Revenge of a Not-So-Pretty Girl (7 page)

No one says a word as we wait for Caroline’s mom to
return with the juice. My heart is beating as fast as a drum. I can’t shake the image of that old lady falling backward and cracking her skull against the table.
Thunk!
Then nothing. Like when you open a jar of peaches for the first time.

“All right,” Mrs. Johns says as she comes back into the room. “One cherry Hi-C for the girl who can’t drink milk. You all enjoy your snacks and do your homework.”

I start chewing on the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but I can’t seem to come up with enough saliva to make it go down. Even a swig of the Hi-C doesn’t help much. I’m just so consumed with the thought that I’ve killed some old lady who lived through the Second World War, maybe even the first one. She might even have made it through a dangerous childbirth or a car or bus accident. And here I am, some kid who should have been helping her to cross the street or pick up her medication from the pharmacy. Instead, I could possibly be the thing that has ended her life.

“Well, if you don’t care whether or not she’s alive, at least give me my share of the money,” I say. I just want to get away from Caroline and get home and start on dinner.

“What you gonna get with yours?” she asks me as she heads toward her closet.

If this question had come even two days ago, I would have been so excited. I mean, I had it all planned out. The Gloria Vanderbilt jeans Mama refuses to buy for me cost forty-five bucks. The Michael Jackson “Beat It” jacket costs fifteen dollars, and the tape recorder I could use to tape songs off the radio costs nineteen ninety-nine. I probably could have gotten it all with the money I’ve been saving up,
but with my share of the almost three hundred dollars, I’ll have enough for four jackets—one in every color. But suddenly, the jacket doesn’t seem all that important.

“Dunno. Have to think about it,” I mumble.

Caroline turns to her cousin. “What about you, Gillian?”

Gillian just shrugs and taps her fingers against the desk. But then the tapping comes to a sudden stop.

“What if she really is dead?” Gillian asks.

“Shut up,” I hear from Caroline.

“For real. I mean, she was all mashed up against the wall when we first walked in, but she got up. She was moving. She was okay. But after Faye pushed her—”

“I didn’t push her.” I try not to yell. “She was holding on to my arm. Her fingers were all cold and bony, and I was just trying to get her off.”

“But what if somebody does find her and they call the cops and the cops find our fingerprints? Then what? What if they come after us and they put us in jail? You can’t go to the movies if you’re in jail. You can’t hang out at Coney Island or go shopping—”

“Gillian, stop it,” I say.

“Gillian, me and you, we’re not about to go to jail,” Caroline says. “Once again, we didn’t do nothing. If anything, it would be Faye. She’s the one who pushed that woman down.”

“We all went in there together,” I remind them, my breath coming faster and faster. “I never even knew this woman existed. You’re the one who came up with this brilliant idea of messing with her after your friend Janet told you about her
being a movie star. And by the way, we still don’t even know if that’s true. I mean, just two hundred and eighty dollars? When she was supposed to be some big-time actress?”

I feel my heart racing and my eyes burning. My words are getting all caught in my throat, and they’re not coming out the way I want them to, so I just sit there and stare at Caroline, who has this weird grin on her face. And for the first time, I notice how ugly she is. I’m no Miss Universe, but I don’t look like an otherworldly being either. I mean, she really does look like she could have doubled for E.T. in that Steven Spielberg movie—if E.T. was put on a McDonald’s-only diet. And I want to just take her big fat face and smoosh it into the bed. Maybe I could beat her. I do move a lot faster than her. Maybe I could get in a couple of good licks before she even realizes what’s going on.

“We all went in there,” Caroline babbles on. “But we didn’t all knock that little old woman over, that’s all I’m saying.”

“But we’d all be in trouble.”

“Trouble for stealing some money and trouble for killing somebody’s grandma are two completely different kinds of trouble,” E.T.’s sister says. Then she just stares at me with her big, bulging eyes. “I don’t know why you’re looking so shocked.”

“I have to go. Just give me my money,” I say quietly.

Caroline takes some cash out of a brown Adidas shoe box, starts dividing it up, and hands a few bills over to me. I don’t have to count it to realize how little there is. And all of a sudden, my head starts to get real hot. I’m staring at two twenties.

“Where’s the rest?” I ask.

“Rest of what?”

“The money.”

“There is no rest. You get forty. Same for Gillian.”

“That means you’re taking two hundred dollars for yourself.”

“That’s right. I came up with the plan. I did most of the work.”

“We did just as much work as you. More, even. We were the ones who ended up standing out in the cold on lookout. Us. Me and Gillian. Skin and bones. You got all that extra padding and you never once went outside the building.”

“ ’Cause I had to make sure Janet didn’t see me.”

“You told us Janet works at Burger King till eight on weekdays. And I could be in a lot of trouble. I’ll probably need the most cash—for bail or something. This is the most money we’ve ever gotten from anybody, even more than from that snotty girl who was going to Woolworth’s with her grandmother’s money. We all did the same work, so we should get an equal share.”

“Please. You wouldn’t have done squat if I hadn’t been there with you. You would have zero dollars now instead of forty. Do you understand just how much forty dollars is? You ain’t never made that much money ever. So why you giving me grief?”

“This isn’t fair,” I say. “This isn’t fair. Gillian, you know it isn’t fair.”

I don’t know why I even say anything to Gillian, because she just starts shaking her head and shrugging like she’s
about to blast off into the stratosphere. My head is spinning and this weird, volcanic churning is taking place in the pit of my stomach. I’m seeing the old lady all crumpled against the floor in her kitchen. I’m seeing me sitting in the back of a police car. I’m seeing my classmates all looking on in shock as Sister Margaret Theresa Patricia Bernadette mouths, “Karma.” And I can hear Mama saying she’s not surprised, that she never thought I would ever amount to anything.

