“Remind me how to turn on the TV, Say-So. Don’t seem to wanna work for me,” Cinder would say, pointing the case he kept his eyeglasses in at the television screen.
Wasn’t long after Cinder started to forget things that Cynthia and her mother moved down the hall into her grandfather’s two-bedroom apartment. Cinder had his room. And Cynthia and her mother had the other, which meant, most nights, because her always-exhausted mother slept like a woman fighting a bear, Cynthia slept on the couch dreaming of the day she could make her mother laugh. Dreaming of the day she could funny her mother free of all the work, of all the stress she seemed to wear on her face like thick makeup the wrong color for her skin. Dreaming of her mother telling her a joke. Knock knock. And Cynthia replying, Who’s there? And her mother saying, Me. And Cynthia not having to say Me, who?
That’s all Say-So ever wanted. A love thing with her mother, the way her grandfather had with Miss Fran—through laughter. And since her mother was too busy to break, well then, anyone would have to do. A smile is a smile. A ha is a ha. So every day she’d rattle off her jokes at the end of class, bathing in her classmates’ crack-ups.
Including today.
As everyone rushed out of Mrs. Stevens’s class, Cynthia stood at the door handing out flyers. Not the kind that are professionally printed with graphics and lasers and cool shadow effects. These were just pieces of lined notebook paper, ripped into squares (with soggy edges because she believed in the lick and rip method) that said, written in red, SAY-SO LIVE ON CINDER’S BLOCK AT THE SOUTHVIEW APARTMENTS. SHOW STARTS AT 3:33.
“Be there or be… Mr. Fantana’s forever-wedgie,” Cynthia teased. She didn’t know where that one came from, but she let it loose and let it live.
Down the hall she went, stopping at her locker, grabbing her things, and heading for the door, pausing only to tell her friend Gregory Pitts that he smells like his last name. She told him this every day just because… just because. And Greg, knowing it was a joke, flapped his arms like a bird, wafting the pit funk toward her.
“Three thirty-three!” she called out to him. “Be there.”
When she got outside, instead of taking the long way she usually took and walking the way most of the walkers went, which was up to the corner where Ms. Post was, orange-vested, waving cars by, blowing her whistle until her face looked like it would pop, Cynthia walked through the grass and headed around the back of the school to take the shortcut. She could’ve gone through the back door, which would’ve been an even shorter cut, but then she would’ve missed snapping on Greg, and who could avoid the opportunity to roast? Plus, she’d learned from her grandfather a long time ago how important tradition was.
She walked along the side of the school, dragging her fingers on the red brick of the building until she reached the line of trees at the back. Not exactly a forest, just a single line of maples that created a barrier between the school and the road. When Cynthia reached the tree line, the trees thick with limbs that looked less like arms and more like outstretched legs—thick-rooted yoga trees—she hiked her jeans up above her ankles and tiptoed, because the land seemed to always be muddy there.
On the other side of the trees was Carigan Street, known for nothing besides the entrance to the Southview Cemetery. The cemetery had a regal iron gate wrapped around it and took up the entire block. Cynthia, after looking both ways, ran across the street and into the cemetery because through the graveyard was the shortest way home. No point in going around when she could go through. Plus, she had to get giggles for her grandfather.
Giggles were cigarette butts. Cinder collected them and Cynthia always tried to make sure to find some if she could. People were always walking through the cemetery, smoking and leaving their leftover cigs on the ground and sometimes even leaving them on the gravestones along with flowers, pictures, notes, bottles, and candles. But the giggles were what she was looking for. What Cinder always wanted. But he hadn’t named them that. Cynthia had.
Shortly after Miss Fran died, Cynthia was helping her grandfather clean the apartment. Helping him organize his papers and clothes. Helping him straighten up.
“You want this?” she asked, holding up an old Vietnam veteran’s hat.
“Uh-huh.”
“These?” Cynthia asked, holding up a stack of stamps and envelopes.
