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Authors: Jacqueline Woodson

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BOOK: Hush
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And Grandma. She’d be there, too. She’d promised. She was going to make a coconut cake for me. There’d be one candle on it—marking the first day of the rest of my life.
10
IT RAINED THE EVENING WE WERE TOLD TO pick our new names. We’d been at the safe house for three weeks. That night, as the rain hammered against the thin windows, Cameron sat on the cheap sofa, her eyes on the television. I had read a book where a girl could stare so hard, a thing would catch on fire. First I stared at Cameron’s neck. When she didn’t move, I stared at her hands. Then her shoulder.
“Do you feel hot yet?” I asked.
“No.”
“Now?”
“No, stupid.”
“How about now?”
Cameron peeled her eyes away from the television. Mama had lifted her ban on it after me and Cameron watched the same video four times in a row.
“Can you believe this is happening?”
She had had a game the night we left and was still wearing the turtleneck from her cheerleading uniform when we got here. Now she was wearing it again. She’d had to leave the rest of it back in Denver. Her hair was a mess.
“Who cares?” I said.
Cameron rolled her eyes at me. “You’re such a freak. You don’t have the vaguest idea what this feels like. You can go to another place and make your one or two friends again. It’s different for me. It’s bigger.”
“Yeah—a whole cheerleading squad. Whoopee.”
“A whole
world,
stupid! You don’t get it.” She wiped her eyes quickly and glared at me. “You don’t know anything, do you.”
“It just . . . when I think about before, it . . . it hurts a lot. I can’t be looking back right now.”
Cameron looked at me for a minute and pushed some stray hairs behind her ear and let out a breath.
On the television, a woman was petting the leather interior of a Mercedes-Benz. The woman in the commercial looked at me and winked as though she and I were in on some secret. I threw my head back and laughed. Advertising was dumber than anything. The woman climbed out of the car and ran her hand over the top of it. I used to touch Matt Cat that way. The world was so stupid. The Feds had said no Matt Cat. No big reminders of who we once were. The whole world felt like it was dissolving. I petted the ugly couch the way the woman was petting the car.
“God, you’re a freak!” Cameron said again.
“I heard you the first time, thank you very much.”
“Well, you don’t act like it, thank you very—”
“Stop it,” Mama yelled from the bedroom where she was again poring over the literature she’d gotten from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. “I’m getting sick of all your fussing.”
I stuck my tongue out at Cameron. She mouthed
immature
and stared at the television.
“What’s your name gonna be?” I asked, after a long time had passed.
“Cameron,” she said. “The same name it’s always been.”
“It can’t be, Cam. You know that.”
A phone rang on the television, and Cameron jumped up then sat back down again. Except for the drivers’ cell phones, which we weren’t allowed to use, there wasn’t a phone anywhere near us. No more raspy voice explaining exactly how it planned to kill us all.
“Anna,” Cameron said softly, her voice breaking. “A palindrome. Backward and forward the same thing. Anna. Easy to spell. Easy to say. Easy to remember. Turn it completely around and it’s the same thing.” She swallowed and stared glassy-eyed at the television. “Anna,” she said. “Forever and ever. Amen.”
“Evie,” I said, even though she hadn’t asked. “Anna and Evie.”
“Evie’s a stupid name,” Cameron said. “Why the hell would you call yourself that?”
I stared a fire into the side of her face, another into her elbow, a third into her thigh right where her stupid short skirt stopped and brown leg began. “It’s mine,” I said. “That’s why.”
“Oh—and that’s supposed to be a good reason.”
I closed my eyes and watched her burn.
PART TWO
11
I WANT TO TELL YOU WHERE WE ARE NOW, BUT I’m afraid. I want to say Toswiah and Cameron still
are—
only they’re Evie and Anna now. World—please do remember me. I still
am.
