Who Am I Without Him?

by Sharon Flake

  “Don’t tell Aunt Lucinda or Momma,” I said to Mookie. “Or they will break y’all up again. For good.”

  Shanna said she didn’t understand why they hated her so much. I told ’em both what Aunt Lucinda told me.

  “I ain’t ready for babies,” Mookie said, rubbing Shanna’s neck.

  “I’m only seventeen,” she said. “I’m going to college next year.”

  “It don’t matter what you two want. Walker women want baby boys. Plenty of ’em. They been planning for ’em since Mookie’s been born,” I said. “And they think they got the right to pick the momma, too.”

  Shanna said the aunts were right. Her side don’t give birth to nothing but girls.

  Mookie sucked on her pretty pink lips. “I like girls.”

  I told him we needed a plan if him and Shanna wanted to stay together.

  Mookie said he would keep doing for the aunts like he always did. Help carry their groceries. Shovel their snow and hold their umbrellas when it rained. Come to dinner and listen to ’em talk about the good old days. “I won’t mention Shanna’s name, ever.”

  Shanna didn’t like that.

  “Won’t bring her around my mother, or yours.”

  “Naw,” I said. “They know you like girls. If they don’t see one around you, they gonna figure you creeping back here to Shanna.”

  Mookie walked over to the window. “Forget it. I’m moving out, then. Gonna live with my dad across town.”

  I told him that wouldn’t work. They would just call him all the time. Beg him to come over to do this and that.

  We spent the whole next hour trying to come up with something. Then just when we was gonna give up, Shanna came up with the perfect plan. “Seems to me they just want some boys in the family. Baby boys they can raise up any way they like.”

  “Duh!” me and Mookie said.

  “Then they should adopt one. Or get one from foster care. Or open a day-care center,” Shanna said.

  I shook my head. “No. The baby’s gotta have Walker blood.”

  Shanna kept talking. Saying that maybe for now the aunts wouldn’t be so picky. “They’d be so busy with the baby, they wouldn’t have time to fuss over Mookie.”

  I told Shanna her idea wouldn’t work. My mother and aunts wouldn’t adopt nobody.

  “Would they babysit, then? I mean, take care of a little newborn baby boy?” She headed upstairs and came back down with a tiny, little baby wrapped in a yellow blanket.

  Mookie’s eyes got big. “That ain’t mine,” he said, looking at me.

  Shanna said it was her cousin’s boyfriend’s sister’s kid. He was here ’cause they didn’t have a steady babysitter to care for it. “Every week it’s someplace else. He’s three months old and keeps a cold.”

  “All them strangers and germs,” I said, sniffing his sweetness.

  Mookie got on the phone. Called my mother and asked how come she ain’t invite him to dinner lately. She asked him what he wanted to eat. Before he hung up, he told her she should invite the aunts over too. “Been a while since we all been together.”

  All the aunts came. They brought chips and cakes and pies, stewed chicken, barbecued chicken, chicken salad, and chicken on a stick. They made potato salad, pretzel salad, spinach dips, sauces, seasonings, and more salads. There was too much food and too many aunts. By the time we finished eating, couldn’t nobody hardly walk or talk.

  That’s when Mookie said he had to make a run.

  When he came back, he had the baby in his arms.

  “Oh, my goodness!” his mother said.

  “It’s not mine, Mom,” he said, heading her way, laying the baby in her lap.

  All the aunts came to look, to touch and count toes and fingers. Mookie told ’em he was babysitting. Helping out a friend of a friend. He said it was terrible, the way the baby ain’t have a permanent babysitter. His mother said the baby had on too much clothing. My mother asked about the rash over his left eye. Aunt Grace wondered who was taking care of the child. “’Cause they doing a poor job, I’ll tell you that.”

  By the time the party was over, all the aunts had agreed that they could do a better job raising the boy than the people doing it now.

  “Sure could,” Mookie said, putting the blanket back on the baby.

  Then he asked them if they wanted him to ask the mother if it would be okay for them to babysit. The nine sisters said it all at once: “Oh, my. Yes!”

