She may have been scared out of her mind, but I was glad to get gone. After Cliff moved in with us, our life turned into a bad movie that got played over and over, with the fight scenes getting longer and louder.
Cliff wasn’t just mean to Ma. After I called him out on a couple of lies, he took to hating me. The older I got, the meaner he got, so leaving didn’t scare me near as much as staying did.
Plus, I was looking forward to meeting my aunt Ellie and my cousin Cheyenne. I figured they had to be nice, seeing how they were letting us stay with them until Ma could find a job and a place of our own.
But then we arrived.
It probably doesn’t matter how nice a person is—when the apartment’s small, two more bodies get in the way quick. And Aunt Ellie pushed Ma’s buttons in a big way. Ma tried to explain it to me one night, keepin’ her voice hushed as we camped out in the front room. “It’s like we’re kids again, with her bossing and criticizing and making me feel worthless!”
“Better’n gettin’ beat up,” I whispered back.
She muttered something but wouldn’t repeat it, and it took me ’til after she was sleeping to figure out that she’d said, “Just a different kind of beat up, is all.”
So Ma had problems with her sister, and it didn’t take but a day or two for me to start having them with Cheyenne. She was in high school, so she got over the excitement of meeting her long-lost cousin before I was done stepping through the door. And the bathroom was definitely hers. Plus, she wore morning on her sleeve like a gaping wound. I swear that girl could not smile before two p.m., and by then I was too worn out from watching my step to be any kind of friendly.
“We have got to get out of here,” Ma said after a few weeks, and I guess Aunt Ellie and Cheyenne agreed, because the instant Ma landed the job at Brookside, Aunt Ellie offered to loan her the money we needed to rent a place of our own.
The apartment we moved to is above a corner market, and it’s small.
Smaller’n small.
To get to it is strange, too. First you go through a metal gate, then you go down a kind of alleyway to some metal stairs that go up to an outside hallway. Our apartment is marked A, and there’s another door further down marked with a dangling B.
Our place has one bedroom and one bathroom with a toilet, a sink, and a small metal-basin shower with a wraparound curtain. There’s one plug-in burner on top of the half-sized fridge near the kitchen sink, and a two-person table off to the side of the front room, where my mattress is parked in a corner. Ma gets the bedroom, which isn’t much bigger than a closet, and the only heat is from the plug-in burner.
We gave the place a Pine-Sol bath when we moved in, and when we were sitting down to jelly sandwiches that first night, Ma apologized and said, “I know it’s not much, but we’ll fix it up.”
“I like it fine,” I told her, which was the truth. I had my little corner, and we were inside our own walls. Nobody was going to be bargin’ in angry or drunk or even just annoyed.
I knew it was a dump. I knew I could have hated it. But the weird thing is, even from that first night, it felt like home.
When Ms. Miller called Kandi Kain’s name the first day of class, I thought for sure it was a joke. Maybe some kind of play on her real name that had caught on. But I learned later that Kandi Kain carries around a copy of her birth certificate just so she can set the record straight for any nonbelievers.
When I saw the certificate, all worn out from being flashed around since probably kindergarten, I became a different kind of nonbeliever.
What sort of mama gives her girl a name like that?
“My mother said it makes me unforgettable,” Kandi said, the words flowin’ out like warm maple syrup. “And it was better than naming me Nova, right? Or Hurra.”
“Hurra’s not a name,” I said.
She hoisted an eyebrow at me. “And Link is?”
I frowned. “It’s Lincoln,” I told her, and it came out kinda proud-sounding.
Like the way Ma always says it.
Kandi was not impressed. Or convinced. “So you say,” she oozed. Then she gave me a scary-sweet smile. “Can you prove it?”
“Prove what?”
“That your name’s Lincoln. How do we know you’re not just making that up?”
“Why would I go makin’ up a name?”
“You thought I did, didn’t you?”
“But your name is Kandi Kain!”
