I sat with my head bouncing up against the window and watched the sky turn from bluey-orange to patches of shadowy gray and snake-berry red. Hurricanes must not reach all the way to the sun, ’cause it was moving across the sky just like it always did, like nothing had happened at all.
My eyelids were puffed up and wouldn’t stay open. When most of the orange was gone from the sky and it was almost completely chalkboard black, I seen the reflection of a girl I didn’t recognize in the glass of the window. I turned my head to see if she was sitting behind me. But I only seen Sealy, who sat with her face turned away with Khayla’s head rested on her shoulder.
I looked back at the window. There she was again, the girl with the frizzy lopsided head and the swelled-up eyes. My heart thumped in the sides of my head. I was fixin’ to check behind me one more time when I noticed the girl in the window-mirror turning her head too.
I froze solid. The girl I didn’t recognize was me?
I rubbed my eyes and forced them wide open. I moved in closer to the window till me and the reflection in the glass were all but touching noses.
A tear inched down the face of the girl in the glass, a tear holding the color of orange from the sky outside. With every little bit the tear moved down the face in the window, I could feel all the blocks sitting up inside my chest crumbling. Every single one of them.
All at the same time, they turned to dust. The dust pile they made settled down into the very bottom part of my belly. The heavy feeling I’d been carrying around up in my chest was gone. It felt empty. When the teardrop finally slid from the face in the glass, wetness fell onto the top of my hand.
I slowly tore my droopy eyes from the window-mirror and stared down for the longest time at the way the tear just sat there. I wondered if my hands would ever get a chance to be as old and soft as Memaw’s.
Sealy’s eyes were on me. I didn’t care.
I picked up her book sack and unzipped it. My sister didn’t say a word.
I found the fat, crinkled-up Bible Sealy had fished out of the black nasty water, still wrapped in Mr. Oscar Dupree’s bandanna. I pulled it out. I zipped the bag back up and put it in a nice pile between me and my sister.
I slowly lifted my head and looked up at Sealy. She was staring with her mouth half-open and her lips quivering something terrible.
“Wanna sit next to the window?” My voice sounded groggy, like I’d just woke up. I blinked one long, slow blink.
Sealy shrugged, never taking her eyes off my face.
I stood up with my back against the seat in front of us and looked down at her and my half-awake baby sister.
“Are you sure, Armani? You always like sitting by the window.”
“Not no more.” It was impossible to keep my heavy eyelids open.
She scooted over, dragging Khayla with her. I sat down in my new spot and gently pushed Khayla’s head down on my leg and went to rubbing her sticky forehead. I ain’t sure how long Sealy sat looking at me.
I tucked the smelly, used-to-be-waterlogged book all wrapped in red up under my arm. I closed my eyes, and went to sleep.
CHAPTER 34
The shelter. Soldiers stood guard outside the bus and in front of the doors of the building we were being told to go into—long guns in their arms just waiting to be used.
I ain’t sure if the soldiers were there to keep bad people from going in, or to keep people from going out. I kept my head down and my mouth shut, trying my best to ignore the screaming blisters up inside my muddy boots.
As soon as everyone piled off the bus, people in red vests shuffled all of us into lines with signs overhead reading INTAKE. We got in the line that didn’t move. We stepped maybe one whole inch forward every hour. I wanted to sit on the floor like bellyaching Khayla, who scooted forward on her butt whenever the line decided to move.
The smell of sweat and boiled beans was thick in the air. My empty stomach went sour. Noise. Hollerin’. Loudspeakers. Crying babies. The scraping sound of metal cots dragging across the hard, shiny floor. Every sound in that place echoed off the concrete walls with no windows and the sky-high ceilings. Bright yellowy fluorescents flickered and lit up everything, shining too much light on the confusion everywhere. It was like the hurricane had brought its chaos up inside the building to shake us up some more, just in case we hadn’t had enough already.
There was commotion at the front of our line. Two kids holding hands caught my eye. The smaller kid was fussin’ and the older one with a huge flat Afro was arguing with a tall, mean-looking man in a red vest with hair the same tacky color as his carrot-orange shoes.
