Money Hungry (2 page)

It’s still early. First period class ain’t even started yet. Kids is hanging out in front of school.

“Raspberry Hill! You better get in here and straighten this mess up, girl!” Zora says, standing at the front door, with her arms folded tight.

I don’t even say bye to Momma. I run Zora’s way. She’s selling a few things for me today, so if something’s wrong, that means I ain’t gonna get my money. And I ain’t having that.

Zora’s eyes is pumpkin-seed green today. Last week, they was the color of honey. Three weeks back, they was gray, blue, and black, all in one week. That’s what happens when your parents is rolling in dough and can hook you up with contact lenses. But all that cash don’t mean Zora got a dime to her name, especially since her parents’ divorce. Since then, her life has changed big-time. Her dad pulled her out of a private school and put her in this-here magnet school. He cut off her allowance— $150 a month—and moved her back into the city with him. Now Zora’s broke half the time. That’s why she’s trying to make a little dough with me today. She’s hoping she can earn enough money to get those new sneakers she wants. They cost $120, and her dad says she’s gotta pay half the cost if she wants ’em.

When I get inside, Seneca Mason pushes past Zora and shoves half a chocolate candy heart my way. “Zora selling these for you?” Seneca asks. Sato and Ja’nae are standing there not saying nothing. They just checking us out.

“Yeah,” I say.

“So?” Zora says, giving her some attitude, like she can fight if things get tight.

“I should’ve known,” Seneca says, getting loud.

“What you want, Seneca?” I say to her.

Seneca waves the candy bar in the air, making her voice get louder with every word she says. “I don’t want this mess. Give me my money back.”

“No refunds,” Zora says, loud and slow, like she’s talking to someone who don’t understand English. “You ate half the candy. Now what do you want us to do?”

Seneca looks at Zora. Then she takes her fat, crooked middle finger and shoves it deep inside her mouth. She drags her finger across her gums, around her teeth. Then out comes her finger, covered with mashed-up chocolate chunks and shiny spit bubbles.

“Dag. That look like it came out your butt,” Sato says, frowning up his face at Ja’nae.

“Shut up, Sato,” Zora, me, and Seneca all say together.

“Here’s the rest,” Seneca says, holding up her finger. “You want it?”

Zora and me back off. Seneca reaches in her pocketbook and grabs a balled-up piece of paper and wipes off her finger.

She puts her hand on her hip, then sticks her other hand way out like she got a million dollars coming her way. “Now give me my money.”

“No-class girls like you are the reason my mother wants me to transfer out of this school,” Zora says, rubbing her white cashmere sweater.

“Good. When you leaving, zipper mouth?” Seneca says, talking about Zora’s braces.

Zora acts like she didn’t hear Seneca crack on her. But I saw her cheek jump when Seneca’s words came out. Before Seneca says anything else, I shove my hand in my pocket and give her fifty cents of the lunch money Momma gave me in the car.

“You better be ready to give
all
that money back,” Seneca says, “’cause nobody’s gonna eat that mess you’re selling.”

Seneca’s right. Before homeroom period is up, eight more people want their money back. The last four kids are out of luck, though. I ain’t walking out of school today with nothing. I mean, I gotta show
some
thing
for all me and Zora’s hard work. But a few minutes later here comes Zenna Greene walking up to me. “I don’t feel so good,” she says, rubbing her stomach. “That candy is making me sick.”

I got my hand in my pocket. I’m feeling the money I made, that Zora made for me. I gotta give Zora fifteen percent. That was our deal. But that’s gonna be fifteen percent of nothing if I keep giving money back to kids who bought the candy and hated it. I wrap my fingers around the money that’s in my pocket. “Maybe your stomach hurts ’cause you ate something else,” I say, starting to walk away from Zenna.

“Give me my money back,” Zenna says, grabbing me back with her loud, squeaky voice.

Zenna is holding her side. Rubbing her stomach. Zenna Greene, Miss Drama Queen, trying to get some attention, I say to myself.

“I gotta go to the bathroom,” she says, trying to make a run for it.

