Once Maddy gets done gushing, I bend down and give Ma a kiss on the cheek. Her skin is dry, rough on my lips, and I know better than to put any gloss on because that’s also “too fast for church.” She smells like flowers dipped in cake batter. And hair grease. Familiar.
“Hi, baby,” she says, taking my hand.
“Hi, Ma.” I squeeze. She squeezes back.
I wheel Ma—always wearing a colorful, patterned dress, her hair in fresh straw curls—out to the passenger side of the car. She can do it by herself, but I like to do it for her. Just used to it, I guess. Sometimes Momly tries to help, but she knows this is my thing. Take care of Maddy, then take care of Ma. I open the car door, put the brakes on the chair so it don’t roll out from under my mother as she hoists herself up and leans into the car. Then she whips what’s left of her legs in. After that, I check to make sure none of her dress is hanging out. Then I close the door and roll the wheelchair to the back of the car, where I fold it up and put it in the trunk. There’s an art to this, because if I do it wrong, and the wheels of the chair bump up against me, it’ll dirty up my dress, and then I’ll have to hear Ma’s mouth the whole way to church and back about how “cleanliness is next to godliness.” But I always do it right, because ain’t nobody got time for no lectures.
Next comes the pre-church small talk.
“So, how was the week?” Ma, who always immediately turns off the car radio (Momly only listens to talk talk talk anyway), asks Momly as we back out of the driveway. This, of course, is a real false start, a fake beginning to a conversation, only because Ma and Momly speak like six thousand times a week. But this was Ma’s way of opening up a discussion in a behind-the-back kind of way, to say whatever she wanted to say to me and Maddy. That way, it don’t seem like Momly’s a snitch. Even though I know Momly be snitching. I mean, she’s our aunt. And our adopted mother. Blabbing just comes with the territory.
“Nothing crazy to report. Maddy brought home all fours in school.” That was Momly’s lead-in this week.
“Fours, huh? Is that like an A?” Ma asked this all the time, and I couldn’t tell if she really had a hard time keeping up with the grading system of our charter school or if she was just being shady. She always called the grading system new wave, and said things like, Charter don’t mean smarter.
Ma cracked the window to let some air in. Momly’s car always smelled like a freshly scrubbed bathtub. Like . . . clean, but poisonous. Cleanliness was next to godliness, huh? So next to godliness that you might die from it. Maddy and me were used to it, but it irritated Ma every single time she was in the car.
“Yes, Ma. That’s an A, remember?” Maddy piped up from the backseat. Ma didn’t turn around. Just nodded.
“And Patty, well, she’s really doing great on the new track team. Patty, did you bring the ribbon?” I caught Momly’s eye in the rearview mirror. She knew I ain’t bring no ribbon. What I look like bringing a ribbon to church? I knew what she was doing. But if there was one thing I didn’t want to talk about this Sunday, it was running. Like I said, I’m a sore loser. And petty, too. And now, instantly annoyed.
“I forgot,” I said, flat.
“Well, let me tell you, Bev, she came in second in—”
“But what about grades? Is she gettin’ fours or fives or whatever?” My mother cut Momly off mid-brag. Ugh. If there was a second thing I didn’t want to talk about this Sunday, it was school.
“We’re getting there. She’s still getting used to it. Still adjusting.”
The “it” they were talking about was my new school. Up until this year, I was at Barnaby Elementary, then Barnaby Middle, which are both public schools in my old neighborhood. Ma thought it would be best if I “transitioned smoothly” out of living with her by keeping me at my regular school where all my friends go. Brianna, Deena, and especially my day-one, Ashley, who everybody calls Cotton. Me and Cotton been friends since kindergarten, back when Lu Richardson’s mother was our babysitter and she used to help us make up dance routines to nineties R & B. Dance routines we still know but I don’t do no more. But Cotton still does. And without me at school with her, who was gonna tape her bathroom dance-offs? Better yet, who was gonna blame her stinky farts on the boys? Who was gonna tell her that her hair is gonna be cute as soon as the curls fall? Maybe Brianna and Deena would, but that wasn’t their job. It was mine. But I couldn’t do it like I needed to because now I was in a different part of the city, somewhat settled into life with Uncle Tony and Momly, and going to this corny new school they picked—because it was a much shorter drive—over in Sunny Lancaster’s neighborhood (he’s another newbie on the track team). Which means, from Barnaby Terrace to Bougie Terrace. Well, the school was really called Chester Academy, which was a dead giveaway it was bougie. I mean, the cornballs who named the place thought it was too good to even be called a school. An academy? Whatever. Anyway, being at Chester was . . . different. Like, real different. First of all, we had to wear uniforms. Pleated skirts and stiff button-ups. And it was all girls, and let’s just say, not too many of them had real nicknames. Not too many of them had mothers that smelled like hair grease. Hair gel? Yes. But hair grease? Nah.
