He smiles a little and shrugs, extending the joint toward me like he doesn’t care whether I hit it or not.
“No thanks,” I say. “I don’t smoke.”
His laugh is a slow build up. It pools in his chest and bursts forward. He laughs like he’s been laughing his whole life, and he knows how.
“I like your bag,” he says, extending a pinky finger and pointing to it. The remnants of his smile are still lingering around the corners of his mouth. “Groceries and shit. Is that literally what you put in there?”
“Literally?” I ask. “You want to know if I literally put my groceries, and my shit, in this bag?”
His teeth slide over his lower lip as he studies me. I can tell it’s a habit by the narrowing of his eyes, the side-to-side bobbing of his head.
Finally, he says, “I was testing you. I don’t like people who misuse the word ‘literally.’ Now we can be friends.”
“Literally?”
He sets his joint in a little ashtray at his feet and holds out his hand.
“I’m Judah,” he says. “And you’re Margo.”
“How do you know my name?” His hand holds on to mine a beat longer than what is considered normal. If I weren’t so ugly, I’d think he was into me.
“This is Wessex Street; we’re all parasites on the same vein in Washington.” He reaches his arms back and cradles his head in his hands while he waits for my reaction. Look at him, sitting in his wheelchair all cool.
“I’m not a parasite,” I say calmly. “I’m not on welfare. I have a job.” I feel bad right away. That might not even be what he meant. You don’t always have to be so defensive, I tell myself.
“Don’t look so guilty,” he says. “I wasn’t accusing you of mooching off the government. I have a job.”
“I’m not guilty. You don’t know what I’m thinking,” I say defensively. Oops.
Judah picks up his joint. “Yeah, I do. You’ve got the kind of face that speaks.” He makes jazz hands when he says the last part. I don’t smile. I want to though.
I scrunch my whole, entire face together because I don’t know what he means. Then I know.
“Oh,” I say.
I look down at him. What kind of job could he have? Maybe something at his school.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he says. “What kind of job could I possibly have?”
“Ew! Stop reading my mind … and my face!”
We both laugh.
“So what do you do?”
He takes a hit of his joint. “Are you kidding?” he says. “I’m in a wheelchair. I don’t have a job.”
“Oh my God.” I shake my head at him and look up at the sky. It’s about to rain. “You can’t just steal my shit like that.” I need to get her cigarettes before it pours. “Gotta go,” I say. I head back down the path, my Groceries & Shit bag swinging on my arm.
“Bye Margo. Come see me again, you hear?” he calls after me.
When I get home an hour later, it’s already dark. I can hear voices from my mother’s room. I wonder if I have enough time to use the bathroom before he comes out. Whoever he is. I have to be back at the Rag first thing tomorrow, and I need a bath. I wish we had a shower like normal people, but the eating house was built before people washed themselves standing up. I grab a towel from my room and fill the bath. I’m halfway through washing myself when there’s pounding on the door.
“Margo,” my mother’s sharp voice calls out. “What are you doing in there?”
I know better than to answer her. What she wants is for me to vacate the bathroom. I do a quick rinse and jump out, being careful not to get water on the floor. She hates that. The next twenty seconds is me frantically pulling on my clothes. It’s not fast enough. I know that. I was stupid to think I had enough time, and now there will be consequences.
When I open the door she’s standing there in her red, silk robe with a cigarette dangling between her fingers. It makes a trail of smoke toward the gray ceiling. She glares at me, making silent promises for later. There’s a man standing behind her, looking as pleased as a newly fed baby. He leers at me as I squeeze past my mother and run barefoot to my bedroom. I didn’t even get to wash my hair. You can’t be ugly in this life and have dirty hair. For some reason I think of Judah Grant—the opposite of ugly, and the reason I wanted to wash my hair.
Judah Grant isn’t sitting in his yard when I walk to the bus stop the next morning. Delaney is digging around in her garden with a big straw hat on her head. She looks like one of those women you see on the cover of a gardening magazine. She waves at me when I walk by. Sometimes she gives me money and tells me to bring her things from the Rag. “I need a new pair of shorts,” she’ll say. “Size two.” Delaney’s whole entire body is the size of my thigh. I get things for her in the teen section of the Rag. “Hey Margo,” she calls. I stop. “Judah needs some shirts. Fancy ones. Something a man should wear to work.”
