Fighting Words

by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

  I took a deep breath and raised my hand. “Ms. Davonte—”

  “Everyone in my classroom is responsible for his or her own behavior, Della,” Ms. Davonte said. “I gave you a pass because you don’t yet know our rules. Trevor, do I have to phone your mother? Again? It’s only the third week of school.”

  Trevor scowled. Underneath the scowl I thought he looked afraid.

  Ms. Davonte said, “Do I?”

  Trevor said, “Nah.” He put his arms on his desk and his head in his arms. He didn’t move for the rest of the morning, not once.

  The girl beside me whispered, “Only Trevor gets strikes. The rest of us just get yelled at.”

  I wanted to say something back to her, something friendly, but I didn’t know what that might be. Also, shoo. I’d said enough for the first morning. I didn’t want my name up on the whiteboard.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  Suki had friends at school, but she never let them come to our house. The only friend I had was Teena. I had another once, for a while, back when I was small. June, her name was, but she went by Junebug. She was friendly and funny until the day I said “My mama cooks meth” when we were on the playground. Probably kindergarten, though I can’t remember for sure.

  “What’s meth?” she asked, wrinkling her nose a little.

  Junebug was black. She wore her hair in a dozen braids, with bright beads strung on each one. I loved those braids.

  “You know, meth,” I said. “It looks like sugar. Only it makes you act funny and sometimes it makes the room explode.”

  She nodded and we kept on playing, but the next morning she looked at me with big eyes and said her mama told her not to talk to me anymore. And she didn’t. And when she stopped talking to me, a whole bunch of the other girls did too.

  I asked Suki what did I do wrong. She said, “You can’t tell people about the meth. Or about Mama or Clifton or any of this.” She made a list of stuff I wasn’t never supposed to talk about: Mama. Clifton. (Especially not Clifton. Not that he was gone most of every week, not that he wasn’t our kin.) Meth. Prison. Who or what or where our daddies were. None of that.

  I tried to win Junebug back. I sat next to her at lunch. I stood behind her in the bathroom line. I made silly faces. I poked her and I laughed a lot. Usually people like funny kids. Junebug ignored me for a couple of days. Then the teacher pulled me aside, told me quiet-like that Junebug’s mama had called the school and asked them to make me stay away from Junebug.

  I didn’t have a mama who could call the school and stand up for me. And it’s not like my mama could’ve hurt Junebug, not from prison, so I didn’t understand why Junebug’s mama cared. But she did.

  Another time, couple years later, I got invited to a birthday party. A real invitation, printed out on paper. I brought it home from school. Suki said “No” but I really wanted to go, so I saved it for the weekend and asked Clifton.

  “Sure you can,” he said. It was Friday night, he’d just gotten home. He smiled, and I smiled back, happy even though Suki was shooting me stink eye.

  The next morning I dressed up for the party. I told Clifton it was time to go. He said, “I ain’t taking you, kiddo. I said you could go. But I ain’t taking you there.”

  It was too far to walk. I went back to my room and cried. Suki got mad and said what did I expect and she hoped I knew better now. Next day the girl whose party it was asked me why I didn’t show up. I said I wasn’t interested in that kind of snow.

  I was in that school for five years. I got myself a reputation early and it stayed.

  5

  Our first afternoon at Francine’s, I took the school bus back to her house, like she told me to. Suki was already home, since the high school lets out first. She was in the bathroom redoing her eyeliner. “I’m going out to apply for jobs.” She put down the eyeliner and studied herself in the mirror.

  I said, “I’ll watch TV.”

  “Nope,” Suki said. “You’re coming with me.”

  I started to argue but knew from the look on her face I wasn’t never going to win. I settled for the promise that if I went with her all the way to the Food City down on the parkway, she’d buy me a slushie at Sonic on the way home. “A small one,” she said. “I’ve only got, like, five bucks. Maybe not even that.”