“Well, I suggest she get used to it soon, or there won’t be no more running,” Ma said. Momly caught my eyes again in the mirror. Winked. She knew Ma was hard on me about school, but she also knew I had to run.
As Momly pulled up in front of the church, she said what she always said every week. “Y’all say a prayer for me and your uncle.”
And my mother said what she always said in response: “Lord knows y’all need it.”
Momly and Uncle Tony never went to church, but when my mother made the arrangements for me and Maddy to live with them, it was under the condition that we wouldn’t miss a service. A whole lot of talk about grace and faith and mercy and salvation, which, to me, all just equaled shouting, clapping, and singing in a building built to be a sweatbox. A constant reminder that all that hair combing I did before coming was a waste of time, as it was a guarantee that I’d be leaving with my curls shriveled up into a frizzy lopsided cloud.
Because of my mother’s wheelchair, she had to sit in the aisle, while me and Maddy sat in a pew. And throughout the whole beginning of the service, Ma would peer down the pew to make sure we were behaving, which was hard because we always sat in the row with the stinky Thomases. Mr. and Mrs. Thomas been smelling like they just puked up mothballs for as long as I’ve known them. They always took the back pew, which is where we sat, so, yeah, most of the time I was sitting real still praying to God not to let me suffocate. Lord, please bless them with some soap. Some perfume. Anything. Make a miracle happen, or, What have I done to deserve this? Father, why hath thou forsaken me?
But there’s one part of the service where Ma always eases up on acting like a warden. And that’s when Pastor Carter starts sweating, and Sister Jefferson starts laughing. See, when the sweat and laughter comes, that basically means the spirit is in the building. And when Pastor starts banging his hand on the pulpit, and throws out one of those everybody-knows-it scriptures like, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” that’s the cue for the organ player, Dante, to get ready to play the happy music. Happy music sounds like the music they play at the beginning of baseball games, except sped up, and looped over and over and over again, until every lady in the church catches the spirit. And when you catch the spirit, that don’t mean you reach out and grab it like it’s ball or something. It’s not like that. Catching the spirit is more like the spirit catching you. And when it happens, you dance. But not like dance dance. Not like Cotton be dancing. You dance like the church is roach infested and it’s your job to step on them all. Like you trying to put a hole in the floor. Like you trying to break the heel off your white church pumps.
And Ma loves this. She always has. But now, she can’t dance. So, when she looks down the aisle during this part, it’s because she wants to see me and Maddy catch the spirit. Actually,
she just wants to see us do a triple-time step. See us move our legs a million miles a minute. Maddy loves it. As soon as she hears the music, she gets to bouncing around in her seat the same way she does when I’m doing her hair. Me, well, I don’t ever really feel nothing. But I love my mother. So I give Maddy the look, and she stands up, shoulders rocking, silly smile smeared across her lips, but only for a second before she mimics the other “saints” and screws her face up like she just caught another whiff of the Thomases. Then I stand up. Ma rolls the wheelchair back so we have enough space to slide out of the pew without tripping or brushing against the wheels of her chair and dirtying up our holy dresses.
And once we’re out, oh . . . it’s party time. More like, workout time. It’s like black Riverdance, or something like that. Actually, it reminds me of some of the warm-up drills Coach makes us do at practice. High knees. Footwork. And Ma loves it. But she can’t fist-pump and yell, “Go, Maddy! Go, Patty! Go! Go! Go!” in church. Not really appropriate. But what she can do is yell, “Yes, Lawd! Yessssss! Thank ya, Lawd! Thank ya!” And that’s basically the same thing.
