you know Mama. She ain’t gonna move to Stone Mountain and leave her house. Not the house that her and Daddy shared all those years,” Gloria said. “And all her friends are right there in the neighborhood where she lives.”
“I understand, Gloria.”
That was all Pop said that day. But next thing I knew, a RE/MAX sign was stuck in the middle of our front yard. Our house sold a lot faster than Pop and Gloria had expected and the new owners were anxious to move in and wanted us out. Before I knew it, we were packing our stuff into boxes. The problem was, we had nowhere to go. She and Pop had looked at dozens of houses in the newer subdivisions of College Park, but Gloria couldn’t seem to settle on one that she liked. She had to have the perfect house, with custom-made cabinets, the master bedroom had to be a certain square footage, and it needed to have a certain number of windows. She actually would walk through each house counting windows. Wow!
“Why don’t we just have a house built?” She finally made a suggestion.
“But where do we go while our house is being built?” Pop asked.
“We can move into one of your rental properties temporarily.”
“That would be fine, Gloria, but the problem is, I don’t have any available on that side of town.”
“Don’t you have any tenants who are behind on their rent?” I could just picture that wicked little smile of hers. “One who’s just begging to be evicted?”
“They’re all a little slow paying, Gloria, but I work with them. Always have. They’re good working-class people who just fall behind from time to time. That’s all.”
“What about that woman in the property on Madison Place? The one whose husband left her. You’ve given her more than enough time to get caught up. And now that her husband is gone, she struggles just to make the rent every month. It’s always late, and sometimes short,” she said. “That’s a cute little house too, and I love it so much, Rufus!”
“That family has lived in that property for nearly fifteen years,” Pop said. “I wouldn’t feel right asking Barbara to leave. And she’s got those children…and…”
“I thought you wanted me to be happy.” I would’ve bet my lunch money that Gloria’s lip was all poked out as she began pouting, and I could just see her rubbing her index finger across my father’s face. “You could put her in one of your smaller places. You could put her in that place just two blocks from here.”
Pop’s demeanor softened. I could tell. He was falling under her spell.
“I could talk to Barbara. See if she wants that old place. It’s a lot older than the one she lives in now, but I could fix it up for her,” Pop reasoned. “The rent over here would be a little cheaper than what she’s paying now. That way she wouldn’t be out on a limb every month. She’d have to uproot her kids and send them to another school, but…”
“It’s better than being homeless,” Gloria added.
“If I’m going to do it, I’d better do it before school starts again in the fall.”
“Is that a yes?” Gloria asked my father.
“I’ll call Barbara when I get to the office,” he said.
Gloria always seemed to get her way no matter what.
On moving day, I carefully placed all my CDs—50 Cent, T.I., Kanye West—into a cardboard box. Packed away my DVDs—Friday, Next Friday, Friday After Next, and some of my old Kung Fu movies—into the same box. And I couldn’t forget my all-time favorite DVD, Rush Hour, and every episode of The Dave Chappelle Show, which was packed in the same box. I didn’t want the movers packing my sacred items. I needed to pack them myself, to make sure they made it to the new place safely.
I placed the box on the backseat of my ’92 Jeep Cherokee that I’d saved up for and bought with money that I had earned by working the drive-thru at Wendy’s. As 50 Cent’s “Just A Little Bit” blasted through my speakers, Killer took his place in the passenger’s seat of my Jeep, his head hanging out the window as I pulled out of the subdivision I grew up in…a place where I had chased the ice cream man down the street at full speed every day just to buy a red, white and blue bomb pop; the same neighborhood where I had my first kiss with Ashley Thomas right in between Mrs. Fisher’s house and the vacant house at the end of the block, the place where I was chased by Mr. Palmer’s Doberman every time I took the short cut through his yard, and where I fell out of the tree in Miss Booker’s front yard and broke my arm when I was nine; the same place where I pushed a lawn mower up and down the street and made money cutting lawns every summer since I was twelve, and where the entire neighborhood gathered for cookouts and block parties every Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and on Labor Day.
The neighborhood was all a kid like me had. That and Kim Porter, the girl who broke up with me the same day she found out that I was moving to the south side.
“It’s too hard trying to go out with somebody at another school, Marcus,” she’d said.
Then she said those four words that pierced my heart.
“Let’s just be friends.”
The words still rang in my head, long after they had lingered in the air. Let’s just be friends.
My life as I knew it was over.
Chapter 3
Indigo
My breasts had grown a little bit over the summer, even though I was still in the same A-sized cup, I could tell they were just a little bit bigger than they were at the beginning of the summer. I wore my pink low-cut top that I’d picked up at the mall on Saturday just to show them off a little, my low-cut Mudd jeans and pink, black and white FILAs.
The first day of school was not the same without Jade. We’d made so many plans before she moved away. Times had gotten too hard for her mother and she decided that they should move in with Jade’s grandmother in New Jersey. Jade hated living there, too, because her grandmother was nothing like Nana. She was mean and stuffy, Jade told me, and she made them go to church three nights a week and on Sunday, too. She hoped it wouldn’t be long before her mama found them an apartment or something. She’d have to find a job first, and that was the hard part. Thank God for free nights and weekends, because I was able to call Jade every night after nine o’clock from my cell phone. And we talked all day on Saturdays and Sundays. That helped, although it still wasn’t the same as having her next door.
On the first day of school, I was forced to walk to the bus stop with Angie Cummings, who was literally “a nobody” on the face of the earth. She was a smart kid who made straight As and wore what looked like her Grandma Esther’s clothes to school. I was more of a B student, and sometimes C when I didn’t apply myself as much. I wanted to make good grades, but sometimes I just got caught up in other stuff and didn’t pay as much attention in class. For people like Angie, who didn’t have a life, straight As came much easier for them.
Even though I’d known Angie since kindergarten, and we attended the same church, she wasn’t someone I hung out with. She was kind of weird and wore bifocals. But since she was going to the bus stop, and I was going at the same time, there was no harm in walking together, although she was the type of person that would ruin your reputation for life. And I’d worked too hard for
