Chapter 11
Jojo
I pulled Kayla out and ran to the porch, to Pop and his lighter, bright as a lighthouse beacon as it flashed in the dark. I skipped the steps and leapt up to the porch, coming to a fast stop in front of Pop like the rabbits that creep around the house when the sun sets: eating, stilling, then running only to freeze again. Saying to me: So delicious, so delicious, but still, still, yes, I see you. Calling to one another: Run run run halt.
“Son,” Pop says, and grabs the back of my neck, his hand large and warm. My wrists feel raw. My mouth comes open and I breathe in. It sounds like a web of phlegm is in my throat. My eyes are burning and I shut my jaw and clench my teeth and try and try and try not to cry. I breathe again and it sounds like a sob. But I will not cry, even though I want to duck down with Kayla, want Pop to fold me in his arms and hug me to him, want to smash my nose in his shoulder so hard I can’t breathe. But I don’t. I feel his hand on me and rise on my toes so he presses harder. I can feel the heat of his fingers. He lets his hand run down my back to rest at the top of my spine, and I even imagine I can feel the whorl of his fingertips, the blood push back under his skin.
“Pop,” I say.
Pop shakes his head, gives my back a little rub.
“Go put your sister to sleep. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
Me and Kayla eat crackers and pimento cheese and some smothered chicken legs Pop got in a skillet on the stove, wash it down with water. I think about putting Kayla in the tub but then I hear the shower, and when I hear Mam’s and Leonie’s voices in the room and see Pop’s lighter flash on the porch, I know it’s Michael. Kayla lays her head on my shoulder, grabs my hair, rolls my curls around her finger like a noodle.
“Mam? Pop?”
Her breathing gets slow and then she’s slobbering on my throat and I know she’s asleep, but I don’t put her down because I’m looking at Richie, who’s looking at Pop, who’s looking out to the black yard, the far road. The boy’s face shows in fire, and I ain’t never seen that look before. Ain’t never seen somebody look at someone else like Richie looks at Pop: all the hope on his face, plain in the circle of his mouth, his wide-open eyes, the wrinkle of his forehead. He step closer and closer to Pop, and he’s a cat then, fresh-born, milk-hungry, creeping toward someone he’d die without. I lay Kayla down on the sofa and step out onto the porch. Richie follows.
“Riv,” he says.
Pop flicks his light, lets it die, and flicks it again.
“Riv,” Richie says again.
Pop pulls phlegm up his throat, spits off the porch. Looks down at his hands.
“It was quiet here without y’all,” Pop says. “Too quiet.” The lighter flame shows his quick smile, and then it’s gone. “I’m glad y’all back.”
“I didn’t want to go,” I say.
“I know,” Pop says.
I rub my wrists and look at Pop’s profile flare and fade in the light.
“Did you find it?” Pop asks.
Richie takes a step forward, and the look changes. Just a flicker. He glances between me and Pop and he frowns.
“The bag?” I say.
“Yeah,” Pop says.
I nod.
“Did it work? It’s a gris-gris bag.”
I shrug.
“I think so. We made it. Got stopped by the police, though. And Kayla was sick the whole time.”
Pop flicks the lighter, and the flame blazes for one half of a second, the fire bright and cold and orange, and then sparks out. Pop shakes the lighter by his ear and lights it again.
“Why can’t he see me?” Richie asks.
“It was the only way I could send a little of me with y’all. With Mam”—Pop clears his throat—“sick. And that being a place I can’t go back to. Parchman.”
Richie is inches away from Pop. I can’t even nod.
“See your face every day. Like the sun,” Richie says.
Pop pockets the lighter.
“You left me,” Richie says.
I slide closer to Pop. Richie reaches out a hand to touch Pop’s face and sweeps his fingers across his eyebrows. Pop sighs.
“You better watch out, boy. He used to look at me like that,” Richie says. His teeth are white in the black: tiny and sharp as a kitten’s. “And then he left me.”
I have to talk against the pockets of silence he creates whenever he speaks: the bugs shush for him with every word.
“Do she feel any better, Pop?”
Pop searches in his pocket for something and then stops. “Sometimes I forget. I forget I don’t smoke,” he says. He shakes his head in the darkness: I can hear the slide of his hair against the wall of the house he sits against. “She got worse, son,” Pop says.
“You was the only daddy I ever knew.” Richie’s voice was soft as a mewl. “I need to know why you left me.”
