“Yeah, ho, if you wanna get beat down,” Joya says. “Git your ass back in the toilet.”
She says it really black, poking at me with her elbow. I have to smother a laugh. She talks like this with some of the other black kids, but sometimes she likes to turn it on for Candace; it makes Candace just about wet her pants.
There is silence from the other side of the door.
“She won’t move away,” I whisper. I mime Candace, making my lips into a thin line, pressing my ear to an invisible door.
“You want me to move her? I’ll pop her head right off her body like a shrimp head,” Joya says.
It’s not an idle threat. The other two girls in our cabin tried to bully Joya when she first arrived. Shar and Karice came at Joya in the common room, smiling mean, ready to teach her the pecking order. They expected her to shrink and cry and take a quiet slap or two. She was outnumbered, and she’s so small and cute. Mistake. Joya leaped right at Shar and grabbed her hoops. She jerked them through her ears, tearing the lobes clean through. When Shar fell down screaming, Joya hurled her tiny body on Karice and bit her on the face, then punched the bite until Karice went fetal. Joya stood up, not a scratch on her, just as Mrs. Mack came running in. Joya told Mrs. Mack that Shar and Karice had been fighting with each other, all the while staring down the bleeding girls, daring them to contradict her. No one did.
“Candace isn’t worth getting in trouble over,” I tell her, then call, “Just a minute.”
I get up and pull my footlocker out from the under the bed. It’s the only thing I own that locks—not that the lock keeps Candace out. I open it and start unpacking pictures, my peacock feather earrings, a braided piece of mane I clipped from Hervé’s big bay gelding. I want the Ramayana lying flat on the bottom, so it won’t get wrinkled.
“Y’all! I’m standing out here in a towel!” Candace whines.
I pack everything back carefully, and then I let her in. For the next few nights, I feel that poem’s presence every time I try to sleep. It’s like I’ve let something alive and dangerous move in under my bed. I toss and dream. My food tastes flat and all the textures are slightly off. I should burn it, but I don’t. Kai asked me to mail it, but I don’t do that, either. The tremble in badass Joya’s voice when she said TPR’ed stops me.
The day before my next court-appointed phone time with my mother, I can’t sleep at all. There’s a streetlight right outside the window, and its brightness feels like a searchlight. I could tell Kai that her poem never came. I could tell her a dog got it. I could somehow blame Candace. On the phone, I could sell it, but what happens when she comes to get me? Like most excellent liars, Kai has a nose for truth. Lying to her face is the hardest kind of lying.
I hear Candace’s bed creak, as if thinking her name was enough to summon her. My bed is too full of churning worry to have room for Candace. I scootch to the edge, making my body into a wall against her as she creeps silently across.
Lying won’t actually fix the problem. If I tell Kai it’s lost or ruined, she can rewrite it and resend it.
Candace hovers, and I pull my blanket up over my head.
“Can I get in?” Candace whispers, as if my blanket isn’t answer enough.
“Go die, Candace,” I say, mean as I can, but she’s impervious. Her spongy body can absorb superhuman amounts of mean.
“I have lickem sticks,” she wheedles.
Lickem sticks is Redneck for Fun Dip, my favorite candy. I unturtle from my blanket to see if she really has some. She holds up the little packets. Lime is missing, but she has cherry and grape.
“Where did you get that?”
“Jeremy.” Jeremy is a pimply high schooler who lives in one of the boy cabins. He has a constant pants tent and dead eyes.
“Ugh, it probably has perv juice on it,” I say. He’d never give her candy, not unless she did something for him. Or to him. That makes me want to pinch Candace as hard as I can, but I settle for telling her, “You’re so gross.”
Candace shoves her flossy hair behind her ears, truculent, and changes the subject. “I think your mom’s poem is real good. It’s real romantic.”
That has me sitting up, fast, and I do pinch her. “Stay out of my stuff!” She takes the pinch and waits for the next one. She’ll take that one, too, and keep on waiting, resigned to it before it even happens. “How’d you get my combination?”
She ignores the question. “I know how you can send that poem to Dwayne and not get your mom in trouble.”