They don’t know Joya and I fell out. Still, I find my temper rising to it. I don’t like her name in their mouths any more than I liked hearing it from Candace.
I ignore them, looking for Shar’s weak spot. Except for those snaggle teeth, she is pretty. She’ll try to protect her face. Behind her, I can see the other two Hispanic kids have come out with their trays. They see us and pause, uncertain, milling by the silverware cart.
“Oh, yeah,” Kim agrees, “Joya’s mama gonna turn her out.”
Shar wears her hair short, in little rings, but not so short that I can’t get a good hold on it. Her ears peek out from under, and I can see the places in her lobes where Joya jerked her earrings through. They’ve healed split, each edge sealing itself, so that her lobes are doubled.
When I don’t react to Kim and Karice’s bait, Shar reaches fast across the table and snatches the top of my biscuit. She licks it with her tongue, a big, juicy lick, taking half the jam out. Then she sets it back in place. She gives me an eyebrow quirk, like she’s asking what I’m going to do about it, luxuriously licking my jam off her fingers.
“I never see you this up close, Shar,” I tell her. “I didn’t realize how much your earlobes look like butts. It’s like you have two old-lady sag-butts hanging off your ears.”
Shar stands so abruptly that her chair scrapes back along the floor. Now she’s looming over me, and Kim and Karice lean, too. For a single, breathless second I think it’s going down right here, right now. I find my body rising, too, readying to improvise.
In that second of fraught silence, Candace, of all people, sinks into the chair beside me.
“Hey, y’all,” she says, and we all boggle at her.
She blushes and ducks her head, drawing her knees up and perching her heels on the chair’s edge, wrapping her skinny arms around herself. She holds her biscuit in both hands, like a little mousie with a nut.
It’s baffling. When I look back across the table, I am baffled further. Karice is backing up. She’s a little behind Shar, so Shar can’t see her going. Karice takes two steps away, then three, and then she turns and walks toward the line, as if she needs her peach half with its maraschino nipple, stat. Kim stares after her, then back at Candace. My odds just got crazy better.
Shar is glaring with such hate at Candace now that Candace’s spine becomes a curve, as if she’s going to fold herself in two. I think she’d keep on folding if she could, into quarters and then eighths, smaller and smaller, until she disappears.
But instead, she peeks up over her knees and says to Shar, “Did you just lick her breakfast?” She sounds genuinely curious.
The two Hispanic kids feel the winds shift as Karice goes past them to the line. The fight they smelled has been deferred, so they file to their end of the table with their trays.
“I think she licked her own breakfast,” I say. I push the tray across toward Shar.
Shar is about to speak, but Candace interjects. “In the supply closet?”
Kim’s been looking uncertainly from Shar to the hole that used to hold Karice, but now she turns to Candace. “Bitch, no one here cares you exist. Don’t make us care.”
Shar leans back, oddly silent. She glances behind her, to her right, where Karice should be, and does a double take. She looks around until she spots Karice in the line.
Candace spins her biscuit in her hands, takes a tiny nipping bite.
Now no one is looking at me. I’ve puffed into a fighting shape, only to find myself invisible. It’s disconcerting. I sink back down into my chair.
Candace says to Shar, “That was nice that Paula got you breakfast. Go on, now. Take it to the supply closet.” She turns to me and adds, “You know how Shar likes to eat stuff in there.”
Shar’s mouth closes all the way, and I can see all the spine draining out of her. I’m so interested in understanding the mechanics here. Back in Paulding County, I learned that I pick fight over flight. From Joya, I learned to find the weak spot, then hit it first and hardest, skipping the preliminaries. Now I’m watching Candace turn a fight with implication. It’s pretty damn effective; Kim is so unmoored she’s taken a literal step back.
“This is not your fight,” Shar tells her.
Candace spins the biscuit and nips at it again. This is her standard, enraging way of eating anything shaped like a circle. She takes little bites off the sides, turning it in her hands, making it smaller but retaining the round shape. “I know, right? It’s yours and Joya’s, but I guess Joya’s gone. Oh well.” She scootches her chair close to mine, so close we’re almost cuddling.
I’m interested enough to abandon my own plans and back her play. I snuggle even closer and tell Shar, “Maybe you should head off to the supply closet, get you a bite of whatever it is you like to eat in there.”
Shar’s cheeks puff out in a fast exhale, as if a blow has landed.
“What is this?” Kim asks Shar, confused, but Shar shakes her head.