  Mookie and Shanna been together for six whole months now. His mother never asks who he’s going out with. The aunts don’t care much if he comes by once a week or not. They always at his house, though—wiping green peas off the baby’s chin, patting his back, or bouncing him on their laps. “Ain’t he the cutest thing,” they say.

  “I thought I was the cutest thing,” Mookie said the other day.

  “You was,” my mother said, and laughed, tucking her nose deep in the baby’s neck and sniffing the lavender bath lotion on his skin.

  Mookie and me walked out the front door and around the corner. “See you later, cuz,” he said, hugging me.

  “Later,” I said, heading for the store, watching him and Shanna walk over to the park holding hands and laughing.

  Don’t Be Disrespecting Me

  THE GIRLS LIKED Erin, but not his name. So they called him E. He liked it, especially when Ona called him that.

  E’s boys teased him about Ona. She lived in the suburbs and couldn’t even get phone calls from boys. But she liked E, even though he came from the part of town that everybody called Death Row.

  “Ona think she better than us,” E’s boy Noodles said. They were at E’s house, lying on his bed—a pile of thin woolly blankets on the floor.

  E thought about Ona’s pretty smile and her apple-butter brown skin. “She’s all right,” he said.

  “Invite her to your crib then.”

  “One day,” E said, rubbing his gloved hands together.

  Noodles stood up and looked through the thick, clear plastic covering E’s bedroom window. “Man, when your momma gonna get the heat cut back on?”

  Even with the plastic, E could see frost on the windows and his breath sometimes when he breathed out. “You got heat?”

  “Well, we . . .”

  “Then shut up.”

  For a long time, they talked about girls. Then E said they should go to the mall. “It’s warm there.”

  “They got girls there, too,” Noodles said. “And girls always got some dough.”

  On the bus, Noodles talked about how he was gonna get some girl to buy him pizza. “And hot chocolate, too.” He wasn’t lying. E knew that. He once saw Noodles talk a girl into paying his way to a $60 rap concert. Saw him get girls in school to lend him bus money, even though the school already gives every student a bus pass.

  “Don’t be hustling girls around me,” E said, getting off the bus and heading for the mall.

  Noodles shook his head. “I was born broke, but that don’t mean I have to stay broke, especially when so many girls got so much money.”

  E ignored Noodles. He rubbed his big toe against the hole in his sneaker, then walked over to the pharmacy and put in a job application. A half hour later, E saw Noodles with his arms hanging over some girl’s shoulder. E stood nearby while Noodles took her over to a cold concrete seat, sat her down, and talked . . . till she took him to the food court and bought him two slices of pizza and a supersize drink. Noodles came back and told E he shoulda come, too. “She had long dollars. Shoot. I coulda got me a shirt out the deal if I wanted.”

  E’s stomach was growling. He hardly ever ate at the mall ’cause he didn’t ever have the money. “Let’s go,” he said. Then he told Noodles how he put in three job applications while Noodles was gone.

  Noodles pulled out five bucks. “Here,” he said, stuffing the money in E’s pocket. “She went to the ATM machine. I told her I’d pay her back, when I could.”

  E shook his head. Told himself to give the money back, but he didn’
t. He bought a piece of pizza and a drink, then listened to Noodles say how he was gonna get that girl to buy him some new sneakers and take him out a few times.

  On the bus ride home, E wondered what Ona and her family did on weekends. On Mondays, she always seemed to have on some new outfit or a new piece of jewelry. E always looked the same: jeans, run-over sneakers, and a coat with sleeves much too short.

  “That’s how it is when you got eight brothers and sisters,” he once told a boy after he’d cracked on the hole in his shirt. Two days later, E stole some jeans off a clothesline in the backyard near his school. Now every year before school started, he stole one pair of jeans. Even so, kids still teased him about his clothes. But not Ona. She never seemed to notice. E never told his boys, but he dreamed about that girl at night. The dreams always ended the same, too—with Ona and him kissing and holding each other tight.

  Ona knew better than to be making eyes at a boy like E.

  “Dirt poor,” her friends called him behind his back.

