I reached into the front seat and grabbed Suki’s arm. “Hey,” I said. “I’ll be starting school wearing all new stuff.” It’d be fabulous. Like I was one of the kids with a real mom who had a job and everything.
I was going to a new school. Not the one I’d gone to my whole life, and not the emergency placement school I’d gone to for the last few days. Brand-new. A do-over.
“Great,” Suki said, not sounding like she meant it. She’d be wearing new clothes too, but to the same old place. Our town had a bunch of elementary schools, but only one middle school and one high school.
We went inside Old Navy and we both grabbed a cart. Suki walked with me to the girls’ section. “Start with underwear,” she said. She pulled out a seven-pack of hipsters, checked the size, and threw them into my cart.
“Hey!” I said. “Let me pick!” She’d grabbed white. I wanted colors.
“’Kay,” Suki said. “Get what you want. One pair of pajamas. Two pairs of blue jeans and at least three shirts. Try things on. Make sure you’ve got room to grow.”
I tried on blue jeans and found some I liked. Brand-new. I grabbed some T-shirts off the sale rack. Two hundred dollars was a lot of money, but Old Navy was expensive. Then I saw a hot-pink hoodie with OLD NAVY written on it in purple glitter. It wasn’t on sale, and August wasn’t exactly hoodie weather, but I loved wearing hoodies any time of year. All the fabric snug around my neck, and when I put the hood up, I could see people but they couldn’t see me. Also I had two hundred dollars. I threw the hoodie into my cart.
I picked through the rack of shoes. I hated the shoes I was wearing but Old Navy didn’t have much. I found a pair of plastic jellies my size. Six bucks, and at least nobody’d ever worn them before.
“Della!” I heard Suki call from another part of the store. “Get over here, quick!”
I hurried. Suki was standing in the center of the store, next to a table piled with shoes.
Not just any shoes. Purple velvet high-top sneakers.
Purple.
Velvet.
High-tops.
“Oh,” I said. I’d never seen any shoes I wanted so much.
“Get them,” said Suki. She was grinning.
“You too,” I said.
“Nah.” She waved her hand at me and laughed. “Look at the difference between your cart and mine.”
Hers had blue jeans. Black underwear. Black socks. Black T-shirts and sports bras. Black eyeliner and mascara. If they’d sold black lipstick, Suki would have bought some. She liked black. Not me.
The purple velvet shoes cost thirty dollars, more even than the glitter hoodie. I put them in the very top of my cart and stroked them, just once. Me, tomorrow, first day of school: new blue jeans, glitter hoodie, purple velvet high-tops. For the first time in my life, I was going to look fine.
I’d added all the prices up so I knew I had enough money, but it turns out I forgot about sales tax, and in Tennessee that’s a lot. My cart came to $221.
I thought about putting back the socks. The cheap T-shirts. But they didn’t cost enough to make a difference.
I could get the plastic shoes.
Suki took the high-tops off the counter and put them into her own cart. “I’ll buy them,” she said.
“Really?”
She put one of her sports bras back, and a shirt. “You got a washer?” she asked Francine.
Francine nodded.
Suki said, “Then I’m good.” She put her arm around me. “Gotta take care of my girl. Who needs more than two bras, anyway?”
I could always count on Suki. Suki fixed everything.
* * *
■ ■ ■
I put those velvet high-tops on my feet right there in the store. I was gonna throw my nasty shoes in the trash, but Suki said to keep ’em, you never knew when it might be handy to have a second pair of shoes. We went back to Francine’s house and Francine ordered pizza for dinner. Delivered. Pepperoni and sausage both. She opened cans of soda for us. Suki cut the tags off all our new clothes, and I sat and stared at Francine.
She was seriously one of the ugliest women I ever saw. She looked like one of those little dogs with mashed-up faces and pouches hanging from their jaws. Also she had little round bumps of skin sticking out from her face. I don’t mean zits. They were zit-sized blobs that looked like they were on stalks, growing straight out from the surface of her skin. All over her face, and neck too. I started counting them. I got to thirty-six before she gave me the stink eye.
“Knock it off,” she said. “They’re called skin tags. They’re not cancer, they’re not contagious, and pulling them off hurts.”
I said, “What if they hatch?”
She said, “If they do, it’ll be into little monsters that attack you in your sleep and make you itch till kingdom come. So you better hope it doesn’t happen.”
When the pizza came, Francine slapped it on the table and passed out paper plates. “I keep foster kids for the money,” she said.
I didn’t mind her saying that. I liked to know where we stood.
“I only take girls,” she said. “Mostly old enough to do their own thing. Two at a time, when I can.” She stubbed her cigarette out on the edge of her plate. “I used to have a roommate, but it was snow, having to deal with people who never quite came up with their share of the bills. I thought, gimme roommates where the state pays their share, that’ll be easier. Usually it is.” She lit another cigarette. “Y’all going to court? Prosecuting?”
Suki nodded. She leaned over and slid a cigarette out of Francine’s pack. Francine smacked her hand. “Nope,” she said. “You’re underage. I don’t contribute to the delinquency of minors. Plus, trust me, you’d wish you’d never started. I do. So. You’ve got clothes and we’ll figure out about the school laptop. What else you need?”
“Phones,” Suki said. Clifton’d smashed hers. It was pretty new too. Clifton hadn’t finished paying for it.
Francine shook her head. “Not my problem. You want one, get a job.”
“Della’s ten,” Suki said. “She can’t.”
Francine shrugged. “She’s ten. She don’t need a phone. Neither do you. I got a landline in the family room. Use that.”
“Seriously?” Suki looked annoyed.
I said, “We did too need Suki’s phone.”
Francine and Suki looked at me. Francine said, “Don’t worry. You’re safe here.”