I shrugged and looked back up at the sky. I grabbed the sleeve of my shirt so I could clean the tears off my face.
“She’s been gone a long time,” Sealy said, staring down at the ground.
Khayla started to stir and Sealy went over to her. I was grateful ’cause I couldn’t move. I felt like I was up to my knees in cement and it wasn’t ’cause of Memaw’s boots. It was ’cause all them cinder blocks piling up on each other in my chest had somehow settled in my feet, making it so I couldn’t move from the spot I was in. I didn’t know if I was ever gonna be able to move—anywhere—ever.
Khayla woke up and went straight to fussin’ about her tummy aching. Stella picked her up and rubbed on her back. Muffled voices, talking mostly in numbers, came pouring out of the walkie-talkie she had strapped to her shoulder. Deep creases spread across her forehead. She turned her back to me and talked gibberish into the walkie-talkie. She whipped around and looked at me and Sealy again, then took a deep breath.
“Come on,” Stella said, with a nod of her head.
“What? Come where?” I asked. I stood there like a dummy, watching her shift Khayla in her arms. Sealy looked at me with her saucer eyes and I could tell her bottom lip was fixin’ to pout out.
“You can’t stay here, Armani. It’s not safe. There are buses.” She looked around, lowering her voice to a firm whisper. “They brought in buses to get people out of here, especially kids and women.”
This was the best news I’d heard in days. I think I might’ve even smiled. I could tell Sealy was feeling the same as me, ’cause when I caught a glimpse of her out of the corner of my eye, she was smiling real big and bouncing on her tippy-toes, all excited. She still had them weird, unblinking saucer eyes, though.
“We goin’?” Khayla asked.
“Yep.” I smiled all sweet at my baby sister, then smiled just as sweet at our new friend Stella. “That’s right, Khayla-girl, we’re gonna go all right.” I was just a-nodding my head up and down the way Georgie was famous for doing. “We’re gonna go find Mama, then get on a nice bus and get right on outta here.” I was a rambling, smiling fool. “Ain’t that right, Miss Stella?” I nodded at Stella, confirming our plan.
I didn’t like the way she tipped her head to the side and her eyebrows went and got all lost again in her pulled-back hair.
“What?” I said. I was ready to go.
“Armani, we can’t go find your mama—there’s no time. Besides, it’s impossible. There’s too many people and it’s going to be dark soon. The last bus is leaving in fifteen minutes. We have to go now.”
“What are you sayin’?”
“She’s saying we have . . . to go with . . . out May . . . ma.” Sealy had crying hiccups.
“Well, we can’t,” I said.
Stella let Khayla slide down her leg till the girl was standing on her own feet. Then she put her arm around my shoulder and led me away from my sisters. “Sealy, I just need to talk to Armani for one sec, okay?”
Sealy sniffed and nodded.
Stella stopped walking after we’d gone a good ways from my sisters. She rested one hand on each of my shoulders. “How old are you, Armani?”
I blinked a tired blink. “What day is it?”
“It’s Tuesday. August thirtieth.”
“Tuesday?” A whooshing sound filled my head, like the wind moving our world upside down when we was stuck up in the attic and my birthday cake went floating. . . .
“Armani.”
I looked at her and the sounds of the chaos around us came rushing back into my ears. “I’m ten.”
“Oh, man. Ten?” Stella looked up at the sky and closed her eyes.
“Well, ten an’ two days.” I sounded pitiful even to my own self.
She took a deep breath and looked at me with a familiar softness around her eyes that made me wonder if Stella had a kid of her own. “Okay, look, I’m only telling you this because you need to understand.” Another deep breath. “Bad things are happening here. You and your sisters can’t stay here. Not tonight. Do you understand?”
“But what about Mama? We can’t just leave her.” That stupid shaking that starts in my toes was already making its way up the back of my wobbly legs.
She put her hand up under my chin and squeezed just enough to where it felt like a chin-hug. “You know what I think?” she asked with a little smile.
I shook my head.
“I think I know why your mama left you with the younger kids while she went to get your baby brother the help he needs. She did it because she trusts you and she knew that you could handle it.”
