“Eureka,” Mr. Emmanuel says.
“What?”
Mr. Emmanuel holds up something in his hand.
It’s a fat black Sharpie marker—the kind that writes in permanent ink. Daddy uses one of those to write my name inside the sweatshirts I wear to school.
“Cool,” I say.
“Most definitely.”
Mr. Emmanuel pockets the marker and goes back to his searching. I continue to stand in the doorway, watching him work.
“What are you looking for now?” I ask.
“Think about it. We have something to write with. But we have nothing to write on. That’s what I was saying before—we need a paper large enough to see from the ground level.”
Hmm. I can see that that’s a problem.
I think about the problem while Mr. Emmanuel continues with his search.
“I have an idea,” I say. “Maybe we could take a whole bunch of little pieces of paper and tape them together to make one giant piece. That would work.”
“Mm hm,” Mr. Emmanuel says. “Maybe. Or how about this? Perhaps we could write directly on the glass itself. Big, big letters. Like a hoarding.”
A hoarding?
“Um. I don’t even know what that is,” I say.
“A hoarding?”
“Yeah.”
“Hm,” Mr. Emmanuel says, staring up toward the ceiling. He looks like he’s trying to remember something that happened to him a long time ago. “I don’t know what you call it here. But do you know the big, big signs they put by the roadways? Advertisements, models, beers, cars.”
“Billboards, you mean?”
Mr. Emmanuel snaps his fingers and points right at me.
“Exactly, pikin. Billboards,” he says. “We could make a billboard right on the glass.”
Write on the glass?
Does Mr. Emmanuel really mean that?
“I don’t think that’s the best idea,” I say. “You’re not supposed to be writing on the windows in the mall, I’m pretty sure.”
Mr. Emmanuel stops his searching and looks at me like I just said one plus one equals eleven.
“Have you ever heard of the expression, ‘You gotta do what you gotta do?’” he asks.
You gotta do what you gotta do?
That doesn’t even make any sense.
“No,” I answer.
“All right. How about this question, then? Have you ever been in such a bad situation, such rohf wata, that you felt like you had to break the rules, just to survive?”
I think about Mr. Emmanuel’s question.
Have I ever done something like that?
I can remember a lot of times when I broke the rules on purpose.
For example, I lied about the amount of candy I ate last Halloween. (I ate a lot more than three pieces, that’s for sure.)
I lied about breaking a water glass on the kitchen tile a while ago. (I blamed it on Roof the Woof.)
I lied about brushing my own teeth, like, just a week ago. (I really didn’t brush my teeth at all.)
I’ve actually lied about quite a few things, now that I think about it.
But I don’t think I ever lied to survive.
“Nope,” I answer, shrugging.
Mr. Emmanuel shakes his head. “White girls. Of course you haven’t,” he says. “Why break the rules when everything is provided for you in gift boxes? I don’t know why I bother even asking you.”
I almost tell Mr. Emmanuel again that I’m not white—I’m just mixed, and I have light skin, okay?—but he said it doesn’t matter what I think I am, so I don’t say anything. Plus, Mr. Emmanuel seems pretty annoyed with me right now, which is another good reason to keep my mouth shut.
Mr. Emmanuel returns to his search, opening the grey filing cabinet drawer by drawer as I watch, but he doesn’t find anything he can use. Eventually, Mr. Emmanuel stops searching, walks to the window, and takes the black Sharpie marker out of his pocket. He stares outside, slowly nodding his head.
I look outside too.
The sun is shining, and the sky is as clear and blue as the calmest ocean. San Jose is almost always like this—amazing.
I want to be outside so bad right now that I almost start to cry.
“I think this is the only way,” Mr. Emmanuel says, almost to himself. The sound of his voice makes me jump a little bit.
I hurry to the window and stand next to him, a few steps back.
“What is the way?” I ask.
Mr. Emmanuel doesn’t answer.
Instead, he adjusts the marker in his fingers so that he’s holding it in a perfect tripod grip, just like Mrs. Palacios taught me when I was in kindergarten class. He reaches toward the window and—with the cap still on the marker—pretends to draw something on the glass. I hear the sound of the black plastic scraping against the glass.
“I think this will work,” Mr. Emmanuel says. “What do you think?” He stops pretend-writing on the window and looks down at me. “Will you be okay with breaking the rules a little bit? To help us survive?”
I think about Mr. Emmanuel’s plan.
Writing on the glass actually does sound pretty fun. And sometimes, when you’re in a really rough situation, you have to break the rules, I guess.
“Okay,” I answer.
Mr. Emmanuel smiles. “Good girl.”
I reach for the marker in his hand, but Mr. Emmanuel pulls it out of my reach at the last second.
“I can do it myself,” I say, frowning.
