“Uncle Tony, I’m not mad no more,” I told him, getting straight to the point so he could stop acting so weird.
His shoulders dropped, rolled back as if he just unbuttoned the top button on his pants after a big meal. “Oh, thank God,” he exhaled the words, and I smirked, then tapped my fork on Maddy’s plate. She stabbed a piece of cauliflower, lifted it to her mouth. Uncle Tony continued, “So, yeah, if you wanna run faster, try this.”
He scooted out from the table, Momly already frowning at whatever was coming. And then . . . it came. The strangest thing I’ve seen Uncle Tony do, maybe ever. The Running Man. Spastic and offbeat and all over the place.
Maddy busted out laughing, white mush in her mouth, and I was right behind her, my laughter scrubbing away the last 10 percent of sad in me. Uncle Tony lurched forward, pumping his legs, panting, “This . . . is . . . how . . . you . . . do . . . it . . . Patty . . . ,” and I kept snickering. My uncle, a straight-up clown.
TO DO: Calm down, count to ten (or ten thousand)
THE FIRST THING I do in the morning every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday is send Ma a text message of a smiley face, just to let her know I’m thinking about her on the days she has to get her blood cleaned. And when I say cleaned, I don’t mean cleaned like scrubbed. You try to scrub blood, you just gonna wind up with nasty red hands. What I mean by cleaned is the doctors do this thing where they run the blood out of one of her veins through a tube that’s connected to a machine, and that machine takes all the bad stuff out, and then pumps the blood out of the other end through a different tube and back into a different vein. Takes like three or four hours, and leaves her super tired, but she gotta do it because the sugar also broke her kidneys, and when your kidneys don’t work, your blood gets dirty. And when your blood gets dirty, it basically messes all kinds of other stuff up inside you. Think about it like this: When you get dirt in your shoe, do it feel good? Nope. It makes you walk with a limp, like there are little fires blazing between your toes. And when you get dirt in your eye, can you see? Of course not. And it burns like crazy, too, every little speck of dirt like a teeny-tiny lit match. So imagine having dirt in your blood. Mess your whole body up. Make your organs feel like they in a microwave.
So, yeah, I text her to let her know I’m thinking about her on those days. I text her on other days too, but especially on the blood-cleaning days. She always sends a smiley face back, which I appreciate because I know how much she hates texting. She loves getting them, but really hates sending them.
Momly is who goes to pick Ma up, who takes her to the hospital’s dialysis—another word with “die” in it—unit, where she gets the treatment, who then brings her back home. And because Momly gets to Ma’s house at the butt crack of dawn, Ma goes to bed dumb early on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays so she can be up and ready to go. And whenever Ma’s not at treatment, she’s recovering from it, which means she’s usually lying in bed drifting in and out of sleep watching TV, or as she always puts it, “letting the TV watch her.” So the morning smiley faces we send each other are important.
Correction: the smiley faces we send to each other are important to me. Almost as important as Vicky Tines’s boyfriend is to Vicky Tines, who she announces is in high school every single day in homeroom. Mrs. Stansfield takes roll by going down her list and looking to see who’s there and who’s not. At Barnaby, Ms. Simmons used to call our names out loud. Needed to hear our voices. But in homeroom at Chester, there were a lot of voices already being heard. Like Vicky Tines’s. Ugh. All of Vicky’s friends be having heart eyes when they listen to Vicky go on and on (and on and on and on). Macy Franks pays no attention to her and just folds paper. Like, what’s the name of that thing . . . that way you fold paper into animals and all that? Mrs. Richardson used to help me and Cotton make paper fortune-tellers when she was babysitting us back in the day. Used to give mine to Momly when she picked me up. But my fortune-teller ain’t never predict this, that’s for sure. Anyway, Macy just be doing that. Making birds and stuff. Laurie Brenner wants a belly-button ring. Jasmine Stanger already got one. I saw it when she was showing Laurie. Pretty sure something’s wrong with it.