The wobble in my legs was going away. “I bet you’re a real responsible girl, right?” I shrugged but nodded in a “yeah, sort of” way. I stood a little taller. “Your mama and daddy would want you to leave here on the bus.” Stella paused, and stopped smiling. “I’m serious when I tell you that you can’t stay here tonight.” Her smile was completely gone and she had that hard, soldier-like look in her eyes again.
I cleared my throat and looked past her shoulder at Sealy, who was watching me real close. “Well, where’s the bus going? How will Mama an’ Daddy find us?”
“I don’t want you to worry about that right now. You just get to a safe place away from here, and I’ll do my best to find your parents and tell them where you are.” Loud mumbled voices came pouring out of the walkie-talkie again. “We have to go, Armani. They’re about to start loading the last bus.”
“Well, maybe we can just wait for Mama in there.” I pointed at the huge Super Dome lurking up behind my sisters and a million other people.
“You can’t go in there!” Stella all but bit my head off. “First of all, it’s about a hundred and six degrees inside the Dome. And besides that, it’s no place for little kids.”
I forced my shoulders back, trying to stand a little taller. “I’m not a little kid.”
“Look, I don’t have time to argue with you, Armani. I’m trying to help you because T-Bone’s like a brother to me.” Stella took a deep breath and turned her head, before looking back at me with them big, round brown eyes. “You have to trust me. Do it for them.”
I looked over at my sisters. Sealy was just staring. She was so small, standing there like that.
“Hey,” Stella said. “You okay?”
No, I’m sure NOT OKAY. Can’t you see that my family is disappearing right before my eyes? I’m NOT OKAY. Nobody’s ever gonna be OKAY again. EVER. I screamed in my head.
“I guess,” I said in a shaky voice too soft to be coming from me.
Where was Mama?
CHAPTER 31
Specialist Stella Salazar held Khayla with one arm and her rifle in the other. Sealy had hold of a loop attached to Stella’s Army pants and was all but running alongside of her to keep up. People stopped pushing and shoving and got out of the way when they seen the soldier with the kids stuck like Velcro coming.
I walked fast and stiff as a board, thinking my chest would burst from the scream I was holding in. I forgot again and tried to grab hold of the locket that wasn’t there.
There it was. The bus. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting, but I know for sure it wasn’t no school bus. There must’ve been about a hundred thousand people all up in there around that bus.
My heart stopped when the door snapped shut and it started rolling inch by inch away from the crowd of people. I seen ladies smacking the sides of the bus and even throwing perfectly good full water bottles at it. Seemed like everyone was yelling and cussing and acting a fool.
My insides twisted into a knot. I sucked in a gulp of bus fumes when I seen that there was another bus hiding behind the one that just left.
The doors to the bus flew open. A soldier stepped out onto the steps with his legs spread and his rifle up in plain sight for everyone to see. People shoved and pushed and hollered. Two more Army guys came.
“Stay with me,” Stella shouted.
I grabbed hold of one of the loops on Stella’s other p
ant leg and put my head down, letting her lead the way. All I could see was feet, lots of feet.
We were at the door to the bus. Stella was talking fast to one of the soldiers as he came down off the bus steps. He nodded at her and she turned to me. She didn’t even waste time trying to put on a smile. “Okay, this is it.”
My eyes were jumpy, looking every which way, hoping that Mama was up in the crowd somewhere.
Sealy was looking at me all puppy-eyed and sniffling. She wiped her snotty nose across her shoulder.
Khayla wouldn’t let go of Stella. I tried my best to peel the girl’s fat fingers away from Stella’s neck, but my legs went to wobbling and Khayla wasn’t budging. I felt like throwing up. What am I supposed to do?
Get on the bus, NeeNee. It’s gonna be all right. Get on the bus.
Memaw’s voice was as loud and clear as ever. I could even hear the hum and smile behind her words.
My head cleared. I knew Memaw was standing beside me. I could feel her. A calm fell over me.
“What are we going to do, Armani?” Sealy tugged on my arm.
