You Don't Even Know Me by Sharon Flake Read Free Book Online

didn’t sport no colors. I didn’t go to the mall unless it was her and me. I never asked to go to the neighborhoods that kids like me live in. I stayed in the house. I didn’t mind the quiet or the stares or that time someone called the cops ’cause they didn’t know I lived around here.
    I tried so hard to do good; to do right. But high school ain’t nice like they always portraying it on TV. It’s hard-core. Scary. Even here in the burbs. The school was so white. And the teachers and classes were so different. I been behind since first grade. Ninth grade just means I’m plain lost. So they might as well be speaking Portuguese at that school.
    Cutting class is easy for me. Hitching a ride is like breathing: I do it all the time. Besides, they live in every city, in every town, on just about every block, I bet. Here wasn’t no different. So one day, it happened. They found me. Or maybe I found them. You have to have somebody, even if you don’t want to, I guess.
    â€œAuntie.” I open the door. Close it. I can’t ask her to let me stay. She’d just say no. But I don’t have no place else to go. I open the door wider. “I’m not going to live with her.” I throw the words into the hall. They fall down the steps and she catches them.
    â€œYou go where I send you. Or get locked up—which is most likely to happen anyway.”
    I slam the door, almost catching Malcolm’s tail when he walks in. “I’m not living with her.” I kick hangers out my way. Pick up the lamp she bought at Macy’s on sale for a hundred fifty bucks and aim it at the wall. If I could remember one phone number, get to just one of them.
    I put it down. Sit back on my bed. Try as hard as I can to remember a number. Only I can’t. It wouldn’t matter anyway. I owe a few of ’em money. And they want it. Auntie told me she was gonna open an account for me. “Putting five thousand bucks in it for starters.” She wanted me to learn to manage money. Big money. “ ’Cause one day it’s all gonna be yours anyhow.”
    I pick up the picture frames, wrapping them in between my shorts and shirts. Leaving the one with her and me dressed in cowboy clothes right where it is. But I take the one we took at the mall. It was after church. We was eating someplace special. One of my boys saw us in the window and came in to say hello. Auntie doesn’t understand. My boys are not like me. Old people are just old people to them—nothing special. So when she gave him a piece of her mind, like she was packing or something, he told me about it later. Said he would hurt her, and still might. “ ’Cause you gonna get the money anyhow, so why should we wait?”
    I think that’s why they lent to me. Why they let the debt build up so high. “I’m good for it,” I always said, when I lost at craps.
    â€œMalcolm, come.” I let him get in my bed. Then I lay across it, too, patting him. Remembering how Auntie would come and find me when I stayed out too late, or all night long, even. I don’t know how she did it, but she’d show up wherever I was. She’d tell my boys to keep quiet and for me to come home. Not leave when they’d say she’d better get gone or else. She grew up with six brothers. Two got killed in the war. One died of lung cancer and two more was shot on the street. “Bad boys run in our family like cancer,” she’d say to them. “Dying don’t scare me, so don’t mess with me.”
    I couldn’t figure out if they was joking or not when they’d say, “Let’s just off her. Tie her up. Burn her up. Get all that dough.”
    But I would always tell ’em straight up, “No. She my auntie. Y’all nuts?”
    Now I’m here wishing I’d listened to them. The money. The house. It would all be mine.
    I go to the bathroom and turn on the shower.