Richie is quiet. So is Pop. I slide down the wall and sit next to Pop on the porch. I want to lay my head on his shoulder, but I’m too old for that. It’s enough to feel his shoulder rub mine when Pop passes a hand over his face, when he begins to flip the lighter over and under his knuckles, like he does sometimes with knives. The trees murmur around us, nearly invisible in the black. When I hear Leonie come walking out Mam’s room, breathing as hard and deep as if she been running, pulling in her breaths like it hurt, I look up at the glittery sky and search for the constellations Pop taught me.
“The Unicorn,” I say as I identify it. Monoceros. “The Rabbit.” Lepus. “The Great Snake.” Hydra. “The Bull.” Taurus. I learned the proper names from a school library book. I know Leonie must be looking out at the porch, wondering what me and Pop are doing in the dark. “The Twins,” I say. Gemini. Leonie’s room door opens and shuts, and I see Michael babying Leonie when she was sick. I see the way Leonie didn’t do nothing when that cop put those handcuffs on me. Richie looks at me like he knows what I’m remembering, and then he sits across from us, curls over his knees, wraps his arms around his back, makes a sound like crying, and rubs what he can reach of his shoulder blades.
“My wounds were here. Right here. From Black Annie. And you healed them. But you left and now you won’t see me.”
I lay my head on Pop’s shoulder anyway. I don’t care. Pop breathes deeply and clears his throat like he wants to say something, but he doesn’t. But he doesn’t shrug me away.
“You forgot about the Lion,” Pop says. The trees sigh.
When we go inside to lay down, Richie still sits, no longer rubbing. Instead, he rocks back and forth, faintly, and the look on his face is broken. Pop shuts the door. I curl around Kayla on the sofa and try to lie still, to forget the broken boy on the porch long enough to drift to sleep. My spine, my ribs, my back: a wall.
* * *
“Jojo,” she says, and pats my cheeks, my nose. Pulls open my eyelids. I jump and wake and fall off the sofa, and Kayla laughs, bright and yellow and shiny as a puppy that just got the knack of running without tripping over her own legs. Happy, like that. My mouth tastes like I’ve been sucking on chalk and licking oyster shells, and my eyes feel grainy. Kayla claps her hands and says, “Eat-eat,” and it’s then I realize that I smell bacon, and I realize I ain’t smelled it ever since Mam got too sick to cook. I sling Kayla on my back and she clings. I think it’s Leonie, and I feel something in me soften for a minute, rethink all the bad I thought about her the night before, and something inside me say: But she do. She do. And then I step into the narrow kitchen, and it ain’t her; it’s Michael. He got a shirt on that look like it’s been washed and dried a size too small, the letters on it faded: it’s one of mine. An old one Mam bought me to wear one Easter. He look all wrong at the counter, the way he reflect too much of the morning light.
“Y’all hungry?” he asks.
“Naw,” I say.
“Yes,” Kayla lisps.
Michael frowns at us.
“Sit down,” he says.
I sit, and Kayla climbs up on my shoulder, straddles my neck, and beats my head like a drum.
Michael takes the pan off the gas, sets it to the side. He lets the fork he was turning the bacon with drip at his side, drip oil on the floor, as he turns to face us.
He crosses his arms, and the oil drips again. The bacon is still sizzling, and I wish he would take it out and drain it so me and Kayla can eat it hot.
“You remember that time we went fishing?”
I shrug, but the memory comes anyway, like someone pouring a bottle of water over my head. Just the boys, he’d told Leonie, and she looked at him like he’d jabbed her in her softest parts. And I thought he’d renege then, say I’m just joking, but he didn’t. It was late, but we went out to the pier anyway and cast lines. He called me son with his fingers, with the way he tied the sinkers and speared the bait. Laughed at me when I wouldn’t spear the worm, when I wouldn’t touch them. Michael waves his fork at me, and he knows I’m lying. He knows I remember.
“We going to have more of that now.”
He told me a story that night. As the fishermen gigged for flounder with their lights and their nets, he said: What you know about your uncle Given? And I told Michael that Mam had showed me his pictures, talked about him, told me he wasn’t here no more, that he was in another world, but hadn’t told me what that meant. I told Michael that because it was true, and because I wanted him to tell me what she meant. I was eight then.
“That’s what me coming home means.”