“We’re gettin’ on the bus,” I said, as sure as I’d been about anything since leaving my other life behind. And just like that, Khayla slid into my arms like it was exactly where she wanted to be.
A loud crackle of noise poured out of Stella’s walkie-talkie. “I need to go,” she said. She bent down and hugged Sealy. She straightened Khayla’s lime-green headband and cupped her hand around one of her cheeks and kissed her there. Khayla never lifted her head off my shoulder or said a word.
Stella held her arm out to me and I fell into her with my whole body. I buried my face in the rough camouflage shirt and she kissed my forehead. “Please find Mama and tell her where we’re goin’.”
“And Daddy too,” Sealy added.
“I’ll do my best,” Stella said. She started walking away. Me and Sealy stood there watching her go. She stopped and half-turned. She tapped her closed-up fist against her chest two times, pointed straight at me, and hollered, “Stay strong!” My breath got caught. I nodded before she turned to go.
“I will,” I whispered.
Specialist Stella Salazar marched off into the sea of crazies.
With Khayla in her usual spot up on my hip and Sealy hanging on to the back of me, we slowly made our way up the bus steps. My nerves were wearing down fast. People were shoving and hollerin’, not one bit happy that we’d skipped to the front of the line. Sweat was pouring in my eyes and my arms were trembling from the weight of my baby sister. I kept telling myself, Stay strong.
When we finally made it to the top step, I all but stopped breathing when my eyes adjusted to the dark of the bus and I seen all the people. There’s a certain way a school bus looks all jam-packed with kids going to school, but it takes on a whole different look when you stuff grown, wore-down people up in there like that.
I barely took two steps into the aisle, when the stupid bus driver stuck her arm out in front of Sealy and said, “Nope, that’s it. I can’t take no more.”
“Armani!” Sealy hollered.
I tried to lift the lady’s arm, “Oh, she’s with me. She’s my sister.”
“I don’t care who she is. I take seventy-five. Not seventy-four—not seventy-six. Seventy-five. Period.” The lady had one blue eye that was looking at me and one that was floating off on its own. I didn’t like looking at her.
“But she’s my sister.” I thought maybe the driver just didn’t understand.
Sealy was whimpering and trying to wiggle her way over to me when that triflin’ lady stuck her leg out and blocked the whole dang aisle so Sealy couldn’t get to me.
“Armani!” Sealy yelled again.
Khayla felt like ten sacks of sweet potatoes weighing on my arm, and it didn’t help when she went to crying about her belly aching. I was drenched in sweat. Somehow I kept from plowing my fist into the ugly woman’s fat head and knocking her good eye loose. “But, ma’am,” I said as sugary-sweet as I possibly could and pointed at Khayla hanging off the right side of my body. “This one here is gonna sit on my lap. You can’t really count her, right?”
“I don’t care if she sits up on your nappy head. She counts.” The lady wasn’t no lady at all. She was a low-down simple mess. Other people on the bus went to fussin’ and hollerin’.
“Either you two go sit down and that one there catches the next bus, or all three of you can just get off,” she said. “It don’t make no difference to me.”
I opened my mouth to say something I most likely would’ve regretted when someone came walking up the aisle from the back of the dark, sour-smelling bus. There was something familiar about the shape of the person who was all but taking up the whole narrow aisle, but I couldn’t figure out why.
The driver looked up in her mirror and told the person in the aisle, “Go sit back down.”
“No. They can have my seat.”
Danisha?
CHAPTER 32
She stepped out of the dark of the bus’s belly, and sure enough, it was Danisha. My eyes filled with tears. “Danisha . . . what . . . where . . . ”
“I know, Cuz.” She wrapped her thick arms around me and Khayla.
“That’s it,” the stupid bus driver said. “I want all of y’all off my bus. Go on. Get off.”
Danisha took hold of my hand. Tears sprung to her eyes. “I lost Bugger. I don’t know what happened. Charlie brought us here.” She glanced out a window toward the Dome. “Something happened, Armani. Something really bad.”
“Thirty seconds,” the triflin’ bus driver said.
