The Chaos by Nalo Hopkinson Read Free Book Online Page A

been this angry at Glory before this. It’d hurt to not be her friend. “I gotta run. They’re expecting me home. Ben can fill you in.”
    Ben shouldered his bag. “But I’m going to my movie.”
    Glory said, “I’ll go with you, Ben.”
    “Cool. Scotch, you sure?”
    “I really can’t. I’ll catch you guys later.”
    “Say hi to Richard,” Gloria told me, blushing. How could I have forgotten? Glory had a thing for my big brother, not for his best friend, Tafari.
    It was going to be a great weekend.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Dad was in the living room, watching his favorite 100 percent fake reality cop show on the TV. He loved those shows so much.
    He caught me glancing at the screen. “No television until after homework, young lady.”
    “Yes, Dad.” As if. Fat chance I’d be I doing any homework this Friday evening. He and Mom would be outta here soon. No way they would know whether I was watching TV or not. I could catch up on my homework on Sunday.
    “Come give your daddy a hug.” He opened his arms. He got his hug, but then I immediately moved away and sat at the other end of the couch. I ignored how his face fell. That was just the price he paid for what he’d done to Rich. I’d been making him pay it the whole time Rich was in jail, and I wasn’t going to stop now.
    “When’re you and Mom leaving?” I asked him.
    He sighed and turned his attention to the TV again. “In about twenty minutes.”
    All right ! I only nodded, but inside, I was doing a victory dance.
    “I left dinner for you kids in the oven.”
    “In the UH-ven?” I said, teasingly. He always said it OH-ven, with a long O . Like he said “bowl” so it rhymed with “owl.”
    He gave me a sideways look. He knew that I’d just made fun of him. I’d better watch it. I asked him, “What’d you make?”
    “Oxtail. Peas and rice. Salad. Yellow yam. A plate each for you and Richard. And you going to eat all the yam I put on your plate.”
    “Yeah. Sure.”
    He put the remote down on the arm of the couch. “That is sufficient. You will not speak that way to me, young lady.”
    Crap, now I’d made him tetchy. Better deal with it now. Otherwise the next twenty minutes would be nothing but lecturing about how when he was a small boy, his father would have tanned his behind for speaking to him too familiar, and Young lady, is this kind of irresponsible behavior that got you into trouble, yadda, yadda. “I’m sorry, Dad. I promise I’ll eat it all.”
    “That’s better.” He turned his eyes back to the television. He muttered, almost as if I weren’t in the room, “Can’t afford to be wasting your mother’s hard-earned dollars.” He rubbed his twisted leg. Dad ran a construction company. He preferred to do some of the work with his own hands, but his leg hadn’t been the same since he’d fallen from scaffolding when I was a little girl.
    I heard Mom before I saw her. From the sound of it, she was at the top of the stairs. “Rich! Come down to the living room, please?”
    “Please,” question mark. Not her usual “please,” period. She was sounding a little bit apologetic around Richard nowadays. Good.
    “Cutty, is Sojourner down there with you?”
    “Yes, darling.”
    “I’m here, Mom.”
    “That’s good, you’re on time. Come and help me with these bags, please.”
    I, of course, still got “please,” period. When they took me out of LeBrun High, they decided that I needed a more “diverse” school, as in a school where I wasn’t one of only five black people out of hundreds of students. That meant the big city; Toronto. Mom would never let on how much she’d hated to move all the way here, the long drive to work and back every day. How much she missed the town of Guelph. But ever since then she’d been starchier with me.
    “Coming, Mom.”
    Dad sighed. He shifted grumpily around on the couch, moving his leg to a more comfortable position. Mom had asked me to help her with the bags, not Dad. For all I was mad