#IDONTCARE
The water temperature had dropped to just below lukewarm when I finally got out of the tub, toweled off, put on my pajamas and robe, and walked out of the bathroom. Mom called to me from her bedroom. I didn’t want to talk to her or anyone. I just wanted to get in bed and try to sleep forever. But she said, “Mango, please,” and there was a tremor in her voice that I’d never heard before. I sighed and dragged myself to her room.
She was on the bed. A tray with two mugs of what smelled like peppermint tea sat on the night table, and her false leg was on the floor. She patted the bed next to her and said, “Come.”
I crawled onto Dada’s side of the bed, lifted my knees to my chest, and folded my arms tight around me. Mom lifted a mug of tea and held it out to me. I shook my head. She brought the mug to her mouth, blew on the tea, and sipped.
“You know my parents died when I was seventeen.”
I nodded, looking toward the hallway, where I could see that I had left the bathroom light on. Normally, Mom would make me go back and turn it off right away, but this night was anything but normal.
“I had a full-ride scholarship to UCLA. A coach out there wanted to train me, because the university thought if I worked hard enough, I might be able to qualify for the Olympics.” Mom kind of chuckled and shook her head. “I didn’t know about that, but I thought my future was set. Then life hit me head-on like a freight train. My parents—two homebodies who never went anywhere—got all dressed up one night and went to a hole-in-the-wall social club in the Bronx to celebrate a coworker’s birthday. They got trapped in a horrible fire. Newspapers said the owner of the club had blocked all the exits to stop people from sneaking in without paying. The one exit they could have escaped through was upstairs, and that’s where the fire started. I mean, really, what kind of world … ?”
My shoulders began to soften. I uncrossed my arms and let my legs drop away from my chest. There was a picture of her mom and dad, the grandparents I’d never met, on Mom’s night table. It was in a small, tarnished-silver frame and kind of clouded by the steam rising from the other mug of tea, but I could see they were smiling with their arms around each other. I realized I hadn’t really looked at that photograph in years. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d even considered them.
Mom was staring down into her mug of tea as if there were a code or a secret she was struggling to decipher at the bottom. I cleared my throat to get her attention, but it didn’t work. Finally, I said, “Mom?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah. Well, needless to say, I didn’t go to UCLA.”
“Why not?”
“I couldn’t go all the way to Los Angeles and leave Dora all by herself.”
“You mean Aunt Zendaya?”
“She was Dora back then, before she became some kind of … I don’t know what. A free-thinking, radical/liberal pacifist—or whatever she’s calling herself nowadays.”
“She’s calling herself Zendaya,” I said, reaching for Mom’s mug of tea. She let me take it and picked up the one on the night table. She had sweetened the tea with just the right amount of honey. It felt good going down.
“Well, she was only fourteen back then. I was the older sister. I was responsible for her from the day she was born. Both my parents worked, and I was always left in charge of Dor—Zendaya. So I turned down the scholarship at UCLA and got a grant to do track at Brooklyn College and a part-time job. With the insurance money my parents left behind, we were okay, though I had to be careful with our budget.”
“So, that’s how you got to be the way you are.”
“What are you trying to say?”
I giggled. “Good with money. Uh … frugal.”
“Whatever.” She smiled. We both sipped our tea, and she looked over at me. “You sure you’re old enough to hear the rest?”
“I’m sure.”
Mom cleared her throat. “A couple of years later, Zendaya was sixteen, and she had a little boyfriend who lived down the block. He called himself some kind of rapper or beatboxer or whatnot. I couldn’t stand him, but I knew the harder I tried to keep her away from him, the more she’d want to be with him, so I gave them a long leash.”
Mom took a deep breath, blew it out through her lips, and leaned back on the headboard. “There was some kind of all-day hiphop festival over on Staten Island, and, against my better judgment, I let her go with her boyfriend and their friends. She was supposed to be home by ten o’clock at night. When she didn’t come back on time, I worried. When she didn’t come back after midnight, I began to panic. I blamed myself for being too lenient. As the hours dragged on, I could hardly catch my breath. When she finally stepped in the door after four o’clock in the morning, I went ballistic.”