First period, English. Mr. Winston is teaching us poetry. Which means Mr. Winston is teaching us boredom. My uncle said, “Tell Mr. Winston to teach y’all some Queen Latifah.” At Chester? Right. Remember the whole “think about cannons” thing? That’s because we’ve been learning this one called “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Cannons are mentioned in it, and Mr. Winston reads it like he some kind of actor or something, all bass-y and slow, like the man who narrates the previews at the movies. Like his dramatic voice is gonna make the poem any less wack. But hot sauce on cardboard is still cardboard.
Then comes math. Geometry. Ms. Teller says “perpendicular” and “hypotenuse” like her life depends on it. My life depends on math being over as quickly as possible.
Then lunch.
Okay, I know what you’re thinking, what you think I’m gonna say. You think I’m gonna go on some kind of rant about how the cafeteria is basically like some kind of “meanie mealtime” and little ol’ Patty Watty doesn’t have a group so she can’t find a seat, right? Wah wah wah! Right? Well . . . right. Kinda. But not exactly. See, the real issue with the cafeteria is that it’s tiny. Like teeny-tiny. It’s almost as if when they started this academy, they didn’t expect there to be so many people who would actually come to get academied. They probably never thought regular kids from regular neighborhoods and regular schools would end up here. But here I am. Looking for a seat in a space as small as the church we go to, and with just as much noise, but none of the spirit.
Point is, there was never enough seats, which was okay, because I never sat down anyway. I would basically just do a few laps around the room, scarfing my pasta Bolognese, which I found out was not pasta and baloney, but was actually just regular spaghetti. But yeah, I’d just circle the room, because when you keep moving, people think you going somewhere, like you on a mission and shouldn’t be bothered. Like you busy. And that’s better than people realizing that you not busy at all. That you not okay with lunchrooms that don’t have trays, and that ain’t big enough spaces to disappear in, and that don’t stink of week-old dirty mop water, which I now know is the familiar smell of love and friendship.
Usually, on the tenth lap, my food would be gone, and the bell would ring. I had it all timed perfectly. But today, on lap number two, barely into my salmon teriyaki, which, by the way, should be called teriyaki salmon the same way barbecue chicken is barbecue chicken and not chicken barbecue. I swear . . . Chester. Anyway, on lap two, Becca stood up from her seat like a bird who just popped its head out of a nest, and waved at me. Well, not at me, but she waved me over. And I felt . . . funny. Like, confused, and weirded out, and skeptical, and yes, I can’t front, a little excited. I cut between the tables, holding my plate steady, and once I got to where she was, smack in the middle of a crowded table full of . . . well . . . you know . . . girls on either side of her eating and talking and laughing, she said, “What are you doing?”
“What you mean?” I replied, pretending like I hadn’t just been acting like a lunch monitor, trying not to drop my plate while forking my fish.
“I mean, how come you’re not sitting?” she asked. The girl beside her, a girl I’d seen every day but never really met, whipped her face toward me. Two faces looking at mine. Four rosy cheeks. Four mascaraed eyes. Four bazillion strands of blond.
“Oh, I’m good.”
“But you never sit,” Becca pressed. “Like . . . ever.”
And before I could either drop my plate, or say anything, Becca bumped the girl next to her, who then bumped the girl next to her, who bumped the girl next to her who happened to be Macy Franks, folding her teriyaki streaked plate into a Styrofoam half-moon. They all scooted over, squishing together, making a sliver of free space on the seat. Was this some kind of joke? A trick? A scheme for Becca to milk me for info about Frida or something
? Either way, I was tired of eating standing up, so I set my plate down, slowly climbed over the bench, and slipped my legs under the table. Then, as if none of this was a big deal, Becca turned back to her conversation—a ditzy discussion about music in space—and I turned back to my salmon teriyaki. Yeah. Kinda awkward.
After lunch it was time for my favorite girl group. I mean, history. Ms. Lanford was standing at the board, chewing the last bit of her lunch, as we all filed in and took our seats in our assigned-group clusters.
“Don’t forget to figure out when you’re going to meet outside of class to work on this. Not everything can be done in school.” Ms. Lanford wiped crumbs from the corners of her mouth. Looked like she may have had crackers for lunch. Definitely not salmon teriyaki. “Hopefully, today everyone is prepared to share with their partners some more new findings about the person you all have chosen.”