But it’s too late. Stuff starts flying out her mouth. Slimy, chocolate-colored stuff. Spaghetti pieces. Chewed-up meat. It all comes splashing over the hard, shiny waxed floor. Kids is screaming and laughing and running out the way.

“You got my new shoes, girl!” somebody says.

“Man, it stinks,” Ja’nae says, holding her nose.

Zenna’s still holding her stomach when the principal, Mr. Jackson, walks over. He tells Zenna to go to the nurse. Yells for a teacher to call the janitor.

“Must be a bug,” Mr. Jackson says, shaking his head.

“Ain’t no bug. It’s Raspberry. She’s hustling chocolate that got worms in it,” Seneca says, butting in my business.

Mr. Jackson don’t even ask me if that lie is true or not. He sticks out his gigantic hand and says, “Fork it over.”

I hand him one of the chocolate hearts. He unwraps it real slow, like it’s a bomb or something. “You trying to kill somebody?” he says, eyeballing the candy, then throwing it into the trash.

“Raspberry don’t care if she kill nobody, long as they pay up before they die,” Sato says, laughing.

I look down in the trash at the candy. It got big dry, white patches on it like the crust you see on a scab that’s ready to fall off. But the candy ain’t
that
stale. I got them for two cents apiece last year after Valentine’s Day was over. The salesman said I could freeze ’em to keep ’em fresh. So I kept ’em in Ja’nae’s basement freezer since then.

The principal closes in on me. “Your mother know you’re selling this mess?”

“Yeah! No, I mean,” I say, fumbling with my words. “She knows I was gonna sell something. But she don’t know what it was, really.”

“Well, let’s give her a little call,” Mr. Jackson says, grabbing me by the elbow and dragging me down the hall. Mr. Jackson is saying something else about calling Momma. Me, I’m holding tight to my ducats. ’Cause no matter what, I’m not giving up no more cash today.

I knew it. Zenna didn’t get sick off my candy. She’s got the flu. The nurse said she was even running a fever. But not too many people here talking about
that
. They’re still running off at the mouth about me, saying how I was selling poison candy in school yesterday.

Mr. Jackson told me not to sell no more candy. But he didn’t say nothing about selling other stuff. So today, I’m at it again. Selling red valentine pencils with purple heart-shaped erasers on top. They’re discounted though, since Valentine’s Day is done and gone.

“Thirty cents,” I say to Eric Kelly when we’re in the lunchroom. But he’s not hardly paying me any attention. He’s eyeing Zora with her smooth, cocoa-brown skin, and that dimple in her left cheek. Eric can’t even eat his cheeseburger, he’s staring at her so much.

“You want it or not?” I say, putting my hand out for the money.

“What you do with all the money you make off us?” he says, wiping cheeseburger juice off his chin with the back of his hand.

“Yeah,” Charles Taylor says, finishing off his lunch—a giant-size Snickers bar and a Big Gulp Pepsi. “You always got some scam going. Gotta be making money off somebody or you ain’t happy.”

I don’t say nothing to Eric or Charles. I just take out my pencils and start counting how many I still got to sell. I’m doing the math in my head. Hmmm. I sold ten pencils in math class. I still got twenty left.

“You want one or not, Eric?” I ask. “Zora likes purple, you know. It’s her favorite color. Right, Zora?” I say, poking her in the side.

She ain’t paying neither one of us any attention. She’s staring at herself in a mirror she got in her hand. Me, I don’t look in mirrors too often. I don’t need no reminders of why my mother named me after a piece of fruit. I got red hair, red eyebrows, and enough freckles on my face that you can play connect the dots. Nope, that ain’t the kind of face I wanna be looking at unless I absolutely have to.

“Zora, tell him,” I say, reaching over and taking one of her carrot sticks.

She still watching herself in her mirror, like she expecting her eyes to change color or something. “Yeah, whatever Raspberry says, that’s right,” she says, drawing back her lips, so she can get a good look at her teeth. They got pink braces on ’em.

“Forget it,” I say, walking away from both of them. Then I spend the next twenty minutes going from table to table trying to sell them things.

“You rich yet?” Sato asks me.

“She makes enough money off us to buy herself a house,” Charles Gordon says.

