“Stop it,” my mother says to him, giggling. He looks at me when he takes another hit and breathes in long and hard. I look away toward the TV.
On Survivor, they’re recapping about who they voted off the island and who stays. I’d like to see some of those motherfoes survive in this place.
I Don’t Want to
Talk about It
Concrete noun.
What did I say, motherfoe?
I Have a Dream
Quote.
I’m supposed to “choose two texts and juxtapose them” for English class. It can be a poem and a play. It can be a story and nonfiction. Take this, Miss Black:
I’m sleeping in the baftub again. But it’s weird to sleep in it alone. Zane used to fluff up all my hair (when I still had it) and sleep on it like a pillow. He used to chew on it too. I’d wake up with spit in it. I would run the sink water. It would wash away all the sounds from my mother’s bedroom. Black noise. (Yes, black. Why white people got to get credit for everything good?) But my mother would come in here half-necked and tell me to turn the damn water off unless I was going to pay the damn bill.
I close the tub drain and spread out a bunch of sweatshirts. I don’t have Zane anymore—or my hair—to keep me warm. Why sweatshirts? Because the only cooties on them is from me. And Daddy. My ear presses against the cold porcelain. I don’t move though. I like the way it sounds like a ocean. I can hear my breathing. I can hear my blood in my ears. NOTHING else.
Falling asleep for me is usually like Wile E. Coyote accidentally walking off a cliff. You know how he kind of stands there mid-air and plummets to the rocks below? But this time, I don’t fall, I float.
I have a dream.
Holy shit.
In the dream, I’m still in the baftub. The water is running but my mother don’t hear it. The whole room is filling up but none of the water is leaking under the door. The tub starts to float. I look up. There is no ceiling. I don’t know why. It’s a dream, stupit. I see the moon. The baftub bobs with the current. It bobs against the wall. The wall begins to crumble.
“Open the door!”
Dream deferred.
What?
“Open the door!”
“Why?” I pop the lock.
My mother barges in. She starts rifling through the medicine cabinet. Digging through drawers, yanking them out.
“Seriously, Ma, you got the rest of the house. Can’t you just let me sleep?”
“What?” she says all groggy as if she’s seeing me through a mist. “Fuck, Macy. Why do you have to sleep in here? Why can’t you just sleep on the goddamned couch?”
“You know why.” I lay back down. “Just leave me alone.”
Tampons hit me in the head. “What,” my mother says, “so you could tell CPS you sleep in a baftub?”
“I don’t tell them nothing, Ma!” I throw the tampons back.
From the bedroom: “Hey girl, where you at? You got the pills?”
Me: “Get out!”
She turns the shower on and high-tails it.
This time I go to get a chair from the kitchen. My mother’s phone is on the counter. I call Alma. She don’t answer. I drag the chair into the bafroom and push it against the door handle. I press my ear against the tub. I’m scared the ocean sound will be gone but it is still there. I breathe in and out because that is good. I can have the ocean anytime now. Macy is cold because she is dripping wet. Yes, Macy. Her. She is cold. I’m not. She’s shivering in a baftub. I’m in a boat. I’m moon-bathing, bitches.
I have a dream.
Block by block the bafroom wall comes down. There is a big-ass tunnel. A current is pulling me forward through the hole. Ahead there are lights. My boat gets pulled toward them. I’m moving faster and faster but I’m not scared. The boat almost turns over but I hold on. Up ahead I see shore. There is a little boy standing there waiting for me.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
Dream deferred.
WTF? Are my mother and her friend doing it against the bafroom door?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore?
Then run?
Him: “Whore. You’re a whore! Say it!”
BANG! BANG! BANG!
So yeah it stinks like rotten meat
Against the door it makes a beat
And yeah her sugar it crusts
her syrup it thrusts thrusts thrusts
and I will sag with every load
UNTIL I EXPLODE
Kitty
Noun. Synonyms: see below.
Setting: Hallway by Alma’s locker.
Me: “Where you been?” I look at her knotty hair, her bleary eyes. “Never thought I’d say this, but you look like shit.”
Alma: “I’ve been pulling all-nighters to get caught up in trig.”
Me: “You need a break, girl. Come hang out with me.”
Alma: “I can’t. I don’t have the time. I’m still behind in—”
I grab her backpack. “If you don’t come with me, I will throw your backpack into a incinerator. Then you will have tons more shit to make up.”
Alma skips all the way to the park. Like I didn’t just take the weight of her bag off her back but the whole world. She sings. I’m the only one who gets to hear her sing like this because I don’t ask her to sing. At home, anything she does well everybody wants her to do over and over and over. She once sang a lullaby and then her mom made her sing lullabies to all the kids every night and to the babies all night because that was the only way they would shut the hell up.
Right now Alma sings for herself.
We start talking about our favorite songs when we were little kids. “Remember Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?” Alma says.
We face each other, clap, and sing:
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Sitting on a fence
Try to make a dollar
out of fitty cents.
She missed! (We jump into a little split.) She missed! (We split wider.) She missed like this! Whoever splits the widest wins. Alma does, of course. Alma and I are having fun.