  But Ona liked him anyway. Figured you could always make a nice person look like something. But a no-class knucklehead like Noodles is gonna be just that, no matter how much you dress him up, she thought.

  Over the weekend, she finally did what she’d been wanting to do. She got her sister Brenda to drive her past E’s house. She’d never seen anything like it. “A shack,” Brenda called it. Her boyfriend said the fire marshal should condemn the whole block, then strike a match and keep on walking.

  “See?” Brenda said. “You never know who you’re gonna sit next to when you go to a public school.”

  Brenda was in her second year of college. She’d gone to private school all her life. So had their older brother, Melvin. By the time Ona came along, her parents had softened. They told her she could go to high school wherever she liked, as long as the school had a good reputation and a scholars’ track for really smart kids.

  E wasn’t in the scholars’ program. But he and Ona still had a few classes together: art, music, and civics. Since their last names started with the same initial (hers was Bleton, his Boven), they always ended up sitting next to each other. She liked him right away. When she slipped and fell the first day of class, he was the only one who didn’t laugh.

  She noticed him at lunch. Not eating or drinking. Stuck over in the corner reading, unless Noodlehead Noodles was messing with him. She saw his outdated clothes and high-water pants, his perfect teeth and chestnut-brown skin.

  “Loser,” her friends had said, when she’d first said she liked him.

  “He’s cute,” she’d told them.

  Maria whispered, but she’d meant for E to hear. “He lives on Death Row. Gonna be on Death Row for real one day, too.”

  Every night Ona took out E’s picture—the one she’d taken from his notebook when he wasn’t looking—and kissed him good night. “Ask me to the homecoming dance,” she’d say to the picture. “Ask me, and just watch if I don’t say yes.”

  In civics, E leaned over and asked Ona if she had a pencil. She gave him one that her dad had bought from a New York City bookstore for $8. “Keep it,” she said, twisting her hair.

  E sniffed. Ona smelled good, like always. He touched the tip of her soft brown hair and wondered what it would be like to dance with her. Slow dance. In a nice place, not in the basement of the school where the kids stank with sweat and danced like they were already in bed.

  Ona tried to be cool. To act like she wasn’t about to jump out of her skin ’cause E was so close to her. But she couldn’t help it. Her fingers were shaking. Her eyes blinked more than they should. “I . . .” Ona couldn’t get the words out. “I . . .” She promised herself all the way to school she was just gonna come out and say she liked him. And that she wanted him to call her sometimes, even if her dad didn’t want boys calling the house. “I . . .” she said again. But it was too late. The bell rang.

  Noodles almost knocked Ona down trying to get to E. E pushed Noodles so hard his books fell on the floor. “Man. Ain’t you got no manners?” he said. “I’m with somebody.”

  Noodles wanted to fight E right then and there. He didn’t like being embarrassed. But he kept his hands at his side ’cause E was his boy. He would let him slide, this time, he thought.

  Ona was so happy. He likes me, she thought. Then she brought up the homecoming dance. “You going?”

  E bit down on his lip and watched Noodles slink away. “Naw. I don’t do stuff like that.”

  Ona waved to her friend Maria. A few minutes later she was sorry, though, ’cause right away Maria asked Ona whom she was going to the dance with. Before Ona answered, Maria turned to E. “For sure you’re not going with him. Unless you got a dress that matches holey jeans and dirty sneakers.” Ona grabbed a hunk of her friend’s arm and pinched.

  “Ouch!”

  Ona’s eyes dared her friend to say a word, then she and E headed for art class in silence. When the teacher turned off the lights to show them a film, Ona apologized to E. He played it off. Said he’d already forgotten about her bigmouthed friend. “Anyhow, I could go to the dance if I wanted.”

  Ona felt sorry for him.

  “You going?” E asked her.

  She moved her desk closer to his. “You wanna take me?”

  E didn’t say a word at first. But his head was full of excuses. I ain’t got no clothes, no ride, no money for the dance tickets. But when he spoke, the word “Yes,” came out strong and clear, like it had been sitting on his tongue for years, just waiting to give Ona whatever she wanted.

