Hush

by Jacqueline Woodson

  We had known we would be leaving but didn’t know exactly when. Each morning before school, Lulu and I hugged each other hard—thankful for another day together. Each night, we cried and said our good-byes. Lulu and I had been born in the same hospital. Our mothers said we turned toward each other in our neighboring incubators and smiled. We were both born a month too soon in the middle of the night. We both weighed less than five pounds. When Lulu left my room, I pressed my face against the pane and cried.

  Cameron was in her own room. Months later, she would tell me that when the men came, she was in the middle of writing a letter to Joseph. I think I loved him once, she said. I hope you don’t ever have to know what it’s like to leave a guy you loved.

  I loved Lulu, I said. And Grandma. And Matt Cat. It’s different, though. The way I felt for Joseph, before he started saying all that stupid stuff and showing his true colors, is . . . I don’t know. It’s something in your heart. You don’t get it. You’re too young.

  I’m old enough to know we only have one heart, I said. Love is love.

  THE MEN WERE QUIET, TALL. ONE BLACK. ONE white. When Cameron asked where the next place was, the men said it was too unsafe to tell us. We climbed into a van with blacked-out windows. Matt Cat had gone to live with Grandma two days before. But as the van rumbled off, I swore I could hear him howling.

  The black man wore a yellow jacket. The white one wore a peacoat. The black one’s hair was cut like my father’s—a little on the top, the sides and back shaved close. He was the one who told us what our last name would be.

  You’ll have to pick new first ones, he said.

  Toswiah was my grandmother’s name and her mother’s name, too. Whenever I told someone my name for the first time, I had to spell it out for them. Toswiah, I’d say slowly—pronouncing it Tos-wee-ah so that it didn’t get mispronounced. Then I’d wait for them to go on about how unusual it was. I am tall and narrow like Cameron and Mama. We wear our hair the same way—pulled back into a braid that stops between our shoulders. Our hair is kinky enough to stay braided without any elastics or barrettes. We all three have the same square jaw and sharp cheekbones. Striking, my mother used to say. Does that mean pretty? I’d ask her. But she’d just smile and shake her head, tell me being pretty didn’t matter. Cameron has eyebrows like our father—thick and black. Sometimes I think she’s beautiful. Sometimes I can’t stand the sight of her. The night we left Denver, we were dressed almost alike—blue hooded sweatshirts underneath purple down vests. Cameron was wearing the tights and turtleneck from her cheerleading outfit and a long black skirt. I was wearing jeans.

  Are you twins, the black one asked.

  Of course not, Cameron said. Jeez!

  Toswiah and Cameron—Jonathan and Shirley Green’s girls. My name is Evie now. Evil Evie. Evie Ivie Over. Here comes a teacher with a big fat stick. . . .

  For more than thirteen years I’d been Toswiah. Then came an end to that system of things.

  First they took our names away.

  Then the house would be sold, the money from it tunneled through this system and that system until it became a check for Evan Thomas. We were running away from death in a black minivan with a brown leather interior. It wasn’t our car, the old brown BMW. That car was behind us, too. As we drove away, I closed my eyes, trying to remember Lulu and that yellow moon. The night got quieter. I knew Denver was growing smaller and smaller behind me.

  It was late May. The air smelled like pine and cedar. I took a deep breath and tried to hold it. Tried to hold on. Cameron pulled her vest over her head and cried. Our mother sat with her hands in her lap. Daddy stared at the blacked-out window. His face was blank as the pane.

  When I closed my eyes, I wasn’t in the van anymore. I was back at our house, waving good-bye to these strangers. Holding my father’s hand.