Then along comes some dude who thinks he is funny. You know the dude. You know what he’s wearing. He has on enough cologne to destroy the entire ozone layer. You tell him to fuck off, but in his defense he is absolutely deaf from blasting his iPod into his ears 24/7.
“Titty titty bang bang,” he sings, eyeballing Alma.
I kick him into a permanent split, confident that I have saved the world from his procreation of future generations.
“Ah!” he screams. “Bitch?!!!”
I pick up a rock.
He limps away as fast as his droopy pants can carry him.
Alma: “Macy! You wouldn’t have . . .”
Me: “Wouldn’t have shed a tear. Alma. Remember this one?
Left left left right left
My body aches
my pants too tight
my booty shakes from left to right!”
Alma laughs and marches with me.
Then we hear it from a car driving by real slow: “Here kitty, kitty, kitty.”
I hold up that rock and look over. The dudes see me and shut their window.
“Come on,” I say, pulling my hoodie over my baseball cap. I grab her hand and we run to the jungle gym where we can talk in private.
We walk up a twisty slide that’s still wet from yesterday’s rain. We laugh because we’re getting all wet and it’s hard to climb and we want to laugh. Need to. We sit at the top of a red and blue plastic tower. I feel the pile of rocks I’ve gathered in my pocket.
They are for intruders.
I lean back against a scratched-up faded plastic tic-tac-toe game and look at Alma. She is sitting criss-cross legged across from me. She is wearing pink shorts underneath her skirt.
“Unbelievable. That”—I point at her pink shorts—“is all that stands between you and them fools back there. Think about it.”
“I don’t want to.”
“You call it that?”
“What do you call it? Your pocketbook? No? Your snatch? Your pootie? Your private place.” The parts under your bathing suit, the counselor used to tell me. Those parts are private. Tell that to the boys. Tell that to the men.
She mimes a phone call. “I don’t call it. And,” she says, “it’s odd that you of all people call it a pussy.”
“The odd thing is a pussycat has got more to it than a pussy. Pussycat’s got teeth. Pussycat’s got claws. Pussycat can pounce. What’s our pussy got? Lips that don’t even speak.”
“Lips? Thank you for that, Macy. Now I’m going to picture my vajayjay talking. Cracking jokes.”
We crack up. Then we crack jokes.
“But seriously.” I stop laughing. “It’s slippery, not spiky. It just sits there. Can’t move. Can’t hide. And all that stands between us and a man who wants it is—what? A pair of underwear? It ought to spit fire. Shoot spears like Agüeybaná.” I show Alma some moves. The slide and the monkey bars are involved.
“Macy!” She puts her fist to her mouth and looks around to see if anyone is watching. She is scolding but still cracking up.
“It ought to have teeth,” I shout, out of breaf. “It ought to close, at least!” I sit back down. “I mean”—I lie back—“God gave animals venom. Armored plates. But the pussy he just gives hairs?”
“Shut up, Macy,” Alma says, looking up at the sky and signing the cross.
Alma is a big believer in God striking people like me with lightning. I haven’t been striked yet. But maybe, I think, looking up where Alma is looking, maybe my life is the lightning.
Langston Hughes
Noun.
Miss Black is making us choose a poem to rewrite. I chose “Mother to Son.”
Daughter to Mother
Well, Ma
I know for you
Life’s been a bitch.
You got the worst of it.
But what did you learn from it?
Whaat?
Life done you wrong?
But it’s the same old song.
You was a child of the street
But, personally,
If I was you and you me
I wouldn’t
Have carried me.
You was a child of the streets
But you didn’t lace up ya sneaks
Didn’t hit the road
Light was green but ya didn’t go
It’s easier to stick with what ya got
Then what you don’t know
Now I’m standing in your shoes
And I got to choose.
Got everything to lose.
Lips
Noun. Can you read mine?
Today the AP and regular classes have class together. George beat-boxes and I do a happy dance. We’re in the awditorium. Miss Black and Miss Link set up a chair on the drama stage. Miss Black writes on a easel:
I sound my barbaric yawp against the rooftops of the world.
We’re supposed to write and reflect about our yawp. We’re invited to stand on the chair on the stage and shout it out.
I tell Alma, “I do like the word barbaric. I do like to stand on furniture. I may cooperate. However comma I do not understand what a yawp is.”
Alma says to think about what I would shout if I were standing on the rooftop of my own house. What would I want to tell the world?
“I would tell the world to pick that shit up! Now!”
Alma says, “No, no, no. The assignment is not about yelling at people.”
“Okay, okay!” I stand up and pace. I want to think of something smart to say to Alma. Alma is sad when she can’t get me to understand something. Actually, she don’t look sad. Just tired. Of my shit?
My lightbulb turns on. I shout: “YOU!!”
Alma: “No.”
Me: “No?”
Alma: “I’m not your yawp. You had a yawp well before you met me. I think you are a yawp, actually.”
Me: “Don’t tell me what my yawp is.”
George: “Yawp. Yawp. Ribbut. Neigh!”
I look at George galloping like a horse. “Yo, Miss Black, that better be a industrial strength chair. My boy here is—healthy.”
Miss Black sighs.