The liar! I’m tempted to ask where he works, but she’s busy pulling money from her bra, and I’m distracted.
She hands me a ten and a twenty. They’re both damp. I hold them between my thumb and my forefinger.
“What size is he?” I ask dumbly. I wonder why Delaney can’t go to the Rag herself and choose his shirts. I wonder why Judah is such an effing liar.
“Get him a couple nice ones with collars,” she says. I want to ask her where he’s working, but we’ve never talked other than me taking her clothes orders.
“All right,” I say. “Something nice.”
I’m going to get him some really ugly shit just for lying to me. Besides, a person who looks like him doesn’t need to be well-dressed, working legs or not. You have to leave some room in the world for the rest of us.
I buy Judah four shirts: pink paisley, purple with tiny white hearts, and a white shirt with red stripes so he can look like a candy cane. Christmas is all about lies anyway. The fourth shirt is nicer because I found a little mercy in my heart. It’s just plain blue. Delaney acts like I’m America’s Next Top Model when I hand them to her.
“They’re perfect,” she says. “You should work in fashion.”
I can’t wait to see him in the candy cane shirt, but I doubt he’ll even wear it. Tough luck for him, the Rag has a very strict NO RETURNS policy. But, he can donate it back if he likes. I’ll make sure Delaney re-buys it for his birthday.
When I get home, my mother’s door is closed. She’s left a note taped to my door, though. Pick up my medicine
Sure. Why not? I’m my mother’s unpaid errand girl. I crumple up the note and throw it at her door. It’s unfortunate that she chooses that very moment to exit her room. The note hits her left breast and bounces to the floor. She watches it fall to her feet, and then brings her eyes back up to my face. My mother doesn’t have to say anything to punish me. She’s not verbally abusive. She turns back around and shuts her door. The message is clear. I disgust her. She wouldn’t even keep me around, except she won’t leave the house anymore, and I get shit for her. I head back outside and walk to the crack house for Wendy’s medicine. At least she didn’t send me to the bad people house.
“Yo, Margo!”
“Yo,” I say.
Judah is wheeling himself back and forth on the driveway. He’s wearing a thin white t-shirt and all of his muscles are popping out.
“Ew, gross. You have muscles.”
“Yeah, I’m a stud,” he says.
“Why are you doing that?” I ask. He’s wheeling himself left, then right, around and around, as fast as he can go.
“Workin’ out.”
“Cool, I don’t do that.” Like it’s not evident in the fat pockets around your knees, I think.
I keep walking, but he follows me out onto the sidewalk. I can hear his wheels squeaking behind me. I grin.
“You don’t smoke or work out. What do you do?”
I don’t know what I do; I’m kind of a loser.
“I talk to you once … now you think we’re friend
s?”
“You’re kind of mean looking,” he says. “I was scared of you. Once you got things rolling…”
He’s full of shit. He can’t even say it and keep a straight face.
I fall back into step, and he has no problem keeping up with me.
“I read,” I say. I look at him out of the corner of my eye to see if he’s judging me.
“I do too,” he says. I remember the book he was holding, the day I walked up his pathway. “Mostly biographies.”
“Ew,” I say. And then, “I get enough of real life in the Bone. I want to go somewhere good when I read, not into someone else’s crappy life.”
“Good lives aren’t worth reading about,” he argues. “I read about the struggle. Other people’s growing pains.”
“I like happy endings,” I say. “Real life never has a happy ending.”
“God, you’re depressing. I don’t know why we’re friends.”
I turn into the crack house’s cracked driveway. “We’re not,” I call. “Now wait for me out here, and if you hear gunshots, call the police. They won’t come, but call them anyway.”
“I’ve got guns,” he says, flexing his arms. “I can protect you.”
I laugh. I didn’t know I had a laugh in me.
