“Oh, okay. I just thought maybe you didn’t because you got all that makeup on, and my mother says that if—”
“Okay, I think we’re almost there, right, Becca?” I cut Maddy off before she got me cut off. Even more cut off.
Becca laughed. T-N-T, not so much.
“Yep, this is me right here on the left. The one with the open gate.” Becca pointed to the most giant-est house I ever seen up close. Momly pulled in, pulled up around this big fountain, to the front door.
As everybody got out, I leaned back in and reminded Momly, “Two hours. Please. Just two hours.”
“Two hours,” she repeated slowly, putting two fingers up. And Maddy, who had now climbed back in the backseat, also put two fingers up, but held them up to the window at Becca and the girls—a peace sign.
INSIDE BECCA’S HOUSE:
(1) A whole lot of space.
(2) A big piano Becca called “that old piece of crap.”
(3) A chandelier that looked like the ceiling was raining diamonds.
(4) Paintings. Pictures of paintings. Paintings of pictures. And pictures. Of Becca. Looking goofy.
(5) A movie theater that Becca said no one ever used.
(6) Big furniture made from the same kind of leather as my uncle’s favorite jacket.
(7) No dog.
(8) A scraggly cat named Carl, that didn’t wear clothes or look like it had ever had a massage a day in its life.
(9) Me and the two other girls, who were taking selfies like they ain’t never been nowhere.
(10) The familiar smell of sugar.
“This is Granny,” Becca said as we popped into the kitchen for a moment. An old lady dressed like an old lady was baking cookies.
“Hi, girls,” she said, scooping batter from a bowl. “Sweets will be ready in a short while.” The old lady’s voice was like Momly’s if it had a whole bunch of cuts in it.
“We’re going to be upstairs doing work, Granny.”
“Okay, well then, I won’t bother you. They’ll be down here. Chocolate chip, oatmeal, snickerdoodle, and peanut butter. You girls help yourselves.”
“She made all that?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s her hobby. We don’t even eat them. She just likes to make them and then give them away to our neighbors. I like cupcakes better. What’s your dad’s favorite recipe?”
I don’t know if it was the sugar smell, or the buildup from earlier, or what, but I just . . . said it.
“He passed away.”
Becca looked me in the eye. Straight in the eye. “I’m . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“It was a long time ago.” And now, relieved I got it over with, I changed the subject without actually changing the subject. Another one of those small-talk tips I picked up from Momly. “Where your folks?” I really asked because the house was so quiet. No TV. No radio. No noise besides pans being slid into the oven, and the weird giggles of T-N-T holding their cell phones in the air, posing.
“Where they always are. At work,” Becca shot back. “Come on.” And with Taylor and TeeTee trying for the millionth time to get the whole chandelier in the shot, I followed behind Becca as we walked up one of those round-and-round stairs to her room.
Here’s the thing about hair-flipper bedrooms, they basically only come one way. I mean, I had never actually been in one in real life, but I had seen them enough times on TV to know that they’re all bedazzled in pink and purple. They look like candy shops. Like doll houses. Like living inside of a strawberry cupcake.
But as we entered Becca’s room . . . uhhhhh . . . blackness. Not like Black History Month blackness. And not blackness like I passed out from the overload of girlyness in Becca’s room. I didn’t. Though I did feel like I was gonna black out from shock, because if Becca’s house was a castle, Becca’s room in this house was the dungeon. The upstairs dungeon. Everything . . . eh-ver-ree-thing in her room was black. The walls, the closet doors, the lamps and lights, the desk, the ceiling, everything. It was like Becca was really a YMBC or something. Like she was really a button-bagger!
As I tried to hide my shock, Taylor and TeeTee finally came busting in the room all squeals and smiles, which quickly turned into gasps and frowns. Their faces were stuck, half-melted. Terrified. Meanwhile, Becca pulled a chair from behind her door, another from the desk against the wall, and plopped down on her bed like none of this was a big deal.
“Okay. Let’s get to work on Miss Frida.” She clapped her hands together, excited.
