Constance (Constance #1)(19)
“When you going to stop getting in fights at school?” Gamma asked.
Con shrugged. She was twelve again and had just been suspended for the second time. Fighting again. This time with a white girl who’d run her fingers through Con’s hair and pretended it was gross and dirty. She’d come here to Gamma’s rather than face her mother.
Con shook her head, trying to chase away the hallucination, but Gamma just handed her a bag of frozen peas as if to say, You’re not getting rid of me that easily, child. Con pressed the peas to her swollen cheekbone. The peas, frozen in clumps, felt so real. It all felt so real. The sweet, bubbling aroma of pork stew on the stove. Fela Kuti on the stereo—there was always music playing in Gamma Jol’s home.
“You ever win any of them fights?” Gamma asked.
Con shrugged again. No, she never won. She was small and there were more of them. Always more. But winning wasn’t even the point. You talked shit about her father who had died for his country; you made fun of how she looked; you put your hands on her—then it was on. Gamma clucked as if she could read her granddaughter’s defiance.
“Will you braid my hair tonight?” Con asked. Let’s see Amber Thornton run those pork-chop-looking fingers through her hair then.
“Oh, you get suspended—again—and you reckon your gamma’s gonna fix that mess you got going on up there?”
“Can I stay here tonight?” Con said, asking her real question.
“Yes, but only for one night.” Gamma Jol smiled and squeezed Con’s face in her calloused hand, which Con loved and hated and loved to hate.
It would be two more years before Con moved back home. She’d recently announced that she’d no longer be singing in the choir at church. Con had become a star attraction in the last few years—this snippet of a girl with a voice larger than the sky—and her mother basked in the attention and praise it brought. Standing up to her mother had been the scariest thing she’d ever done and turned all the simmering tension that had been building between them to open hostility. Mary D’Arcy’s house had never been a pleasant place to grow up, but since their argument, it had become downright poisonous. Twelve-year-old Con knew exactly how her mother would react to her being suspended. How she’d refer to it darkly as Antoine D’Arcy’s “bad influence,” even though the man had been dead for six years. Con was just old enough now to suspect what her white mother really meant by that and was afraid of what she might do if she said it again.
“Child, you are gonna be the death of me,” Gamma Jol said with an exasperated eye roll. “Come on now and help me make up the couch.”
Con wanted to chase after Gamma and take her hand but found she couldn’t move. Gamma Jol disappeared from sight, the kitchen dissolving in smoke and haze, becoming an alleyway once again. Con knew it was another hallucination, but that didn’t make it feel any less real or make her miss her grandmother any less. This was what Laleh had warned her about. Her new body trying to reject her consciousness. So far it felt like the world’s worst breakup.
When she felt steadier, Con sat up and took another round of the pills Laleh had given her, washing them down with a protein shake. The shake did little but cause her stomach to rumble impatiently. She needed food. Real food. But food cost money she didn’t have. Well, there was always dumpster diving in an emergency. Nothing like yesterday’s Ethiopian to start the day off right. She meant it as a joke, but it landed with a thud—not nearly far-fetched enough for comfort.
The smart thing to do would be to ask her friends to loan her some money. She hated asking for help so much that dumpster diving actually sounded more appealing, but she was in trouble here. Real trouble. It might be time to suspend her first commandment, from the Book of Zhi-Left-You-All-Alone-in-the-World: Thou shalt not rely on anyone ever again. Can a girl get an amen? The only problem with asking for help was it would require turning on her LFD, which could bring Palingenesis’s wolves down on her again. Laleh’s parting words echoed in her ears: Anonymity is not your friend right now. Con was starting to see the wisdom in that. She needed to be seen and to establish that she existed in this world. So how could she kill two birds with this stone? Who did she know who lived around here?
Kala Solomon.
Con practically did a little dance of excitement. Kala lived nearby in Silver Spring, a neighborhood just outside the city in Maryland. Providing she hadn’t moved in the last eighteen months. Con didn’t know her exact address, but she’d been there a couple of times, so it should be easy enough to find. And Kala was a friend and would help. She had better, after all the times Con had bailed out her band.
Kala lived in an enormous house that she shared with a revolving cast of transient roommates. None of the people who had signed the original lease still lived there, but at any given time, there were between eight and twelve tenants. The ancient house had probably been a showstopper in its day, but that day was likely in another century. Years of neglect had left it in a state of indifferent decline. The landlord lived in Canada somewhere and did only the bare minimum maintenance to keep the rent flowing. White paint curled up in parchment rolls to reveal red brick beneath, and the front porch canted to one side like a ship in a storm. Con cut across the front yard, through the knee-high grass turned brown straw in the merciless summer sun, and rang the bell.
After a minute, a young white guy in a too-tight Knicks jersey and cargo shorts opened the door. He stood there holding a bowl of cereal under his chin waiting for her to identify herself. When she asked if Kala still lived there, he held up a finger and shut the door in her face. Damn. She checked her reflection in a window. By the most charitable of definitions, she was not having a good hair day. Gingerly, she extracted a candy wrapper that must have gotten stuck there while she was sleeping. Wonderful.