“Wing…” My mom’s voice is heavy with warning.
“Oh, let her stay,” says Granny Dee, and she sounds old, older than she is, so old. “It’ll save us the trouble of having to explain it all to her later.” She takes a long breath and looks down over her spectacles at me. “You do need to learn how to play mahjong at some point, though. Excellent game. Best thing this one” – she tilts her head toward LaoLao – “ever taught me.”
I don’t understand much of what the man in the suit says, but I think I get the basics. The bills are too high. Something about credit. And a second mortgage. And not paying a loan back on time. Multiple loans. And if we don’t pay back our debt in ninety days, they’re taking our house. Our crappy little house that Granny Dee bought with my grandpa when she was pregnant with my daddy. The house my daddy grew up in, the house I grew up in, the only place I’ve ever lived. Sure, I was looking forward to when Marcus was playing for the NFL and bought us a mansion, but even then I never thought we’d sell this house. We’d keep it for ever.
That’s what I thought.
Ninety days.
It doesn’t seem real. I don’t know where we would go. I can’t imagine Marcus waking up and us telling him his room is gone. The house is gone.
And that it’s his fault.
My mom tells me there’s nothing I can do, that it has nothing to do with me. They’ll handle it, the man in the suit was using scare tactics, she’s going to call another bank, get another loan, it’s all going to be all right.
I don’t believe her.
CHAPTER 41
I can’t sleep. Not after seeing that man in our kitchen, not after hearing him say he’s going to take everything we have left.
The poster I saw in the Riveo store is blinking in my head, all lit up in neon, like a fast-food sign you can see for miles and miles on the highway, in your front and rearview mirrors. There’s no way I’m gonna be able to sleep with images of that Riveo poster and that awful man in the black suit playing through my head.
I slip outside and do what my body wants me to do, the only thing I can do now.
I run. So fast that even my dragon and my lioness can barely keep up.
But as I wait for the calm to come over me, and for everything to disappear except me and the sky, the way it usually does when I run, something else takes over. Anger.
I’m so angry that even running can’t shut it out. I try to channel the rage to make myself faster, but I can’t.
I can’t outrun this anger.
I hear a clap of thunder, but I don’t care. I keep running, not paying attention to where I’m going, not caring.
The rain starts as a drizzle, light and soft. But this is Georgia, and we don’t just get drizzles. This is a weather warning; in a few minutes the rain will really start, but I don’t stop running. I keep going. Not caring where.
When the rain comes, I welcome it. I lean my head back and howl at the sky, feeling the fat drops on my face and in my mouth and down my neck, drenching me.
I yell until I can’t yell any more. I yell at the sky, at my dragon, at my lioness. I yell at the road. I yell and yell and yell at everything because I can’t yell at the person I want to yell at the most.
I can’t yell at him for everything he’s done. For everything he’s ruined. It’s all his fault and he can’t ever, ever, ever make it better.
Damn you, Marcus. For doing this to us. For doing this to Monica. For doing this to Michael and his family and that woman, Sophie Bell.
For doing this to yourself.
I’ve been running and yelling and yelling and running for what feels like hours. The rain drowns out my shouts so that no one hears me, and soon it starts to drown out my anger too. It’s hard to stay angry when you’ve been running in the rain all night. Hard to stay anything but tired.
I recognize the intersection ahead of me and I push myself toward it, make myself keep running. My dragon and my lioness are still by my side, but I can tell my lioness doesn’t like getting wet.
“Tough,” I tell her, and turn down a street I’ve only been down a few times before. I’m soaked and feeling stupid but I don’t want to go home just yet, I don’t want to keep yelling at things that can’t yell back.
I step in a puddle, soaking my shoes even more, not caring, and then go up the driveway, and knock on a window, hoping it’s the right one.
No answer. I knock again, louder. Then a face appears at the glass and when the face sees my face, the window opens, letting rain in the room.
“Wing? What the hell?”
“Wanna go for a run?”