“Hmmm. I ain’t mailing nothing, so… nah,” Cinder said. Cynthia peeled one of the stamps from the book, stuck it on her forehead, then made a funny face at her grandfather. He smiled and she put the rest of the stamps in her back pocket.
“What about all this?” she then said, holding up an ashtray full of cigarette butts, red lipstick smudged on the tips.
He looked, leaned into the ashtray, kinda looked like he was leaning over the ledge of a pool, threatening to fall in. He picked one up, looked at it like he was looking at a single bullet. One that could explode his heart. But didn’t. At least not in the way Cynthia thought. Cinder’s eyes watered, but he didn’t cry. He giggled.
Cynthia traipsed around the cemetery, looking for giggles, finding none. There were people walking their dogs through the graveyard, others visiting their family members, sweeping their areas, picking up trash, replacing dead flowers with live ones. Cynthia saw two girls sitting on a skateboard in front of a tombstone. She thought she recognized them but didn’t want to stare because it would’ve been weird. She kept walking. Kept looking, eyes running across the tops of the stones that had last names engraved in them.
But she was running out of time.
It was 3:26 p.m. Seven minutes until the Say-So show, so she figured she may have struck out this time. She may not have any new giggles to give her grandfather. But then she came to Miss Fran’s grave. And sitting on top of it was a cigarette butt. Lipstick kissed the end of it. Cynthia took it as a sign, slid it into her pocket, and headed on.
After she came out on the other end of the cemetery—the Southview Avenue side—she crossed the street over to where the playground was. There was a little girl sitting on a swing, kicking her legs, flying back and forth, static electricity for hair, happiness for a face.
But she was the only person there.
And it was 3:31 p.m.
Cynthia sat on Cinder’s Block. Stretched to crack her back. The couch seemed to be making her body old. And when she thought about that, it made her laugh.
“I bet the reason a couch is called a couch is because of the ouch part,” she said to herself. Or maybe to the swinging girl, but the swinging girl was swinging and not listening. “Yeah… that’s not a good one.”
3:32 p.m.
A bird landed next to her. A pigeon. A dingy gray that was still somehow beautiful, like clouds before rain.
“Yeah, I always wing it anyway,” she said to the bird. “I wonder what it must be like to be you. It’s like, you got wings. So you can fly anywhere you want to go, which is pretty much the most amazing thing ever. You can fly to the things you want. But the letdown is that when you get to wherever the things you want are, you ain’t got the hands to grab it.” That one made her laugh a little.
3:33 p.m.
No one came. But no one ever came. Well, that’s not true. Sometimes Gregory Pitts, Remy Vaughn, Joey Santiago, and Candace Greene would come, but that’s just because they lived in Southview too. Cynthia figured her low attendance was because people had to go home after school. You know, parents, practice, homework… stuff like that. Either that, or they never thought she was being serious about her shows. That the whole 3:33 thing was just part of her act. Part of the joke. Part of the Say-So thing, and so they all were thinking, “Yeah okay, if you say so.” Right? Of course.
Truth was, 3:33 p.m. was for Cynthia’s mother. She got off work as a barista at three and had school—now graduate school—at four fifteen. She always went straight to class, but if for some reason she decided to skip, to take a day off, to give herself a break, Cynthia would be right there, standing on Cinder’s Block ready to joke a smile onto her hero
’s face, just the way her superhero had taught her.
But there are no days off for a hero.
So Cynthia opened her backpack, pulled her notebook out and snatched a page loose. She dug out a pen and started scribbling the joke about the bird and it not having hands and how awesome it would be to have wings if you also had hands, but then that would make birds angels and how it would be way too scary to see angels with beaks. That made her laugh too.
Cynthia then pulled out an envelope. And a stamp. She kept them in the small pocket in the front of her bag. She folded the paper, slid it into the envelope, sealed it, then wrote her own address on it. After that, she slapped the stamp on it. She peeled another stamp from the book and walked over to the little girl on the swing.
“Want a sticker?” Cynthia asked.