A fat tear slowly made its way down Danisha’s cheek and dropped to the floor. “My mama was attacked last night. They beat down Charlie, and Bugger took off runnin’.” She rubbed up under her nose. “Next thing I know, he’s just gone, Cuz. I been looking for him ever since. He was standing right next to me.”
“Maybe he’s with your mama or Charlie.” I wanted to tell her about Daddy and Georgie, but I didn’t have no energy for it. The driver tapped her watch with one finger.
“Look, I don’t wanna leave without Bugger and my mama anyhow.” She sniffed loud. “Take my seat, then y’all will have three.” Danisha’s swelled-up bottom lip started to quiver.
“But, Danisha, you can’t stay here. It’s dangerous. You have to come with us.” I turned to the driver. “Please let us all stay on. This is my cousin an’ these are my sisters and . . .”
“Yeah, and I’m your long-lost mama.” The evil driver snickered at her own bad joke. “Time’s up. Someone, I don’t care who, but someone gets off now.” People outside the bus were screaming and shouting almost as much as the ones inside the bus. “I’m gonna count to three and then I’m gonna throw all of you out on your butts. One, two . . .”
Danisha smiled a lopsided smile and hugged me again. She squeezed past me and glared at the driver until the mean woman’s good sense told her to move her leg before my second cousin moved it for her.
Danisha walked backward toward the steps to the door. “Keep your eye out for Bugger, hear?”
“I will.”
Sealy wrapped herself around one of Danisha’s legs so tight I thought she was gonna knock her down. Then my little sister looked up at my cousin with tears running like a river down her face. “Find Mama and tell her where we are. And Daddy and Georgie.”
Danisha took one more backward step down and the stupid driver slapped the folding doors shut right in her face. Sealy scooched past me and flung herself across the laps of three old ladies sitting in a seat. She stuck her head out the open bus window and shouted, “Find Mama! She’ll take care of you. Thank you, Danisha!”
As the bus rolled away from that awful place, all I could see was the long, dark walk lying out in front of me. Another cinder block took up space up inside my crowded chest. I slowly started making my way down that long, narrow aisle, putting one clumpy boot in front of the other, searching, praying for an empty seat through blurry eyes. A heavy
feeling of dread spread through my body like a fever as I headed further and further to the back of the stinky, hot, shadowy bus with all that was left of my family clinging to me, making it so I could hardly breathe.
CHAPTER 33
The bus rolled along as slow as molasses. My head rested up against the cool glass of the window. Sealy pulled out her swirly green and white journal and the matted-looking feather pen. She stared for the longest time at the blank pages in front of her with her pen froze between her dirty fingers. All I could think just then was how mad Mama would be that Sealy had dirt up under her nails. She’d have me leaning over the tub scrubbing those nails with the little blue nailbrush when Sealy took her bath, the smell of lavender soap floating up my nose.
“Armani,” Sealy said, still staring at the blank pages. “What’s a refugee?”
A lady fanning herself, holding two snotty, sick-looking babies on her lap in the seat across the aisle from us, said without even turning her head or glancing in our direction, “We are, baby. You. Me. All of us. We are the refugees. Cast from our homes.”
Sealy looked at me and said, in a quivery, quiet voice, “Armani?”
I just sat quiet. I pressed my nose into the top of Khayla’s head and took a deep sniff. The lavender smells were gone for good.
Sealy closed her journal and put it back in her book sack.
“Ain’t ya gonna write in there?”
“No, I don’t feel like it.” Sealy sighed. She zipped up the sack and let it sit in a blob between us on the seat.
I ain’t never in my life rode on a school bus that was so spooky quiet, except for the sniffling and coughs and mumbles. One old lady up front wailed and prayed. She was crying for all of us.
We rode like that for a long while, zigzagging down the chunks of tore-up interstate with police cars—one in front and one in back of the bus—flashing their lights and all. Creeping along, slower than a slug, dragging me further and further away from my home, while I seen outside my window how New Orleans was all but worn away from being touched by that storm.
Upside Down in the Middle of Nowhere Page 14
