“Fat girl?” Marcus whispers.
His slides scrape against the floor, and the door thumps as it closes. “I don’t think Mama want them bacon and biscuits I cooked. She threw it up... and she’s real hot.”
“That’s because it was too heavy.”
The blanket muffles my words, so he murmurs out a “huh” and the scraping gets closer.
I open the side of the blanket and poke my lips out. “The food was too heavy. Give her a half of pill from the bottle on her nightstand, a clear Ensure, and take that cover off her.”
I wait for him to say something, but all I hear is Scott Van Pelt’s voice sneaking under the door.
“Okay. Bry came by again earlier. He left you another strawberry cool cup in the freezer.”
“Okay…”
“Fat girl?”
“Yeah?”
“You good?”
“Yeah. I’m good.”
He knows about that article, and he knowsIknow he knows about it. Even Granny knows about it. I heard her telling Mama over the phone that she heard “the radio” talking about me and Ace yesterday morning and asking if it was true. Mama doesn’t lie to Granny, so she told her it was. Now I’m dodging Granny’s calls too.
I wait for his slides to scrape against the floor again and for him to push out of my room, but nothing happens, so I fling the blanket off my head to help him find his way out.
“You can leave no—”
The rest of my sentence gets swallowed by his bushy eyebrows crawling together and the cold black gun in his hands.
“What the hell, Marcus?”
“Did he hurt your feelings?”
“Who?” I frown, pushing up from my bed. “What you talking about?”
“Ace...”
“Huh?” I swallow more chalk while pushing the blanket off my legs.
“You heard me.”
“I—I thought ya’ll were cool?”
“I’m asking aboutyouand him.”
I look at Ace’s shirt I dug from the bottom of my laundry basket and try to put everything that happened into words.
I’ve been waiting for this since Angie’s birthday. It didn’t matter how much Marcus wanted Ace to take it easy that day or how much basketball they played together—he was still a man I hated and liked and all those men had to be dealt with eventually.
“I—he—I don’t know.”
“What you mean you don’t know? You been locked in this room ever since that shit hit the news. You need to tell me if he hurt you.”
“It’s not that simple, a’ight?” I shake my head, looking up at him.
He folds his lips under his teeth. “I’m trying to make sense of all this shit—of your face being all over IG every time I open it, of—of my niggas asking me if that’s your man now, the pictures of him knocking ole’ boy out after the game the other night. What the fuck is going on and why he not over here making shit right if that’s your man?”