After service, Momly is always waiting for us, and I go through the same process—getting Ma in the car, the wheelchair in the trunk. The only difference is on the ride home, Ma’s all high off Jesus and now ready to talk about what I’m normally doing great at, even though not so great this week. Running.
“You know I pray for you. I pray God put something special in your legs, in your muscles so you can run and not grow weary,” she said, lifting a finger in the air, proud that she was able to slip a Bible verse into regular conversation, a thing she was always trying to do.
“She’s really something, Bev,” Momly adds. I hate when they try to make me feel better by talking around me, like I’m not right here.
I lost.
I lost, I lost, I lost.
I sit in the back, clenching my jaw. Maddy sits next to me, kicking the back of Momly’s seat.
“Oh, I know she is, because she’s mine.” Ma turns around and this time beams at me. “And I don’t make no junk.”
TO DO: Introduce myself (which I should’ve done a while ago)
I SHOULD PROBABLY introduce myself. My name is Patina Jones. And I ain’t no junk. I also ain’t no hair flipper. And most of the girls at Chester Academy are hair flippers who be looking at me like my mom some kind of junk maker. But ain’t none of them got the guts to come out of their mouths with no craziness. They just turn and flip their dingy ponytails toward me like I care. Tuh. I guess it’s no secret that it’s never easy being the new girl. And I get to be the new girl in two different places—on the Defenders team, and at Chester. Lucky me. But at least the Defenders I can deal with because I know, for a fact, I can run.
I’ve been running track for three years now, thanks to Uncle Tony. Well, not just him. It really has more to do with my mom, dad, Uncle Tony, and Maddy. My whole family. But let’s just say Uncle Tony okeydoked the idea into my brain. See, it was my dad’s birthday, and also a few months before my mother’s legs were taken, and we were celebrating with cupcakes—real cupcakes, not pretend ones—that my mother had baked in honor of him. Yellow cake, strawberry icing, Dad’s recipe. It had become a tradition that I loved, even though it always made me sad. It was really just a chance for everybody to sit around and for the oldheads to crack jokes and tell me and Maddy stories about him. Maddy never knew him. And even though I did, and I remember him—I’ll never, ever forget him—there were a lot of things I just didn’t know. Like how he used to make beats, and sell instrumental tapes to aspiring rappers and singers in the neighborhood. And how he used the money he made from that to put himself through culinary school to become a pastry chef. And how he loved letting me lick the batter off the spoon before baking a cake, but not nearly as much as he loved seeing me chomp down on the finished product. But apparently, according to Uncle Tony, none of these things were as sweet to him as seeing me run.
“Your daddy called me when you took your first step,” Uncle Tony, peeling the paper from his cupcake, explained in the middle of an I-remember-when session. “I answered the phone and Ronnie just started yelling, ‘She did it, Toon! My baby did it!’ ” Toon was what my dad called Uncle Tony, a nickname from when they were kids back when Uncle Tony was obsessed with, you guessed it, cartoons.
“He sure did. He was so proud his Pancake was walking,” Ma confirmed, smirking like this memory didn’t bother her, even though the shine in her eyes said different. Maddy, who was too young to really care about any of this, listened in, cupcake icing smeared all over her chin. Didn’t really make sense for me to wipe her mouth until she was done making a mess. The things you learn.
“But when you started running . . .” Uncle Tony shook his head. “That’s when he really lost it. He’d send me videos every other day of you dashing back and forth across the room. Little fat legs just movin’! But you’d have thought you’d grown wings and started flying or something the way Ronnie was acting.” Uncle Tony licked pink frosting off the cupcake and went on. “I don’t know what it was about seeing you move like that. But your daddy loved it. You were definitely his Pancake, but you were also his little sprinter.”
Before then, I never even thought about running. It didn’t even cross my mind, even though I used to smoke all the boys in gym class at school, including Lu, who would get all in his feelings and be almost about to cry. Lu would be so salty, frontin’ like he wasn’t impressed, which didn’t matter because running ain’t mean nothing to me anyway. Not like . . . for real. But after hearing Uncle Tony talk about my dad like that, something clicked. And one night, a few months later, after Ma’s legs were gone, after a crazy moment with Maddy—and I do mean crazy—that I’ll also get to later on, I asked Momly and Uncle Tony to sign me up on a team. And they jumped to it because to them, it was also a good way for me to, I guess, deal with all the changes I was going through. Balance out all the unregul . . . um, wild stuff.
