“Everyone in my classroom is responsible for his or her own behavior, Della,” Ms. Davonte said. “I gave you a pass because you don’t yet know our rules. Trevor, do I have to phone your mother? Again? It’s only the third week of school.”
Trevor scowled. Underneath the scowl I thought he looked afraid.
Ms. Davonte said, “Do I?”
Trevor said, “Nah.” He put his arms on his desk and his head in his arms. He didn’t move for the rest of the morning, not once.
The girl beside me whispered, “Only Trevor gets strikes. The rest of us just get yelled at.”
I wanted to say something back to her, something friendly, but I didn’t know what that might be. Also, shoo. I’d said enough for the first morning. I didn’t want my name up on the whiteboard.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Suki had friends at school, but she never let them come to our house. The only friend I had was Teena. I had another once, for a while, back when I was small. June, her name was, but she went by Junebug. She was friendly and funny until the day I said “My mama cooks meth” when we were on the playground. Probably kindergarten, though I can’t remember for sure.
“What’s meth?” she asked, wrinkling her nose a little.
Junebug was black. She wore her hair in a dozen braids, with bright beads strung on each one. I loved those braids.
“You know, meth,” I said. “It looks like sugar. Only it makes you act funny and sometimes it makes the room explode.”
She nodded and we kept on playing, but the next morning she looked at me with big eyes and said her mama told her not to talk to me anymore. And she didn’t. And when she stopped talking to me, a whole bunch of the other girls did too.
I asked Suki what did I do wrong. She said, “You can’t tell people about the meth. Or about Mama or Clifton or any of this.” She made a list of stuff I wasn’t never supposed to talk about: Mama. Clifton. (Especially not Clifton. Not that he was gone most of every week, not that he wasn’t our kin.) Meth. Prison. Who or what or where our daddies were. None of that.
I tried to win Junebug back. I sat next to her at lunch. I stood behind her in the bathroom line. I made silly faces. I poked her and I laughed a lot. Usually people like funny kids. Junebug ignored me for a couple of days. Then the teacher pulled me aside, told me quiet-like that Junebug’s mama had called the school and asked them to make me stay away from Junebug.
I didn’t have a mama who could call the school and stand up for me. And it’s not like my mama could’ve hurt Junebug, not from prison, so I didn’t understand why Junebug’s mama cared. But she did.
Another time, couple years later, I got invited to a birthday party. A real invitation, printed out on paper. I brought it home from school. Suki said “No” but I really wanted to go, so I saved it for the weekend and asked Clifton.
“Sure you can,” he said. It was Friday night, he’d just gotten home. He smiled, and I smiled back, happy even though Suki was shooting me stink eye.
The next morning I dressed up for the party. I told Clifton it was time to go. He said, “I ain’t taking you, kiddo. I said you could go. But I ain’t taking you there.”
It was too far to walk. I went back to my room and cried. Suki got mad and said what did I expect and she hoped I knew better now. Next day the girl whose party it was asked me why I didn’t show up. I said I wasn’t interested in that kind of snow.
I was in that school for five years. I got myself a reputation early and it stayed.
5
Our first afternoon at Francine’s, I took the school bus back to her house, like she told me to. Suki was already home, since the high school lets out first. She was in the bathroom redoing her eyeliner. “I’m going out to apply for jobs.” She put down the eyeliner and studied herself in the mirror.
I said, “I’ll watch TV.”
“Nope,” Suki said. “You’re coming with me.”
I started to argue but knew from the look on her face I wasn’t never going to win. I settled for the promise that if I went with her all the way to the Food City down on the parkway, she’d buy me a slushie at Sonic on the way home. “A small one,” she said. “I’ve only got, like, five bucks. Maybe not even that.”
She’d just come back from the movies when we ran from Clifton. Didn’t have her purse, but she had the change from her movie ticket stuffed in her pocket.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Clifton’s house was in a part of town where there was nothing but houses—old, crumbly, small ones, sitting off by themselves on patches of ugly grass. The city buses didn’t bother going there, and it was too far to walk from there to anywhere else. To get to any sort of store, you had to take a car. Which meant, among other things, that Suki had never been able to get a job.
Clifton drove a long-haul semitrailer, so he was gone most of each week. He had an old beat-up car he kept out back for when he was home. In the last year or two, Suki sometimes borrowed it if we absolutely had to get somewhere, but she had to be careful not to use too much gas or let the neighbors see her driving. After she got her license, she sometimes borrowed Teena’s mother’s car, but Teena’s mom charged her five bucks gas money, so Suki couldn’t do that regular.
Francine’s place was a lot closer than Clifton’s to the center of town. You could walk one direction and get to the main street, or the other direction and get to a strip mall with a grocery store—Food City—and a lot of other things.
We headed toward the strip mall. Suki stopped at every single place that might possibly hire her. A dry cleaner’s shop. A Putt-Putt. KFC. Each time, she made me wait outside, out of sight of the window. “I don’t want no manager thinking I’ll be dragging a kid along,” she said.
“Then why drag me now?” I was plenty old enough to stay home alone. I’d done it for years.
Suki said, “We ain’t taking chances.”
“But we did—”
Suki said, “Not anymore.”
We crossed a busy street. Suki applied at Lowe’s and Long John Silver’s and a place that sold video games. She applied at Dairy Queen. Little Caesar’s Pizza. The grocery store, Food City. Then we walked home a different way and she filled out applications at Big Lots, Walgreens, another pizza place, and Sonic. After which she did buy me a slushie. Atomic Lemon. We sat on a bench outside the Sonic and shared it.
“How was school?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Fine.”
“Fine fine or crummy-but-not-horrible fine?”