Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
A dangerous plan . . .
I stood there a minute, eyeing the guy—my mind half on him, half on Marie. If a driver did-n’t look right, me and Dion’d just start walking. You could tell a lot about a person looking at their eyes. If a person’s stone cold crazy, you can see it—their eyeballs twitch. I can tell crazy people from across the room so I don’t have to walk right up to a truck to see it. Me and Dion say no to more rides than we say yeah to but it’s gotta be that way if we want to make it where we going. I don’t want to be one of those girls you read about....
OTHER BOOKS BY JACQUELINE WOODSON
The Dear One
The House You Pass on the Way
Hush
If You Come Softly
I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This
Lena
Locomotion
Miracle’s Boys
SPEAK
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in the United States of America
by Delacorte Books for Young Readers, 1999
Published by Speak, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2006
Copyright © Jacqueline Woodson, 1999
All rights reserved
eISBN : 978-1-101-15709-1
http://us.penguingroup.com
To brave girls everywhere
One
Mama died when I was nine. She used to all the time say to me that no matter what happened, I’d find myself on the other side of it. She’d say, “Don’t you be scared none either, Lena, ’cause you got a right to be in the world just like everybody else walking through it.” Then Mama would smile, pull my braid and set about to fixing dinner or cleaning up or, if we had a little extra money, she’d have some fabric that she’d cut into a dress for herself with matching ones for me and Dion. We hardly ever had extra money ’cause Daddy didn’t work regular. Once in a while, he’d get work dynamiting coal. But by the time Mama started getting sick, most of the coal had been blown from the ground. We got by, though. We never had to beg anybody for anything and Mama made sure we ate regular.
Dion must of been about four when Mama died but she makes believe she doesn’t remember a lick about her. Dion doesn’t really understand about death so she just makes believe she never knew anybody that died. It’s like she’s got this box of Mama Memories locked up inside her head ’cause I know way deep down she has to remember how Mama used to hold her on her lap, how we’d all sit around that potbelly stove in the winter and Mama’d sing to us. She had a pretty voice, Mama did—all soft and high. We were living in Ripley then. West Virginia. Had us a tiny house down near Dunbar. West Virginia sky got all this blue in it, like sky you don’t get to see in other places. Sometimes I’ll get to drawing it, mixing different blues all up until I get it just so. Pictures I draw of West Virginia remind me of Mama, like maybe that’s her inside of all that blue, looking down at us.
After that we lived in this apartment over Che Che’s Beauty Care. That was in Ravenswood. Lived there for about a year until Che Che said she needed to be getting the rent on time and all at once, not in little bits and pieces. We went to Marietta, Ohio, from there.
Mama got sicker and sicker and finally died in Marietta. We had a little funeral for her in Champlain Field, a few miles outside of Marietta. I forgot the exact name of the town.
I don’t remember crying much the day we buried Mama but I remember sort of listening to the preacher talk about ashes to ashes and the dearly departed. I was standing holding Dion’s hand and my daddy was holding my other hand and there was a few old ladies, the kind that just sort of go from funeral to funeral the way normal people go to the movies.
For a long time, I’d forget Mama was dead and sit by the window waiting for her to come in from doing day work somewhere. After a while, I stopped sitting and the knowing settled down inside of me. Made itself a home there. A few years after Mama passed, we moved on up to Chauncey, Ohio. Me and Dion got ourselves settled in school there and for a while we seemed to be doing all right.
Sometimes when Dion gets to asking questions about Mama, I think maybe that’s that locked box inside her head, opening up a bit. Some days we’ll be walking and Dion’ll look full at me and say something like “What color was Mama’s eyes?” It’s up to me to tell her everything she wants to know. Up to me to do all the remembering ’cause it’s really only the two of us left now.
I should tell you I love my sister Dion more than anybody in the whole world. She’s only eight now but I swear if you hear her talk sometimes you’d think she was a whole lot older. And when she gets mad, she starts to cursing like the devil. I don’t know where she learned to curse like she do. I use my own curse words only every once in a while, not wasting them on something that don’t need a good one thrown in there. Sometimes I think Dion must stay up late at night practicing to herself. And she’s smart too. She reads real fast, always trying to sneak in a couple of pages of some book. Yesterday, we hitched a ride in a Laughing Cow Dairy truck with a Wisconsin plate—I wrote down the number. When you’re hitching, you have to be careful about stuff like that, Dion says. In this short time she thinks she’s some kind of pro. “You got the plate number?” she whispered to me, before we climbed in. I nodded. Thing is—you can take down all the plate numbers you want but if something bad happens to you, not much anybody can do about it. Especially for me and Dion. It’s not like we got us some people somewhere just waiting to take care of business if something happened to us. But me and Dion figure, if anybody ever tried anything—we’re gonna come back after them someday. Come back ourselves and fix that person. We don’t need nobody. I got a half page of plate numbers. Right next to them, I write a little bit about each truck driver—you know, stuff like what they’re hauling, how many kids they got, that kind of thing. My best friend, Marie, gave me this book before we left Chauncey. She said it was to draw in. But back in Chauncey, I got used to drawing on brown paper bags. I liked the way the colors seem quieter coming up off the brown. So I took to writing in this book instead. One day, maybe I’ll see her again and I’ll show Marie how much use I got out of it.
