Authors: Peggy Kern
Little Peach (3 page)
I shrug and turn away from you. Please. Just let me sleep.
“Michelle? Is your mother dead?”
I want to say yes. I want it to be true. I want to say she’s the one who died on the couch last year, who got wheeled out on a stretcher and never came back. I want it to be her.
But the wrong people die. The dead people are the good ones, the bad ones get to walk around like nothing. Like they got a right to keep breathing while the ones you need just leave their skin, waste away till there
ain’t nothing left but a stupid dirty T-shirt and what you can barely remember.
“Yeah,” I say. “She’s dead.”
Quiet. Your eyes settle on me. “Who else, then? Who else can we call?”
Grandpa. That’s who you should call. He’d tell all of you to stay the hell away from me.
C’mon, Punks. Let’s go home
.
“What happens if there ain’t nobody else?” I ask.
But I already know the answer.
Nothing good. Not for me. Not for any of us.
North Philadelphia
I’m fourteen.
“Hey, Punky.”
The words rattle out of Grandpa’s mouth, more air than sound.
“Hey,” I say, pulling up the blanket to his chin, over the empty space where his belly used to be. It’s gone now. So is the fat in his cheeks. Like someone let the air out.
That’s what tumors do. Like the one he’s got in his stomach.
He stays on the couch all day now.
Tonight, Mama sits me on the floor and works hard on my hair, combing and pulling till it’s tight in a ponytail. She pulls too hard, but I don’t complain because Grandpa’s eyes shimmer a little, like maybe this will all be okay. Like maybe he can leave and we’ll be fine.
His hands. His hands are still big. Grandpa’s bear paws.
Scoop me up, Grandpa. Pretend you are a bear. Throw me over your shoulder, carry me up the stairs, because it’s late and I should be in bed. I still need somebody to take care of me.
Time for bed, Punks. School tomorrow. Remember
.
I stay up late and watch him breathe, watch the up and down of his chest till I fall asleep on the floor next to him.
In the morning, he’s still.
I go outside and sit on the step till I hear my mother shout. Then I know it’s true.
Erica once told me there’s pain so bad, your body won’t let you feel it. Like if your leg gets cut off. Or if you’re burned alive.
He’s gone.
My grandpa.
Now it’s just me and her.
Springtime.
I open the door to my room. Calvin is sprawled on my bed. His dirty fingers touch my red bear blanket.
The room is dark except for a dim yellow light from the window. I drop my book bag and turn to leave, but where? Suddenly he’s up and in my face.
“Hey, girl,” he whispers. “Where you been?”
Keep still. Don’t move. Stop shaking
.
His lips pull back into a smile. Yellow teeth and stinking breath and milky eyes pour over me. He touches my face with his fingers.
I pull away, but he just moves closer.
“What do you want?”
“I wanna see how you doing. I know it’s been hard on you lately. With your grandpa gone.”
I don’t say anything.
“You know, my daddy died when I was your age. I know it ain’t easy.” He touches my face again, looks down toward my hips. “You ever wanna talk about it,
maybe I can help, you know?”
“I’m good,” I say.
He moves closer, his lips skid against my mouth. I clench my teeth and my legs turn to water. He holds my head still. His tongue on my lips.
Downstairs, people are talking and walking around. Someone passes my door, peers in, and keeps going.
I shake my head away. “Stop,” I whimper.
Please
.
Calvin pushes up against me. “You miss your grandpa?”
He scratches his grimy black hair. Flecks of white fall on his shoulders. He’s not wearing a shirt.
“Don’t worry,” he whispers. “I’m gonna look out for y’all. Understand?” Then his mouth’s on me again, but harder this time, pushing past my teeth. I try to bite it, bite his tongue like a slug in my mouth. I push hard against his sticky skin, and it feels like I’m drowning and nothing works. My legs, my hands, my teeth, it’s all sinking away from me and I can’t stop him digging into my face. Stop it. Please.
