Wing Jones(11)

I’m not invited to Trey’s party.

Everyone has been talking about it all week. Everyone is going. Even people like Heather and Laura who normally wouldn’t dream of going anywhere as sketchy as Trey’s neighborhood. I overheard Heather today in history. “Everyone slums occasionally. Come on, it’ll be a riot. And I heard he’s got two kegs.”

Her minions nodded their heads like those Chihuahuas you see on truck dashboards.

But nobody thought to ask me if I wanted to go. Not even Marcus or Monica or Aaron. It isn’t that I want to go. I’ve never been to a party like this, and I don’t think I’d enjoy it. But it does hurt a little bit to know that I’ll be home with my grannies while everyone else at my school is at the same party together.

Trey has the “hookup” when it comes to booze. That’s what I hear, anyway. And he also has a gun that his cousin or his uncle or someone he isn’t even related to got for him. Probably Jasper, now that I think about it. It makes me anxious to think about Marcus, Monica, and Aaron at a party with a gun.

They probably already have been. There’s so much I don’t know about their lives. And my whole life is them. It’s like we’re kids again in the swimming pool and they can come hang out with me in the shallow end and it’s great, the best ever, and we play Marco Polo and spider and dolphins and pirates and all my favorite games, and then they swim in the deep end and I’m not a good enough swimmer to go, so I sit on the stairs, because swimming in the shallow end by yourself isn’t fun, and watch their heads bob up and down as Marcus dives and Aaron cannonballs, and sure, I can tell you that it looks fun, but I can’t tell you if it actually is fun.

I don’t tell my Granny Dee this when she asks me why I’m pouting like a trout. I also don’t tell her trouts don’t pout. I don’t even think they have lips. There is no point arguing about anything with my Granny Dee. I know she’s trying to be nice, though, especially when she pushes a plate of cookies toward me.

“Where’s Marcus tonight?” she asks, and I sigh.

“Out.”

“That boy always out.”

“It’s Friday night, Granny. Everyone is out.”

“You ain’t out,” she says, peering over her spectacles at me. They aren’t glasses, by the way – she’ll tell you that. They’re her spectacles.

“Thanks for reminding me.”

“You usually ain’t so broke up about it either,” she says, taking one of the chocolate chip cookies. “Something goin’ on that you wanna tell your Granny Dee about?”

I take a cookie and bite into it. Stale. Made yesterday. Or the day before.

“These cookies are shit,” I say, standing up so suddenly that my chair squeals in protest against our linoleum floor.

“You watch your language, little girl! That is no way to speak to your grandma. I’m not like your other one. I understand you. You can’t get by saying bad words in front of me.”

LaoLao speaks English just fine, but she still has a heavy accent and Granny Dee likes to pretend that she doesn’t understand her. And LaoLao swears plenty too, but she does that in Mandarin. Practically the only Mandarin words I know are swearwords.

“If you don’t apologize right this second for that filthy language, and for insulting my cookies, I will ground you.”

I laugh. “Ground me? What difference will that make? It isn’t like I’m going anywhere – or have anywhere to go.”

“Where is all this sass coming from? I don’t like it one bit.” Underneath her anger is a note of hurt. Her conflicting emotions come at me like a steam train, but when I look harder I see that they’re nothing but a puff of smoke, leaving a little old lady in its wake.

I go around to my Granny Dee and squeeze her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” I say, not quite in a whisper but almost. I don’t have much experience apologizing. I don’t do things that require apologizing too often.

She reaches her veiny hand up and pats my own. “You know what you could do to make it up to me?” She looks up and her eyes are magnified beneath her spectacles. I smile at her encouragingly. “Make me a fresh batch of cookies. You were right, these are shit.”

“Where are Mom and LaoLao?” I ask as I break an egg into our green mixing bowl. The kitchen is small and dark in the daytime, but at night, it’s warm and feels like home. With the curtains drawn over the small boxy windows, some jazz music on for Granny Dee, the oven making everything nice and toasty, I can pretend we are anywhere. I don’t need to see the bars on the windows of the house across from us or our overgrown front lawn, if you can call it a lawn, or watch people hurry by, not wanting to stick around in our neighborhood. I’ve lived in this house my whole life. It was my Granny Dee’s house, the same one my daddy grew up in, but I won’t be sad to say goodbye to it when Marcus gets drafted for the NFL, and I know he will because he isn’t just good, he’s magic, and when he’s rich, we’ll all be rich and we’ll move somewhere real nice, somewhere bigger and better, somewhere we all have enough space and there aren’t bars on the windows and the light shines in every room.

“Your mother took a late shift tonight,” says Granny from her chair as she nods back and forth to the jazz. “And your other grandmother” – I have yet to hear Granny Dee refer to LaoLao as LaoLao – “she went to bed early. Lazybones.”