Seth and Samona (6 page)

I watched Mrs. Gemini do her work for a minute,
then realized that she was cutting out numbers and arranging them in different combinations. She was obsessed. I looked behind her to see if her computer was on. “No poetry today?”

Mrs. Gemini sighed, and her braids shook a little. “Writer’s block, Young King. Woke up with it. Looks like I’m going to have to call up
Intruder
for an assignment. I think they want me to do something religious next. Nation of Islam or something. Some ex-minister with a thing for loose women. Just as long as I don’t have to impersonate a nun.”

I laughed. The last thing Mrs. Gemini looked like was a nun. She does undercover assignments for the magazine
Intruder
to make extra money. Mrs. Gemini says you couldn’t buy a whistle with the kind of money poets make. She’s famous, though. She’s always doing readings at the library and at colleges. One time PBS did a special on poets during the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement and they did a whole section on Mrs. Gemini.

“Well, Young King, I know you didn’t come here to watch me cut numbers. Go on upstairs and make sure my children are keeping their activities within the guidelines of the living,” Mrs. Gemini said, wiggling her eyebrows up and down. “I think Leticia has Samona taking calls from the psychic hot line.”

“I really came to deliver some food,” I said, starting up the stairs to the kitchen. I didn’t want Mrs. Gemini thinking I came here
just
to see Samona.

There was nobody in the kitchen, but I could see why Mrs. Gemini was hiding out in the basement. Leticia was singing at the top of the lungs from somewhere in the house.

“La, la, la, la, la, lahhhhh!”

I put my hands over my ears and started to go into the family room, when I noticed a piece of paper pinned to the refrigerator door. It was Samona’s application for the beauty contest, all filled out in red ink.

The Little Miss Dorchester contest is a junior beauty pageant held every year in our town. Since it’s based mostly on looks, Samona was gonna turn some heads all the way around. Each year a bunch of stupid girls sign up to be in it, hoping to win the seventy-five-dollar check and the trophy and get their picture in the paper. I still didn’t believe she would actually go through with it. Knowing her, she would probably forget to turn in the application on time.

Nigel, Anthony and Samona were in the family room, all of them talking at the same time. Samona was on the red phone which Leticia had installed for the hot line. Nigel and Anthony were sitting on the floor in front of the couch with what looked like all twenty-seven volumes of the Encyclopedia Americana around them.

“I said, a tall dark stranger is coming into your life!”
Samona shouted into the phone, rolling her eyes at me. She had a stack of cards in front of her with things Leticia had told her to say.

I went over to Nigel and Anthony and sat down on the couch behind them. They were wearing the same football jerseys and sweatpants. They looked more like twins than brothers, except that Anthony had a scar on the right side of his face from a fight he got into a long time ago and Nigel was starting to grow a mustache. Nigel and Anthony are as different as you can get, though. Nigel likes to think. He’s studying to be an engineer at Boston College and he spends all his time at his computer. But Anthony used to be a hood right after they first moved to Boston. He was in a gang and carried a gun and used to get into fights—that’s where he got the scar. But all that changed after Anthony got sent to a home for juvenile delinquents for a few weeks. Last year he finished off his high school diploma and then began taking art classes at night. Anthony wants to be an architect. Jean-Claude said that the juvenile hall had helped to make Anthony take things more seriously.

“When? Sometime soon!”
Samona shouted into the phone.

“I’m telling you, Tone, all the good things have already been invented. The airplane, the telephone, the whoopee cushion. Hi, Seth,” Nigel said, throwing down Volume 7 of the encyclopedia.

“I don’t know what he’ll look like exactly, lady! Isn’t tall dark and handsome enough for you?”

Leticia sang,
“La, la, la, la, lahhh!”

“What are you guys looking for?” I asked, unstopping my ears. “What’s Leticia doing?”

“Opera singing lesson,” Anthony groaned, flopping down on his back. “She saw Leontyne Price on TV and now she thinks opera’s going to be her life.”