“Hey,” I said first, scooting my chair up to the desk. T-N-T sort of spoke back. Sometimes their hi’s sounded more like humphs. But only to me. Their hi’s to Becca came with weird no-touch hugs. But whatever.
“Hey, Patina.” Becca beamed, much warmer than the other two girls. As if I hadn’t just been sitting next to her at lunch. She pulled out the materials we put together yesterday. Well, really, the stuff I put together. The photos of Frida I found on Google. Then the three of them looked at me like I had something magical to say.
I returned the stare. Blank face.
“So . . . anything new we should know about . . . um . . .” TeeTee started but couldn’t remember Frida’s name.
“Frida.”
“Yeah, Frida. Anything new we should know about her?” She cocked her head to the side. I imagined her brain oozing out of her ear.
“You tell me.” Me = running out of patience.
“I watched the movie about her online last night,” Becca blurted out, all excited. “Um, well, I watched some of it. There’s Spanish in it, and that threw me off. But I saw the part where she was in school and on the bus with her boyfriend, who by the way was hot, just saying, and the bus got in an accident and gold dust went everywhere and the next thing you know, Frida is just lying there all bloody. A mess. And then she’s got a cast over her whole body. She painted butterflies on the cast after the cute boyfriend moved to Europe, which I was like, what? No! So . . . yeah.”
T-N-T turned their attention back toward me to see if Becca was right. As if I was some kind of expert on gold dust, butterflies, and blood.
“That’s wassup, Becca,” I said, smiling, nodding. “But there’s some details you left out.” Here’s the thing. At this point, I had already come to grips with the fact that this group project was going to be a Patty project. Ms. Lanford told us at the very beginning that there would be one grade given, so everybody had to do a fair share. But how in the world was I supposed to tell the T(a/e)ylors to get it together? How was I supposed to say, Yo, I ain’t doing all the work? I guess I could’ve just said it like that, but I didn’t want no static. I didn’t want to be on nobody’s bad side, especially since I wasn’t even really on nobody’s good side yet. Matter of fact, I wasn’t on nobody’s side, period.
Man, I missed Cotton.
I know that’s such a random thought, but in moments like these, I missed her bad. And what made it worse was that I couldn’t even talk to her, because Barnaby Middle was on spring break like everybody else—Chester’s was the next week—and her grandma took her on their annual cruise trip, which Cotton don’t even like because she says she don’t do nothing but sit around with no cell phone service, eating shrimp all day and looking out at all the water she can’t swim in while her granny plays slot machines. But if Cotton was here, if she was in this group with me, she would’ve just made up all types of silly stories. Oh, Frida? She was the first woman in Mexico to go to the NFL. Oh, Frida? She invented the flute. Used to play with James Brown and them. Oh, Frida? She’s the first woman to have a day named after her—Friday. By the way, Thursday was named after Thurgood Marshall. That’s Cotton. She would’ve turned everything into a joke until T-N-T realized it wasn’t. That none of this was. That this was about a . . . number . . . grade. A four. I needed a four. Even if that meant I had to do three other people’s work to get it.
I pulled out my notebook and started running down more facts about Frida, filling in some of Becca’s holes. “She also went to one of the top schools in Mexico. It was probably like this one.” Becca nodded. She was in. The other two were still holding out. I tried one more time to make a connection. “And that’s where she met Diego Rivera, who at the time was painting a mural in the school auditorium.”
“That’s the fat man, right?” Becca interjected, excited to share more of what she must’ve seen in the movie. But it came off kinda mean, so she added, “I mean . . . I didn’t mean it like that. But that’s him, right?”
“Right. And what’s really interesting is she ended up marrying him once she healed from the accident. Not right away, but a few years after.”
“The fat man,” TeeTee chimed in, just to confirm that we were still talking about the same Diego. “What did he look like?”
Becca sifted through the papers until finding one with his picture, and stabbed his face with her finger. “Him.”
