(5) A movie theater that Becca said no one ever used.
(6) Big furniture made from the same kind of leather as my uncle’s favorite jacket.
(7) No dog.
(8) A scraggly cat named Carl, that didn’t wear clothes or look like it had ever had a massage a day in its life.
(9) Me and the two other girls, who were taking selfies like they ain’t never been nowhere.
(10) The familiar smell of sugar.
“This is Granny,” Becca said as we popped into the kitchen for a moment. An old lady dressed like an old lady was baking cookies.
“Hi, girls,” she said, scooping batter from a bowl. “Sweets will be ready in a short while.” The old lady’s voice was like Momly’s if it had a whole bunch of cuts in it.
“We’re going to be upstairs doing work, Granny.”
“Okay, well then, I won’t bother you. They’ll be down here. Chocolate chip, oatmeal, snickerdoodle, and peanut butter. You girls help yourselves.”
“She made all that?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s her hobby. We don’t even eat them. She just likes to make them and then give them away to our neighbors. I like cupcakes better. What’s your dad’s favorite recipe?”
I don’t know if it was the sugar smell, or the buildup from earlier, or what, but I just . . . said it.
“He passed away.”
Becca looked me in the eye. Straight in the eye. “I’m . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“It was a long time ago.” And now, relieved I got it over with, I changed the subject without actually changing the subject. Another one of those small-talk tips I picked up from Momly. “Where your folks?” I really asked because the house was so quiet. No TV. No radio. No noise besides pans being slid into the oven, and the weird giggles of T-N-T holding their cell phones in the air, posing.
“Where they always are. At work,” Becca shot back. “Come on.” And with Taylor and TeeTee trying for the millionth time to get the whole chandelier in the shot, I followed behind Becca as we walked up one of those round-and-round stairs to her room.
Here’s the thing about hair-flipper bedrooms, they basically only come one way. I mean, I had never actually been in one in real life, but I had seen them enough times on TV to know that they’re all bedazzled in pink and purple. They look like candy shops. Like doll houses. Like living inside of a strawberry cupcake.
But as we entered Becca’s room . . . uhhhhh . . . blackness. Not like Black History Month blackness. And not blackness like I passed out from the overload of girlyness in Becca’s room. I didn’t. Though I did feel like I was gonna black out from shock, because if Becca’s house was a castle, Becca’s room in this house was the dungeon. The upstairs dungeon. Everything . . . eh-ver-ree-thing in her room was black. The walls, the closet doors, the lamps and lights, the desk, the ceiling, everything. It was like Becca was really a YMBC or something. Like she was really a button-bagger!
As I tried to hide my shock, Taylor and TeeTee finally came busting in the room all squeals and smiles, which quickly turned into gasps and frowns. Their faces were stuck, half-melted. Terrified. Meanwhile, Becca pulled a chair from behind her door, another from the desk against the wall, and plopped down on her bed like none of this was a big deal.
“Okay. Let’s get to work on Miss Frida.” She clapped her hands together, excited.
Silence. From me and T-N-T, whose struggle-faces looked like they were trying to swallow their own tongues. Me, well, all I kept telling myself was, two hours. Just two hours, Patty.
“Yeah, let’s get to . . . work,” I finally said, and before I could grab one of the chairs, TeeTee and Taylor had already snatched them, positioned them right next to each other, and right next to the door. So I sat on the bed. Take it easy. No big deal. All-black room . . . no problem. No problem at all. Don’t really mean nothing. Nope. Not at all. Not. At. All.
Funny thing is, the group work went exactly the same as it did in school. Me, basically trying to manage it all while T-N-T, who were usually distracted by paint on their nails, were now distracted by paint on the walls. So while me and Becca were digging around on the Internet for more details about our Mexican artist friend, Taylor and TeeTee were whispering to each other, until finally Becca said, “Are y’all gonna help?”
“Oh, yeah,” Taylor said, shocked that she got called out.
“We just had a question about it all,” TeeTee added. I don’t know what Becca thought was coming next, but I thought it was going to be about Frida. Turns out, the “it all” they had a question about had nothing to do with the project. “What’s the deal with . . . um . . . all this?” TeeTee waved her hands around like she was swatting flies.
“What do you mean?” Becca asked, in that honest way she was always asking something.
“I mean, this.” TeeTee repeated the wave.
“Look, I’m not trying to be mean, but it’s just . . . a little weird,” Taylor jumped back in. “It’s like at school, you act one way, and it’s not all . . . um . . . goth-y like this, but really you . . .”
“She’s what?” I asked, cocking my head to the side. I don’t know where it came from, but something about the way they were talking rubbed me wrong. The same way I felt when people tried to mess with Ghost. Or Sunny. Or even Lu. But Becca didn’t need me.
“Goth-y?” She was for-real confused. “Oh. You wanna know about the black.” She smiled, totally unfazed. Becca reached behind her back and snatched the curtains closed. Then she got up and slapped the light switch on the wall. And then blackness went to darkness . . . and the whole universe appeared.
Stars and planets and whatever other things be up there in space popped out of the black, glowing green, all around us.
“What . . . is all this?” I asked, looking up at the ceiling.
“This is as much of the galaxy as you can fit in a bedroom. And that”—she leaned over to see what was directly above my head—“well, that looks like the Gemini Twins.” She tried to get me to see what she was talking about, but it all just looked like a bunch of stars to me. “Constellations. Like connect the dots, except with stars, you know?” I didn’t know. But I still thought it was kinda cool.
“I ain’t never seen all these stars up there. I mean, I seen a few, but not like this.”
“They’re all up there. Each one connected to another in some weird way. It’s amazing.”
“Wild,” I corrected her.
“Not that wild,” she corrected my correction. “At least not to me. My folks are rocket scientists. This is pretty much as normal as it gets in this house.”
“Rocket scientists?” Taylor finally found her words again.
“Well, they’re really called astronautical engineers, basically the same thing.”