All of the Above (4 page)
Twenty minutes.
The Slow Burn Sauce starts bubbling inside me again. I can feel the heat rising. Maybe I'll work harder in those twenty minutes, Willy Q, than in all the hours I'm working and sweating for you—
Willy Q hollers at me. “We got a customer, Marcel. Over at the window. You watching out or not?”
I open the order window real slowly and give my best I-Don't-Really-Care-What-You-Want-to-Order smile.
Good afternoon, ma'am, I say inside my head. You better order real fast because Marcel Williams ain't gonna be here too long, no matter what his daddy thinks. He's gonna leave this place and be a star.…
“We got Blast Off to Outer Space Hot, Melt the Roof of Your Mouth Hot, Tar in the Summertime Hot …”
M
ARCEL'S
S
LOW
B
URN
S
AUCE
½ cup ketchup
¼ cup water
1 tablespoon brown sugar
½ tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
½ teaspoon cayenne pepper (or more for hotter taste)
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
½ teaspoon dry mustard
¼ cup white vinegar
¼ teaspoon red pepper flakes
Combine all ingredients, bring to a boil, and simmer for about 15 minutes. Makes about 1 cup of sauce. When served, this sauce will be very hot with a slow burn that takes its time cooling down.
Mr. Collins’ club is falling apart right in front of his eyes, and he acts like everything's fine. Hey, Mr. Collins, I want to wave my arms and say, this club is getting smaller and smaller, or haven't you noticed? Like pretty soon it's just gonna be me, Rhondell, and you, if you don't do something about it.
“You should try bringing snacks,” I tell him one afternoon when nobody else shows up except me and Rhondell. “It's too long to wait from lunch until we get home and the school lunch is usually some kind of mystery meat, so half the time we don't eat it anyway. That's why most clubs have snacks.”
After that, Mr. Collins starts to bring in bags of chips and popcorn. Sometimes his wife sends in something sweet like homemade chocolate chip cookies or fudge brownies—just like my mom probably would have made for me every day after school if she was around. I don't think foster non-parent #5 has made a cookie in her entire life, so I'm alsways trying to slip an extra one or two into my purse to eat later. (You know, pretend my mom or Gram made it for me.)
Even though foster non-parent #5 is causing me more and more problems, I don't talk about them with anybody. (LIKE, I DON'T HAVE TO SHARE EVERYTHING THAT IS MESSED UP IN MY LIFE.) I just keep on acting like my smiling, friendly old self.
At least kids start showing up for the first half of the club now, before the snacks run out. We stand around Mr. Collins’ desk eating our handfuls of pretzels or potato chips, and drinking the cans of pop that Mr. Collins lets us sneak from the pop machine in the teachers’ lounge, if we've got quarters—or he gives out loans if you don't.
We can usually count on Marcel and James and sometimes Terrell and Deandra being there. Ashlee doesn't come anymore now that she finally woke up and got herself a new boyfriend. Me and Rhondell are always there, of course. Mr. Collins calls us the Dynamic Duo. I don't like the name much, but I think he is trying hard (too hard, if you ask me) to act like a more friendly teacher to us, and so I let it go.
Mr. Collins says he still remembers how quiet everybody was on the first couple of days we worked together. Me and Rhondell were hunched over our desks, trying to get the pieces to fold on the lines and stay glued. Which was impossible. About halfway through the second day, I remember looking over at Rhondell and she had blobs of glue all over her desk and one of her pieces had just come unstuck again and the two of us almost fell over we were laughing so hard—like it was the funniest thing to see that orange piece she'd been holding for about twenty minutes suddenly come flying apart. That's when I knew we'd get along okay.
We're faster now, of course, but we're still not making much progress on building the giant pyramid. Like no progress. “If we were Egyptians, we would have been fired, girl”—that's what I tell Rhondell. In my opinion, most of it is Marcel's fault because he's the president of the club and he hasn't been sticking to his job. He eats the snack and leaves halfway through the club—what kinda president is that?
So, I decide it's time to tell Marcel that even though I like him a lot (not like as in LIKE, like as in—he's ALL RIGHT to be around), we need somebody new for president. If people are going to come to the club and eat snacks, they have to do the work, too, I say. And if the president can't stay for the whole time and help build, then somebody else should take over, or we're never gonna break the world record. (It's already the beginning of November.) I tell Marcel that I'm willing to volunteer to fill in for him.
But I think everybody just about choked on their pretzels when James jumped into our conversation and said he wanted to be the president instead. We were standing around Mr. Collins’ desk and he came strolling over to us with that sly, sneaky grin of his and announced, “I'm already Vice Prez, right? So I'm the next in line to be Prez before any of you except Terrell, who's not here, so that means I should be the new Prez, doesn't it?”
We tried to argue with James that he hadn't done any work, so how could he possibly take over everything. But he said we were all wrong about him.
“I got more talent than any of you,” he said. “Way more talent.”