You know how sometimes you get to thinking a
bout a person so hard, you start to hurt—not just inside your head or your stomach but all over the place? That’s how it is when I get to thinking about Marie. My mind races back to that last night when me and Dion took off. Marie was at the other end of the phone begging me not to go. I still hear her voice inside my head. Marie’s voice. My friend. I start thinking about real sad things when her voice comes on—about all the people who left her—like her mama who just took off one day and never came back. And me, just giving her a call and saying me and Dion had to go. But we did have to go. And there wasn’t anything anybody in Chauncey could do. That’s where my mind was yesterday when that Laughing Cow truck pulled over to the side of the road and a guy with a real nice smile said, “Get in.”
I stood there a minute, eyeing the guy—my mind half on him, half on Marie. If a driver didn’t look right, me and Dion’d just start walking. You could tell a lot about a person looking at their eyes. If a person’s stone cold crazy, you can see it—their eyeballs twitch. I can tell crazy people from across the room so I don’t have to walk right up to a truck to see it. Me and Dion say no to more rides than we say yeah to but it’s gotta be that way if we want to make it where we going. I don’t want to be one of those girls you read about.
It was cold out, gray, like maybe right behind us there was coming some rain or snow. I shook my head, trying to shake the Marie Memories out of it. The driver didn’t look crazy—just tired. But I pushed Dion in ahead of me anyway. Truck drivers see somebody real young like Dion and they pretty much keep their hands to themselves. Most times, they got a kid Dion’s age waiting at home for them.
Turned out the guy driving the Laughing Cow truck, Larry, had two kids at home and he just kept looking over at us, shaking his head like he couldn’t believe we were out on the road this way. We probably look real young to a lot of people. I’ve heard people say I look old too—like some old lady that’s seen too much of life. Marie used to say that. She’d say it was something about my eyes made me look older than thirteen. Me and her used to sit in Randolph Park and watch people. That’s where I learned about the looks of crazy people, by watching while me and Marie talked.
“We really appreciate you stopping, sir,” I said. “If it wasn’t this kind of emergency, we wouldn’t be traveling this way. It breaks my mama’s heart that we don’t have no people.”
Larry shook his head and every now and then mumbled about what a shame it all was and how the world is more messed up than anybody would ever believe.
“You see things,” Larry said. He had pretty eyes—blue with reddish lashes. When he talked he squinted them up, thinking. I made a note in my mind to write about Larry’s eyes when he dropped us off. “When you’re driving a truck all the time, you see things that would make your heart stand still.”
“We saw dead deer on the road a couple of times,” Dion said. She pulled a book out of the knapsack and started reading.
“Deers and kids and accidents,” Larry said. “Whole families on the highway with their thumbs out . . .”
I listened to him go on a little bit while Dion sat there reading. I swear she read right on up till when it got dark. Then she put that book back in her knapsack and fell asleep. Larry was going on and on about how important families were and whatnot but I couldn’t really listen anymore. To me, blood didn’t mean anything. Only blood relative I had right out besides Dion was my daddy. I knew deep in his heart he was probably all kinds of good but on the surface, he was—he was messed up. Real messed up. After Mama died, he just started going downhill. I’d come home and he’d be sitting on the couch just staring at the wall. Then he’d see me and he’d smile. Only it was the smile he used to give Mama. Not a daddy-to-daughter smile. He wanted me to be Mama. But I’m not. I’m Lena.
I sat there listening to Larry but thinking about my daddy and wishing I was someplace alone where I could just cry and cry. Figure I get a good cry in somewhere, I wouldn’t always be trying to swallow the tears back.
Dion sighed in her sleep. She’s real pretty when she’s sleeping—with her dark brown hair making her face look all soft. I had cut our hair real short before we left but even with it cut short, Dion still looked pretty—like a pretty boy. I watched the lights from oncoming cars move over her. She got Mama’s pretty—Dion did. Me—I guess I look more like our daddy. My hair is just hair—brown and all full of cowlicks. Dion got Mama’s bright blue eyes. My own eyes are kind of light brown—but just plain. I stared at Dion, wondering what’s she gonna be like when she’s grown, being so pretty and all. Wondering if people gonna always treat her like they do now—a little better than they treat regular-looking people.