  9

  AFTER WE LEFT DENVER, DAYS GOT ALL WEIRD. We’d wake up and it would be Thursday and I couldn’t remember the weekend before. For the three months in between this apartment and Denver we stayed in a place called a safe house. It was an old motel, falling apart and empty save for us and the men who’d driven us out of Denver. Each morning, Mama would give them a grocery list and one of them would leave, returning hours later with bags of food and supplies. Sometimes Daddy had to go with them and testify. When he left, minutes passed slowly and the hours went on and on. When Daddy returned, the sun was usually down. He’d look tired. On those evenings, he went into his bedroom without saying anything and wouldn’t come out again till late the next afternoon. No one would tell us where we were, and after a while we stopped asking. I knew we were still in Colorado, because I could see the mountains. But there were no houses nearby and no major roads. The television got only three channels. One night as I was flipping among them, I saw my father’s face on the screen. Turn it off, my mother said quickly. After that, we were only allowed to watch the videos the men brought back for us. Before they gave them to us, they took them out of their plastic rental cases so we wouldn’t even know the name of the video store.

  “I feel like I’m going crazy,” Cameron said. “I feel like I’m going to die.”

  I didn’t tell her, but I felt like we had already died. We were nowhere. We were nothing. Two grown-ups and two kids waiting to be reborn. Cameron cried and screamed outright, but I cried late at night, in the darkness, holding the sobs in so hard, it felt like my chest was going to explode.

  I wanted to be brave.

  Three months—of not seeing anybody but each other and the men who were working on the case until me and Cameron thought we were going to rip each other’s necks off or die trying.

  “I think I’m from another family,” Cameron said one night. Our beds were about three feet apart. The room was tiny and smelled of old carpeting and rust. I stared at Cameron’s profile. The moon was coming in through the window, and the little bit of light from it made her look about a hundred years old.

  “I think I was switched at birth and separated from my real parents,” she said. “They’re sane and living somewhere in Colorado. They have some other children, including your real sister, who they took home by mistake, instead of me. She’s a lot more like you than I am. They go on picnics. My real mother’s into line dancing. It embarrasses my real sister and brother, just like it would embarrass me. Your real sister doesn’t care, though. It makes my mother happy.”

  Cameron sighed, then turned toward the window. “The name she gave your real sister is supposed to be my name. Your sister still has it. Nothing in her life has changed. She’s happy and well-adjusted.” I could hear her crying softly. “I can’t believe this is happening to me.”

  “It’s not forever,” I said.

  She sniffed. “Not this skanky place. But everything else is. Everything.”

  I turned onto my back and stared up at the ceiling. Lulu was back in that real world. I stuck my arm into the air. In the weird moonlight, it looked dark blue and skinny enough to be out of some creep show. I reached my hand up higher, stretching it until my shoulder and back hurt. If I stretched it back in time, back around Lulu’s shoulder, it would get cut right off. Someone would find it back in Denver, recognize it as part of the Green family and trace it right to us here, where nobody’s supposed to know where we are.

  “I’m going back someday.”

  “You can’t,” Cameron said. “You know that.”

  “Someday,” I said again. “I don’t believe in forever. That’s too long a time.”

  I didn’t tell her that Lulu and I had made promises. We’d go to the same college. We’d room together. We had already picked the school—University of Wisconsin in Madison, because Lulu’s father had gone there and always talked about how big and beautiful it was. Far enough away from Denver and this place. I’d have a new name. I’d be taller. But from the incubator till thirteen is a long, long time. She’d remember me.

  And Grandma. She’d be there, too. She’d promised. She was going to make a coconut cake for
me. There’d be one candle on it—marking the first day of the rest of my life.

  10

  IT RAINED THE EVENING WE WERE TOLD TO pick our new names. We’d been at the safe house for three weeks. That night, as the rain hammered against the thin windows, Cameron sat on the cheap sofa, her eyes on the television. I had read a book where a girl could stare so hard, a thing would catch on fire. First I stared at Cameron’s neck. When she didn’t move, I stared at her hands. Then her shoulder.

  “Do you feel hot yet?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Now?”

  “No, stupid.”

  “How about now?”

  Cameron peeled her eyes away from the television. Mama had lifted her ban on it after me and Cameron watched the same video four times in a row.

  “Can you believe this is happening?”

  She had had a game the night we left and was still wearing the turtleneck from her cheerleading uniform when we got here. Now she was wearing it again. She’d had to leave the rest of it back in Denver. Her hair was a mess.