Silence. From me and T-N-T, whose struggle-faces looked like they were trying to swallow their own tongues. Me, well, all I kept telling myself was, two hours. Just two hours, Patty.
“Yeah, let’s get to . . . work,” I finally said, and before I could grab one of the chairs, TeeTee and Taylor had already snatched them, positioned them right next to each other, and right next to the door. So I sat on the bed. Take it easy. No big deal. All-black room . . . no problem. No problem at all. Don’t really mean nothing. Nope. Not at all. Not. At. All.
Funny thing is, the group work went exactly the same as it did in school. Me, basically trying to manage it all while T-N-T, who were usually distracted by paint on their nails, were now distracted by paint on the walls. So while me and Becca were digging around on the Internet for more details about our Mexican artist friend, Taylor and TeeTee were whispering to each other, until finally Becca said, “Are y’all gonna help?”
“Oh, yeah,” Taylor said, shocked that she got called out.
“We just had a question about it all,” TeeTee added. I don’t know what Becca thought was coming next, but I thought it was going to be about Frida. Turns out, the “it all” they had a question about had nothing to do with the project. “What’s the deal with . . . um . . . all this?” TeeTee waved her hands around like she was swatting flies.
“What do you mean?” Becca asked, in that honest way she was always asking something.
“I mean, this.” TeeTee repeated the wave.
“Look, I’m not trying to be mean, but it’s just . . . a little weird,” Taylor jumped back in. “It’s like at school, you act one way, and it’s not all . . . um . . . goth-y like this, but really you . . .”
“She’s what?” I asked, cocking my head to the side. I don’t know where it came from, but something about the way they were talking rubbed me wrong. The same way I felt when people tried to mess with Ghost. Or Sunny. Or even Lu. But Becca didn’t need me.
“Goth-y?” She was for-real confused. “Oh. You wanna know about the black.” She smiled, totally unfazed. Becca reached behind her back and snatched the curtains closed. Then she got up and slapped the light switch on the wall. And then blackness went to darkness . . . and the whole universe appeared.
Stars and planets and whatever other things be up there in space popped out of the black, glowing green, all around us.
“What . . . is all this?” I asked, looking up at the ceiling.
“This is as much of the galaxy as you can fit in a bedroom. And that”—she leaned over to see what was directly above my head—“well, that looks like the Gemini Twins.” She tried to get me to see what she was talking about, but it all just looked like a bunch of stars to me. “Constellations. Like connect the dots, except with stars, you know?” I didn’t know. But I still thought it was kinda cool.
“I ain’t never seen all these stars up there. I mean, I seen a few, but not like this.”
“They’re all up there. Each one connected to another in some weird way. It’s amazing.”
“Wild,” I corrected her.
“Not that wild,” she corrected my correction. “At least not to me. My folks are rocket scientists. This is pretty much as normal as it gets in this house.”
“Rocket scientists?” Taylor finally found her words again.
“Well, they’re really called astronautical engineers, basically the same thing.”
“That’s a real job?” TeeTee came right behind her. I can’t front, I was th
inking the exact same thing.
“I hope so. If not, I don’t know where my parents are all the time.” Becca laughed, but only a little. There was something about her face in that moment that was weird, like something invisible was pinching her underarm. I knew that face. Saw it in Ghost. And some people say they saw it in me. Shoot, it was probably the face I made at lunch. The might-be-sick face.
So I pointed at a cluster to my left. Becca hopped up. “Oh, that looks like Pegasus.” And that did it. No more Frida. Becca was off, spazzing around her room, pointing out different star clusters and planets, explaining why we can’t see all of them where we live, straight up nerding out, and I was into it. But I guess T-N-T . . . not so much. They were basically just sitting there texting, and I figured they were texting each other talking trash about it all, but when Taylor blurted, “My mother’s here,” I realized who they were really texting.
“Already?” Becca asked, still not tripping about the way the girls had treated her. It was like nothing really bothered her, which I admired. “But you didn’t even have any cookies.”
“No, um, no . . . that’s okay,” TeeTee said, as if the cookies were going to be black too. Honestly, I was so caught up in her room that I’d forgotten all about the cookies.