Taller now. Still quiet. Sometimes I dance. Mama makes biscuits sometimes still. Even though she uses a mix now, I eat them the same way I always have—hot out of the oven, standing by the stove. Some days Anna still calls me immature. When we fight, Mama says
It’s because you two are too close in age,
and Anna gets that look—her eyebrows shooting up and out like a bat’s wings, her lips getting thin.
Fifteen months is fifteen months,
she says.
It makes all the difference.
Anna is fifteen. The school we’re at now goes from sixth grade through twelfth. When Anna sees me in the hallways, she smiles and keeps walking. Even though she doesn’t have many friends yet, she doesn’t want to take the chance of being seen with someone in the lower school. Some evenings, I sneak her favorite sweater—the one with autumn colors in it, brown and gold and orange—out of the closet and into my knapsack. I don’t put the sweater on until I’m in class, though. When I wear it, the girls in my class reach out to feel it and say nice things to me.
“Where’d you get it?” they ask.
“In San Francisco,” I say. “Where I used to live.”
Then someone always starts singing the Rice-A-Roni song from the old commercial they show on cable, until the others are laughing.
Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco treat!
That’s what people here know about San Francisco, the stupid commercial about a box of rice.
“There’re other things there,” I say. “Anyway, I don’t even think Rice-A-Roni’s made there!”
“What other things?” a girl named Toswiah asks, her eyebrows coming together all mean on her face. “You trying to say San Francisco’s better or something?”
“No,” I say, walking away, pulling the sweater tighter around me.
“I didn’t think you were. That sweater might be cute, but that doesn’t mean you get to start thinking you’re better than anybody!”
Tonight I need to write. “
Afraid” is this hollowed-out place that sometimes feels bigger than I am. Most days my fear is as long as my shadow, as big as my family’s closet of skeletons.
Can you see me here?
A new girl comes to our class late in the year. I am in fourth grade. When people ask, we tell them we’re cousins. The new girl has a bump on each hand where a sixth finger used to be. When the others point to it and laugh, she hides her hands behind her back. I get up and stand beside her, wanting them to stop. The girl’s bottom lip trembles. “Whatever you do,” I whisper to her, “don’t let them see you cry.” The girl smiles. It’s a tiny, tiny smile. But I see it. Later I will touch the tiny bumps with my pointer finger and tell her to always think of them as beautiful.
Look for the beauty, my mama says. Always look for the beauty. It’s in every single body you meet.
The girl smiles. She has a pretty smile.
12
THE TOSWIAH IN MY CLASS IS SMALL AND LOUD with a constant circle of friends around her. I have never heard this name before on another girl. When our teacher takes attendance, there is that split second when I believe that everything is back the way it once was. We both say
Here!
and Toswiah’s friends look at me and laugh. I am Evie. I am Evie. I
am.
The other Toswiah doesn’t look anything like me—she is shorter and round-faced with dimples and cornrows. I want to snatch her name away and press it all over myself. I want to hear people calling it—calling out to
me.
I would like for her or anyone to be the one that’s disappeared.
At lunch today, Toswiah and her friends circled me in the school yard. It was cold out, gray. The ground was still wet from yesterday’s rain. I was dressed in Denver clothes—a light green ski jacket and dark green pants. Toswiah and her friends dress like this place—dark colors with designer names showing everywhere.
“Where are you from again?” Toswiah asked. Her eyes narrowed, but her voice was soft. I stared at her, surprised.
“Bay Area.” Around us, kids were chasing each other and laughing. There were a few couples leaning against the handball court making out. “San Francisco. You know—the Rice-A-Roni song thing.”
Toswiah rolled her eyes at me. “Is everyone in the
Bay Area
named Toswiah, or do you just like answering to my name?”
“It’s my cousin’s name,” I said, looking down at my hands. “I just haven’t heard it on anybody else before. It makes me miss her.”
Toswiah and her friends looked at me a long time. Toswiah’s nails are long, painted dark blue with a bright yellow sun on each one.
Mama’s religion says
We are in the world but not of the world.
Maybe that’s true. It’s a religion of lots of rules that I don’t believe in, but once in a while it makes sense. This place isn’t my world. My soul isn’t here. I bit my lip. Mama didn’t want us to make friends.