Mr. Emmanuel snorts. “Your job is to dance around. Jump up and down. Be white,” he says. “Composing the message is my job.”
“But I can do all of that.”
“Really?” Mr. Emmanuel says, almost laughing. “You are able to have the idea in your brain and write it up on the glass? Please.”
Mr. Emmanuel is scoffing at me. And I really hate it when grownups do that.
“I can do it,” I say.
Mr. Emmanuel folds his bony arms and smiles his fake smile. I can see the marker peeking out from underneath his elbow.
“Backward?” he asks.
“What?”
“The other way around,” Mr. Emmanuel says. “Backward. You aren’t writing the message for us to read—we already know what needs to be said. The message is for them.” He unfolds his arms and points toward the outside.
“I know who the message is for.”
“So do you really think you can stand way up here and write a message that will be readable from way down there?” Mr. Emmanuel asks.
At first, I thought I could easily write the message—I learned how to write way back in kindergarten. But now that I know Mr. Emmanuel doesn’t think I can, I’m suddenly not so sure.
“I’m pretty sure I can,” I answer.
“Do you know what you’ll have to do? To make it readable, I mean.”
“What,” I ask.
“Well, do you know what it means to walk in someone else’s shoes?” Mr. Emmanuel asks.
Of course I do.
I’ve heard that expression before, from both Momma and Daddy. It doesn’t really have anything to do with actual shoes.
“It means that you try to see things the way another person sees them,” I answer. “Almost like you’re pretending to be another person. Like acting.”
Mr. Emmanuel looks at me for a while without saying anything.
“Not too bad, light-skin,” he says, nodding. “Most white people have no idea what it means to walk in another person’s shoes. And they’re terrible at it when they try.”
I make another grab for the marker in Mr. Emmanuel’s hand; this time, he doesn’t try to keep it away from me.
“Maybe. But mixed people are really, really good at it,” I say. “I do it all the time.”
• • •
Putting myself in someone’s shoes is actually a lot harder than I thought it would be—especially when that person is standing outside, way far below me.
The hard part isn’t deciding what t
he message should say. That part is easy—it only takes me a few minutes.
But writing the message backwards is really, really hard, even for a mixed person like me.
I spend about an hour writing it.
I’m standing on a desk chair the whole time, and I feel like it’s about to spin me right off onto the floor at any moment!
As I work, Mr. Emmanuel stands back from the window so he won’t be seen from the outside. When I ask him why, he tells me that it will make a better story for the reporters if I do it alone, with no grownup help.
See? I knew the best idea was for me to write the message by myself.
When I’m almost finished filling in the block letters, I see a crowd gathering on the sidewalk below—the people look so tiny, like little toy action figures! It’s actually pretty funny to watch.
“I think they see it!” I say, smiling over my shoulder.
“Don’t look at me,” Mr. Emmanuel says. “Look at them. Wave. Look healthy and happy.”
I try to do what Mr. Emmanuel tells me to do.
But I don’t really think I can.
When I think of being healthy, I think of Momma—she’s the one who always takes me to the doctor’s and makes me eat healthy foods I don’t like—and when I think of being happy, I also think of my momma. She’s just good, kind of like if the sun and the ocean could be blended together. Until Momma comes back, I don’t think I can be healthy or happy ever again.
But I have to try.
I climb down from the chair, push it to the left so the message isn’t keeping the reporters from seeing me, and climb back on.
I wave my arms above my head like I’m an airport worker trying to help a jet plane drive into its parking spot. I almost fall on my B-U-T-T a bunch of times when the chair starts to spin under my feet, but I manage to stay upright. I also manage to keep my best school-picture smile on my face the whole time. I can see my reflection in the glass, and my smile looks totally fake to me, but I don’t think the news people will be able to tell. They don’t even know who I am!
“Do you think they can even see me way up here?” I ask, still waving and smiling.
“I think we’ll find out soon,” Mr. Emmanuel responds. “Probably within less than a day.”
“Why?”
“That’s when I would guess the stories will be posted. If there are any.”
“Okay,” I say. “So can I look at it now?”
“Now?” Mr. Emmanuel asks. “How could you look now, pikin? They haven’t been written yet.”
“No,” I answer. “Not that. My sign. I didn’t get to see it from far away. I don’t even know what it looks like.”
Mr. Emmanuel doesn’t respond.
“So can I?” I ask again.
“Okay. But be quick.”
I climb down from the chair as fast as I can, run back to the desk and look at what I wrote.
It looks amazing.
SOS, it says. That’s all.
The letters are written backward so they can be read from the outside, but otherwise they’re perfect—smooth, curved, and dark black.
• • •
After spending what feels like forever standing on the chair, I’m finally allowed to climb down and leave the Manager’s office.