And suddenly, my head feels like it’s going to explode. Without thinking, I find myself running for Caroline’s closet and grabbing that Adidas shoe box. But before I can make my escape, Caroline snatches me up and body-slams me onto the bed.

I’m trying to yell, maybe have Mrs. Johns come rescue me, but my nose and mouth are being pushed into the bed and only a few muffled groans trickle out. I can make out Gillian standing in front of us, shaking her head even more furiously and spazzing out. Eventually, I realize the only thing struggling is going to get me is suffocated, so I stop. That, and the fact that I run out of energy. But then Caroline starts shaking me. And I’m telling her to stop, but she doesn’t. And the volcano that seems to have taken the place of my stomach is growing larger. It feels like someone lit a fire in there and it’s about to come raging out. But Caroline doesn’t listen to me. She just keeps shaking me and laughing her forest-creature laugh. And the more she laughs, the more my stomach quivers. And then the churning that started in my belly begins rising up into my chest and my
throat. Before I can even try to pull away from her, it’s too late. There’s a chunky lava river of peanut butter and jelly and bread and cherry-red Hi-C and the pizza we had for lunch at school flowing all over Caroline Johns. She lets out this loud, deranged scream.

“You gonna be sorry you did that!” she yells as she grabs at my hair, which I had parted down the middle and done in two braids. I can feel a few strands being pulled out, but I somehow manage to slip from her grasp.

“You already stole my money! What else can you do?” I yell back as I flee from her room, her building, her whole sick, twisted little world.

As I walk back to my apartment, not even the cold air outside can calm me.

Maybe I shouldn’t have
called Sister Margaret Theresa Patricia Bernadette “crazy, frustrated, and mean,” because I’m now convinced that she has cast some kind of karmic spell on me: torment an old woman and ye shall inherit your own tormenters. Or maybe my crazy grandfather on Mama’s side was right about God not liking ugly.

It’s only been a day since everything happened with that old lady, but not one thing has gone right since then. And this has to be the worst, by far—me stumbling in on a robber.

I shouldn’t have entered our apartment in the first place, but I was so distracted after discovering the little gift Caroline had left in my hair. Bubble gum! Everyone knows you don’t mess with a black girl’s hair. As I put my key into the first lock, I was focused on getting to the closest mirror. I was focused on the door to the old lady’s apartment opening, on whether she had moved from that kitchen floor or whether she was still lying there, all cold and beyond this world. I was focused on everything except what was
directly in front of me. Didn’t even notice that the first lock didn’t turn. But when the second one didn’t either, I realized it was because it was already open. I thought maybe Mama had come home early and was doing laundry or emptying the garbage and had forgotten to lock the door behind her. I was scared because I had left the house a mess this morning, and I knew Mama would be mad about it. But if I had to choose between a homicidal robber and my pissed-off mama, I would choose my pissed-off mama … I think.

By the time I realized something was wrong, I had come too far into the apartment. I had walked past the small hall leading to the bathroom, but I didn’t look in that direction. It wasn’t until I got to Mama’s bedroom door that things began to sink in. See, Mama always locks her door when she leaves in the morning. Guess she thinks I have nothing better to do than snoop through her stuff. But today her door was wide open, and the inside frame where the lock should have been was busted.

Now I’m huddled in the broom closet in the kitchen, scared for my life. I hear these footsteps, but they only last for a few seconds before there’s silence again. This is the worst part, I think—the silence. Because we have a really long hallway leading to the front door, and those five or six footsteps are not nearly enough to lead that robber out of the apartment. And although I picked up the butcher knife before jumping into the broom closet, I’m not too confident. Even if I could surprise him and maybe get a whack at him or something, the way my hands are shaking, I’m not so sure I’d do him any harm.

I shut my eyes and make a promise to God that if he lets me live, I will try my best to be a better person. I won’t say things under my breath to Mama, and I’ll even try not to wish I had a different mother altogether. If he lets me live, I will figure something out to make up for what I did to that old woman. I don’t know what, but something.

I’ve never been so scared. I open my eyes and try not to breathe, but that only lasts about thirty seconds. I wonder how long the greatest breath holder in the world could hold his breath. Probably should have paid attention in science class that day. I think Mr. Glenn said the human brain can go without oxygen for four minutes. Something like that. But suppose the robber takes longer than four minutes to leave the apartment? I wouldn’t want to pass out with him still in the house and then fall out of the closet right in front of him. But maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. I’d probably scare him half to death, and maybe he’d drop his gun or knife or shogun sword or whatever weapon he had and just run on out.

The sound of the wooden beads that hang from the living room doorway knocking together snaps me out of my thoughts. It’s not loud enough for him to have walked through them, but it’s loud enough for him to have brushed past. And the living room is almost directly across from the kitchen. And now my breath won’t come the way it should, and I realize my inhaler is in my schoolbag and my schoolbag is on the kitchen counter. I don’t have really bad asthma, so I hardly ever have to use it, but every now and then, I’ll have an episode. And this situation definitely qualifies as
one of those every-now-and-thens. But if this robber is standing where I think he is, he has full view of the kitchen. And if he has full view of the kitchen, I’m sure he can see my bag. Oh man.

With my winter coat and knit hat on, and with the radiators humming with steam, I’m starting to get overheated. I can feel a bead of sweat drip into my left eye. And another. But the broom closet is so narrow I just barely fit into it, so I don’t dare try and take the coat off. I don’t dare move an inch. And I’m wondering if this was how that old lady felt when we were in her home. Was her heart beating the way mine is now? Did everything she had ever done in her life come rushing forward,
Speed Racer
fast? Every good thing? Every bad thing?