I sat up straight and moved in closer to Mom. She balled her fists and squeezed them real tight and then released her fingers and shook them out.
“She claimed they had missed the last ferry and had to find a ride over the Verazzano Bridge back to Manhattan and then take a train to Brooklyn.”
“Didn’t you believe her?”
“Believe her? That didn’t matter to me. She should have got to a pay phone and called me! She put me through torture, Mango. She was like my child. We had just lost our parents two years before. I almost went out of my mind when she said she didn’t call because she ‘didn’t want to wake me.’ How could she imagine I would be asleep?”
Mom slammed her mug on the nightstand, and a bit of tea sloshed over the side. She covered her face with her hands, shook her head, and sighed deep. She reached behind her head and pulled off the band she used to put her dreads into a ponytail, shaking her hair loose. Her face had reddened and her eyes were like black marbles, growing harder and darker by the second. It was as though she was being pulled back twenty years, experiencing that night all over again. No wonder she never wanted to talk about it. But I had to know.
“What happened next, Mom?”
She rubbed her temples as she went on. “I don’t know what came over me, but I put my hands on my sister. I hit her. My parents had never laid a hand on either one of us, but I just snapped and couldn’t stop myself. Afterward I tried to apologize, but Zendaya pushed me away. She screamed that she hated me, that I wasn’t her mother, and that she wished I were dead instead of our parents. At that moment, so did I.”
Mom’s hand found one of her dreads, and she began to twist it around and around in her fingers. “I grabbed my keys and got into my half-broken-down car and took off. I wasn’t sure where I was going at first, but I found myself driving toward Brooklyn College. The streets were pretty empty at that time of morning. It was dark, and I was in fifth gear—pedal to the metal. I was rushing to get to the track; that was the only place where I could lose myself. Lose the pain I was feeling. The guilt. The regret. All of it. I just wanted it gone.
“As I approached the college, I wasn’t thinking, I wasn’t … I don’t know. I guess I wasn’t seeing where I was going. I ran a red light. Two cars came at me from opposite directions, and …” She winced at the memory, breathed deep, and shuddered.
“When I woke up, there were sirens. Lights were flashing all around. Firemen were trying to get the car open with the Jaws of Life. Helicopters—I heard the sound of their blades whirring overhead. Then I guess I passed out again. Later I learned that I had made the morning news. That’s how Zendaya found out—when she saw what was left of the car on TV.”
I moved in close to Mom and touched her shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
She put her arm around me and pulled me close. “Zendaya was the first person I saw when I came to in the hospital. She was a wreck, sobbing and saying how sorry she was. Then the doctor told me they would have to amputate my leg. And you were right: I didn’t cry. In that moment, I couldn’t cry.
“See, if I cried, my baby sister—the person I was responsible for—she would blame herself for what happened for the rest of her life. So I held my tears back with everything I had in me. This was my fault. And after
what I had done, I deserved what I got. So I didn’t cry. At least, not when anyone could see.”
I sat up and looked at Mom. Tears were falling from her eyes. I held her face in my hands and did my best to kiss them away.
#IDIDCARE
CHAPTER 19
Truth Hurts
The stained vintage Halston dress taunted me from where it hung on a hanger across the room on the door to my closet. We were going to have to send the dress to a specialty cleaner before we returned it to Tessica. A part of me wanted to hide it, but the bigger part of me demanded I let it hang there in full view to remind me of the worst night of my life. Even though what happened to me at the party was nothing compared to the worst night of my mom’s life, it still hurt.
Maybe Mom was right and I wasn’t ready to hear the whole story yet. Feelings I had for what happened to her and feelings about what happened to me mixed and melded until I couldn’t separate them. All I wanted to do was escape into sleep. That was the only place where I could get away from everything that had happened at the party and everything I had learned.