  “Who cares?” I said.

  Cameron rolled her eyes at me. “You’re such a freak. You don’t have the vaguest idea what this feels like. You can go to another place and make your one or two friends again. It’s different for me. It’s bigger.”

  “Yeah—a whole cheerleading squad. Whoopee.”

  “A whole world, stupid! You don’t get it.” She wiped her eyes quickly and glared at me. “You don’t know anything, do you.”

  “It just . . . when I think about before, it . . . it hurts a lot. I can’t be looking back right now.”

  Cameron looked at me for a minute and pushed some stray hairs behind her ear and let out a breath.

  On the television, a woman was petting the leather interior of a Mercedes-Benz. The woman in the commercial looked at me and winked as though she and I were in on some secret. I threw my head back and laughed. Advertising was dumber than anything. The woman climbed out of the car and ran her hand over the top of it. I used to touch Matt Cat that way. The world was so stupid. The Feds had said no Matt Cat. No big reminders of who we once were. The whole world felt like it was dissolving. I petted the ugly couch the way the woman was petting the car.

  “God, you’re a freak!” Cameron said again.

  “I heard you the first time, thank you very much.”

  “Well, you don’t act like it, thank you very—”

  “Stop it,” Mama yelled from the bedroom where she was again poring over the literature she’d gotten from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. “I’m getting sick of all your fussing.”

  I stuck my tongue out at Cameron. She mouthed immature and stared at the television.

  “What’s your name gonna be?” I asked, after a long time had passed.

  “Cameron,” she said. “The same name it’s always been.”

  “It can’t be, Cam. You know that.”

  A phone rang on the television, and Cameron jumped up then sat back down again. Except for the drivers’ cell phones, which we weren’t allowed to use, there wasn’t a phone anywhere near us. No more raspy voice explaining exactly how it planned to kill us all.

  “Anna,” Cameron said softly, her voice breaking. “A palindrome. Backward and forward the same thing. Anna. Easy to spell. Easy to say. Easy to remember. Turn it completely around and it’s the same thing.” She swallowed and stared glassy-eyed at the television. “Anna,” she said. “Forever and ever. Amen.”

  “Evie,” I said, even though she hadn’t asked. “Anna and Evie.”

  “Evie’s a stupid name,” Cameron said. “Why the hell would you call yourself that?”

  I stared a fire into the side of her face, another into her elbow, a third into her thigh right where her stupid short skirt stopped and brown leg began. “It’s mine,” I said. “That’s why.”

  “Oh—and that’s supposed to be a good reason.”

  I closed my eyes and watched her burn.

  PART TWO

  11

  I WANT TO TELL YOU WHERE WE ARE NOW, BUT I’m afraid. I want to say Toswiah and Cameron still are—only they’re Evie and Anna now. World—please do remember me. I still am. Taller now. Still quiet. Sometimes I dance. Mama makes biscuits sometimes still. Even though she uses a mix now, I eat them the same way I always have—hot out of the oven, standing by the stove. Some days Anna still calls me immature. When we fight, Mama says It’s because you two are too close in age, and Anna gets that look—her eyebrows shooting up and out like a bat’s wings, her lips getting thin. Fifteen months is fifteen months, she says. It makes all the difference. Anna is fifteen. The school we’re at now goes from sixth grade through twelfth. When Anna sees me in the hallways, she smiles and keeps walking. Even though she doesn’t have many friends yet, she doesn’t want to take the chance of being seen with someone in the lower school. Some evenings, I sneak her favorite sweater—the one with autumn colors in it, brown and gold and orange—out of the closet and into my knapsack. I don’t put the sweater on until I’m in class, though. When I wear it, the girls in my class reach out to feel it and say nice things to me.

  “Where’d you get it?” they ask.

  “In San Francisco,” I say. “Where I used to live.”

  Then someone always starts singing the Rice-A-Roni song from the old commercial they show on cable, until the others are laughing. Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco treat! That’s what people here know about San Francisco, the stupid commercial about a box of rice.