  She’d just come back from the movies when we ran from Clifton. Didn’t have her purse, but she had the change from her movie ticket stuffed in her pocket.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  Clifton’s house was in a part of town where there was nothing but houses—old, crumbly, small ones, sitting off by themselves on patches of ugly grass. The city buses didn’t bother going there, and it was too far to walk from there to anywhere else. To get to any sort of store, you had to take a car. Which meant, among other things, that Suki had never been able to get a job.

  Clifton drove a long-haul semitrailer, so he was gone most of each week. He had an old beat-up car he kept out back for when he was home. In the last year or two, Suki sometimes borrowed it if we absolutely had to get somewhere, but she had to be careful not to use too much gas or let the neighbors see her driving. After she got her license, she sometimes borrowed Teena’s mother’s car, but Teena’s mom charged her five bucks gas money, so Suki couldn’t do that regular.

  Francine’s place was a lot closer than Clifton’s to the center of town. You could walk one direction and get to the main street, or the other direction and get to a strip mall with a grocery store—Food City—and a lot of other things.

  We headed toward the strip mall. Suki stopped at every single place that might possibly hire her. A dry cleaner’s shop. A Putt-Putt. KFC. Each time, she made me wait outside, out of sight of the window. “I don’t want no manager thinking I’ll be dragging a kid along,” she said.

  “Then why drag me now?” I was plenty old enough to stay home alone. I’d done it for years.

  Suki said, “We ain’t taking chances.”

  “But we did—”

  Suki said, “Not anymore.”

  We crossed a busy street. Suki applied at Lowe’s and Long John Silver’s and a place that sold video games. She applied at Dairy Queen. Little Caesar’s Pizza. The grocery store, Food City. Then we walked home a different way and she filled out applications at Big Lots, Walgreens, another pizza place, and Sonic. After which she did buy me a slushie. Atomic Lemon. We sat on a bench outside the Sonic and shared it.

  “How was school?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Fine.”

  “Fine fine or crummy-but-not-horrible fine?”

  I grinned. “Crummy-but-not-horrible. The boy who sits in front of me doesn’t like me.”

  “If you can, stay out of his way.”

  “That’s what the girl who sits next to me said.”

  Suki nodded. “And if you can’t, deck him. Don’t you take—”

  I said, “Snow from anybody.”

  The girl who sat next to me was named Nevaeh. Like my middle name. Ms. Davonte’d called her that. The girl hadn’t spoken to me again, not once the whole day. At recess and lunch I’d kept to myself. Everybody let me.

  I asked Suki, “What are we allowed to talk about now?”

  She looked alarmed. “Why do you ask?”

  “I mean—Clifton doesn’t have to be a secret anymore. Does he?”

  She shuddered. “I don’t want to talk about him ever again.”

  If people had known Suki and me didn’t really belong to Clifton, he wouldn’t have been able to keep us. That’s what he told us. We wouldn’t have had anywhere to live. We wouldn’t have had food to eat. We would have been out on the streets, which was not a nice place for two little girls, especially girls as pretty as Suki and as young as me.

  Only: None of that turned out to be true. We had gotten away from Clifton and we weren’t on the
streets. Last week we’d had that emergency placement hag, and she was an old witch, but she gave us beds and meals. And now we had Francine, who was ugly but fine so far.

  I sucked in a huge mouthful of slushie. It froze the roof of my mouth and my whole brain and gave me a headache all in a rush. I quick took a tiny second sip, just like Suki’d taught me. The headache melted away. I said, “We should have told on Clifton a long time ago.”

  Suki was watching the traffic on the busy road. She said, “Do not lay that on me.”

  Her voice rose. She’d gone from happy to ticked off in one second flat. I didn’t have any idea why.

  “I just mean—”

  “Do you know what he used to threaten me with? ‘Tell anyone,’ he’d say, ‘and you’ll never see your little sister again.’”

  “Snow, Suki—”

  “You know that place on the way to your old school, off to the right, by the Lutheran church?”

