3
Niya
Seeing Sean was the most exciting thing that happened to me the whole week, which was kind of sad when I thought about it. I mean, if seeing my deceased brother’s best friend whom I might not see again for years was a highlight for seven days, I might as well go ahead and die now because it was going to be a long three years.
Jazzy, however, had plenty to do that week because she got her check. The state paid her eight dollars an hour to care for our grandmother 30 hours a week. It came to nearly eight hundred dollars a month after taxes, enough to keep her hair and nails done plus purchase some clothes.
I’d asked for a small share—$50 a week?—since I did occasionally put lotion on Big’s feet or go to the store on her behalf.
“Really, Niya? You should be payingmefor all the times I cook and clean for you right along with Big,” my sister fussed. “Plus, I pay your phone bill on my plan. You’re a bum. I’m not gonna pay you for that.”
I couldn’t argue with her. When I had a job, I used to help out but there wasn’t any place within walking distance that was hiring. After a couple years of begging for jobs at the laundromat and even the liquor store, I’d stop trying. So, yes, I was a bum. A 27-year-old bum with nothing to look forward to except the next time I happened to be walking down the street while Sean was driving by. And then what would I do? Flag him down? And what if he stopped? Would I get in? Where would we go? What would we do?
Being in his presence had ignited something in me I hadn’t felt since junior high when I had a crush on Chandler Carraway. He was a nerdy guy with oily skin, but he was tall and muscular. Chandler always wore a hoodie, so not many girls had picked up on his body except me. I saw it once when Mr. Raymond made Chandler take off his jacket in the cafeteria when we were registering for classes. Those biceps popped out like ka-dow.
Even Jazzy had noticed. “Dang, he look good from far away.”
I downplayed the observation with, “Naaa. He’s nobody.” For the next two weeks, I’d begged my counselor to take me out of my third period class—the only seventh grade honors math class—and switch me into thirdperiod choir, the only one seventhgraders could join, so I could be in class with Chandler.
“But your teachers all say you’re great at math, Niya. Have you talked to your grandmother about going from honors to regular math?” my counselor, Ms. Martin said, squinting as she flipped through my file.
“Uh huh. She said it’s okay if I go down. Everybody in my family’s bad at math anyway.” Though I hadn’t talked to Big about dropping the class, I was telling the truth about my family being horrible math students. When I had to help Jazzy with her math homework, Big said she wasn’t surprised because she’d flunked out of high school due to Algebra.
My bright-eyed, blonde-haired counselor shook her head. “If you say so.” She proceeded to fill out the paper for my transfer of classes. As a 12-year-old girl, sitting in a hard, orange chair in a tiny cubicle space, I had thought that moment was the ticket to my happiness. Once Ms. Martin moved me down to regular math and signed me up for the same elective as Chandler, I would get him to like me. He would fall in love with me, we would be the “it” couple from then until twelfthgrade, then I would get pregnant on our prom night, we would move into an apartment together, and we would have a baby sometime around Christmas after we graduated.
That was my dream.
After wrangling that sheet of paper from Ms. Martin’s hand and spending a week in choir class with Chandler, I realized that my dream would not be coming true. Chandler didn’t like black girls. I’m not even sure he liked girls at all. Furthermore, he couldn’t sing.
I was too ashamed or afraid or both to ask Ms. Martin to put me back in honors, so I stayed in regular math, which meant I was ineligible for Algebra the following year and I lost the chance to take higher math classes for the rest of my high school career. Not that I wanted to sign up for that path, but I wondered what might have happened if I’d had at least one honors or AP class.
I’m not saying I would have gone to college or anything like that, but maybe if I had an honors distinction on my diploma, I could have gotten a better job so I wouldn’t be sitting around hoping against hope that Jazzy might spare me twenty dollars every now and then.
As soon as the mail came Friday afternoon, she was up and out. “I’m getting braids this time, so don’t wait up for me,” she said, stuffing a novel into her purse. “Big’s dinner is sitting in the refrigerator with foil on it. Donotlet her put any extra salt on it. It’s seasoned enough already.”
“Okay,” I agreed, knowing I had no intentions of enforcing Jazzy’s rules. I didn’t like it when she talked to me like I was her child. But it had always been this way between me and her. In fact, it was worse after Momma died. Jazzy and I were minutes apart in age, but seemingly decades apart in dominion.
Big sat in her wheelchair and I lay across the sofa for the next three hours, watching game shows. Well, I should sayshewatched television while I played games on my phone.
While I waited for the levels to load, I counted and recounted the twenty-two stripes in the peeling kitchen wallpaper on the side nearest our wobbly, wooden dining table. Despite the folded paper beneath one of its legs, the table still managed to stay annoyingly uneven. Jazmin had tried to bring a little beauty in the place with a white, plastic vase with three fake roses poking out the top. I wanted to ask her what good she thought those roses were doing when our stove looked like we’d gotten it from a church giveaway and our three overcrowded countertops were so stained, it was hard to tell what the original color had been.
Still, I had to give it to my sister. She ran through tons of bleach every month making sure that no matter how run-down our belongings were, they were at least disinfected. That rose vase included.
My connection was slow since I had used all my premium data for the month, and the internet was running on a lower speed. “Shoot,” I exclaimed when I missed catching a diamond in my game because of the delay.
“Y’all gonna all need bifocals and trifocals, keeping your eyes focused on that tiny screen for hours a day,” Big said under her breath.
I glanced over at her and noticed she’d gotten a new swath of gray hair. “No, we won’t.”
“You mark my words. You’re gonna be half-blind before you hit forty.”
That number, coming from her mouth to me, nearly took my breath away.Forty?“I thought you said everybody in our family dies young.”
“Most do. But noteverybody. I’m still here. How old you think I am?” She poked out her lips. She gave me a glance she might have used a long time ago to flirt with a man. Even with her drooping eyelids, a forehead full of wrinkles and skin weathered because of drinking and smoking, Big still thought she was cute.
“I don’t know, but…you really think I might live until forty?” I asked.
She cocked her head as though giving my question serious consideration. “Well, I mean, you don’t go nowhere. You don’t do nothin’. You got a pretty good chance of makin’ it if you stay away from people and keep to yourself. That way you don’t get into no arguments over nobody’s husband. Plus people ain’t sneezin’ all over you. You ain’t got to deal with other folks’ germs. That’ll keep you from cancer. I don’t care what nobody say, cancer is contagious. It’s in the air.” She waved her plump hand in the air. “You stay home, don’t pick up too much weight, you might make it to seventy-one, like me. The only thing that kept me around this long, because I know I’m big, is that I don’t allow no one, nobody to stress me out.”
