Revenge of a Not-So-Pretty Girl (8 page)

And so I try to go to my calm place. I try to think of Michael Jackson again and the words to “Billie Jean,” but all that comes to mind are the ones to “Thriller.”

Man, that’s not the right song for this moment. I have to force myself to stop thinking. And suddenly, there are another three or four footsteps, and they sound as if they’re close to the doorway to the kitchen. They stop. Again. And I grasp the knife handle even tighter. Maybe he’s coming to steal my schoolbag, or to check all the cupboards to see if anyone is hiding in there. So I try to be as still as possible. And I wait.

Silence. The longer this goes on, the harder it is for me to control my shaking. And I begin to wonder if he can hear my knees knocking.

There’s the sound of movement again, but this time, the steps seem to be getting farther away. I wait for the sound of a door slam, but it never comes. And then that unnerving silence returns. I try to count to twenty, try to will my lungs lighter, but between the heat and the sweat and the fear and the narrow closet, I freak out and barrel through the door.

I start running, not remembering to grab my schoolbag or my inhaler. I run past Mama’s ransacked room. I brush against the wooden beads that hang from the living room doorway. I don’t look in the direction of the bathroom, where the robber was. I don’t hesitate going down the long, dark hallway that leads out of the apartment, the one with closets on both sides. Closets where a robber could lie in wait and then spring out all Jason Voorhees from
Friday the 13th–
like and pull me in with him. Nope. I just zoom by as fast as humanly possible, never letting go of that butcher knife, my knees buckling and knocking their way out the door.

I stay at Widow Mason’s apartment until my uncle Paul shows up. Two policemen arrive about twenty minutes later, and Mama maybe fifteen minutes after that. She interrogates me even more than the cops do. Once my statement is taken and the cops leave, Uncle Paul hangs around for a while. But I’m not the one he ends up having to try to calm down—it’s Mama. Once she stops running around like a lunatic, double- and triple-checking what might have been taken, Uncle Paul heads home, and it’s just her and me.

“How do you forget
to lock the door when you leave the apartment? It’s not like you have grown folks’ worries, like you have to go hustle to cook for white folks to make ends meet. Rich white folks who are so stingy, they won’t even allow you to take home a little of the leftovers they always end up throwing out anyway. You don’t have to figure out how to juggle the bills so everything doesn’t get cut off,” Mama says as she surveys the damage to my hair. It’s only been an hour since everyone took off, but I feel as if Mama and I are the last two people left on earth.

I sit on a tall stool in front of the bathroom mirror, which is just above the sink. Mama stands behind me with a cigarette hanging from the left side of her mouth. I’m not so sure the ashes aren’t falling onto my head. As she studies my hair, I study her: how long and graceful her neck is; how with her creamy brown skin, wavy hair pulled back into a bun, and high cheekbones standing out the way they do, she looks kind of like Queen Nefertiti.

“You don’t have a damned thing to worry about,” she barks out, still managing to look beautiful with her face all contorted. Just not fair.

“Where was your head, girl? What were you thinking about? Why are you always doing everything wrong?”

I don’t say anything ’cause I can’t figure out how I did what I did either. Mama stops going through my hair and starts staring at me. And I can’t figure out whether she’s trying to think of some other nasty thing to say, whether she’s going to shoot some super-villain death rays from her pupils or just haul off and backhand me. But even if she doesn’t do anything now, it’ll come later. She’ll just stash it away in her “Ways to Torture Faye” brain file. And when I least expect it, when I’ve had the last bit of lemonade she intended to drink, or I don’t finish making dinner on time, or I spill a couple of drops of milk on the counter, she’ll get me.

Mama opens up the drawer below the sink. I don’t see what she takes out, but then I hear these clipping sounds.

“He took my jewelry. That’s the only thing I had worth a damn in here. He took my good sapphire earrings and the matching bracelet your father gave me. He took that gold chain Mina Singh brought me back from Trinidad. He took all my valuables. Because you didn’t lock the door.” The clipping stops.

“Or did
you
take it? Like you did last summer, to show off to your friends. You know I don’t like you touching my things. I don’t like you playing around with my clothes, my shoes, my jewelry.”

“I didn’t take anything,” I plead.

“Yeah, maybe that’s what happened. You wanted to get at my jewelry, so you broke my door open and decided to stage this little robbery thing. Because I don’t think you could actually be stupid enough to not lock the front door.”

And now the clipping comes faster and more furiously. Then this pink blob surrounded by all these black strands lands in the sink. And then more black strands come down as the clipping noise continues.

“Mama, what are you doing?”

“That gum was right in the middle of your head. Can’t just cut that out and leave the rest.”

“Don’t cut off all my hair!” I scream.

“You should have thought of that before you let some girl get in your head and do something like that to you. You should have thought about that before you let somebody come in here and take my property.… And don’t you try jerking your head away, because then you can’t blame me for where these scissors might land.”

And so I just close my eyes and scrunch my face up tight. I really don’t want any tears to fall. I try to steady my breathing, so I think of
The Wizard of Oz
—when Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion are running through that field of poppies. Only, I’m Dorothy and Michael Jackson is the Scarecrow, just like in
The Wiz
. But the other two characters are the actual ones from the original movie. And I think of how pretty everything looks and how calm. I think about us all falling asleep, and even though it’s the Wicked Witch’s doing, how peaceful and happy this pretty field of flowers makes us.