“Yo, Calvin!” someone yells from the hall. “Corinna lookin’ for you!”
He lets me go and wipes his mouth. I gasp, my heart
punching at my chest bone, and I picture Grandpa busting through the door, Calvin slamming to the ground as Grandpa growls in his face. Grandpa, gathering me up into his arms. Me, curling myself into his lap.
Then I see my mother in the doorway, her thin body like a shadow in the flimsy yellow light. She stares at us and scratches at her arm, her eyes all glassy and slow. She looks confused.
“What the fuck?” she murmurs.
Calvin wipes his mouth again. He glares at her, his eyes challenging and angry, as if he’s daring her to speak. She lowers her head and looks at the floor. Then he chuckles, pats her bottom, and disappears into the hallway.
“Mama,” I whisper.
She points her finger at the dark. “You tryin’ to take him away from me? I see the way you been walkin’ around here, all cute and shit.”
She sways, wipes her nose. “Stay away from him. Hear me?”
Deep inside my chest, my heart jams up for a second and all the air goes out of me. Empty. Like Grandpa on the couch the night he died.
She turns away and shuts my door and then she’s gone.
I push my bed against the door and crawl into the corner of my room. Through the floorboards, her words to Calvin slice the dark.
“C’mere, baby,” she says, her voice soft and young. Like a little girl’s. Calvin laughs again. I grab my book bag and hug it to my chest, Grandpa’s words echoing in my head.
What do you do if you’re in trouble?
Chuck tries to watch me. He sits in his chair outside Boo’s and watches the house till he’s too drunk to see it. He drinks more now that Grandpa’s gone. I think I make him sad. After school he asks me questions like, who’s coming over and do we have enough money? I smile and lie and say it’s not that bad, because I don’t want him calling the cops.
Find a cop
.
They’ll send me to a group home. Like that place on Broad and Olney where Erica went. The place she wouldn’t talk about, even when she showed up at my
house with a busted lip. I tried to ask her questions, to find out what it’s like there, but she’d only shake her head and fold her arms tight across her chest. Then one night she showed up all bouncy, her eyes bright and secretive.
I’m leavin’, ’Chelle. I’m goin’ to New York. Me and my roommate. She got a cousin there
.
Then she slipped me a crumpled piece of paper with an address scrawled in sloppy handwriting, like whoever wrote it didn’t have much time.
Pink Houses
Crescent Street
New York
Pink houses. Were they really pink?
You should come visit, ’Chelle. Once I get all set up
.
How you know it’ll be better in New York?
I’d asked.
Erica shrugged, her shoulders falling slightly.
Can’t nothin’ be worse than here
, she’d said. A few days later, I tried to call her cell phone, but all I heard was the three long beeps you get when you don’t have no more time left on your prepaid.
Find a lady
.
There is no magic lady. No one’s gonna bring me home to Grandpa.
I pull up the carpet in the corner of my room and count the money from Grandpa’s stash. Fifty-one dollars left. I used to have eighty-four dollars, but I gotta spend more now that school’s out. It’s June. By August, I won’t have anything left.
I tuck the bills back under the rug and carefully push the carpet back into place. Then I curl up on the floor below the window.
For a long time I lay in the dark until my eyes grow heavy and I drift off into a fitful sleep. I think I hear someone calling me. Shouting, a siren squealing past, the
thump thump thump
of music. Something shatters.
Then I hear the sound of heavy footsteps. The doorknob turns slightly.
Tap. Tap. Tap
. “I know you in there.”
Calvin’s voice grabs at me through the door. I crawl into my closet and wait until his shadow walks away. He can’t get in—not tonight, not with the bed against the door. But someday he will. I know it.
What do you do if you’re in trouble?
I wait for the answer to come to me. But there’s only darkness and Calvin’s voice and my own heart, pounding like feet on the pavement, running away, running away, running away.
Morning.
My mother’s sitting in the kitchen. She’s smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee, a crumpled paper bag on the table before her.