“Nothing wrong with doing a little business,” I say, stepping over Sato’s raggedy book bag. “Maybe you could buy yourself a new book bag if you worked for me, Sato.”

“Oh man, you gonna let her play you like that?” one of his boys says.

“Man. Forget her,” Sato says, sticking out his foot like he’s trying to trip me up. “My bag may be whacked, but at least I sleep in a bed at night. Not under no bridge like a troll.”

Before I know anything, I’m throwing them pencils right at Sato’s big blockhead. But that don’t make him shut up.

“I guess the projects seem like the White House to you,” Sato says, getting loud. “I mean, so what if you got holes in the walls and rats biting your feet at night.”

“We don’t have no—” I start defending myself, but Sato cuts me off.

“It’s better than living out a cardboard box and washing up in the gas station bathroom like you used to, huh?”

Sato knows how to crack on people good. So I don’t give him a chance to say nothing else. I pick up my pencils and go.

Momma and me never lived under no bridge. But when things got bad, real bad a few years back, we did live in a junkyard not far from here. We slept in a old beat-up van that was up on blocks. It didn’t have no wheels. And the front window was busted. The mosquitoes ate us up good all summer long. One night, I counted fifteen bites.

We wasn’t always broke. We was renting us a nice house, in a half-decent neighborhood, till daddy started hanging out. Coming in with the sun, Momma used to say. I still don’t know how it happened. One day he was daddy. Going to work all day long, and hugging me good night before I fell asleep at night. The next day it seemed like he was somebody else. Arguing about money all the time. Walking off with our TV, or Momma’s old fur jacket. Dragging home friends that looked like they just got out of lockdown. Meeting me after school with his hand out . . . begging for whatever change I had.

When the dope made him so crazy, he beat Momma up and sent her to the hospital for the third time, Momma left him. We lived with friends and family till they got tired of us. Then we lived in a motel till Momma got laid off work, and our money ran out. We went back to living with some of Momma’s friends till they started hinting about how crowded their place was, and how much I eat. Next thing I knew, we was living outside with stray cats and dogs. Dirty men. Crazy women. Kids without parents, and people pushing shopping carts filled with smashed-up pop cans and wrinkled-up newspapers.

People said Momma should go to one of them shelters for women and kids. She wouldn’t. She said she was in a shelter when she was little, and something bad happened to her there. Only she never would say what. So we slept on the street, and in dark corners of tall, empty buildings. We washed up in gas stations and fast-food restaurants. Asked for handouts. Prayed real hard that nobody would knock us in the head, or try to steal the little bit of stuff we had.

No matter how bad it got, though, I never missed a day of school in all the time we was living on the street. And I never missed saving Momma a little of the free lunch they gave me in school. Cold Tater Tots taste like steak when that’s all you got.

Momma’s the kind of person that don’t let her surroundings mess with her head. So every night, when we lived in the van, she would sit in the driver’s seat, look up at the stars, and tell me how things was gonna be. “One day,” she’d say, “we gonna have our own place. With a family room, and a fireplace. What color room you want? Yeah, I figured you’d want blue . . . but what about letting me paint some clouds on the walls for you? And a few stars, so we don’t forget that even bad times is sprinkled with a little good,” she’d say, reaching up at the sky like she was gonna grab a fistful of stars and hand ’em to me.

After we got off the street, Momma had some job stuffing envelopes at night. Sometimes we would be down to just rice, beans, and Kool-Aid. You know what it’s like to eat beans every night for two weeks straight? To drink Kool-Aid without sugar?

Even now, Momma’s always dreaming about the future. But you can’t cash dreams in at the bank or buy bread, or pay rent with ’em. You need hard, cold cash for that. So every penny I get, I save. Momma thinks I just got a little pocket change stashed here and there. But nickels don’t keep you off the street. That’s why I got six hundred dollars stashed all over my room.

You gotta sell a lot of pencils and skip a lot of lunches to make that kinda dough. But it’s worth it. ’Cause if you got money, people can’t take stuff from you—not your house, or your ride, not your family. They can’t do nothing much to you, if you got a bankroll backing you up.