I said snow I got to come down here and explain this to you. If I didn’t say snow, I’d have to say why I don’t want to draw a family tree. The whole class would have heard my business. And then I’d get made fun of on the playground.”
Dr. Penny paused. She looked at me for what felt like a long time. Then she said, “Thank you for that explanation.” She suggested I sit in the comfy chair in her office until recess. She had a shelf of books I could read. I don’t like books much, but there was one about dinosaur poop that was interesting.
I don’t know what Dr. Penny said to Ms. Davonte, but I didn’t have to make a family tree, and Ms. Davonte didn’t hang any of them in the hall.
* * *
■ ■ ■
See? It’s useful, having a big mouth. Next thing I’m gonna do with it is help put Clifton in prison for a long, long time.
* * *
■ ■ ■
We are still on the easy parts of the story.
2
Suki and I live with Francine. She’s our foster mother. That’s the word they use, foster mother, but there is nothing motherly about Francine. She don’t even have meth for an excuse.
“Happy to have you,” she said, when the social worker first brought us to her house. That was a couple of months ago, late August, still hot every single day. It was a week after we got away from Clifton. Feels like a year ago. A lifetime. But it wasn’t.
Francine’s house was half of a double-house, if you will, with a tiny little yard and a cramped living room. It wasn’t dirty and it smelled okay. “Here’s your bedroom,” Francine said. “I don’t usually take girls as young as you, Della, but I like that you two are sisters. Probably won’t fight as much.”
Back then Suki and I never fought with each other.
The bedroom was nice. Bunk bed made up with sheets and pillows and blankets. Two wooden chests of drawers. One each.
“Huh,” Suki said. “Not much space.” She took the plastic grocery bag out of my hand and dropped it into the top drawer of the first dresser. Dropped her own plastic bag into the top drawer of the second.
That was all the stuff we had. We were in a hurry when we left Clifton’s place.
We were running.
“Beats the emergency placement witch,” I said. I meant the woman who took us in the first few days. The room at Francine’s was smaller than the one at the witch’s house, but it seemed friendlier, and so did Francine.
Suki sniffed. “We’ll see.”
* * *
■ ■ ■
Back in the family room, Francine said, “Didn’t they let you go back for your clothes? Books, toys, anything?”
“Clifton burned our stuff,” Suki said. “That’s what the cops said.”
We’d seen the smoke from Teena’s house. Clifton threw everything we had onto the burn pile in the backyard, doused it with gasoline, and lit a match. Cops said he was trying to pretend we didn’t live with him.
Francine turned to the social worker, who was still shuffling papers. “They get a clothing allowance?”
Social worker checked her notes, and said we did.
So, soon as the social worker left, Francine piled us into her old junker car and drove us to Old Navy. I got to pick out whatever I wanted, two hundred dollars’ worth. And Suki got two hundred fifty, ’cause she was older.
“Don’t forget underwear,” Francine said on the way there. “Socks, pajamas, whatever else. I ain’t buying you anything more till your checks start coming in.” She paused a moment. “You need school stuff? Backpacks, notebooks, pencils?”
I shook my head fast. No way was I spending my two hundred dollars on that.
Suki said, “Clifton wrecked my laptop. The one the school loaned me for the year.”
Francine sighed. “I’ll have to sort that out,” she said. “I’ll head over to the high school tomorrow morning, after I get Della settled. I work at the DMV, lucky they don’t open until ten. You got a driver’s license, Suki?”
Suki nodded. She’d taken driving at school and passed the test. She traced her finger along the passenger-side window. “Left it at Clifton’s,” she said.
“I can get you a replacement,” Francine said. “We’ll work on that too. You’ll need to get insurance before you ever drive my car. You a decent driver?”
Suki said, “So far.”
It was strange losing all our stuff at once. On the one hand, I loved getting all new things, and from Old Navy, no less. A fancy store. Most of my clothes came from the free clothes closet. Sometimes Teena gave me hand-me-downs, but since she usually got her clothes from the free clothes closet in the first place, they weren’t actually any better. But I’d had a purple sweatshirt I really loved, and a couple of nice T-shirts.