by E. R. Frank
When that boy, Shawn, started crying at the end of every pull-out period and begging to stay and read some more and the rest of us didn’t cry but begged, too, Ms. McClenny convinced somebody important to increase our pull-out class to three times a week. After that, every Friday we moved from the circle of chairs to the green and blue and orange square patched rug where we could sit or lie down or stand on your heads if the spirit moves you. On Fridays we listened while she read aloud. By the end of the school year, Ms. McClenny had read to us every page of Peter Pan.
In first grade we were back to twice a week. Sometimes we didn’t stay in the basement room but instead walked up the stairs to the school library. Ms. McClenny showed us the different sections and how to browse. You can pull any book off the shelf and look at it for as long as you like. She explained there were libraries everywhere and that we should ask our parents to take us to the ones near where we lived. When you’re a teenager, she had said, you can get your own library card.
I had her for pull-out during second and third grade too. I remember sitting on my hands in that red chair, listening so hard to Number the Stars that my fingers fell asleep.
And now that reminds me of another book I read last year about a girl who lived when millions of Jewish people and others were murdered by Nazis. Somehow I skipped a lot of it, but one thing that caught my attention was that Death is the narrator. Remembering that makes me think Sex could narrate my note. After all, just like Death, Sex happens to everybody.
It is tiring to be me, is how Sex could begin. I am incredibly busy all the time without ever a rest. Sometimes I am busy in a way that feels extremely good. That is when two young people are in love, and I come around and help them out. That is some good stuff. It’s okay with older people in love, but older people are just not as attractive. Janelle stole HBO off the neighbor’s cable, and HBO didn’t care if certain characters were unattractive or fat or practically grandparents—everybody had sex on HBO. So I prefer young people, because their bodies are still beautiful. Don’t get me wrong: It’s cool when it’s two people not in love, but it’s not as good as it can be. I am never my best self so much as when two young people in love invite me around.
Sex would just be warming up. But sometimes is not most of the time. Most of the time, I am busy with making money for somebody. This is my job, and honestly, it is just not any fun at all. Yes, it’s true that there’s some good feeling when I’m chilling with whatever man hit me up for company. But often even then, I have to deal with his bad mood or his ignorance or his general nastiness. Even if the dude is pleasant to pass the time with, the girl is a whole other story. You see, Sex would explain, when it’s for moneymaking, the girl rarely enjoys herself. And most of the time, she does not want me around at all. It’s hard work, because of how the girl acts like she likes me, when she would rather eat a cockroach-stuffed rat than party with me.
And while I’m complaining . . . Sex would be on a roll now. I never ask Violence to be in my company. I deeply dislike it when he comes by, but family is family. I wouldn’t have chosen Violence for a cousin, but what can I do? I don’t invite him. He just shows up.
Sex would have a lot to say. Another hard part of my job is that I am forced to do things I really shouldn’t have to. For instance, I have to work with children. Sex would sigh as he wrote this part. I am not fit for work with a human body that is too small to do what I need it to do or a human brain that is too young to understand me. Sex would write with his teeth gritted. But somehow, the powers that be tell me I have to add children to my job description. I do not appreciate the extra stress. After Sex introduces himself like that, he would get to the point of the note.
Anyway, he would continue writing, this is not about me so much as it is about a situation. Maybe he would begin a new paragraph here. There are a lot of people involved, including one child. Three children, depending on whether you think of a fourteen- and sixteen-year-old as children. If you consider how old each of them was when her story began, then we are thinking about four children. Since three of them had not reached the age of ten when I was forced to meet them, and the other was not quite fourteen.
L.A. used to tell Brandy everything, and Brandy never promised to keep quiet. So I know more of L.A.’s story than I want to and plenty of Brandy’s. And Lollipop’s is coming out a little more every day.
There are four females living in a stable in Newark, New Jersey. They have a Daddy and a clean place to sleep and food and clothes. You could say they are being taken care of real nice. Sex would pause here. Or. You could say the secrets they are keeping are like a poison eating their souls from the inside out.
