“Lester, I’ma have something for you to do in just a minute, if you just let go of these bags and let me take care of my baby girl,” Daddy says, softer now.
Lester steps back and bows as if Daddy really were the king of this place. I get a glimpse of Lester’s sneakers—no laces and one of his big toes sticks out of a hole. He scratches his head and neck and keeps his eyes on my bags as if there were nothing more he wanted to do in the world than to carry one of them up the steps to Daddy’s brownstone.
I’m so focused on Lester and his scratching that I don’t notice the small crowd of kids walking up toward us—even the skinny boy with the pigeon chest and red shorts. I turn the other way. More kids. They’re coming from every corner of this block.
There’s nowhere else to look but down at the brown and gray concrete. Blades of grass stick through the cracks as if there were a secret tiny forest underneath the sidewalk, with teeny-tiny aliens who do nothing but laugh all day. This itsy-bitsy forest beneath the concrete is their prison and punishment for being so happy.
“That’s your daughter, Mr. J?” someone asks. It’s a boy’s voice and I refuse to look up. I imagine one of those tiny laughing aliens climbing over my shiny black Mary Jane shoes, swinging across the lace trimmings of my socks, and scurrying its way up my skinny, Vaseline-covered legs. I let out a snort and quickly cover my mouth before a forbidden laugh bursts out.
I look up to see all the kids’ eyes on me. Then, Daddy yells out my name: “Ebony-Grace! Don’t be rude.”
Get ahold of yourself, E-Grace. Not one snort. Not one giggle. Wipe that smile off your face! I tell myself. I furrow my brows and purse my lips so tight they almost go numb.
“What’s wrong with her, Mr. J?” Pigeon-Chest Boy asks.
There are almost a dozen of them—all different shapes and sizes. They talk at the same time—No Joke City gibberish. But luckily, my super-duper bionic ears can decipher it all. The words and questions spill out of their mouths as fast as shooting stars.
“Why her face like that?”
“Why she just standing there?”
“What’s your name, girl?”
“Can you see through walls with them Coke-bottle glasses?”
“She looks like she been sitting out in the sun her whole life!”
“You know my people down in ’Bama?”
“Is that a perm or a press ’n’ curl?”
“Subspace frequencies jammed, sir. Wormhole effect!” I say and cover my ears and shut my eyes because it’s sensory overload. I need my helmet. I need to go back home. “Beam me up, Granddaddy!”
But still, they poke and prod and ask more questions. They move in closer and they smell like hot sun, salty sweat, city streets, and car exhaust. I brace myself to be beamed back up onto the Uhura. I wait for the atmospheric pressure to squeeze my whole body into a teeny-tiny wormhole in the universe, and I’d zoom up through an invisible portal, catapult into space, and stumble onto the cold, logical metal floors of the Starship Uhura.
“Beam me up, Captain Fleet!” I yell out loud. “Beam me up, please!”
CHAPTER
4
“Hey, hey, hey!” Daddy’s voice booms through all the gibberish. “Y’all step away from her. She’s fresh from Alabama. She’s gonna need her space.”
It’s only when Daddy pulls my hands away from my ears that I open one eye to recognize Bianca Perez making her way through the crowd. She grabs my other hand, stretches her arm out in front of Pigeon-Chest Boy and all the other kids standing around, and pulls me toward the steps of Daddy’s brownstone.
“To the rescue!” I say.
Still, those nefarious minions stand right outside the rusted iron gate, shouting their comments and questions. They’re nefarious because they’re so rude and mean. Who yells at a stranger like that, as if they’d have no home training, as Momma would say? And they’re minions because they’re all working under the orders of King Sirius Julius, who wants them to be friends with me. But they have no manners!
“Hey, girl! You wanna go in the fire hydrant?”
“You know how to jump double-Dutch?”
“I bet you she’s double-handed. They don’t jump double-Dutch Down South.”
“She look country. Look at her knees!”
They all laugh and point and I know it’s a trick to get me to laugh, too. Then, King Sirius Julius will take me prisoner in Planet No Joke City forever! I can just hear him now, calling my momma and granddaddy to say, “I told you she’d be happy here. Now let her stay with me.”
I look around for King Sirius Julius, who’s already disappeared up the steps and into the brownstone, leaving me and Bianca Pluto to fend off his nefarious minions. They keep laughing and pointing, but I won’t be fooled. No Joke City jokes aren’t funny.
Bianca doesn’t laugh, either, thank goodness. “¡Déjala sola!” she yells at the nefarious minions. “Why don’t you go wash off your funky butts in the fire hydrant?”
More shouting, more questions, and more gibberish. I cover my ears and shut my eyes again, until a deep thumping sound comes from somewhere down the block and reaches my bones. It forces me to stare up at the gray-blue sky and hazy yellow sun. Music. Heavy bass music like the Sonic Boom from Planet Boom Box. I can see the sound waves vibrating across the roofs of the brownstones forming a forcefield around all of Harlem. I stand on the steps and point.
“Look!” I whisper.
Bianca stands next to me and looks up, too. “I don’t see nothing,” she says.
“The Sonic Boom,” I say, really slowly so as not to alarm anything that might be inching closer to where Bianca and I are standing.
“The what boom?” she asks.
“The Sonic Boom, sent by the Sonic King and the Funkazoids from Planet Boom Box!”
Bianca rolls her eyes and sighs. “Calvin has a new boom box. You wanna go watch him break-dance?”
I look at her all crazy because now she’s talking nonsense. “Who wants to watch anybody dance when an evil king is sending mind-controlling sound waves over your city?”
“Broomstick!” Daddy shouts from inside the brownstone, and in an instant, the waves disappear. “Ebony-Grace! Come on in here and wash up. We gotta call your mother, and then I got some lunch for you. You can join us, too, Bianca, if your grandmother says it’s all right.”
Daddy’s telephone is at the very edge of the kitchen wall, just like Momma’s phone down in Huntsville. Bianca runs to wash her hands in the bathroom as Daddy picks up the receiver to call Momma in Alabama. The long spiraling cord hangs across the black and white kitchen tiles. I watch him turn the phone dial with each number—all eleven of them, starting with 1, then 256. Of course, he knows my Huntsville number by heart because he calls every Saturday morning. Our short conversations have never changed.