  Ona’s head turned around so fast she heard her neck bones crack. “Okay. What color are you going to wear?”

  E couldn’t open his mouth. All he kept thinking was how stupid he was for asking Ona to go to the dance when he knew his mother didn’t have any money to get new clothes, and he didn’t have a job.

  Noodles popped E upside the head when E told him what he’d done. E sat in his bedroom window. Pushed at the puffed-out plastic filled with wind. “Maybe I can still find a job or something.”

  Noodles asked E how many applications he’d put in over the last six months.

  “Thirty.”

  “Well, ain’t you figured it out yet? They don’t want you,” Noodles said.

  E looked scared. Embarrassed, too. “The jitney station might give me a few dollars for cleaning up.”

  Noodles came over to E. Pulled out a chocolate bar. “Only one thing to do,” he said, breaking the candy in two. “Steal it.”

  E was quiet for a long while. “Steal what?”

  “Whatever you need. Clothes. Shoes. Socks.”

  E watched the crap game going on across the street.

  “Steal the money, or steal the clothes,” Noodles said. “Shoot. I need me some clothes, too.”

  E’s sisters came into the room and started digging through a tall brown box in which they kept their clothes. “I need to put another shirt on. It’s cold in here,” six-year-old Erie said.

  E stared at the gloves on her hands. Looked at his sister in a torn jacket, and heard Noodles’s words loud and clear. “Steal it.” So that’s what he did.

  Noodles just wanted to go to a store, try on some clothes, and walk out. E wanted the money. Said his sisters needed stuff, too. And his mother needed help with the bills.

  “What you planning to do? Rob a bank?” Noodles laughed.

  E smiled.

  “A bank. For real? Cool,” Noodles said.

  “Get a brain, Noodles.”

  “We could rip off teachers. Take the money right out their purses,” Noodles said.

  E liked that idea but turned it down. He didn’t want to be kicked out of school if they got caught. Then he thought about something Ona had said. People around her way rarely locked their doors and windows. He was telling her about his neighborhood with women walking the street in hot-pink furs and no underwear. She was talking about hers, where people kept big dollars in upstairs drawers for hard times that never seemed to come.<
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  Later that night, E and Noodles figured out just when and how they’d get the money. Come midnight, E put Noodles out of his house. Said he was going to bed. He couldn’t sleep, though. His brothers kept coughing and snotting. “I shoulda stepped up to the plate a long time ago,” he said to himself. “Shoulda been a man long before now.”

  They noticed it right away: the houses in Green Oak Park looked like small apartment buildings. People had smoking chimneys and pretty green shrubs, even though it was January and frost covered everything.

  Nobody was outside and not too many houses had cars out front. So they walked from house to house, peeking inside, since people didn’t have their shades down or their curtains closed.

  “They live right out in the open,” Noodles said. “You do something like that on Death Row, you gonna get shot just for being stupid.”

  E liked the beige-and-white house with the statue out front. It had a curved brick walkway and a welcome sign out front with the family’s name on it. He walked around back. The rose-colored kitchen was empty. He tried the doorknob. No problem. “People here don’t lock doors, just like Ona said.”

  Noodles went in first. Said if somebody answered, he’d just act like he was in the wrong house. But nobody was home. So they ran upstairs. Dug in the drawers. Made up a rap song when they found $600 in the drawer in the master bedroom. They snatched cupcakes and cinnamon rolls on the way out. Then walked, like nothing was up, all the way out of the neighborhood.

  E gave Noodles half the money. Said he wasn’t doing this anymore. But it felt good when he told Ona that he’d paid for the tickets. It felt good wearing new jeans and sneakers and having kids fuss over him. But the money ran out before he gave his mother any. So two weeks later when Noodles said they should do it again, E was game.

  “Friday’s our lucky day,” Noodles said. “So let’s do it again on Friday.”

  Noodles picked the house this time. They walked in, sat on the furniture, and even watched a little TV. E looked around the room, at the shiny white piano and the fluffy cream-colored furniture. “How some people end up with all the money in the world, and other folks end up poor as dirt? Like us.”