“I’m going to ask you one more time,” the orange-haired man said to the older kid. “Are you with an adult or not?”
I held my breath waiting for the older kid to answer.
“Armani.” Sealy tugged on my arm.
“Shhh. Not now, Sealy.” I never took my eyes off the Afro kid and the orange-haired man.
“Ummm.” The kid turned and looked at the fussy little boy standing next to him. I knew the answer to the man’s question.
People in our line were hollerin’ for the kid to hurry up and answer. I slipped my hands over Khayla’s ears on account of all the cussing up in there.
The orange-haired man was speaking into a walkie-talkie. He finally looked at the older kid again. “Step over here, please,” he waved, showing the boys where to stand.
My heart was beating faster and my head was starting to buzz like the overhead lights. I’d been watching people for hours get to the front of that stupid line. They’d jabber for a bit with the man in his ugly red vest, get handed a trash bag and a paper with the word RULES printed all big across the top, and then walk on over to one of the other hundreds of lines in the overcrowded crazy place. Every single one of them went somewhere, except them two kids.
My insides took to shaking.
The two kids stepped off to the side like the man told them to. The little kid was hanging tight to the older one. The older kid turned, and for a long second we seen each other. He looked right at me with his scrunched-up mad self. He lifted his chin in a nod just enough so that I could tell he did it. I nodded a “hey” back.
The line moved an inch. Khayla scooched forward.
While my eyes were still locked on the kid, out of nowhere came a lady who didn’t look like she belonged in that dreadful place at all. She was wearing a red vest, but it looked like part of her outfit the way she wore it. Her long, dangly, apple-red earrings were the same exact color as the dang vest. She even had red accessories stuck up in her praline-tinted wig that was piled on top of her pointy head.
I wasn’t the only one staring at her. Truth is, a person couldn’t help but stare. She was shiny and clean—all done up, looking like a brown Marge Simpson on her way to a Mardi Gras parade. I could all but smell the soap on her even from where I was standing. She was just a-smiling and went right up to the two scared-looking boys.
“Armani.” Sealy tugged again.
“Hang on, girl.” I shrugged her hand off my arm. I squinted my eyes and put all my focus on my ears, tilting my right ear in the direction of the kids and the shiny lady.
“My, my,” the shiny lady said in one of them high-pitched, sugary-sweet voices set aside for what Memaw calls the highfalutin’ types. “What do we have here?” Her smile was plastered on in a way that reminded me of the kind a nurse wears right before she shoves a long needle in your arm.
The older kid took to staring at the floor, and the little one went and hid behind him. The orange-haired man barely looked at the shiny lady when he said into his walkie-talkie, “Two unchaperoned minors. Child Protective Services dispatched.”
My legs felt like they were full of muscadine jelly.
“Well, all righty then,” the shiny lady said. I don’t know how words rolled out of her smiling mouth when it didn’t even look like her lips budged.
The line moved an inch. Khayla scooched forward.
The shiny lady
reached out like she was gonna touch the older boy’s Afro, but he took a quick step back and said, “You need to let us be. I’m fifteen years old, man. We don’t need anybody. We can take care of ourselves!”
“Oh, darlin’, it’s gonna be just fine,” the shiny, highfalutin’ lady said. She tipped her head and kept right on smiling with her extra-large white teeth flashing this way and that. “Come on, now. We’re gonna find us a nice place to rest, and get y’all fresh water and somethin’ to eat. How’s that sound?”
The little kid poked his head out from behind the older one right when the older kid glanced over at me. I had to remind myself to breathe. His nostrils opened and closed real big. His chest moved up and down fast. The boy looked like a bull getting ready to charge. “We’re not goin’ anywhere.”
CHAPTER 35
The orange-haired man in the tacky red vest looked at the kid with the lopsided Afro. “You don’t have a choice. You either go with this nice lady or I call security.” The man got all up in the kid’s face. The kid finally looked away, rolling his eyes.