  “No—”

  “It’s a group home. For girls nobody will take into foster care. Clifton pointed it out to me every time we went past.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, remembering. He’d say, “There it is, the prison for bad girls.” Suki would always shrink a little when he said it, get smaller and quieter right in front of me.

  Suki nodded. “He told me if anyone found out what we were doing, you’d go into foster care and I’d have to live in that group home. And then I’d never see you again.”

  Her voice could get totally flat sometimes, like a puddle of water, frozen.

  “I called the place once,” she went on. “I asked them who lived there. They said, ‘Girls ages thirteen to eighteen who are unplaced in foster care.’ So I knew that part was true.”

  “But the rest of it wasn’t,” I said. Clifton was a liar as well as a flaming snowman. We had evidence, after all. It was why he was still in jail. No bail.

  Suki nodded.

  “I’ll make that video, and he’ll stay in jail.” Our lawyer told me they were going to videotape me telling exactly what happened, explaining exactly what the evidence showed. They’d show it in court when Clifton finally went to trial—it took forever for it to be his turn—so I wouldn’t have to sit in front of him and say hard things in person while he glared at me.

  Suki said, “Yep. Everyone knows what he did to you.”

  She didn’t mean everyone everyone. It’s not like we made the national news. Not like we were telling anyone at school. I wouldn’t do that, not ever. Suki meant the cops and lawyers and caseworkers and such.

  Suki shoved herself off the bench and started running down the road.

  “Hey!” I ran after her. When I’d caught up, I grabbed her arm. “What’s the matter?”

  She yanked the slushie cup out of my hand and threw it into the street. The last bits of Atomic Lemon exploded across the pavement. A guy in a passing car honked his horn and shouted something rude.

  “Hey,” I said, but quieter.

  She slowed to a fast walk. Her face was set hard, like stone, but tears rolled down her cheeks. “Suki?” I ran after her again, grabbed her hand. “We’re okay now.”

  She looked at me. “You’re okay,” she said. “Sorry about your slushie.”

  I curled my pinkie finger around hers. “You paid for it.”

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  I should have guessed, you know? I should have guessed the parts of the story that weren’t about me. I should have guessed what had happened to Suki.

  I’ve learned that some things are almost impossible to talk about because they’re things no one wants to know.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  Not even me.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  That’s the first hard thing I’m telling you. It might not look hard, not yet, but it’s very nearly the hardest thing of all.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  Sometimes you’ve got a story you need to find the courage to tell.

  6

  Francine was home when Suki and I got back. She said, “Next time you go somewhere, send me a text so I know where you are.”

  Suki shot her a dirty look. “With what, the landline?”

  Francine laughed, as if Suki meant that to be funny. “Sorry,” she said. “Leave me a note, then, will you? I ought to be keeping tabs on you.”

  “Soon as I get a job and a paycheck, I’m buying a phone,” Suki said. “Then I’m getting one for Della.”

  Francine waved her hand. “Kid don’t need a phone.”

  “She needs to be able to call me,” Suki said. “If there’s trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble she going to have?”

  Suki said, “You been paying attention at all?”

  Now Francine shot Suki a look. “She gets in trouble, they’ll call me,” she said. “That’s what they do. I gotta spend too much of my vacation time hauling your snowflakes outta trouble, y’all be living somewhere else. So maybe just don’t get into trouble.”

  Suki said, “None of it was her fault. Snowflakes.”

  Francine said, “Wasn’t her fault. Wasn’t your fault, neither. I’m not saying it was. I’m talking about whatever you might do next.”

  I might get in trouble, but if I do, it’ll be Suki who gets me out. Always has been. Suki ran with me from trouble, took my hand and yanked me away from trouble.

  I don’t need anybody but Suki.

  Suki said, “Maybe we can get her a government phone.”

  Government phones are free phones, for people who can’t afford regular ones. No data and not many minutes, but they’ll always work to call 911. Teena’s mom had one once. It was better than nothing.

