Cornrows, Low-Cut, Ponytail, and Puny-Tail in front of me. Chop ’em down, Patty. Push, push, push, breathe. Cornrows is on my side now. The crowd is screaming the traditional chant when someone is getting passed—Woooop! Woooop! Woooop! Push. Push. Cornrows is toast. One hundred meters to go. Mouth wide open. Eyes wide open. Stride wide open. Chop ’em down, Patty. Arms pumping, whipping the air out of my way like water. Low-Cut is slowing up. Her little pea-head’s bobbling like it could snap right off. She’s tired. Finally. Woooop! Woooop! Got her. Two more to go. Ponytail can feel me coming. She can probably hear my footsteps over the screaming crowd. She knows I’m close, and then she makes the biggest mistake ever—the one thing every coach tells you to never do—she looked back. See, when you look back, it automatically knocks your stride off and it gets you messed up mentally. And once Ponytail looked over her shoulder, the woooops started back up like a siren. Woooop! Woooop! Woooop! Fifty meters. That’s right, I’m coming. Chop ’em down, Patty. I’m coming. I could see Puny-Tail just ahead of her, that little twist of hair in the back of her head like a snake tongue. She was running out of breath. I could see that by the way her form had broken down. Ponytail was too. We all were. And even worse for me, we were also running out of track.
I got Ponytail by a nose—second place—then collapsed, people cheering all around me, jumping up and down in the stands quickly becoming a wavy blur of color as the tears rose. Second? Stupid second place? Ugh. No way was I going to cry. Trust me, I wanted to, water pricking at my eyelids, but no way. I wanted to kick something, I was so mad! Coach Whit came over and helped me up, and once I was standing, I yanked away from her and limped over to the bench. My legs were burning and cramping, but I wanted to kick something anyway. Maybe kick the bench over. Kick those stupid orange slices Lu’s mother brought. Anything. But instead I just sat down and didn’t say a word for the rest of the meet. Yes, I’m a sore loser, if that’s what you wanna call it. To me, I just like to win. I only wanna win. Anything else is . . . false. Fake.
But real.
So real, I didn’t even want to talk about it on the way to church the next day. Not with no one. Not even with God. I’d spent all morning braiding Maddy’s hair the same way Ma used to braid mine when I was little. Only difference is Ma got fat fingers, and used to be braiding like she was trying to strip my edges or make me bald. Talkin’ ’bout, “Gotta make it tight so it don’t come loose.” Right. But I don’t even do Maddy’s that tight, and I can knock out a whole head full of hair in half an hour if she sits still. Which she never does.
“How many more?” Maddy whined, squirming on the floor in front of me.
“I’m almost done. Just chill out, so I can . . .” I picked up the can of beads and shook them in her ear like one of them Spanish shaker things. And just like that, she calmed down and let me tilt her head forward so I could braid the last section, the bit of curls tightly wound at the base of her neck. I dipped my finger in the gunk on the back of my hand, then massaged it into Maddy’s scalp. Then I stroked grease into the leftover bush-ball, tugging it straight, then letting it go, watching it shrink back into dark brown cotton candy.
“What colors you want?” I asked, separating the hair into the three parts.
“Ummmm . . .” Maddy put a finger to her chin, acting like she thinking. I say acting, because she knew what color she wanted. She picked the same one every week. Matter fact, there was only one color in the can.
“Red,” we both said at the same time, me, of course, with a little more pepper and a little less pep. Maddy tried to whip around and give me a funny face, but I was mid-braid.
“Uh-uh. Stay still.”
Then came the beading. Today, thirty braids. So, three red beads on each braid. Ninety beads. I used tiny bits of aluminum foil on the ends to keep the beads from slipping off, even though I knew they would anyway. But who got time to use those little rubber bands? Not me. And definitely not Maddy.
When we finished, Maddy did what she always did—ran to the bathroom. I followed her, like I always did, and lifted her up so she could see herself in the mirror. She smiled, her mouth like a piano with only one black key, one front tooth missing. Then Maddy ran back to the living room and blew a kiss at a picture propped up on the table next to the TV—the same picture every time—of me at her age, six, with a big cheese and a missing front tooth and braids, red beads, aluminum foil on the ends.
I do Maddy’s hair every Sunday for two reasons. The first is because Momly can’t do it. If it was up to her, Maddy’s hair would be in two Afro-puffs every day. Either that, or Momly would’ve shaved it all off by now. It’s not that she don’t care. She does. It’s just that she don’t know what to do with hair like Maddy’s—like ours. Ma do, but Momly . . . nope. She never had to deal with nothing like it, and there ain’t no rule book for white people to know how to work with black hair. And her husband, my uncle Tony, he ain’t no help. Ever since they adopted us, every time I talk about Maddy’s hair, Uncle Tony says the same thing—just let it rock. Like he’s gonna sit in the back of Maddy’s class and stink-face all the six-year-old bullies in barrettes. Right. But luckily for everybody, especially Maddy, I know what I’m doing. Been a black girl all my life.
The other reason I always do Maddy’s hair on Sundays is because that’s when we see Ma, and she don’t wanna see Maddy looking like “she ain’t never been nowhere.” So after Maddy’s hair is done, we get dressed. As in, dressed up. All the way up. Maddy puts on one of her church dresses, white patent leather shoes that most people only wear on Easter Sunday, but for us—for Ma—every Sunday is like Easter Sunday. I put on a dress too, run a comb through my hair until it cooperates. Ugly black ballerina flats because Ma don’t want me “looking fast in the house of the Lord.” Then Momly drives us across town to Barnaby Terrace, my old neighborhood.
Barnaby Terrace is . . . fine. I don’t really know what else to say about it except for the fact that there’s nothing really to say about it. Ain’t nobody rich, that’s for sure. But ain’t nobody really poor, neither. Everybody’s just regular. Regular people going to regular jobs having regular kids who go to regular schools and grow up to be regular people with regular jobs, and on and on. And I guess everything was pretty regular about me, too, until six years ago. Follow me. I’d just turned six, and me and my dad were having one of our famous invisible cupcake parties. Kinda like how little girls on old TV shows be having tea parties, but you know how it don’t ever really be tea in the cups? Like that. Except I didn’t have a tea set, and my mom wouldn’t let us use her real teacups, which were really just random coffee mugs, plus my dad always said tea don’t even taste good enough to pretend to drink it. He also said “tea” and “eat” are made of the same letters anyway, so pretending to eat was pretty much the same as pretending to drink. And what better thing to pretend to eat than cupcakes. And that’s what we always had—imaginary cupcakes.
But on this night, my mother cut the party short because it was a school night, plus she was pregnant with Maddy at the time and needed my father to massage her feet. So he whispered in my ear, “Sleep tight, sweet Pancake, your mama and the Waffle need me.” Then he kissed me good night—first on the forehead, then on one cheek, then on the other cheek. I don’t know what happened next. My guess is that after rubbing Ma’s feet, he kissed her good night too. And Maddy, the “Waffle” who was probably being all fidgety in Ma’s stomach. I bet Dad smooched right on the belly button, then rolled over and went to sleep.
But he never woke up.