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

Tiptoe up the hall and listen for Auntie, who is downstairs frying bacon and praising God. Her bedroom door creaks when I push it open. Perfume and pink are everywhere. I open the closet door slow so the creak don’t give me away. The crystal clock on her dresser says I’d better hurry. The first drawer I open says I’m wasting my time. Her jewelry box plays music, so I stay away from it. The drawers with underwear and shirts, stockings and scarves don’t even have any change in them.
    â€œJeffrey!”
    She’s at the bottom of the stairs, so I can’t answer or she’ll know where I am.
    â€œYou gonna miss that plane if we don’t get moving.”
    She makes the best bacon. Coffee too. It’s like her, I’m thinking, to give me a last meal—like they give prisoners in jail before they kill ’em.
    I go into the third bedroom. Once I found a hundred bucks in a drawer. Nothing this time. Her emergency money ain’t here. She’s gonna make me leave broke. That’s like her, too.
    â€œJeffrey!”
    I lean over the railing. “Okay. I’m coming.”
    I take a quick shower, then get dressed and take one last look at my room. I never had one so nice; so big. I picked out the furniture. Painted the room myself. Got the most expensive bedding in the store, just about.
    I sit, trying to get myself together, wondering why I can’t never seem to get it right.
    The front door downstairs opens. Auntie’s speaking to a woman across the street, the jogger who starts out in the dark and is home before most people have their breakfast. Neighbors here ain’t like the ones where I come from. They talk too much. Tell everything they see—me and my boys out front having a little smoke; me and my boys sitting ’round back on my own property drinking a forty, which ain’t nobody’s business but ours. Next thing I know Auntie knows about it. And I’m on restriction and my boys can’t come visit, which is crazy because I am sixteen not six.
    Did someone snitch? Did they say I was there with my boys when that thing with that kid went down?
    Auntie talks to her about the weather. She asks how her husband’s business is going. She mentions how the gardener is killing our trees and how she is going to Savannah in a few weeks—which she never told me.
    It don’t make sense, but I lay back down underneath the covers, thinking about her. How she always tried to make me something I wasn’t. At home, my dad and I drank soda out the can. Auntie said people don’t do things like that ’round here. I didn’t like it at first, pouring root beer into a glass every time I drank one. But I got used to it. And after a while I didn’t even mind not watching television while we ate. Sitting in the dining room was cool too. I never told my boys about the cloth napkins on my lap, or how she once had a friend of hers teach us how to set a proper table and which forks to use. Watching The Simpsons and South Park was a no-no. And BET was out of the question. Those were Auntie’s rules. I followed ’em, too. My mother . . . my mother is different. At her place in Arizona I will be sleeping with three little boys—like before. And trouble will follow me like hot air.
    I ask myself again, how did I blow this? What did I do?
    The door shuts. Auntie’s yelling up the stairs for me to come on. “Now.”
    But I’m not leaving. Not going empty-handed; broke. And she won’t just give me the money, so . . . “I’m coming,” I say, sitting my suitcases outside the door and locking Malcolm inside my room.
    I take my time walking down the steps with them suitcases. Going back up and coming down with more.
    â€œJeffrey. Don’t miss that plane, boy.”
    She’s out the door and clearing more things from her car. I pick up a biscuit filled with bacon, eggs, and cheese and chew and swallow it quick.