The House You Pass on the Way by Jacqueline Woodson Read Free Book Online

loves that kind of stuff.”
    Staggerlee looked away. At school she had been called “Light-bright.” She hated it, the way the word sounded so much like a swear, how girls’ mouths curved so nastily when they screamed it. When she was younger, she hated how light she was, how people stared and called her beautiful or ugly just because of it. Some mornings, she wanted to pull her skin back and walk outside with just her blood and veins and bone showing. What would people say then? What names would they come up with? She looked at Trout. Her skin was dark brown like Daddy’s. Staggerlee wanted to touch it, to run her hands along Trout’s arm. She wanted to ask her what it was like to walk inside that skin every day.
    “Why would I want to pass?” Her voice came out sounding cold. “I know what I am.”
    Trout narrowed her eyes, smirking. “What are you?”
    It was a test, Staggerlee knew. One she had had to take a thousand times. Choose a side, Trout was saying. Black or white.
    “I’m me. That’s all.”
    Trout’s eyes softened. Staggerlee stared into them. They were brown and clear as water.
    “Yeah,” Trout said. “I hear that.” She turned away from Staggerlee and watched the passing land for a while, squinting against the dust. “That’s all anybody is—themselves. People all the time wanting to change that.”
    She looked old sitting there, all huddled into her jacket.
    “Are you glad you came here?”
    Trout looked thoughtful a moment. “I don’t know yet.” She sighed. “I miss Hallique.” For a minute she looked like she’d start crying. But then she blinked and her eyes were distant again.
    Staggerlee leaned back and stared out over the land. The pictures they had of her father’s people had been taken a long time ago. In most of them, Hallique and Ida were little girls, and there were a few of them as teenagers. Hallique never smiled in any of the pictures. When Staggerlee had asked her father why, he’d said, “That’s how she was—straight-faced.”
    “What do you miss about her?” Staggerlee asked Trout now.
    Trout shrugged. “I look over at her chair at the table and it’s empty and I know it’ll always be empty now. And her pictures. I look at them and . . . I don’t know. She’s there in them but she’s not, too.” She reached into her knapsack and pulled out a small stack of pictures with a rubber band around it.
    “We went to the shore last year.” She handed the picture to Staggerlee. “This is me and Hallique.”
    Staggerlee stared at the picture a long time. The woman in it was tall and dark like Daddy. Her hair was braided and pinned to the top of her head. She wore tiny wire-frame glasses and had an arm across Trout’s shoulder. They were both laughing into the camera.
    “That’s Hallique?” Staggerlee asked softly.
    “Yeah.”
    “I never saw a picture with her smiling.” She stared at the picture again. They were both wearing shorts. Trout was wearing an orange bathing suit beneath hers. Hallique wore a T-shirt with something written across it Staggerlee couldn’t read.
    “She said when she was young, she was too busy worrying about what her life was gonna be like when she grew up. But after the bombing, she said she was going to live—that tomorrow wasn’t guaranteed.” Trout frowned. “Or something like that.”
    “Then why’d she stop talking to Daddy, if she was going to live ?”
    Trout shrugged. “She never talked about that. Neither one of them did. It was like your daddy was dead and buried. Hardly any pictures either—except what they clipped from the newspaper.”
    “They hated us.”
    “They didn’t hate you. They just didn’t think about you all. I guess that’s just as bad, huh?”
    Staggerlee nodded. “Somebody dies and then everyone scrambles to make things right.”
    Trout raised her eyebrow. “What’re you talking about?”
    “Like Ida Mae letting us finally meet you. Finally writing to us. It took somebody