I wait until I’m sure he’s gone, and then I creep out of my spot, quiet as a little bobcat. The thing about bobcats is, they can be two foot from you and you’ll never know it. One big breath, and I run past the cellar door and around the fig tree. After you’re past it, you’re safe. Riggs knows the workers look out the kitchen windows a lot. He won’t do things where anybody else can see.
Camellia’s waiting for me on the hill behind the church house playground. Lark and Fern are riding a teeter-totter with Gabion in the middle. Stevie’s sitting in the dirt beside Camellia. He climbs over into my lap soon as I sit down.
“Good,” Camellia says. “Get him offa me. He stinks like pee.”
“He can’t help it.” Stevie wraps his arms around my neck and lays against my chest. He’s sticky, and he does smell bad. I rub a hand over his head, and he whimpers and pulls away. There’s a goose egg under his hair. The helpers here like to thump kids on the head where it won’t show.
“Yes he can help it. He could talk too, if he wanted to. He’s just gettin’ hisself in trouble with the workers. I told him he better stop it or else.” Camellia’s a fine one to talk. If any of us does get the closet while we’re here, it’ll be her. I still don’t know for sure what happens in the closet, but it must be bad. Just a couple days ago, Mrs. Murphy stood over the breakfast table and said, When the food thief is caught, it’ll be the closet, and not just for one day.
Nothing’s disappeared from the kitchen since.
“Stevie’s just scared. He misses…” I stop without saying it. It’ll only make him upset if I bring up his sister. Sometimes I forget that, even though he won’t talk anymore, he can still understand everything we say.
“What’d you hear at the window?” Camellia hates it that I won’t let anybody else go under the azaleas. She always looks me over and sniffs at me to see if I found any peppermints while I was there. She thinks the big boys are lying about Mr. Riggs. If I don’t watch her, she’ll try to sidle off over there while we’re out to play. I can’t turn my back on her for a minute, unless I’m leaving her with the babies to watch.
“She didn’t say anything about Briny.” I’m still trying to make sense of what I heard under Mrs. Murphy’s window. I’m not sure how much of it I should tell Camellia.
“He ain’t comin’. He’s got hisself in jail or somethin’, and he can’t get out. Queenie’s dead.”
I scramble to my feet, taking Stevie with me. “No she ain’t! Don’t you say that, Mellia! Don’t you ever say that!”
On the playground, the teeter-totters stop, and feet scrape the ground to hold swings still. Kids look our way. They’re used to watching the big boys get in fights and roll around and kick and punch. It don’t usually happen with girls.
“It’s true!” Camellia’s on her feet quick as a whip, her chin poking out, her long, skinny arms cocked on her hips. Wads of freckles seem to squint her eyes down to practically nothing, and her nose scrunches up. She looks like a spotted pig.
“It ain’t!”
“Is so!”
Stevie whines and squirms to get away. I figure I’d better let him. He runs off to the teeter-totter, where Lark grabs him up in her arms.
Camellia rears back a fist. It won’t be the first time we’ve gotten in a knockdown, spit-flying, hair-pulling match.
“Hey! Hey, you cut that out!” Before I even see it coming, James is out of the big boys’ hidey-hole, and he’s headed our way.
Camellia hesitates just long enough for him to get to her. His big hand snakes out and grabs her dress, and he slings her into the dirt, hard.
“Stay down,” he growls, and points a finger.
She doesn’t, of course. She pops to her feet madder than a swatted hornet. He shoves her down again.
“Hey!” I yell. “Stop it!” She’s my sister, even if she was about to punch my lights out.
James looks my way and grins, the chipped tooth showing the pink tip of his tongue. “You want me to?”
Camellia takes a swing at him, and he grabs her arm, holding her far enough away that she can’t kick him. She’s like a daddy longlegs spider with one foot stuck in a door. He squeezes so hard her skin goes purple. Her eyes fill up and spill over, but she just keeps on fighting.
“Stop!” I yell. “Let her alone!”
“You want me to, then you be my girlfriend, pretty girl,” he says. And, “Elsewise, she’s fair game.”
Camellia roars and squeals and goes wild.
“Let her be!” I take a swing, and James grabs my wrist, and now he’s got us both. My bones crush together. The babies run over from the playground, even Stevie, and start pounding James’s legs. He swings Camellia around and uses her to knock down Fern and Gabion. Fern’s nose spouts blood, and she screams, grabbing her face.
“All right! All right!” I say. What else can I do? I look around for grown-ups, and like always, there aren’t any.
“All right, what, pretty girl?” James asks.
“All right, I’ll be your girlfriend. But I ain’t gonna kiss you.”
That seems good enough for him. He dumps Camellia in the dirt and tells her she better stay there. He makes me follow him up the hill and drags me around an old outhouse that’s nailed shut so nobody can get in it and get snakebit. For the second time that day, a hammer pounds inside me. “I ain’t kissin’ you,” I tell him again.
“Shut up,” he says.
Behind the outhouse, he pushes me to the dirt and plops down next to me, still squeezing my arm. My breath comes fast and hangs in my throat. I taste my stomach.
What’s he plan to do to me? Growing up on a boat and with four babies born after I came along, I know a little bit about what men and women do together. I don’t want somebody to do that to me. Ever. I don’t like boys, and I never will. James’s breath smells like rotten potatoes, and the only boy I’ve ever thought I might let kiss me was Silas, and that was only for a minute or two.
The chants of his gang wind their way around the building. “James’s got a girlfriend. James’s got a girlfriend. James and May sittin’ in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g…”
But James doesn’t try to kiss me. He just sits there with red splotches working up his neck and over his cheeks. “You’re pretty.” His voice squeaks like a baby pig’s. It’s funny, but I don’t laugh. I’m too scared.
“No I ain’t.”
“You’re real pretty.” He lets go of my wrist and tries to hold my hand. I pull it away and wrap my arms around my knees, holding myself in a tight ball.
“I don’t like boys,” I tell him.
“I’m gonna marry you someday.”
“I don’t wanna marry anybody. I’m gonna build a boat and go down the river. Take care of myself.”
“I might get on your boat too.”
“No you ain’t.”
We sit there a while. The boys down the hill chant, “James’s got a girlfriend….K-i-s-s-i-n-g…”
He lolls his elbows over his knees, looking at me. “That where you come from? The river?”
“Yep, it is.”
We talk about boats. James is from a dirt farm in Shelby County. Miss Tann picked him and his brother up off the side of the road when they were walking to school one day. He was in the fourth grade then. He’s been here ever since and not seen a day of school this whole time. His brother is long gone. Adopted.
James lifts his chin. “I don’t want me some new parents,” he says. “I figure I’ll be too big pretty soon, and I’ll get outa here. I’m gonna need me a wife. We can go live on the river, if you want.”
“My daddy’s comin’ back to get us.” I feel bad saying it. I feel sorry for James. He seems lonesome more than anything. Lonesome and sad. “He’ll be here pretty soon.”
James just shrugs. “I’ll bring you some tea cakes tomorrow. But you gotta still be my girlfriend.”
I don’t answer. My mouth waters thinking about tea cakes. I guess now I know who’s been sneaking around in the kitchen at night. “You hadn’t oughta. You might get the closet.”
“I ain’t scared.” He puts his hand over mine.
I let it stay there.
Maybe I don’t mind it too much.