I will tell you about it.
Chapter Four
I MET L.A. last winter. I’d had a fight with Janelle, and she kicked me out into the freezing cold. After all I done for you when you was small and now you going to do me like that? You going to do this baby like that? Walking up and down Chancellor, I imagined I could still smell her gin and Coke and hear her indignance. She hadn’t given me a minute to grab a book. I couldn’t go to school without my coat or knapsack—Trevor and Dawn would ask questions I didn’t want to answer—so now I would fail both tests and baby Sienna might not get her medicine, either. She was tiny and cute as a million buttons.
“You okay?” some girl said to me. I’d seen her pass across the street before. I remembered noticing that I liked her high boots. They were tall and brown with a tassel on each zipper. “I asked if you okay?” I think I’d seen those boots go by a few times since lunchtime. Since not eating any lunch.
I nodded. A bus cruised past, lumbering and loud.
“You been out here crying all day.” She had straight hair with a golden stripe down the side and golden Spanish-colored skin mixed up with black features.
“I’m fine. Thank you.”
“Hmm.” She raised her eyebrows. “You uppity.” That seemed like an old-fashioned word. “Here.” She took off her coat. A white down vest edged in white fur. She held it out to me. “Put it on.”
In nothing but an old hoodie and worn-thin jeans, I was so cold it felt like I wasn’t wearing any clothes at all. Not even underwear. But I had my pride. “I have to catch the bus.” Mist came out of my mouth, white and thick, like the fur on the coat. I was shivering, and my teeth were chattering.
“You not catching no bus, girl,” she said. “You watching them buses go by.” She shook her vest at me impatiently. “You even have any money?”
Embarrassed, I kept my eyes on her tassels but held up my dime so that she could see it.
She sighed. “Just take the damn coat.”
So I took it. It wasn’t the warmest ever, but it helped. The fur was soft beneath my fingertips.
“I’ll come back by here with some food later,” she told me.
She came back forty-five minutes later with a cheeseburger, fries, and a Coke. I ate it all in about a minute, standing up because there wasn’t anywhere to sit down. “Thank you.”
“Where you staying tonight?” She had her arms crossed over herself. The mist was coming out of her mouth too.
I shrugged. I could probably go home by now. It had been hours. Most likely Janelle had forgotten about me. Even though this was the first time she had ever shouted me out the door. I have two tests today. I rarely talked, much less spoke up, so it wasn’t easy. I already went to Rite Aid for Sienna’s nose spray Tuesday. That errand made me miss a quiz plus homework. Can you send Jywon? He never went to school anyway. She had bounced the wailing, feverish Sienna on her shoulder, disgusted. Jywon nothing but a boy. I am not sending him for no medicine. You see this baby burning up. What is the matter with your brain? I had been surprised. Jywon wasn’t a boy. He was sixteen. Soon as I start asking you to do for me, you going to give me attitude? Selfish. You the most selfish female I ever kept. Get out and keep out. You overstayed your welcome.
She had started mixing gin in with her Coke a few months before, after they took Vonna
to move back in with her mother. I’d never seen Janelle drink much besides a beer now and then, but the day Vonna left, Janelle sat motionless at the kitchen table for close to four hours and then stood up, walked out the door, and went to buy as many of those blue bottles as she must have had cash for. That was when she started getting mean, saying things and slapping my face for the first time. After Vonna’s mother got arrested again and Vonna returned to us four days later, I’d hoped that Janelle would go back to her regular self. But she kept that Booth’s gin and bought more when the bottles ran out.
“All right then,” this girl said to me now. “I’ll take back the coat. I’m L.A. You ever need anything, you come back around here.”
I slipped off the coat and handed it to her.
“What’s your name?”
I wasn’t trying to be rude. I just didn’t like to talk. So I didn’t answer.