  “There’re other things there,” I say. “Anyway, I don’t even think Rice-A-Roni’s made there!”

  “What other things?” a girl named Toswiah asks, her eyebrows coming together all mean on her face. “You trying to say San Francisco’s better or something?”

  “No,” I say, walking away, pulling the sweater tighter around me.

  “I didn’t think you were. That sweater might be cute, but that doesn’t mean you get to start thinking you’re better than anybody!”

  Tonight I need to write. “Afraid” is this hollowed-out place that sometimes feels bigger than I am. Most days my fear is as long as my shadow, as big as my family’s closet of skeletons.

  Can you see me here?

  A new girl comes to our class late in the year. I am in fourth grade. When people ask, we tell them we’re cousins. The new girl has a bump on each hand where a sixth finger used to be. When the others point to it and laugh, she hides her hands behind her back. I get up and stand beside her, wanting them to stop. The girl’s bottom lip trembles. “Whatever you do,” I whisper to her, “don’t let them see you cry.” The girl smiles. It’s a tiny, tiny smile. But I see it. Later I will touch the tiny bumps with my pointer finger and tell her to always think of them as beautiful.

  Look for the beauty, my mama says. Always look for the beauty. It’s in every single body you meet.

  The girl smiles. She has a pretty smile.

  12

  THE TOSWIAH IN MY CLASS IS SMALL AND LOUD with a constant circle of friends around her. I have never heard this name before on another girl. When our teacher takes attendance, there is that split second when I believe that everything is back the way it once was. We both say Here! and Toswiah’s friends look at me and laugh. I am Evie. I am Evie. I am. The other Toswiah doesn’t look anything like me—she is shorter and round-faced with dimples and cornrows. I want to snatch her name away and press it all over myself. I want to hear people calling it—calling out to me. I would like for her or anyone to be the one that’s disappeared.

  At lunch today, Toswiah and her friends circled me in the school yard. It was cold out, gray. The ground was still wet from yesterday’s rain. I was dressed in Denver clothes—a light green ski jacket and dark green pants. Toswiah and her friends dress like this place—dark colors with designer names showing everywhere.

  “Where are you from again?” Toswiah asked. Her eyes narrowed, but her voice was soft. I stared at her, surprised.

  “Bay Area.” Around us
, kids were chasing each other and laughing. There were a few couples leaning against the handball court making out. “San Francisco. You know—the Rice-A-Roni song thing.”

  Toswiah rolled her eyes at me. “Is everyone in the Bay Area named Toswiah, or do you just like answering to my name?”

  “It’s my cousin’s name,” I said, looking down at my hands. “I just haven’t heard it on anybody else before. It makes me miss her.”

  Toswiah and her friends looked at me a long time. Toswiah’s nails are long, painted dark blue with a bright yellow sun on each one.

  Mama’s religion says We are in the world but not of the world. Maybe that’s true. It’s a religion of lots of rules that I don’t believe in, but once in a while it makes sense. This place isn’t my world. My soul isn’t here. I bit my lip. Mama didn’t want us to make friends. It’s too dangerous, she said. I know how you girls tell your friends every single thing. There’ll be time for friends, she said. Let’s just get ourselves good and settled in who we are first. If you’re truly hungry for friends, make friends with the Witnesses.

  Ugh! Anna said. And what? Party with the Bible on a Saturday night? I don’t think so.

  “I was in San Francisco once,” one of Toswiah’s friends said. “It’s a stupid place. Cold in the summertime.”

  “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco,” Toswiah sang, like it was a rap song she’d just made up.

  I smiled. “Mark Twain said that.”

  The other girls looked at me, but Toswiah’s lips turned up a little. She shrugged.

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “It’s pretty there, in San Francisco,” I said.

  “No, it’s not,” the girl said.

  Toswiah rolled her eyes again. “Don’t even go there, Tamara. You know she’s a Joho, and Johos can’t fight anybody. It’s against their religion.”