“What your mama have herself?” Larry asked.
I blinked. I was staring so hard at Dion, I had forgotten he was there.
“Excuse me?” I stared straight ahead. From the first day, we knew not to look anybody right in the eyes. Seemed it was easier for people to tell you was lying when you looked at them.
“Your mama have a boy or a girl?”
“Girl.” I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. He was grinning, like he was the proud daddy.
“My wife’s working on a boy,” he said. “I keep telling her next one’ll be a girl just like the ones that came before her. Seems that’s the way it works. You start having girls, you just keep on. Your mama want a boy?”
“She got two already. Me and my brother Dion here is probably a handful for her. Figure she was ready for a girl.”
Larry looked at me but didn’t say anything. The first night we got in a truck, this guy started trying to feel on me. He kept saying, “You such a pretty boy,” and I had to keep slapping his hands away. I hoped I wouldn’t have to be slapping at Larry’s hands. I had figured us looking like boys would make hitching easier but some people didn’t seem to care what you were. When we got into cars with ladies, we let ourselves be girls again ’cause seemed ladies wanted to be riding with girls. But with men truck drivers, me and Dion toughened up.
“Figure she just wanted a healthy baby, that’s all. Me and Dion was born healthy and I hear this one was too.”
Lying made my stomach hurt. We had told the same lie ever since Chauncey—that we were on our way to see our mama. That she’d just had a baby and had sent for us but somebody stole our money on the way. Dion had come up with the lie. We changed it a bit so we didn’t get too bored with it, but mostly it stayed the same and I swear, every time somebody asked for details, my stomach got to aching.
I stared out at the dark highway and tried to switch my mind to something else. You on the road long enough, you get to thinking too deep about things. Some mornings, I’ll be half-asleep and I’ll start remembering all this stuff I don’t want to be remembering, like the times I’d be sitting in the park with Marie worrying about Dion home alone with our daddy. How some days, I’d just take off in the middle of a conversation and run all the way home. And then I’d get home and Dion’d be there on her own sitting in front of the television with a bowl of cereal. I was always scared in Chauncey. Scared of my daddy. Scared of the mornings and the nights in our house. Scared for Dion. It was scary on the road but in a different way. It was easier to be afraid of strangers than to be afraid of your daddy. I put my arm around Dion’s shoulder and pulled her closer to me. We were getting further and further away from Chauncey. Everything in my life was starting to feel like it happened a long time ago.
Larry had his brights on and every now and then a deer scooted along the bank. I felt like that deer, trying to get out of the way.
Every truck we climbed into was different. Larry’s truck was filled with pictures of his family and smelled like the Jolly Rancher candies he kept scattered on the dash. The first truck we hitched smelled like fresh-killed chickens. The minute Dion stepped off, she started puking and made me swear I wouldn’t make her ride in any more dead-animal trucks. Even though my stomach had been a little queasy that first day, I felt good. Good and free.
“Your dadd
y living?” Larry asked softly.
“No. He died of cancer.”
Every single lie you tell just makes you remember the truth harder. Why couldn’t that be the one thing that wasn’t a lie? Why couldn’t he have been the one to die instead of Mama? I turned back toward the window, hoping that was the end of it.
“Cancer took my daddy too. But that was a long time ago,” he said quietly. “Shoot, I wasn’t much older than you.” He tapped a finger against the pictures on the dash. “That’s why I’m going to be a good daddy to my girls,” he said. “I ain’t gonna leave them standing.”
I looked over at him. Larry turned to me then looked away real quick. “I don’t mean to say your daddy was a bad man.”
“I figure you don’t.”
He cleared his throat. “We get to Owensboro I’ma give you and your little brother some money to get yourselves—”
“We’ll be fine once—”
Larry held up his hand. “I know you’re proud. I could look at you and tell that. But you just gonna have to swallow it for a bit. No telling what could go wrong between now and the next minute and when I let you and your brother off in front of that hospital tomorrow morning—I want to feel all right about it. Now if you feeling real bad about it, you can take one of my cards off that dashboard and mail the money right back to me when you-all in a safe place.”
I reached onto the dashboard and took a card from a stack held together with a rubber band. It was too dark to read it so I stuck it in Dion’s knapsack.
“Thank you, sir. I’m sure our mama will get it right back in the mail to you.”
Lena Page 1