“And yours is Lincoln Jones.” She gave me a cool look. “The more I think about it, the more I think you made it up. No mother names her child Lincoln. Besides, it doesn’t fit with Jones.” She turned her nose up a little. “Jones is ordinary. Lincoln is pretentious.”
I didn’t know what pretentious meant, but I sure didn’t like the way it sounded. Like I was pretendin’ to be something I wasn’t. And her nose bein’ up like it was didn’t help, either. So I let her have it. “Ma says my names balance each other. And that Lincoln is an honorable name. One I should be proud of.”
“Hmm,” she said, considering me. “I guess that’s true.”
Darn straight! I thought, and for a second I felt good.
But then she went and said, “But ‘Ma’? You really call your mom that? Where are you from, anyway?”
Ma always tells me that the best way to get rid of a pest is to ignore it. “If you swat at the bee, Lincoln, it’ll surely sting you.” And having been stung by a bee a time or two, I know she’s right. But sittin’ around waiting for the thing to fly off on its own is terrifying. There it is, walking on you, all fuzzy and twitchin’, with its stinger fixin’ to fire, while you sit holding your breath, sweating bullets.
Still, any time I’ve managed to not swat, I haven’t been stung. I remind myself of that fact when tuna’s flingin’ at me on the bus. I don’t swat at the pests on the bus, and I don’t swat at them in the classroom.
It’s hard, but that’s what I do.
Now, Kandi Kain may not fling tuna, but she’s still dangerous ’cause she’s got that queen bee thing going on. She likes swarms of kids around her. Boys and girls. She holds the four-square balls hostage at recess, then directs kids around, and for some reason they do what she says. She’s pretty, sure, but that’s no reason for folks to act like drones.
So I kept my distance and did my own thing, but every time she’d look at me, there’d be a frown bendin’ down her face. Then, one day in early October, she marched right up to me and said, “What’s with you and that notebook? You writing the Declaration of Independence, or what?”
Her hands were on her hips, showin’ off fingers that were painted like candy corn—yellow at the base, orange in the middle, and white at the tip. I could tell her joke about the Declaration of Independence had been brewing in her brain for some time. I could tell she thought it was smart and clever, too. Like sportin’ candy-painted nails when your name is Kandi.
Too bad for her, I just thought it was dumb. “Abraham Lincoln had nothing to do with the Declaration of Independence,” I told her. “He came almost a hundred years later.”
That hushed her up for one whole blink of the eye.
“So what are you writing, then?”
I’d already closed the notebook when I’d seen her coming over.
I’m not stupid.
“Nothing,” I told her, ’cause that’s what I tell everybody when they ask. It’s not rude. It’s universal for none of your business.
But I guess when the universe revolves around you, things work a different way. “Of course you’re writing something,” she said. “Don’t need to get all huffy about it.”
“I wasn’t gettin’ huffy!” I said, and it came out so huffy my cheeks started to burn.
She gave me one of those scary-sweet smiles, then twitched up an eyebrow and said, “So you drawing pictures of me, or what?”
“No!” I cried, and slapped open my notebook. “It’s just stories, see?”
She nosed right in, and her eyes seemed to be gulping u
p the words. “Annie?” she asked, pointing a candy-corn nail at the name. “Are you writing about Annie Totes?”
I gave her a blank look. Who was Annie Totes?
“In our class?” she asked.
I felt like a double fool. “No!” I slapped the notebook closed again. “It’s nobody.” And then, ’cause I could tell she didn’t believe me, I let on a little. “The Annie in my story’s a character, all right? She’s an old lady.”
“Like somebody’s grandmother?”
“Yeah, like that,” I said, even though it wasn’t like that at all.
“So what’s she doing?”
I stared at her a second, and for that second it felt like she wasn’t just being nosy. It felt like she really wanted to know. And in that second, I was dying to tell her all about Annie and the hero of the story, Lamar, and his pet wolf, Howler, and how Annie was being haunted by chain-rattlin’ ghosts.
And then that second passed and I came to my senses.
“Nothin’,” I said, and put the notebook away.