Michael pokes the bacon. That night on the dock, he didn’t tell me how or why Uncle Given left. Instead, he told me about working out on the rig. How he liked working through the night so when the sun was rising, the ocean and the sky were one thing, and it felt like he was in a perfect egg. How the sharks were birds, like hawks, hunting the water. How they were drawn to the reef that grew up around the rig, how they struck under the pillars, white in the darkness, like a knife under dark skin. How blood followed them, too. How the dolphins would come after the sharks left, and how they would leap from the water if they knew anyone was watching, chattering. How he cried one day after the spill, when he heard about how all of them was dying off.
“For you and your sister,” Michael says, and lifts the piece of bacon he’s been poking at. It’s already maroon and stiff, but he drops it back in the grease anyway.
I actually cried, Michael told the water. He seemed ashamed to say that, but he went on anyway. How the dolphins were dying off, how whole pods of them washed up on the beaches in Florida, in Louisiana, in Alabama and Mississippi: oil-burnt, sick with lesions, hollowed out from the insides. And then Michael said something I’ll never forget: Some scientists for BP said this didn’t have nothing to do with the oil, that sometimes this is what happens to animals: they die for unexpected reasons. Sometimes a lot of them. Sometimes all at once. And then Michael looked at me and said: And when that scientist said that, I thought about humans. Because humans is animals. And the way he looked at me that night told me he wasn’t just thinking about any humans; he was thinking about me. I wonder if Michael thought that yesterday, when he saw that gun, saw that cop push me down so I bowed to the dirt.
Michael lifts out the bacon and drops it on the paper towel. That night on the pier, it was as if the pull of the moon on the water, the surge of the tide, drew the words from Michael. He said: My family ain’t always did right. Was one of my dumbass cousins that killed your uncle Given. I didn’t think Michael was telling me the whole story. Whenever Leonie or Mam or Pop talked about how Given died, they said: He got shot. But Michael said something different. Some people think it was a hunting accident. He wound up his line and got ready to cast again. One day I’ll tell you the whole story, he said. Now the faint smell of charred bacon wafts through the air, and Michael pulls out another piece, this one curled black and hard.
Kayla claps and pulls at my hair in bunches, the same way she does grass.
“I just want you and Michaela to know that I’m here. I’m here to stay. And I missed y’all.”
Michael pulls out the bacon and puts it on the plate. It’s all black and burnt at the edges. Char and smoke fill the room. He runs to the back door and opens and closes it, trying to wave out the smoke. The grease hisses to silence. I don’t know what he wants me to say.
“We call her Kayla,” I say. I pull Kayla up over my head and set her in my lap. “No no no no,” Kayla says, and starts kicking. My scalp burns. I bounce her on my knees, but that just pisses her off, and she straightens like an ironing board and slides off my legs onto the floor. Her whine escalates until it’s like a police siren. Michael shakes his head.
“That’s enough, young lady. Get up off the goddamn floor,” he says. His door waving ain’t doing much.
Kayla shrieks.
I kneel next to her, bend over, put my mouth next to her ear, and speak loud enough for her to hear me.
“I know you mad. I know you mad. I know you mad, Kayla. But I’m going to take you outside later, okay? Just sit up and eat, okay? I know you mad. Come here. Come here.” I say this to her because sometimes I hear words between her howls, hear her thinking: Why don’t he listen why don’t he listen I feel! I put my hands under her armpits, and she squirms and wails. Michael lets the door slam, walks toward us, and then stops.
“If you don’t get up off that floor right now, I’m going to whip you, you hear? You hear me, Kayla?” Michael says. He’s turning red around his eyes and his throat as he waves his arms in the air, and the smoke just follows him like a blanket he’s wrapped around himself. This makes him redder. I don’t want him to hit her with the fork.
“Come on, Kayla. Come on,” I say.
“Goddamnit,” Michael says. “Michaela!”
And then he’s hunching over both of us, and his arm whips out, whips in, and he’s dropped the fork and he’s smacking Kayla hard on the thigh, once and twice, his face as pale and tight as a knot. “What did I say?” He punctuates each word with a slap. Kayla’s mouth is open, but she’s not wailing: all of her seized up silent, eyes wide from the pain. I know this cry. I swing her up and away from Michael’s hand, spin her around and to me. Her back under my rubbing hand, hot. My shushes don’t mean nothing. I know what’s coming. She lets go of the breath in one long thunderous wail.