“Yeah, it’s cool. We just . . . have to go. Sorry,” Taylor said, not seeming sorry at all.
“Well, let me walk you down,” Becca insisted.
I checked the time and knew that the two-hour mark was coming, and one thing about Momly was she was never late. She was the most on-time person in the world. So it made sense for me to head downstairs too. And halfway down the fancy round-and-round steps with the crystal chandelier hanging over us like ice frozen in the air, my phone buzzed. It was Momly. She was here.
Becca opened the door, and Maddy was outside talking to someone.
“Mrs. S, what are you doing here?” Maddy squealed, as me, Becca, Taylor, and TeeTee came through the door. Maddy was standing at the passenger-side window of the other car in the driveway. The one that came for T-N-T. At least I thought it had come for T-N-T, but why would Maddy’s teacher be here for them?
“I’m here to pick up my daughter, Taylor.” What? Daughter? Taylor? “And this is my sister, Mrs. Dorsey. She teaches at the school too. Fourth grade.”
“Hi, Madison. I’ve heard so much about you. Hopefully, you’ll be in my class in a few years.” Wait a minute. Taylor Stein. TeeTee Dorsey. Bestie-cousin-sisters. And daughters of . . . no way . . . teachers? Teachers. Tuh. Well, well, well. T-N-T. Regular girls.
I looked at the queen hair flippers, but guess what? They wouldn’t look at me. Just shot off the step and trotted over to the car. And that’s when I knew they knew they were caught. Gotcha! I could tell they knew what I was thinking. They knew I knew they’d been fronting this whole time. Ain’t no teachers rich, and I knew that because at Barnaby, they told us all the time. They don’t pay me enough to teach you and babysit you. Now I got why T-N-T were acting all weird in Becca’s house. Taking selfies at the piano and all that. Chandelier shots for days. I turned back to Becca. It was like she hadn’t even noticed. She just waved at them, while at the same time Maddy waved me over.
“Patty, it’s my teacher, Mrs. S!” she said as I walked toward the car.
“I see! Hi, Mrs. S.” I tried to keep my cool. “Happy early birthday. Taylor says y’all got plans tomorrow. Hope you have a great time!”
And before I got in the car, I looked up at the sky. Still cloudy. But I looked for stars anyway. Of course, I didn’t see none. But now, for some reason, it felt good just knowing there were more up there than I’d ever known.
TO DO: Be introduced to Momly (like, for real)
I HAD NEVER talked so much at dinner, but I was going on about Becca’s house, how beautiful it all was, and how Becca’s room was nothing like I expected.
“Stars everywhere. It was like being at the science center or something,” I explained. “And did y’all know rocket scientists were real?”
Momly laughed and Uncle Tony joked me, talking about, “It don’t take a rocket scientist to know rocket scientists are real, Patty.” I admit, he got me.
I tried to explain to Maddy what constellations were, telling her they were stars connected in the sky to make pictures. She said her teacher told them about constellations before, which of course made me go in on her teacher’s daughter. Bony McPhony and her cousin, Lie-Lie. All this time I’d been thinking about Taylor and TeeTee like they were some kind of royalty, when really they were just . . . regular girls pretending to be something they not. Cornballs.
“But you don’t know, maybe they have fathers that are doing well?” Momly suggested, her voice tired.
“Come on, babe,” Uncle Tony cut in. “If I hit it big, you think you’d decide to be around all them snotty noses—matter fact, snotty, snotty noses—every day?” Then he quickly added, “Not you, Maddy. And I’m not trying to be mean, but . . . come on, y’all know what I’m sayin’.”
“Well, how exactly do you plan on hitting it big?” Momly threw one of her zings that sound too sweet to be a zing, which makes it zingier.
“Oop!” I yelped, just to get Uncle Tony back for the rocket scientist burn.
“And also,” Momly added, “Tony, you know me better than that. There’s nothing I love more than a snotty nose. Snotty or not.”