It’s too dangerous,
she said.
I know how you girls tell your friends every single thing. There’ll be time for friends,
she said.
Let’s just get ourselves good and settled in who we are first. If you’re truly hungry for friends, make friends with the Witnesses.
Ugh!
Anna said.
And what? Party with the Bible on a Saturday night? I don’t think so.
“I was in San Francisco once,” one of Toswiah’s friends said. “It’s a stupid place. Cold in the summertime.”
“The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco,” Toswiah sang, like it was a rap song she’d just made up.
I smiled. “Mark Twain said that.”
The other girls looked at me, but Toswiah’s lips turned up a little. She shrugged.
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“It’s pretty there, in San Francisco,” I said.
“No, it’s not,” the girl said.
Toswiah rolled her eyes again. “Don’t even go there, Tamara. You know she’s a Joho, and Johos can’t fight anybody. It’s against their religion.”
“My mother is,” I said. “I’m not.”
“Then why don’t you pledge to the flag?”
“Because my mother doesn’t allow us to.”
“Mama’s girl,” Tamara said.
“Joho head,” another girl said.
“So why’d you move here, then,” Tamara asked, “if San Francisco’s so pretty?”
We had been taught to say we moved here because we wanted a change. But standing there, that reason sounded stupider than anything. What kind of change? A gray, cold place where people thought we were weird?
“Just because,” I said. “Why did your family move here?”
“I was
born
here,” Tamara said. “And my mother and her mother and my father and his father.” She circle-snapped her finger in front of my face, making the others laugh.
“My father read somewhere that this was a better place to live,” I said. Across the yard, I could see Anna talking to a boy and laughing.
“It’s the
only
place to live,” Toswiah said.
“Oh,” Tamara teased. “Like you’ve been everyplace else.”
“I don’t have to be everyplace else to know what’s good.”
If you’d ever been to Denver,
I wanted to say,
you’d know there were better places.
But I stood there silently, trying to think of something else. Even thinking the word
—Denver—
brought tears to my eyes.
“Hey! There’s Eric!” another girl said. Then Toswiah and the others were walking fast toward a group of boys.
I watched them walk away. A terrible loneliness came over me, making me shiver. When I looked up, the sky was almost silver. A beautiful, sad silver. All around me, kids were screaming and laughing and running.
“Denver,”
I said to the this-place sky.
“It’s pretty there. We have the Rocky Mountains.

The cold here is different. It slips into you gently, then makes its way deep inside. And settles. I pulled the zipper on my coat up to my neck, feeling the cold air all the way to my bones.
Toswiah. I am Toswiah.
Everyone around me had first names they’d been born with and would probably carry to their grave.
The laughter and screaming grew further and further away from me.
I stared up at the sky and started spinning slowly, not caring who was watching. I lifted my arms out beside me and threw my head back. The sky twirled dark gray, then silver, then silver-white. I spun until I collapsed from spinning. Collapsed right onto the cold, wet this-place ground. No one came over to lift me up by my arms.
How could they when I wasn’t even there?
13
IN FIFTH GRADE I SAT BEHIND A GIRL NAMED Carla. One morning, as I stared at the back of Carla’s head, I saw a bug crawl down behind her ear and disappear into her thick brown hair. A few minutes later, another bug crawled across her neck. Carla reached up and scratched her head hard. When I saw the third bug, I screamed and pointed to it, yelling that Carla had head-bugs. Everyone in the class ran over and the teacher tapped her ruler on the desk for order. Carla put her head down on her desk and cried. That afternoon, our teacher sent notes home to everyone’s parents telling them how they had to check our heads for lice. As my mother went through my hair with a hard plastic comb that night, I though about Carla. I knew by the next morning she would be the cootie-girl, and even as I kept hearing the awful, gulping sound Carla made as she cried, I couldn’t help feeling relieved that it was her and not me.
BOOK: Hush
6.31Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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