I stop laughing when Mo opens the door. I’m hit in the face with the smell of weed and cooking steak. He shoves his eight-month-old son at me. “Hold him,” he grunts. I take Mo Jr. and sit down on front step with him. I have to brush aside a bunch of cigarette butts. Mo Jr. smells like a week-old diaper. He looks up at me like I’m the most boring creature alive, before staring off into the bushes to the left of the house.
“Mo,” I say. “Little Mo.” He won’t break his gaze with the bushes. I start whistling. I’m a fairly accomplished whistler; Judah looks up from where he’s doing wheelies on the sidewalk. Little Mo turns his face to me.
“Finally,” I say. “It hurts my feelings when you don’t pay attention to me.”
I whistle him a song I’ve heard on the radio at work. He smiles a little. When Big Mo comes back to the door, he reaches down to take the baby and slips a couple baggies in my lap. I stand up and dust off my pants. Mo leans against the doorframe. “Your mom okay?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Same as always.”
“She used to babysit me, when I was real little.”
I keep my face blank, but I’m more than surprised. She never told me. Not that she tells me shit.
I leave the wad of twenties on the stairs.
“Bye Little Mo,” I say. But the door’s already shut. I put the baggies into my Groceries & Shit bag.
When I reach the street, Judah looks at my bag.
“Those for you?”
“Nah, my mom’s a prescription pill druggie.”
He looks relieved. “Even if they were, you’d have no right to judge, pot head.”
“Marijuana is different,” he says. He pronounces it mari-jew-wana.
“No. It’s all an addiction. Emotional, physical. You do it because you need it. It doesn’t matter if your body craves it or not. Your mind does.”
“I like you,” he says.
I’m surprised.
He walks me home. He wheels me home. Which is better, because anyone can walk you home. I don’t let him get right to the house. Everyone knows what my mom is, but you still don’t want anyone to see it first hand.
“What are you addicted to?” he asks me before I can say goodnight.
“Isn’t it obvious?” I ask him.
He nods his head knowingly. “Sarcasm,” he says.
I shift my Groceries & Shit bag from one arm to the other.
“Food,” I say. “Namely Honey Buns. But, if it’s processed, I’ll take it.”
No use keeping secrets in a place where everyone airs their sins. Mine is gluttony.
“I’m fat,” I tell him. And then I add, “Because I eat Honey Buns for dinner.”
“You’re not fat,” he says. I don’t stay to hear what he says next. I beeline for the front door.
A FEW DAYS AFTER I CONFESSED to Judah Grant about my Honey Bun addiction, there is a knock on the front door.
Pra pa pa pa pa
I am trying to glue the sole of my sneaker back on when I hear the knock. I’m so startled I drop the shoe and the tub of gorilla glue. I stand frozen, not sure what to do, watching the amber stuff leak onto the linoleum. No one comes to the eating house at this time of day, not even the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I glance up the stairs to my mother’s bedroom with my heart still raging. She won’t wake up for another few hours. My mother has severe agoraphobia, not to mention the paranoia and the prescription pill addiction. If she were awake right now, she’d be tossing little white pills in her mouth and sweating bullets. Nights she left the door open for her men, just so she wouldn’t have to hear them knock.
Ra pa pa pa. Louder this time.
I pad, barefoot, to the door, and peer through the eyehole. A cluster of humans is crowded in front of the eating house. They are all different sizes and ethnicities, packed together under the slight overhang to remove themselves from the rain. I latch the security chain before I unlock the door. Then I peer through the gap at their hodgepodge group.
“Yes?”
A man, near the front of the group, steps forward and shoves a piece of paper at my face. He’s grizzly looking, with a gray beard and a brown head of hair. I look from him to the paper. There is a little girl’s face in the center; she has pigtails and two missing front teeth. HAVE YOU SEEN ME? is written in bold, black letters along the bottom. A chill creeps up my spine.
“We are part of a search team for Nevaeh Anthony,” he tells me. “Have you seen this little girl?”
I slam the door shut and unlatch it. When I throw it open, everyone, including me, looks surprised. Seen her? Seen her? I see her every day. I saw her what…? Two days ago? Three? I take the paper from him.