The little girl stopped swinging. Held her hand out. Cynthia stuck the sticky square to the back of it. Charlie Chaplin.
* * *
When she got upstairs to her apartment, Cynthia dropped her bag on the couch and beelined to her grandfather’s room.
Knocked.
“Grandpa, I got mail.”
No answer.
Knocked again.
“Grandpa. It’s Say-So. Mail.”
Nothing.
Concerned, Cynthia turned the knob, opened the door slowly. “Grandpa?”
He was there, sitting on the side of his bed, scribbling in his notepad. Paper balls littered the floor, so many that the door swept a bunch of them to the side of the room. That wasn’t unusual. There were always paper balls. Most with random sentences on them. Starts and stops. His hands holding a pen, spitting whatever was coming from his sputtering mind. But a few were not in his handwriting. A few had been snatched from envelopes written in the loopy cursive of the coolest granddaughter in world.
“Grandpa, you hear me knocking?” Cynthia asked. Cinder looked up at her, and for a moment it seemed like he didn’t recognize her.
Finally, “Oh, Say-So. I didn’t hear you. In here trying to get my jokes together. Trying to write a zinger for you to take to school tomorrow, y’know?” Cynthia came to his side. Kissed his cheek, looked down at the paper. All he had written was the word “EARDRUMS.”
“Eardrums, huh?”
“Yeah, it’s not working.” He ripped it out, balled it up, tossed it on the floor. “I got something else I think is better, but I don’t know. Anyway, how was school?”
“I killed.”
“You did the shirt joke?”
“Yep. And it crushed ’em.”
“Ah. Your mother used to love that joke.” His voice sweetened for a moment. Then he continued. “Your teacher ain’t get mad, did she?”
“No, no, she was cool about it,” Cynthia reassured him, remembering the cigarette butt in her pocket. “Oh, I almost forgot. I found a giggle.” She pulled the red-stained tip from her pocket, dropped it in his palm. Cinder let it roll around, staring down at it for a second before smiling. He got up from the bed and dropped it in a bottle on a small table a few feet away, adding it to what looked like a hundred. Maybe more. “And some mail came for you.”
Cynthia held the envelope out. The one that she’d stuffed with the paper she’d written the bird joke on. The one that she’d simply written her own address—which was his address—on. Nothing else. Grandpa took the envelope and set it on the table. Cynthia knew that later he would open it, read it, then forget he’d read it, and believe he wrote it. And the next day he’d tell her to try a new joke in Mrs. Stevens’s class. And she’d tell him she would, then come home and tell him his jokes were working. His jokes were still cracking people up. And he’d say things like, “We a good team, ain’t we?” Or, “Like father, like daughter.” And Cynthia would kiss his cheek and nod.
Cynthia headed back toward his bedroom door. Before leaving she turned and asked, “What was the other thing?” Cinder looked confused, so Cynthia continued. “The joke. You said you were thinking about something else.”
“Oh, just this thing I was kicking around. But I don’t think it’ll work.”
“What was it? Tell me.”
“Okay.” Cinder steadied himself. Looked his granddaughter in the eye. “What would happen if a school bus fell from the sky?”
Cynthia thought for a second, a smile creeping onto her lips. “I mean… is it coming from Ookabooka Land?”
Silence.
Just that thought between them. Cynthia looking at her grandfather, her Cinderella, her cinder block. The man who taught her to perform. Taught her that life is funny most of the time, and the times it ain’t funny are even funnier. And there ain’t no forgetting that.
He looked back at her. And in a way that only grandfather and granddaughter could do, together Cynthia and Cinder split open and laughter poured out of them. A laughter free enough to make the bottle (of giggles) on the table rattle.
HOW A BOY CAN BECOME A GREASE FIRE
GREGORY PITTS’S friends love him so much that they told him the truth. And the truth was, he smelled dead. Like, rotten. It wasn’t that he was rotten, but just that he smelled like his body had mistaken its organs for garbage and that he was essentially a walking, talking trash can. And on this, of all days, that smell just wasn’t going to cut it. So in an act of service and sheer desperation, Remar Vaughn, Joey Santiago, and Candace Greene—Gregory’s crew—decide to help him out. Because today was a day of romance.