“You can’t stay here no more,” she says. “I’m sorry, ’Chelle, but you can’t.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Don’t play dumb.”
“It ain’t my fault,” I say. “He was there when I got home.”
“I know. It don’t matter.”
Mom drops her cigarette into her coffee. It hisses as it hits the brown liquid, a trail of smoke rising in the still air.
“I know I ain’t right,” she continues. Her voice wobbles as she stares at the table, her eyes like liquid, like
they’re about to spill out onto the floor. “I know I ain’t. But me and Calvin . . .” For a moment, she looks like the girl in the photo from when I was a baby, her eyes far away and sad.
“You got friends, Michelle? Good friends?”
I shiver.
Mom slides the bag across the table to me. “There’s forty dollars in there, and the WIC card for this month so you can get food. You go stay with one of your friends. Someone good. You let me know when you all set up, okay?”
She stands up and heads for the stairs, her bare feet scraping on the floor. Rage swells up in me, tears out of me toward her, and I push. I push so fucking hard I knock her to the ground. Then I grab the paper bag and throw it at her crumpled body.
“I don’t need shit from you,” I spit.
She pulls herself up and shuffles to the stairs.
“You’re gonna miss me,” I hiss. “You don’t know.”
Her foot on the step.
“Ain’t you even gonna ask me where I’m going?”
She stops. Turns. “Can’t nothin’ be worse than here,” she says. “You smart, Michelle.” And then, “Not like me.”
Her thin body struggles, step by dirty step. A door closes softly. A lighter clicks, and then the smell of smoke.
What do you do if you’re in trouble?
I got fifty-one dollars and an address.
Pink Houses.
That’s where I will go.
10th and Filbert Streets, Philadelphia
The bus station’s crammed with every possible kind of person, rushing and standing and waiting in lines. A woman with shiny blond hair and tight dark blue jeans talks on her cell phone and sips a cup of coffee with whipped cream on top. A guy with a huge duffel bag and red sweatshirt that says
UPENN
dashes to the line at the ticket counter. A mother pushes a sleeping baby in a stroller. An old woman sits in a wheelchair by the door, dozing off under a blanket.
My heart pumps hard. It’s nine thirty a.m. Overhead, a giant schedule flashes the names of places I’ve never been to.
Atlantic City, New Jersey 9:45 a.m.
New York City 10:00 a.m.
Norfolk, Virginia 10:30 a.m.
Boston 11:15 a.m.
I hug my pillow and step into line behind the boy in the sweatshirt.
“Next!” yells the woman behind the counter. The boy steps up, flips open his wallet, pulls out a credit card, and taps it absentmindedly on the counter.
“Round trip to Boston,” he says. She types something into her computer.
“A hundred twenty-nine fifty,” she replies without looking up. My face flushes and I grab my pillow tighter. I don’t have that kind of money. What if a ticket to New York costs more than what I got?
The boy swipes his card, signs his name, takes his ticket, and strides off into the crowd.
“Next!” she calls. I clench my fifty-one dollars in my
hand. Above my head, the names of cities scroll by.
Toronto, Canada 9:50 a.m.
Columbus, Ohio 11:45 a.m.
Orlando, Florida 12:00 p.m.
“Next!” she repeats, raising her eyebrow at me.
I glance behind me. There’s a long line of people. An older woman in a big red hat puts her hand on my shoulder.
“Your turn,” she says gently. Her face is soft, and she’s wearing red lipstick that leaks into the wrinkles around her mouth.
“You can go,” I say, trying to sound casual. My hands start to sweat, soaking the money in my tight fist.
“You sure?” she says. “Do you need help?”
“Yeah.” I nod and force myself to smile. “I mean, no. You can go ’head.”
She smiles and walks to the counter.
“One way to New York,” she says.
“Forty-three seventy-five.”
One way to New York. Only forty-three dollars. I glance around, almost expecting to see the cops or
Calvin or my mother coming for me. But nobody’s there. Just strangers.
