TO DO: Calm down, count to ten (or ten thousand)
THE FIRST THING I do in the morning every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday is send Ma a text message of a smiley face, just to let her know I’m thinking about her on the days she has to get her blood cleaned. And when I say cleaned, I don’t mean cleaned like scrubbed. You try to scrub blood, you just gonna wind up with nasty red hands. What I mean by cleaned is the doctors do this thing where they run the blood out of one of her veins through a tube that’s connected to a machine, and that machine takes all the bad stuff out, and then pumps the blood out of the other end through a different tube and back into a different vein. Takes like three or four hours, and leaves her super tired, but she gotta do it because the sugar also broke her kidneys, and when your kidneys don’t work, your blood gets dirty. And when your blood gets dirty, it basically messes all kinds of other stuff up inside you. Think about it like this: When you get dirt in your shoe, do it feel good? Nope. It makes you walk with a limp, like there are little fires blazing between your toes. And when you get dirt in your eye, can you see? Of course not. And it burns like crazy, too, every little speck of dirt like a teeny-tiny lit match. So imagine having dirt in your blood. Mess your whole body up. Make your organs feel like they in a microwave.
So, yeah, I text her to let her know I’m thinking about her on those days. I text her on other days too, but especially on the blood-cleaning days. She always sends a smiley face back, which I appreciate because I know how much she hates texting. She loves getting them, but really hates sending them.
Momly is who goes to pick Ma up, who takes her to the hospital’s dialysis—another word with “die” in it—unit, where she gets the treatment, who then brings her back home. And because Momly gets to Ma’s house at the butt crack of dawn, Ma goes to bed dumb early on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays so she can be up and ready to go. And whenever Ma’s not at treatment, she’s recovering from it, which means she’s usually lying in bed drifting in and out of sleep watching TV, or as she always puts it, “letting the TV watch her.” So the morning smiley faces we send each other are important.
Correction: the smiley faces we send to each other are important to me. Almost as important as Vicky Tines’s boyfriend is to Vicky Tines, who she announces is in high school every single day in homeroom. Mrs. Stansfield takes roll by going down her list and looking to see who’s there and who’s not. At Barnaby, Ms. Simmons used to call our names out loud. Needed to hear our voices. But in homeroom at Chester, there were a lot of voices already being heard. Like Vicky Tines’s. Ugh. All of Vicky’s friends be having heart eyes when they listen to Vicky go on and on (and on and on and on). Macy Franks pays no attention to her and just folds paper. Like, what’s the name of that thing . . . that way you fold paper into animals and all that? Mrs. Richardson used to help me and Cotton make paper fortune-tellers when she was babysitting us back in the day. Used to give mine to Momly when she picked me up. But my fortune-teller ain’t never predict this, that’s for sure. Anyway, Macy just be doing that. Making birds and stuff. Laurie Brenner wants a belly-button ring. Jasmine Stanger already got one. I saw it when she was showing Laurie. Pretty sure something’s wrong with it.
First period, English. Mr. Winston is teaching us poetry. Which means Mr. Winston is teaching us boredom. My uncle said, “Tell Mr. Winston to teach y’all some Queen Latifah.” At Chester? Right. Remember the whole “think about cannons” thing? That’s because we’ve been learning this one called “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Cannons are mentioned in it, and Mr. Winston reads it like he some kind of actor or something, all bass-y and slow, like the man who narrates the previews at the movies. Like his dramatic voice is gonna make the poem any less wack. But hot sauce on cardboard is still cardboard.
Then comes math. Geometry. Ms. Teller says “perpendicular” and “hypotenuse” like her life depends on it. My life depends on math being over as quickly as possible.
Then lunch.
Okay, I know what you’re thinking, what you think I’m gonna say. You think I’m gonna go on some kind of rant about how the cafeteria is basically like some kind of “meanie mealtime” and little ol’ Patty Watty doesn’t have a group so she can’t find a seat, right? Wah wah wah! Right? Well . . . right. Kinda. But not exactly. See, the real issue with the cafeteria is that it’s tiny. Like teeny-tiny. It’s almost as if when they started this academy, they didn’t expect there to be so many people who would actually come to get academied. They probably never thought regular kids from regular neighborhoods and regular schools would end up here. But here I am. Looking for a seat in a space as small as the church we go to, and with just as much noise, but none of the spirit.
Point is, there was never enough seats, which was okay, because I never sat down anyway. I would basically just do a few laps around the room, scarfing my pasta Bolognese, which I found out was not pasta and baloney, but was actually just regular spaghetti. But yeah, I’d just circle the room, because when you keep moving, people think you going somewhere, like you on a mission and shouldn’t be bothered. Like you busy. And that’s better than people realizing that you not busy at all. That you not okay with lunchrooms that don’t have trays, and that ain’t big enough spaces to disappear in, and that don’t stink of week-old dirty mop water, which I now know is the familiar smell of love and friendship.
Usually, on the tenth lap, my food would be gone, and the bell would ring. I had it all timed perfectly. But today, on lap number two, barely into my salmon teriyaki, which, by the way, should be called teriyaki salmon the same way barbecue chicken is barbecue chicken and not chicken barbecue. I swear . . . Chester. Anyway, on lap two, Becca stood up from her seat like a bird who just popped its head out of a nest, and waved at me. Well, not at me, but she waved me over. And I felt . . . funny. Like, confused, and weirded out, and skeptical, and yes, I can’t front, a little excited. I cut between the tables, holding my plate steady, and once I got to where she was, smack in the middle of a crowded table full of . . . well . . . you know . . . girls on either side of her eating and talking and laughing, she said, “What are you doing?”
“What you mean?” I replied, pretending like I hadn’t just been acting like a lunch monitor, trying not to drop my plate while forking my fish.
“I mean, how come you’re not sitting?” she asked. The girl beside her, a girl I’d seen every day but never really met, whipped her face toward me. Two faces looking at mine. Four rosy cheeks. Four mascaraed eyes. Four bazillion strands of blond.
“Oh, I’m good.”