* * *
Janelle let me back in and even made a plate for me, but I couldn’t get warm. Vonna and then Jywon used up all the hot water, so I couldn’t take a hot bath or shower. I shivered in my bed that night and two more. Then we argued again because Janelle wanted me to skip school to watch Sienna at home while she went to tussle with Medicaid about Jywon’s eyeglasses. I’m trying to graduate eighth grade, I started to explain. She put her hands on her hips and shot her head forward. I’m trying to take care of all y’all kids! You big enough to help, but you think school more important than fever and a boy about to go blind? Jywon was only farsighted; he wasn’t going blind. I didn’t even think she was going to Medicaid; I think she wanted to sit at the kitchen table, looking out the window and drinking her gin and Coke. But she yelled and whacked my head with her fist, and Sienna was screaming again, and I couldn’t take it. It was too late to go to school. So I went back to the street and walked all the way up and all the way back, over and over to keep warm.
L.A. showed up with another cheeseburger after a few hours. She had on the same white down vest with the fur. She asked some questions but then forgot about me, maybe because I didn’t say much. She chewed french fries and walked along, talking and talking. “. . . fighting with my aunt all the time. Kicked out every minute. Her men always trying to get with me.” She shook her head and took another fry.
I sneezed. Then I sneezed again. I had nowhere to wipe my nose. I used my hoodie sleeve. I wanted her to offer me that coat again.
“You sick,” L.A. informed me.
I was. I wanted to go home and crawl back to bed, but Janelle took my sheets for Sienna. She said she would get money from welfare for new sheets, but I had a feeling it would be a while, and then what about a blanket? I was skinny, and I got cold fast.
“You should come by me. My boyfriend cool. We got heat. You not warm enough where you at, is you?”
“I can’t leave,” I coughed. “They’ll put me as a runaway.”
“You think anybody care? That lady ain’t going to notice you missing until next Christmas.”
It was strange. It was nine or ten years since I’d been living with Janelle, but I knew what L.A. said was true. I’d been there the longest, but Janelle liked me the least. Not when I first came, and I was small. But by the time a few years had passed, after Vonna had moved from a crib to a bed and when Ms. McClenny let me bring home Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and I asked for us to read it together, Janelle called me a show-off and told me not to bring any books around anymore.
Foster mothers can be complicated. A lot of them don’t like you when you get older. Denise and Jenny both told me that, even before Denise went home to her aunt and before Jenny left Janelle’s for a group home. It wasn’t just Janelle, they told me. It was all of them. You going to see, they’d both said, at different times. Soon as you get a little bigger, you going to see. They were each only at Janelle’s for a few months, but they were older than Jywon, practically grown, and they knew things. They were right: Even before Janelle began drinking, she stopped being nice to me. The drinking just made the not nice turn into nasty.
“You coming or not?” L.A. asked.
I followed her home. It’s no use wishing I hadn’t. Because I did.
* * *
“This her,” L.A. said. “Dime girl.”
Her boyfriend was tall and dark and looked like a cross between Chris Brown and Kanye. A perfect cross. He smiled down at me. “Hello, Beautiful.” Nobody ever called me beautiful in my entire life. I was so surprised it took me a minute. And then I sneezed when I was trying to say hi back.
He had a gold letter D on his front tooth. “God bless you,” he told me.
For the first time I heard the meaning behind those words. I felt like God had just blessed me. And I wasn’t even sure I believed in God. My legs and belly felt shaky in front of his brown eyes, which angled downward a little at the outside edges. He had a scar cutting his right eyebrow in half. It’s hard to describe, but he looked like a gangster puppy dog.
“Get this girl some hot food,” he told L.A. She turned on the stove and pulled out a bowl and a spoon. “Sit down, Dime,” he told me. “Make yourself at home.” He was pointing to the couch. I sat on it. It was black and felt like the way I imagined real leather would feel. Opposite the couch, mounted up on the wall, was a huge TV. Huge. I sneezed again.