On Monday morning, I couldn’t face going back to school. When Mom came to wake me, I croaked that my throat hurt, and even though I knew she didn’t believe me, she let me be. Maybe it was because this was her first day back at work. She would have to stand for hours on a false leg that didn’t fit perfectly anymore. She wasn’t going back to work because she loved her job—being a retail manager was not her dream. She did it because she had to.
Later that morning I sat up in bed, rubbed my eyes, and wondered why she wasn’t at my bedside, lecturing me on finding my strength and following her example of doing what was expected of you no matter what. Maybe she was tired of me. I was certainly tired of myself.
Around eleven o’clock, Dada burst into my room, handed me a smoothie, and said, “Get dressed. We’re going for a run in the park.”
I hadn’t run since the day I’d tripped over the tree root and skinned my knee. Back when I was in GOT training, sometimes I would run through the park with Dada on weekends. I’d listen to music as I ran, but Dada never would. “Shut out the world with headphones? No way, mon. The sounds of the city, the cars honking, buses wheezing, birds chirping—that is music enough for me.”
The banana-strawberry-kale smoothie was incredible. And although I kind of resented being ordered to get up, I knew I’d have to leave my room sooner or later.
We set out for the park. At the corner, I realized I’d forgotten my MP3 player and headphones. “I have to go back. I can’t run without music.”
“Yes, you can.”
“I know I can, Dada, but I don’t want to.”
He put a hand on my shoulder. “Mango, you’ve never forgotten your music before, have you?”
“No.”
“Well, think about it. Maybe you left it behind for a reason. Maybe you need to experience your run differently today. Maybe—just maybe—you need this time to think about things and see yourself without distractions.”
My Dada could be so … Zen sometimes. His almond eyes regarded me with such love, I had to give in. I shrugged. “Okay. But I have a feeling this is going to be like eating cornflakes without milk.” Dada laughed, and we walked to the park.
It was a perfect day for running. A steady breeze put a chill in the air that complemented the warmth of the sun. The trees were showing off their blossoms, fluffy and colorful. I had barely noticed the wonders of summer, being so wrapped up in rehearsing the play, fake-friending Hailey Joanne, and hiding my feelings for TJ. But even though I was busy with all my personal drama, the world didn’t stop. Flowers bloomed, bees pollinated, and baby birds hatched. Regardless of how down I felt, the world kept moving onward and upward. The realization made me smile. Nothing could stop what was meant to be. The only thing standing in my way was me.
When we had finished running through the park, I was exhausted but feeling good. The dark fog that had overtaken me had lifted, burned off by the sun and blown away on the breeze. As we crossed Martin Luther King Boulevard, Dada held his hand out the way he used to do when I was small. My hand lifted to his automatically. My eyes began to water, and I had to bite my bottom lip to stop it from trembling.
Dada squeezed my hand. “Are you all right?”
I nodded. “Yes. I’m fine. I’m great.”
“Then why are you about to cry?”
“Because you reached for my hand, and I love you so much. You, Mom, Jasper … you didn’t turn your back on me when I messed things up. You loved me anyway.”
“Of course, Mango. Family loves you whether you’re on top of the hill or deep in the valley. Unconditional. That is the only kind of love that counts.”
As we approached a bodega, Dada dug some change out of his sweatpants and bought a newspaper. “When we get home, we can go through this newspaper together, read about all the troubles in the world, and compare them to yours. How do you think you’ll measure up?”
I laughed. “Not at all?”
“That’s right. Not a blip on the radar. That’s a reason to be grateful for life and all the things it brings to you, positive and negative.”
“I’m not grateful for the negative.”
“Why not? Without the bad, you wouldn’t appreciate the good. You’d probably be bored to death. Life without conflict, challenges, or pain is dull, like food with no spice—bland, unsatisfying, a waste for de taste, mon.” He laughed at his silly rhyme, and it was contagious.
By the time we reached home, I had decided that I’d had enough of hiding in my room. I told Dada that I wanted to go to school. I could get there in time for rehearsal. This afternoon we were scheduled to do our first run-through of the entire play, from beginning to end with the full orchestra. It was my responsibility to do what was right and not let the cast, Bob, and Mr. Ramsey down.