Not knowing who Annie Totes was was part of a problem I didn’t know I had until it was too embarrassing to fix. I’d been so busy puttin’ my head down and avoidin’ folks that I hadn’t bothered learning the names of the kids in my class. That’s okay the first day or first week or even the first couple of weeks of school, but a month in, it was all-at-once embarrassing.
As in when Ms. Miller asked me to hand back papers and I couldn’t. And when I slipped up on the Annie Totes question.
It’s not like I knew nobody. There was Kandi, of course, and I’d figured out the Hee-Haws. The one in my class was named Hank, and the one who was on the bus and in the other sixth-grade class was named Ryan. Hank didn’t mess with me in class and he didn’t ride my bus, but when he got with Ryan at recess, it was like flippin’ a switch.
I also knew Benny Tazmin. He’s no bigger’n me, but he fills the room with his jokes and snickers. Remembering his name came easy ’cause Ms. Miller’s on him a lot for “disruptive behavior,” and the boys around him egg him on, cheering, “Ben-ny, Ben-ny!” or they tattle on him, saying, “It was Taz!”
Besides Kandi and Benny and Hank, I also knew the two girls who were always trailing after Kandi. The reason I knew their names was because Kandi acts like she’s supervising them and does it using both their names like a parent: “Lexi Simmons, where have you been?” “Macy Mills, are you coming or not?” The three of them seem to be in some sort of fashion club that moves from stripes to polka dots to solids and back, and involves socks with animal designs. One of them’s always messin’ up in the eyes of the others, though, and half the time it seems they don’t even like each other. Maybe they do and have a funny way of showin’ it. Maybe they should stick to simpler socks.
And then there were my tablemates, Colby, Rayne, and Wynne. All girls. Colby’s bossy, with a nose that’s usually tipped up and twitchin’ like she’s trackin’ someone’s scent. Rayne’s shy, with a lion’s mane of dark hair, and Wynne wears wire-rimmed glasses and whispers everything, always.
So out of the twenty-eight kids in class, I knew nine.
And that included me.
That afternoon, though, it bumped up to ten when Kandi caught my eye and did a big point-point with a candy-corn finger at a girl across the classroom. She shielded her pointing hand with her other hand but didn’t come anywhere near covering what she was doing. And then she mouthed a big, exaggerated “ANNIE TOTES!” that anyone could see.
I covered my face and slumped in my chair.
Kandi Kain is the worst.
What I thought about Kandi was proven true on my walk to Brookside that same afternoon. “Where are you going?” a voice right behind me said.
It made me jump, and when I whipped around, sure enough, I was face to face with Kandi.
“You take the twenty-seven bus to school,” she panted. “But you walk this way after. And you keep on walking forever! Where are you going?”
I didn’t notice I was being followed ’cause sometimes when I get to thinking about my stories, everything else sort of blanks out. In this case I was in the middle of a big fight scene in my head where Lamar and Howler corner the guy who’s been faking the chain-rattlin’-ghost stuff. His name’s Mr. Butte and he’s meaner’n skunk spray. And now that he’s trapped in the corner of a basement, he’s desperate.
I like playing out scenes in my head before I write them. I’ll do the same scene over and over on my way to Brookside, fine-tuning it ’til I’m itching to put it on paper. My favorite is when I get to a scene near the end of a story where the villain is trapped in a basement, or pinned in an alleyway, or tossed headfirst inside a jail cell. I live for the clank of a jail cell. Doesn’t matter if the story is turning out good or bad, I finish just so I can hear the jail cell slammin’ shut.
Ma doesn’t get why I’m always scribblin’ in a notebook. “It’s not a journal?” she asked after I’d filled up the first one and was starting on a second.
“No, ma’am,” I told her. “It’s stories.”
“Like…made-up stories?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She studied me for a bit. “So it’s not private, then? I can read it?”
But I didn’t let her. I worried that she’d say how wonderful they were because she’s my ma, or that I’d be able to tell from her face they weren’t any good. Either way, I didn’t want her to see. I didn’t want anyone to see.