“You ain’t have to do that,” I tell Michael. He’s backing away, shaking his spanking hand like it’s gone numb.
“I told her,” he says.
“You ain’t,” I say.
“Y’all don’t listen,” Michael says.
Kayla writhes and shrieks, her whole body coiling. I turn my back on Michael, run out the back door. Kayla rubs her face into my shoulder and screams.
“I’m sorry, Kayla,” I say, like I’m the one hit her. Like she can hear over her crying. I walk around the backyard with her, saying it over and over, until the sun sits higher in the sky, bearing down on us, turning the muddy puddles to vapor. Burning the land dry, and burning me and Kayla: her to peanut butter, me to rust.
* * *
I apologize until she quiets to hiccups, until I know she can hear me. And I’m waiting, waiting for her small arms to fold around my neck, her head to drop to my shoulder, and I’m so intent on waiting for it that I don’t even see the boy staring at us from the shadow of a tall, many-armed pine tree until Kayla’s pinching my arms, saying, “No no, Jojo.” In the bright light of the day the shadow swallows him: cool dark bayou water, the color of mud—tepid and blinding. He moves and he is of a piece with the darkness.
“He’s slopping the pigs. Your pop.”
I blow air hard out my nose, hope it will mean nothing to him. That he will not read it as wanting to talk, that he will not read it as not wanting to talk.
“He don’t see me. How come he don’t see me?”
I shrug. Kayla says: “Eat-eat, Jojo.” All’s quiet in the house, and for a stupid second I wonder why Leonie and Michael ain’t arguing about him hitting Kayla. And then I remember. They don’t care.
“You got to ask him about me,” Richie says. He steps out of the shadow and he is a swimmer surfacing for air, glistening in the light. And in the light, he is just a skinny boy, too narrow in the bones, the fat that should be on him starved off. Somebody that I can feel sorry for until his eyes widen, and I squeeze Kayla so hard she cries out. The face he pulls is pinched with hunger and longing.
I shake my head.
“It’s the only way I can go.” Richie stops, looks up in the sky. “Even if he don’t know me no more, don’t care about me. I need the story to go.” His afro is so long it sprouts from his head like Spanish moss. “The snake-bird says.”
“What?” I say, and regret it.
“It’s different here,” he says. “So much liquid in the air. Salt. And a mud smell. I can tell,” he says, “the other waters is near.”
I don’t know what he’s talking about. Kayla says: “Inside, Jojo, inside.”
Richie looks at me like he’s seeing me the way I seen him. Like Pop looks at a hog at slaughtering time, measuring the meat. He nods.
“You get him to tell you the story. When I’m there,” he says.
“No,” I say.
“No?” he says.
“No.”
Kayla is making little mewling sounds, pulling at my ears. “I want eat, Jojo,” she says. “It’s enough we brought you back. Brought you here. What if Pop don’t want to tell that story? What if it’s something he don’t want to say?”
“Don’t matter what he want. It matter what I need.”
I jiggle Kayla. Turn in a circle, my feet sinking in the muddied grass. A cow lows nearby, and I hear: Cool and becoming of green things, it is. All the new grass. I stop my spin when I see his fierce eyes again.
“If I get the story, you going to leave, right? You going to go away?” My voice edging up to a question, high as a girl’s. I clear my throat. Kayla pulls my hair.
“I told you I’m going home,” Richie says. He takes a step before me but parts no grass, squelches no mud, and his face is furrowed: a piece of paper crumpled over on itself, a smudged ball hiding words.
“You ain’t answer.”
“Yes,” he says.
He’s not specific enough. If he had skin and bones, I’d throw something at him. Pick up the corner of a cinder block at my feet and hurl it. Make him say it. But he’s not, and I don’t want to give him cause to change, to stay lurking around the house, around the animals, stealing all the light, reflecting it back wrong: a warped mirror. Casper, the black shaggy neighborhood mutt, lopes around the corner of the house, freezes in a stop, and barks. You smell wrong, I hear. Snake coming through water. The quick bite! Blood! Richie walks backward into the shadows, his hands palms out.
“Fine,” I say.
I let Casper’s bark turn me around. Know the dog is keeping him pinned to the tree, so I can jog up the steps and into the house, even as I feel Richie’s eyes tightening up my shoulders: a line pulled taut between us, razor-sharp.
