That’s the most Judah’s ever said about what put him in the wheelchair. It wasn’t a car accident like the kids at school had guessed. I remember him as a little boy. He used to run around the front yard naked, shrieking until Delaney would catch him from behind, and tickle him into a fit of laughter. Sometimes I used to see him working in the dirt with her, planting things.
Then one day he just stopped being in the yard. I never thought much about it until school started. He would have been in the same kindergarten class as me, except he never showed up on the first day of school, or the second, or the third. Then a few months later, when I was walking home from school, I saw the chair. It was on the porch, empty, but spoke volumes. Something had happened. Something. But what?
When I asked my mother, she said that he’d been sick. He had to go away for a while, and now he was crippled. I didn’t know what cripple was until I went to school the next day and asked my teacher, Mrs. Garret. Then the wheelchair made sense. Judah couldn’t use his legs anymore. I tried to imagine what it would be like. His house didn’t have stairs like mine, but how did he get in the bath? Get out? Who put his pants on in the morning if he couldn’t stand up to do it himself?
I imagine his mother does it for him, my mom said when I asked. I watched him really carefully from then on, not because I thought he was a freak like the other kids. Because I didn’t know how he could be so different and still always be smiling.
I finish my bag of Gushers and crumple the wrapper in my fist. How did I even end up here, on Judah’s porch? We’d never spoken a word to each other, and now, here I was every day.
“Hey,” he says.
“What?”
“You look different lately.”
I laugh a little. “Lately? As in the two months you’ve known me?”
“Awe, come on. We’ve lived on the same block since we were little. We might not have known each other’s names, but…”
“Different how?” I ask. My palms are sweating. I look like a murderer, that’s what. But what does he see? Can he see the blood on my hands?
“Like you don’t give a shit anymore,” he says.
I don’t.
“I remember watching you walk to school. Every day. First grade through twelfth. You reminded me of a rat.”
“Whaa?” I spin around, and he pretends to flinch like he’s afraid of me. He’s laughing when he says, “You scurried around like you were afraid of everything. Hiding behind the hood of your raincoat, sneaking looks at the world like you expected it to take your cheese.”
“It did take my cheese, fool.” I laugh.
“Well, you don’t do that anymore. You’re gangsta now, with your Groceries & Shit bag, and your blue Docs, and your defiant walk.”
“You’re dumb,” I say, though inwardly I wonder how right he is, and when exactly I stopped being a rat?
“I like this new look on you, Margo the lion,” he says.
What Judah doesn’t say is how much weight I’ve lost since I broke up with Little Debbie and her crew. Fat rat lost a few pounds. And I stopped chopping my hair off every time it grew past my chin. So, now it’s shoulder length, and it reminds me of dying grass—pokey and yellow.
I wonder if he saw those changes, and not just the ones that happened on the inside. The fact that my lips aren’t buried in the dough of my cheeks, or that I actually have long legs once the cottage cheese deposits melt away. Or maybe he’s one of those saintly people who only looks to the inside of others and doesn’t see their doughy arms and freckled double chins. He’s just a cripple kid, I think. Who cares what the poor, cripple kid thinks of you? But I do. Because pot-smoking, Judah Grant is the best human I’ve ever known, and I can’t even pinpoint why. I listen to Alanis Morissette on my headphones all night and pretend I don’t have a crush on that smiling fool.
“You listen to white girl music,” Sandy tells me the next day. I’m singing “Uninvited” as I empty garbage bags in the stock room. “And on top of it, old white girl music,” she says.
“I am a white girl,” I say, putting an ugly ass shirt into the ugly ass shirt pile.
“Yeah, but you have to stay current and shit. Listen to some Miley Cyrus or somethin’. That bitch is a ‘Wrecking Ball’!” Sandy cracks up, and I frown. I don’t have a radio, car, or television. I use my mother’s old CD player and listen to my mother’s old CDs.
“And why you singing anyway? You in love or something?”
“Ugh, Sandy! Go away and manage something.”
“I’m managing you, girl,” she laughs. “You’re different lately. I like that.”
I stare at the wall after she walks away. Why does everyone keep saying that? And yet no one … NO ONE has said anything about the fact that I’m not a walking Honey Bun anymore.
I make it two more weeks, covering Lyndee Anthony’s shortcomings with Judah’s words. Everyone grieves differently.
But it’s her laughter that changes everything for me.
I no longer see her as Nevaeh’s mother, because, after all, Vola Fields was Mo’s mother, and that didn’t give her a minute of pause when she beat him. I see her instead as a possibility. Is there a possibility that she is tied to Nevaeh’s death? Her boyfriend? Her negligence? Her hands?