But back to Kandi sneaking up on me.
I didn’t notice it ’cause I was a long ways from school and my mind was with Lamar and Howler, down in a dark, eerie basement cornering evil Mr. Butte. That, and I don’t happen to have eyes in the back of my head.
I was mad at Kandi for spooking me, and even madder at me for getting spooked. And on top of getting mad and madder, I got an instant case of the worries. We were half a block from Brookside, and I sure couldn’t have Kandi knowing I spent my afters at an old-folks’ home!
I stopped walking. “Why you followin’ me?”
“Where are you going?” she asked, like her questions mattered way more than mine. “There’s nothing back this way!”
My mind was scrambling. “Well, there must be, or I wouldn’t be headed this way, right?”
“So where, then?”
I was stuck. And I was mad. And my mouth kept right on being stupid. “To the intersection of Nowhere and None of Your Business,” I said. “And how do you know I take the twenty-seven?”
She looked down. “Hilly’s on the twenty-seven. She says Troy’s pretty mean to you.”
I knew which one Troy was, but Hilly? I gave Kandi a good, hard squint. “Who?”
“Hillary Howard? She’s in Mr. Ulman’s sixth with Troy. Short brown hair. Bracelets?”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh, her.” Then I gave another good, hard squint. “Why’s she sit with him if she thinks he’s mean?”
Kandi looked away. “Being a girl is…complicated.”
Like that was any kind of answer?
Then real quick she switched subjects. “But the twenty-seven picks up on the west side, and you’re going due east.”
“Am I?” I said, ’cause I had no idea what direction I was headed, and hearing “due east” come out of someone with such long, shiny hair and fingernails painted like candy corn just seemed…strange.
“Sun’s over there,” she said, pointing behind us, then nodded in the direction I was headed. “So that’s east.”
“Well, doesn’t matter which direction I’m goin’,” I said. “You’ve got no business following me.”
“Look,” she said, “I’ve got to get home. I just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”
I stared at her, thinkin’ that if lies were flames, she’d be one towerin’ inferno.
My dark look didn’t seem to affect her, though. She danced off with a little wave and called, “Tell Annie and Howler I say hi!”
“Howler’s a wolf,” I yelled after her.
&n
bsp; “I know that!” she called back.
Which left me kinda dumbstruck.
How could she have picked that up from one little look at the page?
It didn’t help my case of the worries, that’s for sure. I headed on toward Brookside, wonderin’ if she could read me just as easy.
Going inside Brookside is like pushing through a secret revolving door. On one side there’s daylight and trees and cars and movement.
On the other there’s Death.
They try to cover that up with soft music playing and a big lobby that looks like it’s straight out of a magazine. I never sit there myself, and nobody else seems to use it, either. It’s like a big, fancy family room missin’ its family, and if you hold still in it for even just a minute, you can feel Death lurking nearby.
Even so, I was glad to step inside. Kandi might have been long gone, but her following me still had me jittery.
“Good afternoon, Lincoln! Isn’t it a lovely day?” the receptionist said, shooing Death away. She’s told me lots of times to call her Geri, but I was still having trouble doing that.
“Yes, ma’am. It sure is,” I said as I went up to her desk.
She smiled as I signed in. “You have got to be the politest boy I’ve ever met.”
“Ma’am?”
She stood. “We’re not used to being ma’am’d around here, but I must say, I do enjoy it.” Her heels clicked on the tile floor as she led the way across the lobby to the East Wing, which is the side where Ma works. She raised an eyebrow in my direction. “My grandson calls me dude.”
Being reminded that I talk different from other folks around here had me feelin’ all self-conscious. Ma says I just need to start putting the g’s on my words—something she’s been working hard at since her sister told her, “You sound like a hick,” when we were staying with her and Cheyenne. Ma fumed about it for days, but now she’s correctin’ my speech. At supper the other day she even told me that sayin’ “ma’am” was “regional” and that I should maybe go easy on it. I dropped my fork. After years of drillin’ it into my head, she wants me to go easy on it?