* * *
The bacon is sitting on a plate lined with paper towels. I put Kayla on the table and pick the meat apart, peeling away what’s still a little gummy, still a little brown. I hand the meat to her, bit by bit, to eat. She eats so much I’m left with the charred pieces. I can’t even eat them, so I spit it all out and make us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Michael and Leonie are in her room, their door closed, conversation a muffled purr. Mam’s room is still dark, her blinds closed. I walk in and open them and put the box fan in the window, turn it to a low hum. The air moves. Kayla marches around Mam’s bed, singing one of her nonsense songs. Mam stirs, her eyes open to slits. I get her water from the faucet and a straw, hold it up to her so she can drink. She holds the water in her mouth longer than she should, puffing out her cheeks in a balloon, works her way up to swallowing, and when it’s down, her face breaks like drinking that water hurt.
“Mam?” I say, pulling a chair up to her bed, propping my chin on my folded fists, waiting for her to put a hand on my head like she always does. Her mouth quivers to a frown, and she doesn’t. I sit up, ask a question, and hope that it covers the pain behind my rib cage, which moves like a puppy turning in circles to settle and sleep. “How you feeling?”
“Not good, baby.” She speaks in a whisper. I can hardly hear her over Kayla’s gibberish song.
“The medicine ain’t working?”
“Guess I’m getting used to it,” she huffs. The pain pulling all the lines of her face down.
“Michael’s back,” I say.
She raises her eyebrows. I realize it’s a nod.
“I know.”
“He hit Kayla this morning.”
Mam looks straight at me then, not at the ceiling or off into the air, and I know she done shrugged off her pain as well as she can and she’s listening to me, hearing me the same way I hear Kayla when she’s upset.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
I sit up straight-backed as Pop and frown.
“No,” she says. “You old enough to hear this.”
“Mam?”
“Shush. I don’t know if it’s something I did. Or if it’s something that’s in Leonie. But she ain’t got the mothering instinct. I knew when you was little and we was out shopping, and she bought herself something to eat and ate it right in front of you, and you was sitting there crying hungry. I knew then.”
Mam’s fingers is long and thin. Little more than bone. Cool to the touch, but I can still feel warmth like a small flame in the middle of her palm.
“I never wanted you to be hungry, Jojo. It’s why I tried. I would do it if she wouldn’t. But now—”
“It’s all right, Mam—”
“Hush, boy.”
Her fingernails used to be pink and clear. Now they seashells, salt-pitted and yellow.
“She ain’t never going to feed you.”
Her hands used to be muscled plump from all the work she did in the gardens, in the kitchen. She reaches out and I duck my head up under it so her palm on my scalp and my face in her sheets and I breathe it all in even though it hurts, and it smells like metal and sunburned grass and offal.
“I hope I fed you enough. While I’m here. So you carry it with you. Like a camel.” I can hear the smile in her voice, faint. A baring of teeth. “Maybe that ain’t a good way of putting it. Like a well, Jojo. Pull that water up when you need it.”
I cough into the blanket, partly from the smell of Mam dying, partly from knowing that she dying; it catches in the back of my throat and I know it’s a sob, but my face is in the sheets and nobody can see me cry. Kayla’s patting my leg. Her song: silent.
“She hates me,” I say.
“No, she love you. She don’t know how to show it. And her love for herself and her love for Michael—well, it gets in the way. It confuse her.”
I wipe my eyes on the sheets by shaking my head and look up. Kayla climbs in my lap. Mam’s looking at me straight on. Her eyelashes ain’t never grew back, which makes her eyes look even bigger, and when Mam blinks, I realize we got the same eyes. Her mouth works like she’s chewing, and she swallows and grimaces again.
“You ain’t never going to have that problem.”
While she talking, I want to tell her about the boy. Want to ask her what she thinks I should do about Richie, but I don’t want to worry her, don’t want to put another thing on her when it’s taking everything in her to bear the pain, which I can see now. Like she’s floating on her back in an ocean of it. Like her skin’s a hull eaten hollow with barnacles, and the pain’s seeping through. Filling. Pushing her down and down and down. There’s a sound outside the window, and the blades of the box fan cut it as it carries into the room. Chopping it up. Sound like a baby crying. I look out and Richie’s passing under the window, letting out one little cry and then gulping in air. And then he’s letting out another cry, this one sounds like a cat yowling, and then gulping in air. He touches the bark of each pine tree as he passes up underneath it.