I arrived at school just before rehearsal started. My old friend the mango pit was growing in my belly, because I didn’t know how I would react when I saw TJ. What would I tell him about not showing up to sing our duet at the party? Before I could reach the auditorium, Izzy saw me in the hall and pulled me into the girls’ bathroom.
“What happened to you on Saturday? I thought you were going to sing with TJ! I called on Sunday, but your mom said you were sleeping. Somebody said you got sick and had to be taken away in an ambulance. What happened? Was it food poisoning? That’s what some people were saying, but the food was amazing!”
“It wasn’t food poisoning.”
“Then what was it?”
“Never mind. I’m fine now.”
“Are you sure? Why weren’t you in school today?”
“I … uh … Mental-health day, you know …”
“Okay. Helen Keller could see you don’t want to talk about it, and I’m not the kind of friend who pries into people’s business.”
Izzy shrugged. I could tell she was a little peeved that I wouldn’t confide in her, but I just couldn’t. Not right then. I still had to face TJ and, eventually, Hailey Joanne. I didn’t know how I would handle any of that, and I didn’t want to have to talk about it before coming face-to-face with them. I gave Izzy a hug and whispered in her ear, “Thanks for understanding.”
The entire cast and crew were assembled in the auditorium. Bob and Mr. Ramsey sat on the lip of the stage and explained that the first run-through of any show never goes smoothly, and we might not make it through the entire play, but that was to be expected. This is when we would run into all the kinks in cues and blocking and work them out one by one. “So don’t be discouraged or hard on yourselves or each other. This will be a slog, so let’s all do our best, but be prepared for the worst. Okay, places for act one, scene one!”
As I hurried stage right, where I would make my first entrance, TJ ran up behind me. “Hey, um, are you okay? What happened Saturday night?”
I stopped and turned to him but couldn’t lift my eyes from the floor. “Oh, it was nothing. Something I ate, maybe. Can we talk abou
t this later?”
“Sure.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “I was worried about you is all, but if you’re okay, I’m cool.” He took off for stage left, where he would make his first entrance. I wondered if I had just thrown Dada under the bus by saying it was something I ate. Why did I lie? Of course, I couldn’t tell TJ the real reason I ran away, not before I cleared the air with Hailey Joanne.
While I waited for my entrance cue, I took some deep breaths and told myself to calm down and concentrate on the play. I was Juliet, a pop superstar, confident and talented and on the way to the greatest adventure of her life. I realized for the first time that it was nice to have a character to escape into, to hide behind, when things in your real life got tough.
Bob and Mr. Ramsey ended up being right: there were hundreds of kinks to work out, and we had barely made it through the first act before rehearsal was over and we were released. I sort of hung out in a dressing room until almost everyone was gone. I was avoiding walking home with Izzy and the questions she would bring up. And, of course, I didn’t want to see TJ when we were offstage and out of character.
When I thought the coast was clear, I slipped out the backstage exit and walked the long way around the building. Wind pushed heavy, dark clouds slowly across the sky, like whales. I could smell rain in the air and knew I’d have to hurry home if I didn’t want to get drenched.
To my surprise and horror, a familiar black SUV with tinted windows was idling at the curb. The driver’s door opened, and Mr. Versey stepped out. “Good evening, Miss Mango. Miss Hailey Joanne would like to offer you a ride home.” He opened the back door, and there was Hailey Joanne on her cell phone, waving at me to get in.
I wanted to run. Maybe I should have, but I knew I couldn’t avoid this moment for the rest of my life, so I sighed and climbed into the cave-like darkness of the SUV.
As Mr. Versey pulled away from the school and merged into heavy traffic, rain began to fall hard. Hailey Joanne finished an angry conversation that I could tell was with her mother. She clicked off her phone and then reached over and touched my hand tenderly. “Are you all right? What happened to you at the party? I saw you scream and run off. I tried to chase you, but there was no way I could keep up with the six-inch heels I was wearing. What happened? Why did you scream like that?”
Mango Delight Page 14