“Him? She could’ve done better than him. And he looks so old,” Taylor scoffed.
“He was old. Twenty years older,” I explained. Taylor leaned forward, the drama of that kind of relationship seeming to send some kind of electrical charge through her. Suddenly, Frida was a little more interesting.
TeeTee pinched the corner of a picture of Frida, the one where her neck is too long and a small monkey’s looking over her shoulder, and turned the picture around.
“I mean, she wasn’t like . . . she definitely coulda done better than that guy,” she said, studying Frida’s face.
“Yeah, I agree. But he was a genius with a paintbrush, and I guess that’s why she chose him. People used to call their relationship ‘the Elephant and the Dove.’ ”
Becca’s eyes lit up. “Like Beauty and the Beast!”
Taylor grimaced. “I guess,” she said, and just then it occurred to me that we were all leaning in, analyzing Frida’s and Diego’s faces, looking through the pictures, discussing something . . . interesting. Sure, it was about their crazy love story, but still. It was a start. And if it weren’t for the piercing sound of the fire alarm suddenly going off, we might’ve been able to get to some of the other cool things about Frida Kahlo, but at least we decided whose house we would go over to do the “go over somebody’s house” portion of the project. Becca’s. Taylor and TeeTee basically begged Becca to host it at her place, which I guess made sense because it was right across the street from the school. Becca said the best day to do it at her house would be the next day, Wednesday, because her grandmother was making cookies, which T-N-T said was perfect because Thursday was Taylor’s mother’s birthday, and Friday . . . was Friday. I told them I could do it, but I’d have to come by after track practice, and if it wasn’t for the alarm suddenly screaming over us, maybe, just maybe, they would’ve asked about my running. But I guess fire drills are important too.
At least they are to six-year-olds.
Specifically six-year-olds named Madison Jones.
“But just in case there is a real fire, it’s good we practice, right?” Maddy went on and on in the car after school. From the moment I met her in the hallway she’d been blabbing, so excited about the hustle and bustle she’d experienced earlier in the day. Fire drill, fire drill, fire drill. It’s like that was the only thing that happened in the north wing of Chester.
“I think we should also maybe practice stop, drop, and roll with Mrs. S,” Maddy barreled on, rolling her hands in the air. “Just in case somebody don’t make it out in time, especially since she make us all walk so slow. I don’t know about everybody else, but if there’s a for-real fire, I’m outta there.”
Momly snorted.
“But w
hat about me?” I asked.
Maddy thought about it for a second. “Patty, I can lift you up, but I don’t think I can lift you and run.”
“Not yet,” I replied, sliding one arm out of my shirtsleeve.
“Right. Not yet.” Maddy flexed one of her arms, squeezed her bicep.
The ride to MLK Park was the one thing that got Maddy to stop yakking about fire drills . . . for some reason she still geeked out at the fancy houses we passed on the way, especially the big white ones, their wooden castle doors with knobs like golden fists. The fountains and wraparound driveways. The windows—no curtains, like they want everybody to know what they got. But can’t nobody really see nothing anyway, because of the gates, the tops of the metal posts curling up into the air like witch fingers. And in front of the gates, shrubs. And then the mailbox, with the address, which is always just one or two numbers. Like 6 Chester Ave. Or 13 Chester Place. And as we moved through town, the numbers continued to climb as the neighborhoods changed. From mansions to weird cereal-box communities, where every house looks like a different version of the one next to it. Then on to older neighborhoods like mine, where the houses are still nice, but have been around for a while, so still made of brick. My address has three numbers. 685 Wallery Street. But Ma’s address, over in Barnaby Terrace, has four—5014. And I think Ghost’s is something like five or six. It’s like the less numbers in your bank account, the more numbers in your address.
Practice was a little less silly today. Well, it got less silly after warm-up laps, stretching, and the usual clowning around. Well, Lu was clowning Curron.
“Yo, Curron, how come yesterday Coach ain’t make y’all do that dancing thing Patty and Krystal did?” he asked, winding up and tossing a live grenade into the mix. He had one of his legs pulled back behind him, doing a final stretch.
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