This time when the shiny lady reached out, the kid curled up his lip and let her put her arm around his shoulder. “Well now, see? I told y’all it was gonna be all right.” She took hold of the little one’s hand. “Let’s see if we can find you a nice cookie, darlin’.”
The older kid turned his head and looked back at me one more time before the three of them got lost in the crowd. I could still hear that highfalutin’ voice way after they were out of sight.
Khayla scooched forward.
I knew what I needed to do.
“Armani,” Sealy said for the umpteenth time.
“What?”
“That man over there wants us to come here.” She pointed at a very tall white man standing off by hisself. His long gray hair almost reached the pockets of his dirty PawPaw pants that were pulled clear up by his armpits. He seen Sealy pointing and he waved back with a heavy, wrinkled hand and a great big happy smile. She waved some more and let out a giggle.
I pushed her waving hand down. “Are you crazy, girl? Don’t be wavin’ at strangers.”
“But he’s nice, Armani. He has Dumbledore eyes.” She wouldn’t stop staring and smiling.
“Dummy sounds about right.” I stood in front of her to block her view of the homeless-looking man.
“Not dummy, silly, Dumbledore. Look.” Sealy pointed again, still grinning from ear to ear, and leaned to the side so she could see past me. The girl had lost her mind.
The line moved again. The knot in my stomach twitched.
Khayla whimpered, “I haffa go potty.”
I ain’t never been so happy to hear them four words.
“Sealy.” I snapped my fingers in her face, trying to get her attention on me and off the white man with the high pockets. I grabbed Khayla by the hand and pulled her to her feet. “Follow me,” I told Sealy over my shoulder.
“Where are we going?”
“Just hush up and do what I tell ya. And stay close.”
“But we’ll lose our place in line, Armani.”
“What part of hush don’t you understand, girl?” I’d done lost my patience. “Just follow me and don’t talk to nobody.”
Khayla was holding herself and bouncing around like fire ants were crawling up her legs. Mama would’ve made her stop jumping around, acting a fool, but I was glad she was doing it, ’cause it made it easier for me to get us out of line, and quick.
My rubber boots squeak-squeaked every time I took a step across the hard shiny floor. Heat filled my cheeks. I needed to get us as far away as possible from the orange-haired man and his meddlin’ self.
Loud enough, but not so loud that it sounded suspicious, I said, “Hang on, Khayla, there has to be a bathroom around here somewhere.”
“I haffa go, now.” Khayla was playing her part perfect.
“Armani—”
“What?” I said, taking another squeaky step away from the line.
“The bathroom’s over there.” Sealy had stopped behind me.
“How do you know?”
“Because he told me.” She pointed and smiled at that ol’ mister so-and-so with his pockets all high and his grin too big. He was following us?
He seen me looking at him with my lip curled up, and he went on smiling big with one of them follow me nods of his gray-covered head.
“See?” Sealy said, all happy.
I let out an annoyed poof of air. “Whatever.”
We fell into the back of the line for the bathroom. The bellyaching pouring out of Khayla was so loud, about a thousand eyes fell on us. We were finally away from the worry of mister orange hair pulling us off to the side so Miss Highfalutin’ could come haul us off to who knows where, and now Khayla’s fit had everyone in the world looking at us. The baby girl needed a toilet, and she needed it fast. She wasn’t holding her front side no more—now she had both hands planted firm on her backside. It had become a serious emergency.
Out of nowhere, a teenage girl wearing a red vest came up beside us and wanted to know why Khayla was hollerin’. She wanted to know if the baby needed a doctor. She seen for herself the way Khayla was clinging for dear life to her booty. The girl hurried up and told us to follow her.
Sealy and Mr. High Pockets man gave each other a thumbs-up. I didn’t have the want-to or the time to try and figure out what was going on with Sealy and that strange ol’ man.
I followed the red-vested girl all the way to the front of the line. I swear Sealy skipped up behind me the whole way.
