Sheeda had stood up, properly respectful, her arms to her side so her phone’s screen warmed her legs. “Ma’am?”
Auntie D’s right eyebrow peaked. “Do you know what time it is?”
“Eleven thirty,” Sheeda said.
“Exactly. Obviously you forgot that I get notifications when you text after eleven p.m. I’m ready to go to bed, I don’t need this thing pinging me this late.” With laser-pointed interest, she stared at Sheeda’s phone. “It’s summer, but that doesn’t mean you need to be up texting all hours of the night. Who in the world are you talking to this late?”
As she lied, Sheeda prayed her aunt wouldn’t ask to see the phone. “Just talking to Mo.”
Auntie D folded her arms. “The number I have for her isn’t this one.” She peered at her own phone, then back at Sheeda’s.
It wasn’t anything for Auntie D to go through her stuff. The only reason she didn’t go through Sheeda’s phone was because she didn’t have to. Thanks to notifications, she knew if Sheeda was texting at school or at night and had access to her social media. Also, she knew every one of her friend’s phone numbers so when she looked at the phone bill, she would know who Sheeda was texting.
What Auntie D didn’t know was that Sheeda used the social media her aunt checked just enough to make it look legit—mostly random pics of her and the squad. The social media she used regularly was under a fake name. It wasn’t anything bad on her social media accounts. Not to her. But Auntie D tripped over anything, even if somebody else put up a photo wearing something she disapproved of, Sheeda caught the sermon. The fake account was easier.
She cursed herself for slipping. She’d been too caught up to remember the stupid late-night notifications.
The thought of her aunt seeing that she was talking to a boy had made Sheeda’s legs wobbly, but it didn’t stop her from continuing the lie.
“Mo and her brother switched phones because hers got broken and her mother didn’t want her going away without one.”
“I tell you what. You better not go breaking or losing your phone. I bet I won’t be jumping through hoops to get you another one.” She shook her head. “I know she’s gone and y’all probably catching up, but it’s late. Time to cut it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Sheeda said, holding in her sigh of relief until her aunt’s footsteps disappeared.
The day she’d made the fake FriendMe account, she was so nauseous Auntie D made her drink ginger ale and eat soup for dinner, thinking she was coming down with something. That was the biggest lie she’d never told.
This time, determined to have at least one fun thing for herself, she’d slid into new territory by agreeing with Lennie to only talk through the chat app. Only this time, instead of nausea, she was dizzy with the adrenaline—lighter, like her head could pop right off her body and float to the ceiling. She usually did what she was told and probably always would. But Auntie D made everything a reason to head to the altar and ask for forgiveness. Her and Lennie were only talking. It wasn’t a big deal.
It had been a close call, though. That’s when she’d decided she’d go ahead to the carnival with Yola and Kita. Lennie seemed to like only hitting her up at night. There was seriously nothing else for her to do.
Lying there in the bed, instead of the excitement for what the day could bring, there was only emptiness in her chest. Some of it was already missing Mo. But that wasn’t all of it. Summer reminded her of home. Home before the Cove was home. Thinking about it made her stomach bubbly.
Summer had been when her and her five cousins ran the big, mostly dirt-packed front yard of a small house with the paint so chipped you couldn’t tell if it was white or an ashen gray. Once school let out, there was nobody to tease them and call them funky or laugh at how their clothes were frayed and tattered. It’s why she’d loved summer back then.
Summer was safe.
Summer was also one of the few times that she thought about her mother. She realized that she hadn’t thought about her old house, or for that matter, her mother, in a long time.
She took inventory of her tidy box of a room. There wasn’t a sock on the floor, a shoe peeking from under the bed, or even a stray hanger waiting to be hung. Auntie D demanded clean spaces. Sheeda wasn’t even allowed to hang anything on the walls. Just because they lived in a low-income row house didn’t mean it was going to be unkempt and cluttered, from the Book of Auntie D, first chapter, first verse.
Sheeda didn’t see how a poster of Mack Boy Oh was going to clutter up the bare wall, but Auntie D’s house, Auntie D’s rules. So, it stayed rolled up in a tube in her closet.
The house she shared with her aunt wasn’t just clean, it was vanilla and totally empty of anything that made it unique. Compared to her friends’ houses that always smelled like some type of food cooking and every corner had evidence that people lived there, their row smelled like cleaning spray and looked like a movie set pretending to be somebody’s house. A long time ago, Sheeda had loved how clean it was. How much space there was for only two people. The row had felt like a mansion compared to the tiny, always-on-the-verge-of-collapsing house she’d shared with her mother, Uncle Dewayne, Aunt Rhonda, and their five kids in North Carolina.
Down South, her and her mother shared a room. Her five cousins shared another, and her aunt and uncle had their own room. Nine people in a house meant there were always people everywhere. There was always stuff everywhere, too, like trash, food, and roaches.
Five-year-olds didn’t think much about bills or house repairs. Or how not one of the three adults in the house ever got up and went to a job. At least, she hadn’t thought about it until that day the White dude visited and told her mother that the way they were living wasn’t sanitary and he might have to recommend taking Sheeda away until Desiree Tate could find better conditions.
Conditions. Sheeda remembered that word, clearly, because she hadn’t understood it.
No one ever explained it to her. All she knew was, her Aunt Deandra came to visit, soon after, dressed in a pale pink linen dress that Sheeda kept touching because it was so clean and bright. Her mother said she was going to stay with Auntie D for a while, or at least until she could find her own place. And when Sheeda arrived in the Cove and saw her aunt’s spotless house and realized she had her own room, “a while” was fine with her.
Sheeda didn’t know anything about guardianship then. All she knew was her mother never did get another place. And, at first, Auntie D would send her to visit her mom each summer. The first summer Sheeda had been glad to be back with her cousins. The second she’d spent most of the summer cringing from the cockroaches and praying none crawled in her bag. By the third Auntie D announced, “Your mother is trifling, no sense in me making you stay in that pigsty just so she can still claim she your mother.”
Sheeda had put up a small fuss, too ashamed to admit she’d been relieved. It was the first time she’d ever been thankful for her aunt’s many rules.
After that, Sheeda and her mother only talked by phone. There were always promises of her mom coming up to visit. But it seemed like before every visit, her and Auntie D got into it about something and then her mother would cancel in a huff and mutter about how Deandra needed to remember who was Sheeda’s mother.