I hear this loud “Hmm,” and I realize Mama’s no longer cutting. She’s looking me over. I guess she’s satisfied, because she puts the scissors down and walks out of the bathroom.

“You clean things up in there, and then come clean this mess of an apartment,” she calls out over her shoulder.

I gather enough courage to look down into the white sink, which is now coated with the curly black patches of what was once my hair. Then I gather enough courage to look up into the mirror and see this sad little face that seems so unimportant without anything framing it.

And suddenly, I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if that robber hadn’t run the other way. What would have happened if he had come into the kitchen and my rubber arms couldn’t hold that knife straight enough to defend myself? Would anybody really care? Maybe Daddy. Maybe Keisha. Maybe Uncle Paul. He’s the only one I’ve ever heard tell Mama she needs to lighten up on me. But who else, really? Not so sure Caroline and Gillian would. And I already know how Mama feels—that the only purpose I serve is to take up space and use up her energy and her hard-earned money. Maybe if I had died, I would have turned into one of those angels in heaven. That would be pretty cool, since you never see any black ones. Only little white ones. I mean, what’s the deal? Is heaven segregated? That’s hard to believe, especially since Dr. Martin Luther King is up there. But maybe it’s just taking him a while to get heaven in order. If I’d died, I could have helped integrate it, just like those nine students did
to that school down in Arkansas way back when. See? I remember one thing at least from class. But then again, maybe I didn’t die because I wouldn’t be going to heaven. Maybe I didn’t die because I’m being given a chance to redeem myself.

The next morning
, I walk the block and a half down Clarkson Avenue to the B41 bus stop on Flatbush Avenue, like I do every morning before school. Only, I don’t stop there to wait with the other kids. I decide to take a detour onto Parkside Avenue. People headed to work are filing into the subway station. I move past them and over to Ocean Avenue, where the southern boundary of the park is. Then I move on to a building that’s become way too familiar over the past couple of days. This time, I don’t hesitate when I get to apartment 1H. It’s not that I’ve gained any extra courage over the last sixteen hours, it’s just that I can’t go through all the suspense again. If the knob doesn’t turn this time, then fine, I’ll know somebody’s been in there. If it does, well, I guess I’ll just have to deal with that. So I fix my hand right on that knob and I crank it. It turns. All the way around.

I’m hoping I won’t see anything there on the floor. I’m hoping that the old lady has just been absentminded and
forgotten to lock her door. I’m hoping she might be out running errands and buying some support panty hose and Geritol.

I push the door open and slowly step inside. Once again, I find myself standing on the shiny wooden floor of the old lady’s hallway. Her shopping bag and all the stuff that was in it are still scattered about, and she’s still lying there on the kitchen floor, just as she was when we left her a day and a half ago. Only thing is, she’s not on her back anymore. She’s leaned up against her side, the legs of the table holding her in that position. So I guess she wasn’t dead then, but I’m sure she is now. I mean, what old person can survive on a hard kitchen floor like that? Then I get a thought. If she moved, then I didn’t really kill her. Maybe she tried to get up, but the blow to her head made her dizzy and she fell and hit her head again and that second blow was the one that did her in.

I close the door behind me and take a couple of steps forward. Where I’m standing in the hall is dark, but the ceiling light is still on in the kitchen. And it’s making a little buzzing sound. I never noticed that when we were in there before, but it wasn’t as quiet then, what with Caroline huffing and puffing, and Gillian babbling to herself like an insane person, and my heart beating as loud as it was.

The dishes Caroline threw down are still broken and spread across the floor. I’m kind of trying to avoid looking at the old lady, so I just stand there closing and opening my eyes. Maybe if I do it often enough, one time when I open them she won’t be there anymore. I’ll open them and
I won’t be standing in the warm hallway listening to the steam coming up out of the radiator. Maybe I’ll be standing outside her front door and the knob won’t turn. I’ll hear a television blaring, and I can just head off to school, where my main worries will be that crazy religious studies Nazi, pretty and perfect Charlene Simpson flirting with yummy Curvy Miller, and me unveiling my new, unflattering hairdon’t.

I try to take a few more steps forward, but it’s as if I’ve landed in quicksand and I’m being sucked under. The thing is, I realize I don’t really know if this old lady is dead. I mean, I think she is. She looks like she is. Her face is all ashy-looking and her eyes are closed and she’s just not moving. But it’s not like I have much experience with dead people. The only real dead person I’ve ever seen was my grandfather. They had an open casket and it creeped me out for an entire year. He didn’t even look like my granddad. He looked all waxy and fake, like the plastic fruit some people keep in a bowl on their dining room table.

The old lady doesn’t look waxy from where I’m standing, so maybe she isn’t dead. I drop my book bag down on the floor and force my legs to move. I step on this one floorboard and it squeaks something awful. I don’t remember it making any noise the last time I was in here, but maybe we all managed not to step on it. Maybe we did step on it, but we were so caught up in our criminal caper we didn’t even notice. Anyway, I pass the bathroom and keep going. But I feel all hot and bothered, because if she is dead, I did it. I mean, even if she did try to get up and fell down again and
hit her head a second time, technically, I’d still be responsible because I put her in the position to fall again in the first place.