What's Mine and Yours(57)

Adira started weeping again.

“You want to tell somebody?”

“They were just trying to make me mad. If I go to the principal, then they win.”

Down the hall, a few other kids were watching them, but no one came over to ask what had happened, to see what they could do.

“We should get them in trouble,” Gee said. He was channeling Jade, he knew. It was the kind of thing she would have done. She had never worried about being a snitch.

Adira groaned and pressed her fists into her eyes. “You think they’ll get in trouble? I love you, Gee, but sometimes I swear you don’t know nothing.”

She shook her head at him and grimaced—he disgusted her—then gathered her backpack and stomped away. Gee called after her, but she didn’t turn around. Across the hall, two white girls leaned against their lockers, watching. The blond girl gaped at him; the other, a redhead, seemed to be smiling at him meekly, as if to commiserate, but Gee couldn’t be sure; she wouldn’t look him in the eye.

He didn’t open his locker to drop off the address or pick up his textbook. He drifted down the hall, dazed. He kept hearing Adira crying, telling him he knew nothing. He saw her tears spilling freely, her wet cheeks, and destroyed hair. Without wanting to, he found himself defending the Central students in his mind. It’s not most of them, he thought. There’s always one. And then, involuntarily, before he could stop himself: One is all it takes.



Gee had few memories of the trial for the man who killed Ray. When he tried to piece it together, he could conjure up a vision of himself taking the stand, a little boy in a too-big blazer, although, of course, the memory wasn’t real, and he hadn’t watched himself testify from the benches in the courtroom. He knew a woman with a squeaky voice had asked him questions he hadn’t known the answers to. He had said he couldn’t remember, or he didn’t know, and each time, he had the sinking feeling that it wasn’t what anyone wanted him to say—not the judge or that questioning woman, or Wilson, or Jade. But they had told him to only tell the truth, and nobody had explained whether there was something that he was secretly meant to prove.

In Gee’s memories, the man who did it wasn’t there, although he must have been. If Gee tried to recall him, he managed to, but he knew this, too, was all invention. He dreamed up a man who was a composite of images he’d seen on TV: a broad male body in orange clothes, a tattoo circling a muscular neck, handcuffs linking wrists.

Gee didn’t know his name, and he didn’t know what he and Wilson had been fighting about. No one had ever explained it to him, not then or in the years after. He didn’t know whether Wilson had been caught up in a debt, a deal, or something else. His mother had given him the version of events appropriate for a six-year-old, and never bothered to fill in the rest.

Wilson had disappeared afterward. He had been their family, and then he was gone, cut off, probably by Jade. His sister Carmela had disappeared, too, although she had watched Gee for a while. Weeks? Months? He couldn’t tell. Everyone they’d known before was gone, except Linette. Even Ray had been wiped away the moment Jade took his picture off the wall.



After school, Noelle caught the bus from the station downtown, half a mile from Central. She rode north, and the bus left her on the side of an access road with no sidewalk. She kept far onto the shoulder as she walked, the mud mucking up her glossy black boots. It was a while before she reached the old gravel road, its long slope down through a cavern of trees. Then the three houses: the first painted salmon pink, the second, the one that had belonged to them, still midnight blue. The last belonged to Ruth, her mother’s only friend.

Bailey was reading a comic book on the porch swing. They waved at each other. He was an eighth grader, like Margarita, but he seemed younger than his years. He loved his comics and gardening, and whenever Noelle and her sisters came over with Lacey May to visit, he went on doing whatever he had been doing before. He wasn’t bad or boring, just quiet.

Noelle asked for Ruth, and Bailey led her inside their pretty green house. Ruth was in her bathrobe, eating yogurt from a giant tub and watching the news. There had been a fire in Raleigh, a whole family burned alive in the middle of the night.

“Noelle, honey, what are you doing here? Is everything all right? Where’s your mama?”

“It’s just me.”

Ruth seemed to read her situation instantly. She sent Bailey out front, led Noelle to the yard.

They sat on the brick patio overlooking the vegetable garden. Bailey was growing beets and cabbage, radishes, and raspberries, the fruits edging out of their buds into the sun.

“He sure loves these plants.”

Ruth mm-hmmed at her. “They keep him company. It can get lonely out here, you know. Your mama called this morning to invite me to some emergency meeting for concerned parents. That’s where she is right now, isn’t it?”

“Why didn’t you go?”

“People get all worked up over nothing. What do I care if these kids have a better shot now than they used to? Who am I to stand in the way? We all get good breaks and bad ones. That’s life.”

Noelle didn’t see the point in arguing with Ruth, in saying that maybe she ought to care about what happened to other kids in the county, maybe she ought to care about the trouble Lacey May and the other parents were causing. She didn’t want to upset her, not when she needed her help, not when she was already so much better than her own mother.