“Mam? After you . . .” I can’t bring myself to say it, so I talk around it. Richie moans. “After, where you going to go?” Richie stops and lists. He’s staring up at the window, his face like a shattered plate; Casper barks off in the distance, a series of high yips. Richie rubs his neck. Mam looks at me and startles like a horse: for her, this means her eyelids jump.
“Mam?”
“You ain’t let that dog get into my garden, did you, Jojo?” she whispers.
“No, ma’am.”
“Sounds like he treed a cat.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Kayla slides off my lap, walks to the fan, and puts her mouth on it. Every time Richie lets out a little catlike yowl, she hoots back. She laughs as the fan chops it up. Richie gets up, hands still kneading his throat, and walks, crooked and limping, right underneath the window.
“After, Mam,” I say. “What happens when you pass away?”
I couldn’t bear her being a ghost. Couldn’t take her sitting in the kitchen, invisible. Couldn’t take seeing Pop walk around her without touching her cheek, without bending to kiss her on her neck. Couldn’t bear to see Leonie sit on her without seeing, light up a cigarette, blow smoke rings in the warm, still air. Michael stealing her whisks and spatulas to cook in one of the sheds.
“It’s like walking through a door, Jojo.”
“But you won’t be no ghost, huh, Mam?” I have to ask even though I know the telling hurts her. Even though I feel like speaking’s bringing her leaving closer. Death, a great mouth set to swallow.
Richie is rubbing the screen, his hand sliding from side to side. Kayla giggles.
“Can’t say for sure. But I don’t think so. I think that only happens when the dying’s bad. Violent. The old folks always told me that when someone dies in a bad way, sometimes it’s so awful even God can’t bear to watch, and then half your spirit stays behind and wanders, wanting peace the way a thirsty man seeks water.” She frowns: two fishhooks dimpling down. “That ain’t my way.”
I rub Mam’s arm and the skin slides with my finger. Too thin.
“That don’t mean I won’t be here, Jojo. I’ll be on the other side of the door. With everybody else that’s gone before. Your uncle Given, my mama and daddy, Pop’s mama and daddy.”
There’s a growl and a hacking bark come from underneath the house, from underneath the floorboards, and I know Casper’s back and in the crawl space between the cinder blocks: a black shadow in the dusty dark.
“How?”
“Because we don’t walk no straight lines. It’s all happening at once. All of it. We all here at once. My mama and daddy and they mamas and daddies.” Mam looks to the wall, closes her eyes. “My son.”
Richie jerks away from the window and backs up, stumbling like an old man. His arms out in front of him. Casper saying: Wrong! No smell! Wingless bird. Walking worm. Back! I stop rubbing. Mam looks back at me like she can see me clear through the pain. Like she looked at me when I was younger and I lied to her when I got caught having a who-can-pee-the-furthest-up-the-wall contest in the boys’ bathroom at school.
“You ever seen something like that? Something like a ghost?” Mam wheezes. “Something you thought was strange?”
Richie’s climbing the tree like a rope. Gripping the young pine with his insoles, pushing, his hands flat to the feathered bark. Inching up. Swinging his leg around and sitting on a low branch, his arms and legs still wrapped around the trunk. The tree holding him like a baby. He yelps at Casper.
“No, ma’am.”
“I ain’t never have the talent for it. Seeing the dead. I could read people, read the future or the past in they bodies. Know what was wrong or needed by their songs: in the plants, in the animals, too. But never saw the dead. Wanted it so bad after Given died—”
Richie’s yelp slides into a humming. He’s singing to Casper, and there are words in it but I can’t understand them, like language flipped inside out. A skinned animal: an inverted pelt. I can’t help it. I gulp against the feeling I want to throw up all the food that I ever ate. Kayla’s rubbing the screen like Richie did, back and forth. Humming.
“No, ma’am.”
“But you could. You could have it. The vision.”
Mam turns her head to one side, hearing Richie’s song. A grimace, like if she could move without pain, she’d be shaking her head no.
“Is there something outside?”
I shake my head for her. Casper whines.
“You sure?”
The blades cut Richie’s song. I can feel every wave of his dark crooning on my skin: a bad touch. Leonie slapping my face. Michael punching me in my chest. An older boy named Caleb who sat next to me in the last seat on the bus and put his hand on my lap and squeezed my dick before I elbowed him in the neck and the bus driver wrote me up when Caleb fell into the aisle, choking. All bad.
“No, ma’am,” I say. I will not sink her.