  Francine rolled her eyes. “Nobody gives kids government phones. This lack of a cell phone thing, it ain’t the tragedy you think it is.”

  “You could sign up for one,” Suki said, “and let Della have it.”

  “How poor do you think I am?” Francine said. “I don’t qualify for a government phone. I got a real job. I don’t make minimum wage.”

  “That’s right,” Suki said, “’cause you’re getting rich taking care of us.” She’d looked it up online, at school. It was a boatload of money. Like, I can’t believe the state of Tennessee gives anyone that much money just for housing Suki and me. We could live on our own with that much money, just fine. We would have.

  “I get money for you and from my day job,” Francine said.

  “The minute I turn eighteen, we’re out of here,” said Suki. “Della and me both. I’ll get custody of her and we’ll live by ourselves.”

  “That’s fine,” Francine said. “You got, what? Eighteen months to go?”

  Suki glared at her. “Seventeen months and three weeks.”

  Francine didn’t seem offended. She just said, “It’s all right. You’ll get there.”

  When Francine said things like that, all calm and understanding, it felt like she was on our side. Teena’s mom—I’d always thought she was on our side, but now I wasn’t so sure. She called the cops when Suki begged her not to. She wouldn’t let us just stay with her. And that emergency foster placement woman, the one the cops gave us to, she was nothing but nasty.

  We were at the police station being interviewed. It was past midnight. I was so tired, I could barely keep my head on straight, even with Suki beside me tense and shaking. I asked could we go sleep in the jail. The policewoman said no, they had people on standby to take kids in, and someone was already on their way. She said it real nice, like we were going to get some sweet grandma type like you’d see on TV, who’d smile at us and tuck us in and maybe feed us cookies. Instead we got this worn-out white woman wearing too much makeup for that late at night, chewing breath mints, probably so she didn’t smell like beer.

  “This them?” she said. “G
ot any stuff?”

  We shook our heads. We didn’t even have Suki’s purse. I wasn’t even wearing shoes.

  That lady—I forget her name ’cause I really don’t care—she had kids and a husband and a nice little house, and they’d made over the garage into a kind of extra bedroom for emergency placement kids, with three twin beds and a crib, I guess in case they needed to take in babies in the middle of the night. (Who does that? Loses their babies in the night? Though Suki says our mama might have. It was just a matter of luck and timing.)

  We curled up in one bed, Suki’s arms around me, Suki’s chin trembling against my head. I felt safer than at Clifton’s, though that wasn’t saying much. Suki and me have always slept tangled up together. We had two beds at Clifton’s house too, but we only ever slept in one.

  The next morning the emergency woman liked to have a fit when she saw Suki and me sharing a bed. She yammered on about how it wasn’t right, like somehow we were using the bed for something other than sleeping in. She said, “I heard what kind of accusations y’all are making.”

  I didn’t get what she meant, not right away. Suki’s eyes flashed fire. She said, “Then you know my little sister needed someone to protect her.”

  Nasty woman said, “How do I know what’s true?”

  That was my first understanding that what happened to us was going to be hard to talk about not just because I didn’t want to or really know how. It was going to be hard to talk about because people didn’t want to hear it.

  I hadn’t said one word to the emergency woman, not a single word the whole night before. I said one now. “Snowman.” Only it wasn’t snowman, of course, and it may have rhymed with something you’ve gotta scratch.

  So that didn’t go well. She couldn’t send us to school because I didn’t have shoes, and she didn’t want to spend money buying me shoes, but on the other hand couldn’t exactly expect me to show up at school or later in court barefoot. Finally Suki said, “There’s a free clothes closet downtown.” Which you would have thought the woman would have known, but I guess when you’ve got your own house and nice cars and kids that eat designer cereal and get onto the school bus with fancy backpacks with their names printed on them, you don’t have to wear clothes other people have thrown away.