Mr. Emmanuel walks away from me without a word, heading toward the center of the store.
He doesn’t even say thank you or anything.
I get lost a few times on the way back to the boys’ clothing section, but eventually I find it—and I don’t even have to ask a single grownup for help. As I run down the hallway past the row of open fitting room doors, I feel excited to see my momma again. I want to tell her about what I just did—how I helped the village of the second floor all by myself.
When I burst into Momma’s fitting room, I’m surprised by what I see.
Miss Christiana is kneeling next to the padded bench where my momma is lying. A blue bucket is resting on the floor in between them.
Miss Christiana looks up at me. With her wide brown eyes and the two braids in her hair, she almost looks like a kid right now, like me.
“My Lord in heaven, pikin. You nearly scared the socks off me,” she says.
“I’m sorry.”
“No, no. It’s all right. Come kneel with me,” Miss Christiana says, waving me over. “I had planned to do this alone, but I think you should be here as well. Come.”
I do what Miss Christiana tells me to do. I walk over to the bench and kneel down next to her.
The room is quiet.
As I wait for Miss Christiana to tell me what to do next, I keep my eyes pointed toward the ceiling like I’m praying. But to be honest, I’m not praying right now. I’m really just trying to look anywhere except in Momma’s direction.
Ever since I found out that my momma is gone, I’ve been trying to figure out what it means.
Is Momma only sleeping?
Sometimes I think that’s true.
I think Momma could be just asleep because she told me that’s what she was going to do—go to sleep for a while, maybe a long while—and Momma doesn’t usually say things that aren’t true, at least not when she’s talking to me.
But other times I think that Momma is probably dead.
The reason why I think she could be dead is because she looks dead—at least she did the last time I looked at her. Her body was cold, and she wasn’t breathing at all. I also think she could be dead because that’s what Miss Christiana seems to think, and Miss Christiana reminds me of my momma: I don’t think she would tell me a lie, especially not about this.
But even though I’m still not sure whether Momma is dead or just sleeping for a while, I think that I’ve decided on one thing, at least.
Either way—dead or asleep—I think that my momma is coming back. In my whole entire life, Momma has never left me behind, not anywhere, (at least not for very long), so I don’t think she’s going to start doing that now.
Why would she?
“All right, love,” Miss Christiana says quietly. “Now I am going to do some important things with your mum’s body. To prepare her for the ground—or for whatever her wishes were before she passed on. Because you appeared here at exactly the right time, I think that you were meant to join me.”
Prepare her for the ground?
“I don’t want her to be in the ground,” I say, still looking toward the ceiling. My vision goes blurry as the tears start to build up in my eyes.
I feel a hand on my shoulder—it’s gentle, like my momma’s, which makes the tears build up even faster.
“It’s all right, love,” Miss Christiana says. “All I want to do now is to wash your mum. To make her clean. That’s all. See?”
I hear the sound of water droplets hitting the surface of a pool. It’s weird, hearing that sound inside a place where you try on clothes.
I look down to see what Miss Christiana is doing—I can’t help myself. I’m too curious not to look.
I see her squeezing water out of a bright yellow sponge held tight in her grip. The water falls from the sponge and lands in the blue bucket underneath her hand.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“I told you. Washing the body,” Miss Christiana responds. “And you can help me if you want to.”
No.
I really, really don’t want to.
“No, thank you,” I say.
Without a word, Miss Christiana takes my hand in hers, gently opens it, and presses the yellow sponge into my palm. The green side of the sponge feels scratchy against my skin.
“Try,” she says.
“But I don’t want to.”
“I know. It’s all right not to want this.”
Miss Christiana keeps one hand on top of mine and the other on my elbow and, keeping a firm but gentle grip, guides me slowly in the direction of my momma’s face.
I look at Momma—I can’t help but look as my hand gets closer and closer to her cheek.
Her brown skin
looks a lot paler than it’s supposed to.
Her lips are purplish.
Her eyes are closed almost like she’s asleep, but they don’t look how they would normally look. I think her tears must have dried up or something, because her eyes look almost glued shut.
The sponge touches down high on Momma’s cheekbone, and Miss Christiana murmurs a bunch of words that I don’t understand as she gently moves my hand in small circles over my momma’s skin. A drop of water runs down Momma’s face and falls into her ear.
Miss Christiana continues to murmur as we wash both of Momma’s eyes.
Her forehead.
Her chin and throat.
One arm. Then the other.
Both legs and both feet.
When we’re finished, I immediately drop the sponge back in the bucket, turn toward Miss Christiana and collapse, sobbing, into her arms. She sits down, gathers me onto her lap, and rocks me back and forth.
I understand what’s happening now.
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