“Maybe
we
should watch TV. That’s where Letty gets all her ideas,” Nigel suggested. “She’s made money off the hot line.”

“Fat? Lady, I promise you he wont he fat! He will he the one you have been waiting for.”

“What about the wine?” I asked.

“Now that was a good idea,” Nigel said, rubbing his chin. “But a good wine takes years to develop its flavor.”

“Huh?”

“We gotta store the wine in the basement for fifty years,” Anthony said. “It don’t taste like nothing but grape juice right now. But, man, our kids will make a fortune off of it.”

“La, la, la, la, lahhhh!”

“That’s it, lady! Your time is up!”
Samona hung up the phone and unplugged it from the wall. “And that’s it for me too. This hot line’s out of business.”

“We’re searching for something with great creative potential,” Nigel said, picking up another volume of the encyclopedia. “Something that will bear our name forever. Do you realize man has yet to land on Pluto?”

From the corner of my eye I could see Samona sneaking out of the family room.

“Something all natural—maybe we could use Ma’s vegetables. I got it! A vegetable love potion.” Nigel’s eyes lit up.

“What? Man, that’s stupid.” Anthony shook his head. “This is all Ma’s fault. Whenever she has writer’s block, our creative juices get blocked too. It’s a curse.”

I followed Samona into the kitchen before she could disappear. “Wait a minute, Samona Gemini, I’ve got something to say to you!”

Samona had the nerve to look surprised. “I know you’re not taking that tone of voice with me in
my
house.”

“You lied to me and Enrie about the wake,” I said, wagging a finger in her face. “I didn’t believe you for a minute, but you scared Enrie.”

Samona went to the refrigerator and pulled out a pitcher of some brown-colored stuff. “I didn’t lie. Anthony
did
tell me that was what a wake was. He lied to me.”

“Samona, you just can’t go around lying to people,” I said, very seriously. “It can get you in a lot of trouble—”

“Stop being such a stick-in-the-mud, Seth. I bet I made the wake a whole lot more fun for you and Enrie,” Samona said. “Want some tannia juice?”

“What is it?” I asked suspiciously. “All that stuff about your aunt Delia too—what if I told her you were telling stories about her having a wake?”

“Aunt Delia wouldn’t care.” Samona poured out two glasses of juice. “It’s root juice.”

“No thank you.” I pushed the glass away. “This isn’t a social call, Samona. I came to set you straight. You can’t just go around making up stories.”

“Why not?” Samona asked, seriously.

“You’ll get a terrible reputation. That’s why I don’t like to hang around you—”

“Okay,” Nigel said, running into the kitchen with Anthony right behind him. “Put some pots on the stove, Samona, we’re gonna cook up a love potion. And keep a lookout for Ma. She’ll kill us if she sees us messing in her garden.”

“A love potion.” Samona wrinkled her nose. “That’s stupid.”

“That’s what I said,” Anthony grunted, following Nigel out the door. “Kid stuff.”

“I want to dig, too!” Samona shouted, her eyes lighting up. She rushed out the door and looked back at me. “Come on, Seth.”

I shook my head and glared at her instead. I was still mad at Samona, and I didn’t think digging up Mrs. Gemini’s garden was a good way to prove my point.

I sighed and got up to put the tannia juice back
into the refrigerator. Samona would never change. I didn’t know why I even bothered to come over here. It was best to stick to my lifelong plan of avoiding her.

I went back down to the basement to say good-bye to Mrs. Gemini. She had finished cutting the cloth and was sewing different numbers together.

“Leaving so soon? Give me a hug, Young King.” Mrs. Gemini opened her arms and hugged me. She smelled like all kinds of vegetables mixed together. “You know, Samona doesn’t have many friends.”

I started to tell Mrs. Gemini that Samona didn’t have
any
friends but then I realized she thought I was Samona’s friend. I decided not to break her heart.

“I think Samona would be a very lonely girl if it wasn’t for you.” Mrs. Gemini rubbed my head and let me go. “Thank you, Young King.”

