1
Niya
Ishould have been happy the day I turned 27, but I wasn’t. I was only three years away from 30, the age my mother died, an age my father and my brother, Jhavon, never reached.
My grandma, Big, said people in our family died young. “We got a hex on us,” she told me and my twin sister, Jazmin, as we were walking from Jhavon’s grave site the day we buried him. Jazmin and I were 14 when Jhavon died and when Big whispered those words to us in her raspy, superstitious tone. We’d heard the words before, but now that Jhavon, who had been three years older, had died, the curse seemed more real than ever.
The countdown was on.
So when I woke up at 6:58 a.m. on August 3rd, my 27thbirthday, anxiety gripped my neck and pinned me in bed for the first five minutes. I took several quick breaths, tightening my fists around the fitted sheet.Only three years left.
I remembered one summer when we visited my Uncle Poe in Oklahoma, he took us to church, and our teacher said Jesus was 33 when He died. At the time, I thought Jesus had lived to a ripe old age.
Not so anymore.
Sunlight still managed to stream through the dingy window, making the blackened walls appear dirtier than ever. I had tried my hardest to clean those walls once, but the bleach I put in the water stripped the paint and Big popped me with a belt for destroying her house.
It never occurred to her or me that a fresh coat of paint might work wonders.
Lying on my bed in the small room I shared with my twin sister, Jazmin, on a lazy Sunday morning, I wondered,How will I die?
I wasn’t even close to sick, so that was probably not how I would go. I walked or rode a bus almost everywhere I went, making a car accident unlikely. I didn’t have any enemies in the neighborhood, but my neighborhood itself was a threat. Just the week before, somebody had shot up into Miss Mabel’s house-store. The store part of her house had closed for a couple days.
I gotta stop going to Miss Mabel’s.
With that decision made, I breathed a little easier. I figured maybe I could plan well enough to buy myself the full three years. Maybe I could make it to thirty and a half, or thirty and nine tenths. My mind ran the calculations almost effortlessly.Twelve months in a year…divided by ten…one point two months…times nine…ten point eight…That meant I could make it through mid-summer of my twenty-ninth year.But I don’t want to die when it’s hot outside. People might not come to my funeral.
“Niyaaaaa?” Big hollered my name from the other side of the thin wall separating my bedroom from the living room.
Before I could take a deep breath and answer, Jazmin rushed into our room and yanked the covers off my legs and feet, sending a woosh of semi-cold air up my body.
“Get your lazy butt up. Big wants you to go to the store for her,” she fussed.
“Why can’t you go?”
“Cause I do everything else around here.”
“No, you don’t,” I argued.
Jazmin shifted her weight to one hip. “Which one of us is already out of bed? And which one of us got up and cooked breakfast already?”
She had a point, though I wasn’t sure if she should call getting out of bed and preparing food doing “everything.” Besides, she’d have to do those things whether I was around or not. That’s what she got paid to do.
“Happy birthday to you too,” I said with much sarcasm, staring at my mirror image. We both had the same brown eyes, perfectly arched brows, bronze skin tone, curly hair and full, wide lips. But whereas my lips often held a smile, Jazzy’s was often downturned into a frown.
Rolling her eyes, Jazzy said, “Same to you. Now, get up.”
There was no use in arguing with Jazmin. Big would be on her side if I tried. Conceding, I twisted my body to a sitting position and let my feet hit the floor. “What does she want at this time of the morning?”
“Bread and cigarettes. Big’s been begging for her smokes, and I’ll give her one today. You can go to Miss Mabel’s or, if she’s acting all self-righteous today and starts giving you a hard time about buying cigarettes on a church day, go to Mr. Henderson’s.” She said these words like we didn’t already know the drill, which annoyed me even more.
“You know I don’t like going to Mr. Henderson’s. You don’t go there yourself.” We both avoided that store for two reasons. One, Mr. Henderson could talk your ear off. There was no running in and out of the store with him. The second was Jhavon had died near Mr. Henderson’s store. Going there brought back too many memories and too much sadness.
“Well, hopefully Miss Mabel won’t be in one of her sanctimonious moods,” Jazzy said. “She wasn’t the last time I went. I guess she realized she was losing too much money trying to make us all holy.”
I didn’t bother telling Jazmin Ms. Mabel’s house-store was off limits to me because I was doing everything possible to live well into my thirtieth year. All I said was, “Okay,” because, again, there’s no winning with Jazmin.
“And if you end up at Mr. Henderson’s, see if he has any new books by Gina Johnson.”