The tangy smell of pee flew up my nose. Walking into the bathroom was a whole new kind of fool-headed crazy filled with blabbering, bickering women and girls and babies all shoved in there like crawfish in a boiling pot. I ain’t never seen Sealy’s mouth so wide open as it was when she went to staring at them nasty ol’ women standing around in nothing but their bras and panties, just a-jabbering and doing their laundry in the tiny gray-white sinks like they did it that way all the time. Soon as they seen Khayla up on her tippy-toes grabbing hold of her backside, they all but opened a stall and shoved all three of us inside.
“Oh, my gosh. This feels so good!” Sealy said, splashing water from the sink up on her face. I watched the water drip off the round part of her chin. She looked into the cracked mirror and went to smoothing down her flyaway hairs with her wet hand.
After cleaning my sisters the best I could with the rough brown paper towels, I pulled a wad of towels down out of the dispenser and ran them up under the water to get them good and wet. I closed my eyes and tried to scrub hurricane muck from my skin. A shirtless woman pushed me out from in front of the sink and started scrubbing her hairy armpits with the lunch-bag-colored towels. She messed with herself in the mirror, not even taking the time to look my way. Whatever. It was fine by me. I didn’t wanna look in no mirror nohow.
Before we left the bathroom, I pulled Sealy over to a corner. I tried to whisper so no one would hear. “Listen, Sealy, we can’t tell no one that Mama an’ Daddy ain’t with us. You understand that, right?”
“But why?”
“Why what?” I was trying to get Khayla up off the floor where she’d gone and plopped her sleepy, fussy self.
“Why can’t we tell anyone that we’re by ourselves?”
“Because we just can’t, that’s why. Didn’t you see what happened to them boys?” Sweat was pouring off me. “Khayla, stand up.” I nudged her with my foot.
“How come, why, Ah-mani?” Khayla said, with her eyes half closed. Sealy wasn’t even trying to help me with our baby sister.
“We need to ask someone to help us,” Sealy said.
“No, we don’t!” I said louder than I meant to. Khayla weighed a ton. I couldn’t get her up.
“But if we don’t get someone to help us, what will we do? How will we find—”
“Did you forget that I just made ten?” I yelled in a whisper. “Mama left me in charge of y’all, remember?” My head hurt when I tried to
slide it.
Sealy wasn’t backing down. She flipped her watery eyes up at me and about knocked me over backward when she put both her hands where her hips should be and did a perfect head roll. “Well,” she sniffed, “you can be in charge, but we still need to tell someone about Daddy and Georgie so we can send help.” She wiped the back of her hand across her soggy face, not even caring about the snot she left there. Her beady little eyes never left mine. Hot stabs poked the inside of my chest.
I grabbed her by both shoulders and pulled her close to me. I tried to press my nose up against hers, but she did a good job of pulling her head back as far her little neck would go. “You better listen good, Sealy Jean Curtis! Mama ain’t here, now, is she?” My fingers started to dig into her shoulders. “And I sure don’t see Daddy.” The shaking in my legs moved fast up to my middle. “You better do what I say, or I swear, I’ll just leave your butt right here.” Me and Jesus knew that I’d never leave my sister nowhere, nohow, but right then, I shut the door on babyfyin’ lil’ Miss Sealy.
Big ol’ alligator tears rolled down her cheeks. I pushed back on her shoulders when I let go, and she stumbled backward. I didn’t care. I was tired. I looked away and took a step back. I took a couple fast, deep breaths. Without thinking twice, I whipped around and got back in her wet baby face. Her hands flew up like she thought I was gonna hit her or something. “And if Georgie was stupid enough to go an’ jump off the roof into the water like an idiot, why should I care?” My eyes burned. My whole entire self was shaking.
A snot bubble came halfway out of Sealy’s nose and popped. I grabbed Khayla by one arm and slung her up onto my hip. I didn’t hear one sound out of her for a long while. I didn’t have a clue what Sealy was or wasn’t doing, mostly ’cause I didn’t care. I didn’t care right then if my sister was mad or not. All I knew was that I had to do what Mama and Daddy expected me to do—keep Sealy and Khayla and me together—and safe.
Upside Down in the Middle of Nowhere Page 15