“Wh-when?” I ask him. I press my palm against my forehead. I feel funny. Clammy and sick.
“Mother says she hasn’t seen her since Thursday. Got on a bus to see her gramma and never came back?”
Thursday … Thursday was the day I braided her hair.
“I saw her on Thursday,” I say. I step out of the house and pull the door shut behind me. “I’m coming with you.”
He nods at me real slow. “You have to go down to the po-lice station. Let them know what you seen,” he says. “When they done with you, we’ll be canvassing this whole area. From Wessex to Cerdic. You come find us, hear?”
I nod. I’m running down Wessex, barefoot, my fat jiggling around my body like jello, when I hear Judah call my name.
I stop, breathing hard.
“You seen her?” he calls. His brow is furrowed, and he’s pushing himself up out of his chair by his arms so he can see me.
“On Thursday,” I yell back. He nods. “Where are your shoes?”
“They broke.” I shrug.
“Go! Go!” he says. I run—fast and barefoot.
I wait for Detective Wyche at his desk while he gets himself a cup of coffee. When I walked in, the first thing he did was ask where my shoes were. “I need to speak to the detectives in charge of the Nevaeh Anthony case,” I said, ignoring his question. He looks startled for a minute, then he leads me to his desk, announcing that he needs a cup of joe. He has bobble heads of the last ten presidents lined up around his computer. I examine my filthy feet and wonder how a person’s shoes can fail them on a day like this. I’m bleeding in a couple places where the sidewalk nicked me. Even the sidewalk in the Bone is broken, I think.
Detective Wyche comes back with his partner—a much fatter, older man with sweat stains around his armpits. He grunts loudly when he sits down next to me. He smells of Old Spice and desperation. They question me for two hours while I bounce my knees up and down and wish I could have a cup of coffee, too. I don’t ask for one, because I’ve been taught to believe it’s wrong to ask for things. You suffer quietly so
no one has the right to call you a pussy. Detective Old Spice takes the lead. He wants to know when I last saw Nevaeh.
On the seventeen bus; she was going to her grandma’s, I was going to work. I don’t know exactly where her grandma lives.
What was she wearing?
Red tights and a T-shirt with a smiley face emoji that said: Don’t text your ex. When I say that, Detective Wyche raises his eyebrows. Oh shut up, I want to say. Nobody has money for clothes.
Did she say anything unusual?
No, she was happy. Normal.
Did she have any bruises on her arms and legs? Not that I could see.
Did she ever mention anything about abuse? No. She spoke a lot about her grandma. She loved to be with her.
Do I know Nevaeh’s mother, Lyndee Anthony? Just in passing.
We’ve never spoken? And on and on it goes. When I finally think it’s over, they ask me all of the same questions in a different way.
I walk home in the rain, my feet throbbing, and grab my raincoat. It’s getting dark. I wonder how long the search party will look for her in this weather. It’s too late to find them now.
I am walking down Wessex with a pile of the posters I took from the detectives when Judah wheels himself in my path. I stare at him blankly before he hands me a pair of rain boots.
“They’re my mom’s,” he says. “She doesn’t use them.”
I take the boots. They are green with red cherries. I pull them on my bare feet without saying a word.
“Give me some.” He holds out his hand, and I slide a thick stack of posters between his fingers. We decide to hand out the flyers at Wal-Mart. Neither of us speaks. I’m not entirely sure Judah knows Nevaeh; he never had reason to run into her, but his face is drawn and pale. That’s how it is in the Bone. You are scared for yourself, mostly, but sometimes you are scared for someone else. As for me, I know what it is like to be a kid, and to be alone. When we run out of posters, we go home.
“We had to shove them at people,” I say. “It’s like no one wanted to look.”
“You have to understand something about the Bone,” Judah says. “Every bad thing that happens here reminds people of what they’re trying to forget. When you’re rich and you see stuff like this on TV, you hug your children and feel grateful it’s not you. When you’re from the Bone, you hug your children and pray you’re not next.”