Lena

Table of Contents

 

A dangerous plan . . .

 

I stood there a minute, eyeing the guy—my mind half on him, half on Marie. If a driver did-n't look right, me and Dion'd just start walking. You could tell a lot about a person looking at their eyes. If a person's stone cold crazy, you can see it—their eyeballs twitch. I can tell crazy people from across the room so I don't have to walk right up to a truck to see it. Me and Dion say no to more rides than we say yeah to but it's gotta be that way if we want to make it where we going. I don't want to be one of those girls you read about....

OTHER BOOKS BY JACQUELINE WOODSON

SPEAK
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in the United States of America
by Delacorte Books for Young Readers, 1999
Published by Speak, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2006

Copyright © Jacqueline Woodson, 1999

All rights reserved

 

eISBN : 978-1-101-15709-1

 

To brave girls everywhere

One

Mama died when I was nine. She used to all the time say to me that no matter what happened, I'd find myself on the other side of it. She'd say, “Don't you be scared none either, Lena, 'cause you got a right to be in the world just like everybody else walking through it.” Then Mama would smile, pull my braid and set about to fixing dinner or cleaning up or, if we had a little extra money, she'd have some fabric that she'd cut into a dress for herself with matching ones for me and Dion. We hardly ever had extra money 'cause Daddy didn't work regular. Once in a while, he'd get work dynamiting coal. But by the time Mama started getting sick, most of the coal had been blown from the ground. We got by, though. We never had to beg anybody for anything and Mama made sure we ate regular.

Dion must of been about four when Mama died but she makes believe she doesn't remember a lick about her. Dion doesn't really understand about death so she just makes believe she never knew anybody that died. It's like she's got this box of Mama Memories locked up inside her head 'cause I know way deep down she has to remember how Mama used to hold her on her lap, how we'd all sit around that potbelly stove in the winter and Mama'd sing to us. She had a pretty voice, Mama did—all soft and high. We were living in Ripley then. West Virginia. Had us a tiny house down near Dunbar. West Virginia sky got all this blue in it, like sky you don't get to see in other places. Sometimes I'll get to drawing it, mixing different blues all up until I get it just so. Pictures I draw of West Virginia remind me of Mama, like maybe that's her inside of all that blue, looking down at us.

After that we lived in this apartment over Che Che's Beauty Care. That was in Ravenswood. Lived there for about a year until Che Che said she needed to be getting the rent on time and all at once, not in little bits and pieces. We went to Marietta, Ohio, from there.

Mama got sicker and sicker and finally died in Marietta. We had a little funeral for her in Champlain Field, a few miles outside of Marietta. I forgot the exact name of the town.

I don't remember crying much the day we buried Mama but I remember sort of listening to the preacher talk about ashes to ashes and the dearly departed. I was standing holding Dion's hand and my daddy was holding my other hand and there was a few old ladies, the kind that just sort of go from funeral to funeral the way normal people go to the movies.

For a long time, I'd forget Mama was dead and sit by the window waiting for her to come in from doing day work somewhere. After a while, I stopped sitting and the
knowing
settled down inside of me. Made itself a home there. A few years after Mama passed, we moved on up to Chauncey, Ohio. Me and Dion got ourselves settled in school there and for a while we seemed to be doing all right.

Sometimes when Dion gets to asking questions about Mama, I think maybe that's that locked box inside her head, opening up a bit. Some days we'll be walking and Dion'll look full at me and say something like “What color was Mama's eyes?” It's up to me to tell her everything she wants to know. Up to me to do all the remembering 'cause it's really only the two of us left now.

