“Patricia!” snapped Miss Thompson, looking at me with her face twisted up like she smelled some dog doo-doo. “You’re very tardy.”
It was 8:45 a.m. and I’d just walked into my third-grade classroom. Miss Thompson was doing her best to make me feel bad for showing up late. But she didn’t need to. I had my own reasons for wanting to get to school on time. If I wasn’t there by 8:00 a.m., I missed getting Free Breakfast. That little box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and itty-bitty container of apple juice were the only things I liked about school. I hated being late more than Miss Thompson could ever imagine. But I couldn’t get to school on time when nobody woke me up.
It had been more than a year since we’d left the liquor house, and Mama, Sweetie, my brothers, and I were living in a run-down two-bedroom duplex on Griffin Street, on Atlanta’s West Side, across the street from a family who kept a dirty brown sofa and busted refrigerator in their front yard. Mama didn’t see a reason to open her eyes until The Price Is Right came on at 11 a.m. So it was usually Dre who woke me up in the morning by kicking me in the leg and hollering, “Git up, girl!” But he wasn’t the most reliable.
Dre was eleven years old and “living his life,” as he liked to say, which meant he was busy stealing college kids’ bikes off the campus at Georgia Tech. Sometimes he’d get caught by the popo and thrown into juvenile detention. When that happened, nobody would wake me up and I’d come to school late.
Miss Thompson stared at me standing in the classroom doorway, sighed, and rolled her eyes. “All right,” she said, finally. “Go hang up your coat and come take your seat.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I could feel the eyeballs of every kid in the class on my back as I walked across the room to the closet behind the blackboard. I hated those kids almost as much as I hated being late.
Porsha and Mercedes were my biggest enemies. I don’t know what I ever did to make them mad, but those two little bitches made it their mission to make my life miserable. After school they’d roll up on me and Sweetie and tease the fuck outta us. “Nasty-ass bitches!” they’d scream. “Look at your nappy-ass hair! Your shoes is raggedy! You nasty and you stink! Y’all smell like dog shit.” I guess being named after luxury vehicles made them feel like they were better than everybody.
“Fuck you, Pontiac!” I’d holler at Porsha, and she’d damn near lose her mind. “It’s POR-SHA!” she’d yell.
In the closet, I slid off my jacket and hung it on my hook. My coat was red with a dingy used-to-be-white collar and dirty cuffs. I leaned over and gave it a sniff. In fact, it did not smell like dog shit. But it sure did smell. The odor was more a mixture of wet mildew and dried funk. It wasn’t even my funk, either. I don’t know who that jacket used to belong to. Dre and Jeffro had stolen it one night, along with a bunch of other clothes, from the donation bins out behind the Goodwill store on North Avenue. Most poor folks shopped inside the Goodwill, but we were so broke my brothers had to rob the place.
As much as I hated school, I liked being alone in the coat closet. It was cozy and quiet. I ran my hands over the different-colored jackets hanging on their hooks. Porsha had a light pink coat with pretty fake fur around the hood, so I stuck my index finger in my nose and wiped it on her collar. “There’s your present, bitch,” I whispered.
Above the coat hooks was a shelf where all the kids who didn’t get Free Lunch kept their lunch boxes. They were filled with every kind of sandwich you could think of—bologna, peanut butter and jelly, souse meat, sliced ham, government cheese—all of them cut in triangles and wrapped in tinfoil. At lunchtime kids would sit in the cafeteria and lay out their sandwiches, thermoses filled with Kool-Aid, and little sacks of Lay’s potato chips, like they were at a swap meet. All by myself in the closet, surrounded by all that food, I could hear my empty belly calling out to me. “Girl,” it said, “I’m hungry!”
I had missed Free Breakfast, and Free Lunch was hours away. But it occurred to me that Mercedes, who was fat as hell anyway, probably wouldn’t notice if I ripped off an itty-bitty piece of whatever sandwich her mama had packed in her lunchbox. Hell, sometimes that heifer had two sandwiches. There was no way she’d notice if a little corner was missing. I grabbed her blue Smurf lunch box off the shelf and crouched down under the coats. When I opened the lid, the smell hit me like some good perfume: ham and American cheese on soft white bread, dripping with Miracle Whip.
We didn’t have this kind of top-shelf food at home. Mama used her food stamps to buy runny no-name ketchup and cheap Sunbeam bread. Put those together, you got a ketchup sandwich, also known as dinner. One time Mama came home with a big tin can of government peanut butter. You knew it was government because it said “surplus” on it. That’s not a brand they sell at the Super Saver. That peanut butter was a health hazard. It was dry as hell and would get stuck in your throat like a ball of concrete. After the time Andre almost choked to death on a sandwich, we learned not to eat the government peanut butter unless you had a big cup of water right there ready to wash it down.
I pulled off a tiny piece of Mercedes’s sandwich and put it in my mouth. But I was so hungry, and she was so fat, I thought, Fuck it, and started shoving that delicious sandwich in my mouth faster than I could swallow. I closed my eyes and let out a little moan. It was like I’d died and gone to sandwich heaven. I was so deep in my feelings of enjoyment for this good-good food, I didn’t even hear Miss Thompson come into the closet. I opened my eyes and there she was, standing right beside me.
“Patricia Williams!”
“Yeth?” I said, looking up and swallowing hard.
“Young lady, are you back here eating up somebody else’s lunch?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then whose is that?” she asked, pointing at Mercedes’s blue lunch box in my lap.
“I don’t know,” I answered. Miss Thompson glared at me with her eyeballs popping out of her head.
“Why?” I asked, holding up the sandwich. “You want some?”