He settled into a thick, brick-colored armchair across from me. He put his feet up on the glass coffee table. He was wearing some kind of soft-skinned slippers. They looked so warm. “L.A. been telling me about you.”
I wasn’t sure what that meant.
“She been saying you in a bad situation where you been staying.”
I hadn’t told L.A. anything about Janelle calling me selfish so much lately or keeping me out of school for babysitting or errands while she drank and hit me and twice threatened to cut me or me having to slap away Jywon all the time. So I wasn’t too sure how she knew it was a bad situation. But then again, I guess a thirteen-year-old girl sitting at a bus stop in the cold with no coat for hours is probably a pretty good tip-off something’s not right.
I shrugged.
“When I talk to you,” he said softly, “you got to answer me.”
I stayed quiet. He slid his slippers off the table, leaned forward, and put his hands on my cheeks. Almost like he was going to kiss me. And also like he was a little bit angry. I was scared of him being angry, but at the same time his hands felt so good and his eyes felt so good, I didn’t want him to let me go.
“You understand?” he asked.
I started to nod, but his hands got just a little bit firmer on my cheeks. They were so big. And warm. I wanted them to stay on my face forever. “Yes,” I said. “I understand.” I didn’t want to disappoint him. He was looking at me like he saw me. Like he really wanted to hear my voice. Like I mattered.
“Soup.” L.A. brought it to the coffee table and set it down in front of me.
He let go of my face. I wanted to ask him to put his hands back. But instead I picked up the spoon and ate. He watched. Only I didn’t feel watched: I felt seen.
“She going to be good,” he said to L.A. I didn’t know what he meant. “You did good.”
L.A. beamed. She had nice teeth just like his. Big and white and straight. She looked like a little girl when she beamed like that. I only ever saw her light up with him.
Chapter Five
THAT ONE DIDN’T know me yet, Sex would write about me in the note. What I mean is, she knew about me because she read books and watched HBO. And she heard people talk. But she hadn’t met me face-to-face. L.A., though. Well. Sex would pause his writing fingers for a second. L.A. knew me from a tiny little girl. Practically a baby. I was not happy to meet her that first time or all those times after. No sir. But her father and uncles and my nasty cousin in tight with them forced the issue. It bothers me to this day.
L.A. didn’t share much with me after those first two cold afternoons pacing Chancellor, but it seemed like she had shared her whole life with Brandy. And Brandy could be loquaci
ous.
It made it easier for the one with the gold D on his tooth, though. He took one look at L.A. all those years ago, and he could tell she was going to be cake. “Hey, Beautiful,” he said to her. “What you crying for? What? You got to repeat the eighth grade again? Well, how many times you done the eighth grade? Twice? Twice already? Nah. You not stupid. They just ain’t teaching you right. Wipe those tears, Beautiful. Here. Use my scarf. That’s all right. We’ll wash it when we get home. Sure, baby. You come home with me. You can use my phone and call your mama to tell her you ain’t lost. You ain’t got a mama? All right then. You call your aunt then. Sure, baby. I don’t care if you don’t go to school. . . .” I didn’t understand it back when Brandy used to tell me. I don’t think Brandy understood it either. But I’ve grown up since. It’s not hard to sweet-talk a girl looking to feel special. Not hard at all.
Chapter Six
HE SAID I should call Janelle. He tapped the speaker on his phone and handed it to me.
“I’m staying with a friend,” I told her.
“Where at?” I could hear the gluey Booth’s in her voice.
L.A. and her boyfriend both shook their heads.
“Over by the McDonald’s on Clinton,” I lied. He smiled at me with all those straight teeth and the gold letter D glittering. He was the best-looking man I’d ever seen.
“You don’t got no clothes.”
It was true. “L.A. is the same size as I am,” I lied again, glancing at him for the smile. L.A. was taller and more curvy. Janelle would never know.
“Her mother going to get you to school?” The way she spoke, I could almost smell the alcohol.
“Yeah.” Even though I didn’t need anybody to get me to school, because I liked school.