So proving myself on this new track team—the Defenders—was still just . . . running. Even if it was “elite.” I mean, no matter how you look at it, it’s still, listen to your coaches at practice, and wait to hear the gun at the meets. Then . . . run. Nothing to it. But proving myself at Chester Academy (also “elite”) was trickier—way trickier—because there were no practices, no coaches, and no starter pistols telling me when to leave everybody in the dust. Matter fact, ain’t even no dust at Chester, and running ain’t nothing these girls are concerned with at all. Unless it was running their mouths.
Chester Academy is one of those schools that go from kindergarten all the way up to twelfth grade, but the different levels are broken into three wings of the building. The south wing, which was where the high school was. The east wing, which was sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. And the north wing, which was elementary, Maddy’s domain. Yep, she’s at Chester too, and she loves it, but that’s because this the only school she’s ever been at. She’s never been in a school where you didn’t have to wear pleated paper bags. She never went to a school with boys, and yes, boys make school really, really annoying sometimes, but they also can make it pretty fun. Or at least funny. Maddy never went to a school with mostly black kids either. She’s only known life as a “raisin in milk,” as my Ma puts it, where lunch is sautéed prawn, which ain’t nothing but a fancy way to say cooked shrimp, and this stuff called couscous, which is basically just grits without the glob. Me, I’m a proud product of the Barnaby Terrace school system, where we ate nasty rectangle pizza (I don’t miss that part) and drank chocolate milk for lunch. Where we played pranks on people and traded candy while talking trash after school. Where we had . . . fun.
Chester . . . well, I ain’t had one second of fun at Chester yet. Matter fact, when I walk down that busy hall in the morning, I keep my eyes down. Focus on the floor because I ain’t got time to get stunted on by a whole bunch of rich girls whose daddies own stuff. Not like cars and clothes, though they got those, too. But stuff like
. . . boats. Ain’t even no water nowhere near here, but these fools got BOATS! And they don’t just own their houses, they own buildings! And businesses! Not like a corner store or a weekend dinner-plate situation or nothing like that. I’m talking biz-niss-sizz. My dad . . . he wanted to start his own business, another one of those birthday stories. A cupcake shop. And maybe if he didn’t . . . never wake up . . . he would’ve done it. But I bet he wouldn’t have bought no boat. But that’s who these girls’ daddies were. What they did. And if your daddy got himself a boat, and a building, what does he get you? Probably some kinda crazy pet, like a horse. (Can you even teach a horse how to guard your house?)
The other thing about these girls is that it seems like they ain’t never been told they can’t do nothing. Never. I mean, they be wearing full faces of makeup and everything. Do you know what my mother would do if she saw me with my whole face made up for school like I was about to go on some kinda fashion photo shoot or something? She’d probably try to run over me with that wheelchair. But here, at Chester, as long as your face is selfie-ready 100 percent of the time, you got a chance. A chance at what? Well, I don’t really know. All I know is, I ain’t got one.
What I got is track. I got Ghost, Sunny, and I can’t believe I’m gonna say this . . . Lu. That’s what I got. Who I got. So I don’t really care about the selfie-readies.
Well, that’s not totally true. I care a little bit.
“So . . . what y’all do this weekend?” I asked Taylor Stein, Teylor Dorsey, and Becca Broward. It was Monday, in history class, which meant it was also the second day of the worst group project of all time in the history of life. The four of us had been lumped together last Friday to start on this assignment about an important woman from the past, and in two weeks we would have to do a presentation on her. On Friday all we did was nail down who we were going to focus on. My first choice was my hero, Florence “Flo Jo” Joyner, but none of the girls in my group knew who she was. Seriously? How do you not know one of the flyest runners to ever take a lap? There was a woman named Madeline Manning, who was probably the best American eight-hundred-meter runner, and that’s my race, but still, Flo Jo was it. Plus, those nails . . . She looked like she raced during the day and was in a singing group at night.
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