I couldn't believe it when Mr. Collins took his side and agreed to give James a chance. See, Mr. Collins doesn't have a clue about kids. That's his problem as a teacher. Other teachers would have seen right through James. They would have known he was trying to pick a fight with Marcel like he picks fights with everybody. James is just plain mean and I don't know why Mr. Collins couldn't see that. He just lets him butt on in and take over.
“Girl, this whole club is gonna fall apart now,” I say to Rhondell as we walk down the hall after school. “You mark my words. He'll ruin the whole thing. Why would Mr. Collins
do
something like that?”
Rhondell is silent. I figure she doesn't want to tell me that it was really my fault for opening my mouth about us needing a new president. See, she's smart and I'm not. She knows when to keep her mouth shut and I don't. (WHY CAN'T I EVER LEARN THAT?)
I should have just left things the way they were. See, that was always my mistake. I was always trying to fix things—like trying to make my foster non-parents be nicer people or trying to act better so they would like me more. One time, I had a foster non-parent who used to lock up every room in her house at night because she was afraid of foster kids stealing from her, so I told her it would save her a lot of trouble if she waited to see if I was honest first instead of wasting her time locking everything up. Just suggesting that idea got me into trouble with her.
And if I had left things the way they were years and years ago, maybe I wouldn't even be living with foster non-parents in the first place, because maybe my Gram would still be alive. In fact, you could probably say that if I hadn't been born when I was, things could have been different. Maybe my mom wouldn't have gotten into that car to get away from her screaming, throwing-up baby (me).…
As Rhondell pushes open the front door of the school and we step outside, the first snow of the year is falling. Actually, it isn't really snow, but more like round spitballs zinging out of a freezing gray sky.
“Look at that, Sharice,” Rhondell says, squinting up at the sky. But I'm so mad at myself, I just duck out into the snow without saying good-bye to Rhondell or even stopping to pull on the sweatshirt I've got in my backpack. I head down the street toward the library, letting the spitball snow sting my arms.
“This pyramid's gonna have STYLE now that I'm working on it.” That's what I tell the group on the first day I'm Prez. “And everybody better do exactly what I say now that I'm Prez, too. Or else you gonna get a beating from me.”
“James—” Collins raises his eyebrows and gives me the teacher look, but I just pretend to ignore it. I stroll on over to the big pyramid that Marcel and Collins have been starting to glue together, and I show them how they don't have a clue about what they're building.
“Why you gluing the colors like that?” I point to a section where little purple and green and yellow tetrahedrons have been all mixed together. “You should be gluing the same colors next to each other—you know, make one big section of purple, then blue, then green”—I show them with my hands—“so the whole pyramid looks like a rainbow when it's done. That would make more sense than this mess—” I wave my arm at the pyramid.
See, I've been sitting back there in my corner drawing my comics and watching them try to build this pyramid for about a month now—and it's been cracking me up because Collins can't build and Marcel doesn't know what he's doing when it comes to art. Just look at his daddy's barbecue signs. I could have given them about fifty ideas for how to make the pyramid look better, but they didn't ask me for help, did they?
I got the idea for making the rainbow a while ago. I was sitting there in the back of class doing nothing one day and I remembered something I did in art class when I was in third or fourth grade. The art teacher, who was this cool guy who sometimes played music in class, had us soak this heavy piece of white paper with water and then paint big stripes of different colors. The water on the paper made the colors blend together like a rainbow, and once the paper dried, we did pen and ink drawings on top of it. Mine was a bald eagle with its wings out. It was one of the best things I had ever done, and I wished I still had it, but I didn't. Who knows where all that stuff went?
But I figured if the tetrahedrons were glued together by color, they would blend into a rainbow just like that painting did. Even though nobody else looks like they agree, Collins says he likes my idea, and since the pieces are only attached at the points, it wouldn't be too hard to pull apart the glued ones and rearrange them. We haven't gotten too far on building anyway, he says—and that's the truth.
So that's how I start turning the project around. Trust me, Barbecue Face Williams never would have thought of this rainbow idea, if he was still being Prez.
Every day, I stay later and later at school, trying to keep everybody doing what they're supposed to do and not messing up the colors. Afterwards, I ride home on the bus, still trying to peel the dried glue off my fingers. Sometimes I don't get back to my uncle's apartment until way past 4:00. Come dragging in, half-starved, and find DJ and his friends hanging out in the living room, with their cans and cigarette butts lying around everywhere. Don't know why they can't pick up nothing.
“Hey, Math Boy,” they call out, “go out and find us something to eat.”
I'm not sure what's up with DJ these days, but he's getting a real attitude. Like he's turning into somebody I don't even know. We always used to look out for each other. When we first came to our uncle's, I remember the two of us sitting on the beds in the apartment and my brother saying that even though it was just the two of us now, I could always count on him as my family. He was serious, too, which he almost never is. Then he told me the story for the hundredth time about how he was the one who carried me up three flights of stairs by himself when I was about four or five and fell on the sidewalk outside the apartment where we lived back then and cut open my forehead.