Some dude walks over and says to Alma, looking her up and down, “So everybody knows your yawp, right?”
Alma: “What do you mean?”
Me cracking my knuckles: “Yeah, homie. What do you mean?”
Homie says 1st: “Please stop doing that!” 2nd: “Uh. I don’t know what I mean. Nobody ever does.” Homie sits down.
Alma to me: “You know, I didn’t make myself look like this. I could have looked like anything. Beauty isn’t art if you don’t make it with your own hands. So it can’t be a yawp.”
Me: “Right. I’m stupit. Brains!”
Alma: “Brains? Knowing math is my yawp?”
Me: “Isn’t it?”
“It is, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“I don’t know, Macy!”
Alma saying I don’t know shakes me up. Shouldn’t Alma be creating a PowerPoint about her yawp? How can Alma not know what her yawp is?
George is out of his seat and galloping toward us. He gets down on all fours, looks at Alma and pats his back.
“George, not now!”
George curls in the fetal position.
“Alma!!” I sit down and pet George. I know what to do. There really isn’t any other way. “Giddy up, George!”
I get on. This event makes cause and effect happen. Kids all over the awditorium are riding other kids. The effect: I get sent to cool out in the office. I really reeeeeally want to sound my barbaric yawp, so I promise pretty please I will cut the shit if they let me back.
I slide back into the awditorium. The chair is gone and George is standing on what really looks like a roof. Apparently the school did Fiddler on the Roof this year.
The class quiets down. Miss Black aims the spotlight.
George: “Crisco!”
The class is cracking up.
Miss Black on the microphone: “George—”
Me: “He means he likes pie. He bakes pies. They are so delicious.” (He sent me home with one after I stayed at his house. The world would be a better place if everyone ate George’s pie.) Everyone is staring at me. “CLAP,” I command. They clap.
George claps. He is the champion of the afterclap. He cheers. He cheers himself into a cough fit. George just had the bronchitus.
Miss Black: “Okay, George.” She motions to Julio to take him to the nurse. “Macy, you’re up.”
I stand on the fake roof. The class starts clapping. “Shut up!”
The class shuts up.
Me: “I DISLIKE EVERYONE!!!” (The counselor would be so proud I did not say hate.) “Now clap!” Everybody claps but Alma.
Alma isn’t there. I’m mad. I get down. Class ends. I go the restroom but no one’s in there. I go to our conference room. At the door to Pepe’s closet, I check if the coast is clear, open the door, slip in, and flip on the light.
Alma sits up from lying on the floor, blinks.
Me: “Were you sleeping?”
Alma: “No.”
“You have a crease in your face. What happened? You missed my yawp! And you missed saying yours.”
“I don’t have a yawp!”
Me: “What about track? The debate team . . .”
Alma: “I don’t feel barbaric about those things. I feel—tired.”
Me: “I feel barbaric about everything.”
Alma: “I don’t know how I feel about anything.” She lowers her voice. “Anymore.”
I reach out my hand. She grabs it and stands up. Inspects me. Takes out her nail clipper.
“I got a lightbulb!” I say. “Your yawp is helping people! You should be proud and shit.”
&nb
sp; Alma does a kind of half smile. “Yes. I’m good at that. But I don’t feel proud. I feel—tired.” She yawns.
“That yawn was pretty barbaric.”
“Shut up. I gotta go.”
“A’ight, see you in class.”
She kisses me on the cheek and goes back to class. I rub my cheek without thinking. Ick. A gob of lipstick.
Lipstick? When did Alma start wearing that shit?
Life
Noun. It’s a open book.
Miss Black has moved all the desks. “Today we are going to sit on picnic blankets for class.”
Me: “Will picnic food be involved?”
Miss Black whips out a basket. She pulls out a book. Damn it. She says we have a open-book question at the end of class. Double damn it. But she also pulls out fruits: EXCLAMATION POINT.
This is when the counselor shows up at the door, of course. I shake my head so hard my whole brain moves to the left hemisphere.
The counselor waves to Miss Black and she steps outside.
Miss Black steps back in and asks me to start passing out the grapes.
I’m confused—why was the counselor here if it wasn’t for me?—but I don’t ask questions. I get up and go get the grapes and when I turn back around, Alma is gone. I don’t see her again until next period.
Me: “What the fuck, Alma? Why would you go to the counselor?”
“You mean, why not talk to you instead?”
“Yes.”
Alma sighs. “Look, I missed a few practices. Coaches wanted me to talk to them. Anyway, what’s the big deal? You talk to the counselor and I don’t ask about it.”
Me: “Wait. CoachES?”
Alma: “Yes. Plural. I’ve been super busy. My mom’s been sick. Don’t make a big deal. I’m already mortified. Look—my uncle is coming to help my mom out for a few weeks, so things will level out.”
“All right. I wish I could help you.”
“You can’t. How about I help you with math?” She points to problems 2, 3, 4 . . .
I let her help me, but in the end she’s almost doing it all for me and I still don’t know what’s going on.
Love Supreme
Noun. Love rhymes with above. Supreme with dream.
The Disturbed Girl's Dictionary Page 15