I should tell you I love my sister Dion more than anybody in the whole world. She's only eight now but I swear if you hear her talk sometimes you'd think she was a whole lot older. And when she gets mad, she starts to cursing like the devil. I don't know where she learned to curse like she do. I use my own curse words only every once in a while, not wasting them on something that don't need a good one thrown in there. Sometimes I think Dion must stay up late at night practicing to herself. And she's smart too. She reads real fast, always trying to sneak in a couple of pages of some book. Yesterday, we hitched a ride in a Laughing Cow Dairy truck with a Wisconsin plate—I wrote down the number. When you're hitching, you have to be careful about stuff like that, Dion says. In this short time she thinks she's some kind of pro. “You got the plate number?” she whispered to me, before we climbed in. I nodded. Thing is—you can take down all the plate numbers you want but if something bad happens to you, not much anybody can do about it. Especially for me and Dion. It's not like we got us some people somewhere just waiting to take care of business if something happened to us. But me and Dion figure, if anybody ever tried anything—we're gonna come back after them someday. Come back ourselves and fix that person. We don't need nobody. I got a half page of plate numbers. Right next to them, I write a little bit about each truck driver—you know, stuff like what they're hauling, how many kids they got, that kind of thing. My best friend, Marie, gave me this book before we left Chauncey. She said it was to draw in. But back in Chauncey, I got used to drawing on brown paper bags. I liked the way the colors seem quieter coming up off the brown. So I took to writing in this book instead. One day, maybe I'll see her again and I'll show Marie how much use I got out of it.

You know how sometimes you get to thinking about a person so hard, you start to hurt—not just inside your head or your stomach but all over the place? That's how it is when I get to thinking about Marie. My mind races back to that last night when me and Dion took off. Marie was at the other end of the phone begging me not to go. I still hear her voice inside my head. Marie's voice. My friend. I start thinking about real sad things when her voice comes on—about all the people who left her—like her mama who just took off one day and never came back. And me, just giving her a call and saying me and Dion had to go. But we
did
have to go. And there wasn't anything anybody in Chauncey could do. That's where my mind was yesterday when that Laughing Cow truck pulled over to the side of the road and a guy with a real nice smile said, “Get in.”

I stood there a minute, eyeing the guy—my mind half on him, half on Marie. If a driver didn't look right, me and Dion'd just start walking. You could tell a lot about a person looking at their eyes. If a person's stone cold crazy, you can see it—their eyeballs twitch. I can tell crazy people from across the room so I don't have to walk right up to a truck to see it. Me and Dion say no to more rides than we say yeah to but it's gotta be that way if we want to make it where we going. I don't want to be one of those girls you read about.

It was cold out, gray, like maybe right behind us there was coming some rain or snow. I shook my head, trying to shake the Marie Memories out of it. The driver didn't look crazy—just tired. But I pushed Dion in ahead of me anyway. Truck drivers see somebody real young like Dion and they pretty much keep their hands to themselves. Most times, they got a kid Dion's age waiting at home for them.

 

Turned out the guy driving the Laughing Cow truck, Larry, had two kids at home and he just kept looking over at us, shaking his head like he couldn't believe we were out on the road this way. We probably look real young to a lot of people. I've heard people say I look old too—like some old lady that's seen too much of life. Marie used to say that. She'd say it was something about my eyes made me look older than thirteen. Me and her used to sit in Randolph Park and watch people. That's where I learned about the looks of crazy people, by watching while me and Marie talked.

 

“We really appreciate you stopping, sir,” I said. “If it wasn't this kind of emergency, we wouldn't be traveling this way. It breaks my mama's heart that we don't have no people.”

Larry shook his head and every now and then mumbled about what a shame it all was and how the world is more messed up than anybody would ever believe.

“You see things,” Larry said. He had pretty eyes—blue with reddish lashes. When he talked he squinted them up, thinking. I made a note in my mind to write about Larry's eyes when he dropped us off. “When you're driving a truck all the time, you see things that would make your heart stand still.”

 

“We saw dead deer on the road a couple of times,” Dion said. She pulled a book out of the knapsack and started reading.

“Deers and kids and accidents,” Larry said. “Whole families on the highway with their thumbs out . . .”

I listened to him go on a little bit while Dion sat there reading. I swear she read right on up till when it got dark. Then she put that book back in her knapsack and fell asleep. Larry was going on and on about how important families were and whatnot but I couldn't really listen anymore. To me, blood didn't mean anything. Only blood relative I had right out besides Dion was my daddy. I knew deep in his heart he was probably all kinds of good but on the surface, he was—he was messed up. Real messed up. After Mama died, he just started going downhill. I'd come home and he'd be sitting on the couch just staring at the wall. Then he'd see me and he'd smile. Only it was the smile he used to give Mama. Not a daddy-to-daughter smile. He wanted me to be Mama. But I'm not. I'm Lena.

 

I sat there listening to Larry but thinking about my daddy and wishing I was someplace alone where I could just cry and cry. Figure I get a good cry in somewhere, I wouldn't always be trying to swallow the tears back.