The Black Kids(16)

* * *




From my perch on the roof, I can see into my sister’s room. Inside, my mother takes a book off Jo’s shelves, then another and another. My father comes in, and the two of them say something to each other, come to some sort of agreement, and then he too begins to take books off Jo’s shelves. Then they’re not Jo’s shelves at all, they’re just planks of wood in need of a purpose. My mother takes down a Purple Rain poster. My father takes down Jo’s seventh-grade photo.

“This calc homework is ridiculous. Have you finished it?” Courtney says.

“I haven’t looked at it yet.”

Together, my parents remove a customized trophy case with Jo’s Model UN trophies. They get more and more frenetic, swept up in the act of removal as they take things off the wall and throw them on the floor. I can’t tell if they’re laughing or crying or both.

“So, problem eight says, ‘The graph of the function f is show in the figure above. For how many values of x in the open interval (?4, 4) is f discontinuous?’… like, I don’t get it.”

“I don’t have my book out here with me.”

When they tire, my parents sit down together in the middle of all the things that make up my sister’s life and look at each other. There are patches of bright where the wall hasn’t seen the light of day in years. The room is exposed and raw, and I’m embarrassed for them and it. Lucia appears in the doorway, and my parents look up startled, caught.

“And problem nine says…”

Courtney’s looking for me to feed her the answers, like I’ve done for most of our lives. But I don’t know how I’m supposed to tell her the answers when I don’t have them yet myself.

“Shit. Gotta go,” I tell Courtney, and start to crawl back to my room before anybody notices. I drop the phone on the roof with a thud, and it starts to slide down and off. I grab the phone and yank it up, but the damage is done.

They look out at me. My father wades through Jo’s things on the floor to get to the window, which he slides open.

“You get your little ass off that roof right now, young lady.”

“What are you doing?”

“We told you and Jo not to go out on that roof ever again.”

Jo fell off once. We were up here together in the sun and then, like that, she fell into the bushes below and then hit the ground hard. She fractured several ribs and broke her arm and scraped her skin so hard in several places that she wasn’t brown anymore but red. She spent several months in a neon-pink cast that she let me draw on with Technicolor Sharpies when I was bored. Jo fell, but I thought I saw her rise onto her tiptoes and lean forward. I thought I saw her close her eyes and lift off. But I know nothing.

In the hospital, when they were setting her arm, my father held her tenderly against his chest and sang “Isn’t She Lovely” while she cried.

“Daddy, that’s Stevie’s absolute worst song,” Jo stopped crying for a second to say.

“Girl, is you crazy?” my father said, which is how we knew he was dead serious, ’cause he very rarely uses the vernacular.

Then Jo started to laugh until the doctor yanked her arm back into place. Then she screamed into Daddy’s armpit while he held her tighter against his beating heart.

“What are you doing to Jo’s room?” I ask my parents.

“Jo doesn’t live here anymore,” my mother said.



* * *




Lucia has a stack of People magazines on the bed and we pore over them, imagining other people’s lives as our own. Lucia loves Princess Diana, and People keeps speculating that she and Prince Charles might be getting divorced. Lucia’s dark hair is cut exactly like Princess Diana’s, and my mom’s is too, so that my two mothers are each other and somebody else all at once. The idea that it’s 1992 and we still have kings and queens and people born into being the heads of entire countries is weird to me, but I think my mom and Lucia both like how Diana looks good in Givenchy and happiest as she holds the brown orphans others have left to die.

“How is she?” Lucia folds laundry on the bed next to me. I place my whole head in the laundry basket. I love the smell of fresh laundry, the heat against my skin, those few moments when the clothes are like the sun instead of just another pair of faded pajamas. Lucia swats me away.

“It’s been a shitty month. Her dad keeled over from a heart attack, and there’s family drama. ‘Diana pleaded with nearby photographers to “please, just leave us alone,”’?” I read.

“Smartass. Your sister.”

“Crazy,” I say. “Can we talk about something else?”

“You need new friends.”

“Did you know Diana’s mom ran off with a wallpaper heir?”

“You’re gonna miss me, you know.” Lucia sighs, and when she does, I wonder if she’d rather be arguing with Umberto and Roberto back home instead. I think she’s talking about when I go off to college, but later I find out that’s not what she’s talking about at all.



* * *




On Saturday, Lucia invites me and my parents out to dinner at her favorite place, which is this perfect Chinese hole-in-the-wall with questionable service and actual Chinese people eating there. As we slurp and my mother finishes her second glass of rice wine, she tears up and tells Lucia how grateful she is for everything she’s done for us over the years and that we truly consider her part of the family.