Needy Little Things(7)
Jude looks at me like I’m a whole alien. “Wait, you don’t like music?”
“You should spend some time evaluating why you find that harder to grasp than the fact that I can hear people’s needs. But to be clear, it’s not that I don’t like it. All the noises in my head clash. Gives me migraines.”
“You’ll be all right,” Malcolm says. “One place nobody is going to judge you over earplugs and noise cancelers is Afro Alt.”
“But isn’t the whole point to enjoy the music? Somebody else would appreciate the ticket more than me.”
“Not as much as I would appreciate having my best friend with me celebrating the best birthday gift I have ever gotten. And yes, the music is a big part of Afro Alt, but that’s not all it’s about.” His eyelids flutter and his face goes all passionate and dreamy. “Afro Alt is about acceptance, realness, individuality. It’s a place where you can be Black and awkward, Black and fat, Black and queer, Black and disabled, Black and what the hell ever and have it celebrated, Ri. It was made for a couple of strangeos like us. And you too, boo boo,” he says to a random old lady paying a little too close attention to our conversation.
“Ri, once we get your outfit picked, I volunteer to snazz up your ear defender headset to match. I’m getting glam space cadet vibes already.” He clutches the tickets to his chest and looks up and down the street. “Where’d Ms. Sunglasses go? I’m gonna need her to go gnatty on you if she has hookups like this.”
“Gnatty?” Deja asks. “Haven’t heard that one yet.”
“Some people catch on to my ability and go out of their way to run into me. But after this week, I don’t even care.” I want to fulfill every need I can. Keeps the headaches at bay, and maybe, possibly, even saves lives.
“It’s all fun and games until that gnat ends up flying up your nose cause it has zero concept of boundaries. Like that old dude,” Malcolm says. “What was his name?”
“Phillip. Haven’t seen him in a while.” He used to stop by Sweet Pea’s daily to see if I had something for him. Ms. Jess finally told him he had to buy something or stop coming. “All the ice cream he was eating probably took its toll. But at least he was generous with the tip jar.”
“Not generous enough to be waiting for you outside of the school!”
“He wasn’t waiting. It was a coincidence.”
“Coincidence my left butt cheek.” Malcolm looks at the tickets again and pokes out his lips. “But if a gnat comes bearing bomb-ass gifts like this, their faux pas are worthy of forgiveness.” He grabs his iced coffee and gives it a vigorous shake. “Jude, crank up that Civic. Deja, fold up that towel. Ri, grab Santa Bag. It’s time to shop.”
CHAPTER 3
I take the stairs of my apartment building to unit 3B, planting both my feet on each step like an old woman with a bad hip after a double shift. Malcolm really had us in those thrift stores like we were filming a movie makeover montage on a deadline. The hall is chilly and damp and smells like old cabbage. I enter the apartment and take a moment to give thanks to the essential oil diffuser Mama keeps on the console by the door, but before it clears my nostrils of the hallway’s offenses, a Nerf football hits me square in the center of my chest. “Mama!” I draw out at the top of my lungs.
My little brother darts around the corner, laughing hysterically, but I’m not playing with his annoying behind tonight. I throw my bags down and chase after him.
“Riyah!” Mama’s voice echoes through our tiny apartment. “Riyah, don’t you start with him!”
I stop so short I almost fall. “Me? Jojo started it!”
He finds this so hilarious his laugh goes silent. I run into his room and pin him to his bed, my irritation quickly subsiding as I watch him gasp and writhe. I smack him upside the head with a pillow. “Ass.”
“I know you not cussing in my house,” Mama says from the doorway. She dries her hands on a dishrag. “Y’all stop playing and come eat.”
We follow her, making faces at each other all the way to the dining table.
“Josiah, come take this medicine.” Mama opens the kitchen cabinet where she keeps all the pharmaceuticals. She slips on a single latex glove, then drops a pill directly into his mouth. He promptly washes it down with a glass of water. It’s hydroxyurea, part of his sickle cell pain management plan. That it isn’t safe to handle it with bare hands, but Jojo can ingest it has never sat right with me, but it seems to be helping.
Sickle cell disease is a genetic disorder that causes red blood cells to be misshapen. It means Josiah’s at high risk for blood vessel blockages and all the scary things that go along with them. Mama moved us from Chefly, in middle-of-nowhere Georgia, to Atlanta when he was two to have access to better medical care. Dad stayed down there to keep working his father’s tiny farm. I miss him all the time, but being angry about the situation feels the same as being mad at Josiah over something he can’t control. So it is what it is. I shove those feelings down and leave them for future me to deal with.
We visit Dad in the summers and he visits us for Christmas, with plenty of surprises scattered in between. It used to bother me when people would assume they are divorced, but Mama never wanted to hear me whining about it. It’s your father and me in the relationship, so it’s your father and me who set the parameters is what she would say. I didn’t even know what a parameter was, but I knew they seemed more in love than most folks’ parents. At some point, I decided that was good enough.