After dinner, I wanted to help Momly with the dishes, sensing how tired she was. Uncle Tony had cleared the table and was now helping Maddy get ready for bed. She was probably talking his ear off about going to the farm in the morning. I couldn’t wait to hear what she thought of it, only because I remember when I went—every school in the city goes to the same one. Maybe it’s because they got so many cows, and that’s cool, but milking cows might’ve been the grossest thing I’ve ever done. I mean . . . yeah. It’s up there.
I ran the water in the sink.
“Oh, don’t worry about the dishes, Patty. I’ll take care of them in a minute,” Momly said, now bending down, sweeping nothing into a dustpan.
“I got it.”
“No, it’s okay,” she insisted. But I was already squirting green liquid soap on everything.
“Seriously, it’s fine. I can do it.”
Momly didn’t say nothing to that. Just emptied the dustpan in the trash, then put the broom back in the kitchen closet. She snatched a hand towel from the oven handle.
“Then I’ll dry.”
I scrubbed each plate, then handed it over to Momly, who wiped it, then put it back up in the cabinet. We did this over and over again with dishes and silverware, until there was nothing left but cups.
“I just can’t believe those girls,” I went on, handing Momly a glass. Just couldn’t get over it.
“I can.” She set the glass down. “I knew a lot of girls like that. Shoot, I was almost one of them.”
I ran water in the last glass, then turned the faucet off. “What you mean?” I asked, handing her the final cup.
“I mean, I remember when I first went to that school. To Chester.” She dried the glass and set it on the counter. Then she folded the towel into a square, placed it on the counter as well.
“Wait. You went there?”
Momly smirked. “Yeah, a long time ago. I told you that.” Had she? I didn’t remember ever talking to her about going to Chester. Actually, if I’m being honest, I don’t really remember talking to Momly about anything. At least not about her. Didn’t realize that until that moment.
“I mean, maybe you did, but I don’t remember.”
“Uh-huh. Well, in case you missed it . . . I grew up in the country. Not too far from the farm I have to drive Maddy to tomorrow morning. And when I was ten, my parents split up, and my father pretty much disappeared. My mother had to figure out how to support us, now that we were on our own, so she ended up applying to be the custodian of Chester Academy. And because she was an employee, I got to go there for free.”
I had no idea. I mean
, about any of it. I didn’t know Momly went to Chester. I also didn’t know her mom was a janitor.
“Did you like it there?”
“Ha!” she yelped, then continued, “No. No, no, no. Shoot, the only reason we sent you and Maddy there is because I know the education is excellent. But, for me, I couldn’t stand it. Not at first. I mean, listen, I’m a poor girl from the sticks who ended up in a fancy city school. And what made it worse was after classes, I couldn’t just go home like everybody else. I had to hang around with my mother, help her clean floors and bleach toilets. Of course, eventually my classmates found out, and then the jokes started. They called me names like Emily Mop Bucket, stuff like that. A few of the girls would even purposely leave trash around, or spit their gum out on the floor, because they knew after school my mother and I would have to clean it up.”
“Stupid hair flippers.” I murmured, chewing on the words.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just . . . did it . . . like, did it ever get better?”
“Better?” Momly humphed. “Eventually. I mean, first I tried to fit in. Tried to find another poor kid to pick on to take the attention off me. But all the kids I went to tease ended up becoming my friends. And after that, school got better for a while. But there were other things that happened that made it tough again.”
Uh-oh. “Other things like what?” I asked. Momly crossed her arms.
“Well, halfway through my seventh-grade year, my mother had a massive stroke. The whole left side of her body was basically paralyzed. So she couldn’t do the job anymore. Luckily, my grades were good, and they pitied me, so the school let me stay through the eighth grade for free. But . . . that was hard. And I . . .” Momly drew in a breath, then continued. “And I, um, I didn’t know how to deal with it, so I decided I would just keep doing her job, which I couldn’t do because I was twelve years old, so obviously the school couldn’t let me be the custodian, plus they had no idea I was helping my mother in the first place. So they ended up bringing on somebody else. A man named . . . Mr. Warren.” She paused, giving me a second to catch on.
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