“Before we get going, you sure you good, Candace?” Joey asked. “I heard what happened to Bryson.” Bryson was Candace’s cousin. He’d gotten jumped the day before.
“Yeah, it’s cool. Bry’s a tough kid,” Candace said. “Plus, we walking that way, so as soon as we get done with lover boy here, I’m gonna stop by and see him.”
“Cool, well… first thing we need to do is get you smellin’ right,” Remar, who they all called Remy, said to Gregory. They had all met up by the benches in the front of the school.
“You got the stuff, right?” Candace asked Remy.
“You know it.”
“What is it? And why y’all talking about it like it’s…” Gregory caught himself. “Know what? It don’t even matter as long as it works.”
“Oh, it’ll work,” Joey said, bouncing his eyebrows.
Remy dug around his backpack and pulled out a can of body spray. “Now, Justin gets this stuff from the gas station. He says it’s basically deodorant for your whole body.” Justin was Remy’s older brother, and he was always right, let Remy tell it. He popped the top off the canister. “Close your eyes.”
And then… pssssszzzzzzzzzzz. He sprayed Gregory from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet. A spritz or two even got in his mouth, sending Gregory gagging and coughing.
“Hold still!” Candace ordered, while Remy spun Gregory around and sprayed all down his back. It smelled like… it smelled like… a combination of burnt flowers and burnt rubber. But that was better than Gregory’s normal smell, the smell of all-day fownk.
“No spraying!” Ms. Wockley yelled, pointing at Gregory and his friends. “You know the rules. Go away if you want to spray!” Ms. Wockley’s frustration came from the fact that there was always someone spraying something in the hallway. Always a perfume or cologne that was supposed to help but ended up taking stink up to stank. But this was a special case. Either way, Ms. Wockley’s outrage was hilarious to Gregory, Remy, Joey, and Candace, so the four of them cracked all the way up.
“Go away if you want to spray!” Candace repeated with a hoot. “She a poet and she don’t know it!”
“A rapper that look like a napper!” Remy followed.
“A spitter way too bitter!” Joey came in third.
All their jokes matched the corniness of Ms. Wockley’s non-joke, which made them laugh even harder, Gregory half choking because laugh plus spray equals choke.
They started walking, but they weren’t walking home like they normally did. They lived in the Southview Apartments, but decided today that they would walk
over to Rogers Street because that’s where Sandra White lived. Gregory had been trying to work up the courage to tell her that he liked her and wanted to know if maybe they could be boyfriend and girlfriend even though he hated the way that sounded. Sounded… trash. Together was what he preferred to call it. He had told Remy, Joey, and Candace that he wanted to do this, and they were in full support and along for the ride. Not to mention, Candace was the only one who knew where Sandra lived. She and Sandra were closer when they were younger, but they were still cool.
Even though they were all in support of Gregory shooting his shot, they also told him that he’d need to prepare. He’d need to make sure he was ready, and to put his best foot forward, first and foremost, he needed to not smell like a… forward foot. He needed to smell better than the lunchroom. Better than the locker room.
“Yeah, so I just hit you with the ooh, and now you ready for some la la,” Remy said. He was always saying corny stuff like that, mainly because he swore he was some kind of mastermind when it came to approaching girls—thanks to Justin—even though Candace told him every chance she got that he wasn’t.
“I think you hit him with too much ooh. Like… smells more like eww,” Candace joked, curling her top lip up under her nostrils. But it was better than before. And since the smell part was worked out, it was time for her to explain the importance of moisturizing.
“Now that you don’t stink, we gotta make sure you ain’t dry.” Candace pulled a bottle of lotion the size of a shoe out of her backpack. Gregory’s eyes widened, and his brows furrowed, leaving him with a look of astonishment. And… fear.
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