Tessie D

It’s almost Spring Break. Nothing is really happening at school — everyone is in limbo waiting until the break so the teachers and students are all just going through the motions until Friday.

Some of my friends are going camping at the lake next week. Monica is going to visit her grandmother in Dallas for the week after the festival.

But, Momma, Daddy, Annie and I will be at home for the week. We won’t do anything special but I’ll get to sleep in and can read all week. That’s my favorite part of the break — sleeping in, reading all day and night. Daddy’s mother, Nannie, got me a subscription to a romance novel club last Christmas for the past three months, I’ve gotten a package in the mail with four paperbacks. I have been saving them for Spring Break and I’m going to read all of them over the next week. We’ll have to be quiet since Momma will be working and sleeping, which makes it perfect for reading.

Annie will probably be with her best friend, Sammie. They have been inseparable since we moved here. One year for Christmas, Annie and Sammie both asked for a pair of expensive basketball shoes — not at Annie played basketball. Neither of us did. Playing costs money and we never had it. But, Annie and Sammie still wanted these shoes everyone else was wearing — white with orange and green stripes and these little inflatable pumps on the tongue. The shoes were so expensive but that was all Annie wanted for Christmas that year. So, Momma bought them — looking back, probably putting them on a credit card — but Annie’s feet were so much larger than her classmates’ that Momma had to buy them from the men’s section of the store, not the girls’. Annie and Sammie wore them on the first day back after the holiday. They were walking into the building, holding hands and wearing their matching basketball shoes. One of the boys yelled out, “Dyke!” and the shoes never left the closet again.

Sammie also drives Momma a little crazy — she always wants to spend the night at our house or have Annie sleep over at hers. Days on end. Sometimes, Momma gets fed up with it and tells Sammie that she has to go home, but that doesn’t happen too often.

To be honest, I kinda get it. Sammie’s home life is more weird than ours. I went over to their house once and it was obvious that they hadn’t cleaned it in months. I’m not being figurative here. Literally. They live in a rundown old farm house on the edge of town that looks decent enough from the outside. But, I think if Momma had ever gone inside, rather than just drop Annie and Sammie off from the driveway, she’d never let Annie back. Sammie asked if I wanted to spend the night once when we were in junior high. I said yes because Sammie had a Nintendo with Super Mario Brothers 3 and I wanted to play it. But, the house was disgusting. There was so much trash and clothes on the floor that you had to step on them to get through the house. In the kitchen, the dishes were piled and stacked up the sink and the house reeked of urine. They had several cats but I never saw a litter box. I only stayed a few hours before I called Momma to come pick me up because I was getting bitten by fleas and Sammie’s little brother thought it was funny to jump on my back and pretend to hump me. Before I left, Annie and Sammie begged me not to say anything to anyone about the house, so I didn’t.

Looking back, I probably should have said something. But, at the time, it didn’t seem like something I needed to tell Momma about. Besides, what would Momma have done anyways? Call Sammie’s mother and tell her to clean her house and make her son stop being a little pervert?

Sammie’s house and family weren’t that different than anyone else’s in the larger scheme of things. Everyone in town is poor. It’s not like that made them different. And, lots of people’s parents drink too much, yell at their kids, are unemployed, depend on the oldest kids too much to watch their younger siblings. Nobody has fancy houses or cars here.

Maybe if we weren’t so different, if Annie wasn’t so used to things being so weird, that she had understood what we all know now about why she wanted to stay at our house or why she wanted Annie to spend the night all the time — knowing what we know now about Sammie’s dad and what he was doing to her.