“Bye, Mrs. Gemini.” I could feel my face getting hot. I hurried back outside, thinking about what Mrs. Gemini had said. Samona
doesn’t
have any friends, I thought; she doesn’t hang out with any of the girls in our class like Bessie Armstrong or Maisie Hong. That’s because everybody thinks she’s weird, I said to myself. From what I could tell Bessie Armstrong was the kind of girl who jumps rope and plays with dolls. Samona was the kind of girl who goes to a witch’s house and gets banned from field trips for a whole school year. About the only girl stuff she ever seemed interested in was this beauty contest. If Samona would only dress
normal and stop talking about weird things and act like every other girl, I thought, she’d be fine.

Papi was sitting on the steps of our apartment building when I got back home. He had on his red soccer uniform and was dripping with sweat.

“Did you beat the Saints?” I sat beside him. I wanted to talk to Papi about Samona and Chantal. But I couldn’t talk about Chantal without getting her in trouble.

“Pulverized them.” Papi kicked his leg out. “The Mighty Spiders keep spinning webs of victory.”

“You sound like Mrs. Gemini’s poetry.”

“You just came from there, right? Spending some time with Samona?
Ki jan li yé?
How is she?” Papi asked, still smiling.

“It’s not funny, Papi,” I said seriously. “I keep trying to tell you that Samona’s crazy. Why doesn’t anyone believe me?”

“Samona’s her own person.” Papi pulled a towel out of his gym bag and wiped his face. “Very few people can say that at her age. You see all the time how kids are trying to copy each other’s hair and clothes and style. Samona’s comfortable with herself.”

“Yeah, but nobody
else
is comfortable with her. She acts so different from everyone else. She’s always making up these wild stories—”

“You should know about being different,” Papi said. “Remember last year when you had that
ti neg ayisyen
—the new Haitian boy in your class? The one that couldn’t speak English—Marcel?”

“Marc.” I nodded. “Nobody liked him just ’cause they couldn’t talk to him. Samona helped me to teach him English.”

“Different doesn’t mean bad. It just means different,” Papi said. “If Samona was like every other girl at school, would you notice her? If everybody had the same personality and behaved the same way then life would be very boring. Think about what life would be like with no Samona.”

“Peaceful,” I said.

Papi picked up the soccer ball and stood up. “Speaking of peace, let’s not go upstairs yet. Do you want to help me practice some soccer kicks at the park?”

“Yeah,” I said quickly, and he winked at me. All of the relatives were getting on his nerves too. I jumped up and followed Papi.

O
n Sunday, I woke up early cause Jean-Claude and Chantal were fighting again. It was a good thing the last of our relatives had gone home last night, ’cause they were yelling so loud they would have woken everybody up. Then I heard Manmi shouting at them and they got quiet fast. I rubbed my eyes and got out of bed ’cause there was no use going back to sleep now. We had to go to church every Sunday and I knew that soon Granmè would be knocking on the door telling me to get up and to go to my
twalèt
, which means “wash up!” I peeked through the blinds and saw it was raining outside. That meant we would drive to church. Manmi makes us walk when it’s nice out ’cause the church is only five blocks away. It takes us forever to get there ’cause Granmè walks so slow.

I went to the closet to take out some of my only-wear-to-church clothes and I heard Jean-Claude slam into the room and throw himself on his bed. When I turned around, I saw that he was still in his blue
striped pajamas and he was beating his fist in the pillow. All of a sudden, he stopped and turned over and put his hands behind his head.

“Jerome again?” I said, not really expecting an answer. I wanted to talk to Jean-Claude about everything Chantal had said yesterday but I felt like I needed to talk to Chantal again just to make sure I had everything right. I was still having trouble understanding it all. Chantal didn’t want to be a nurse, didn’t want to do all the housework, didn’t want to marry a nice Haitian man and could be president of Haiti if she wanted to. I knew if I told Jean-Claude just like that, he would think I was as crazy as Samona Gemini.