The Present Tense of Prinny Murphy by Jill MacLean

Author:Jill MacLean
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: JUV039050, book
ISBN: 9781554559565
Publisher: Fitzhenry & Whiteside
Published: 2011-09-09T00:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

'in·ter·lude

Friday night Ma and me go shopping. In Walmart my eyes light right away on a lime-green jacket. Pursing her lips, Ma says, “Not a good color for you, Prinny,” and she’s right. She searches along the rack and pulls out a cherry-red jacket with slash pockets. It looks great on me; then we find sneakers with cool laces.

In Violet’s Boutique I try on a pair of embroidered jeans, half-price. Ma nods in approval. All this takes my mind off Tate and LaVaughn, and for once things are easy between Ma and me; she’s a born shopper.

As we leave Violet’s, Ma says, “Lordy, there’s Hector’s mother. She’s so proper she makes me feel I’m tipsy when I’m stone-cold sober. I’ll run to the Ladies—she’d never use a public washroom.”

“I’ll wait here,” I say. “No rush.”

Across the mall is the teacher’s supply store, rigged up to look like a toy store from the outside. I went in there once. Verb charts, bulletin boards, racks and racks of workbooks about phonics, math skills, and language arts.

I wouldn’t be so scared of it now.

I’m drifting off, playing some more with my poem about the fox sparrow, when two people come out of the supply store. My cousin Hud, wearing his black hockey jacket and jeans with the knees out. His little sister Fleur is beside him. Her pink trousers are too short; her jacket, also pink, could do with a trip to the Laundromat. She’s holding a plastic bag as carefully as if it contains a million dollars.

Hud Quinn shopping with his sister on a Friday night?

Fleur stops, takes a big yellow box of crayons out of the bag, and opens the box, gazing into it as if she can’t quite believe how lucky she is. She pulls out a thick red crayon. Then she tips the box sideways to get at another one. The crayons slide out, graceful as a waterfall, and tumble to the floor. She grabs Hud by the leg.

My feet dig into the floor; my muscles tense. Hud’s not going to swipe that little kid. Not while I’m around.

Hud stoops, his bare knees poking out of his jeans, and starts picking up crayons, one by one. The light falls across his cheek, where high over the bone a purple bruise curves like a crescent moon. He didn’t have that bruise on the bus after school; I’d have noticed.

Fleur holds out the empty box, chattering away to him. As he tucks the first crayons in and adjusts her hand to hold the box upright, Hud answers her. She hunkers down, stuffing a green crayon in the box with her free hand, still talking. He smiles. A creaky smile, like a gate that’s hardly ever opened.

Somehow I don’t think he’d want me watching him. I turn my back and hurry to the washroom. Ma’s coming out, so I steer her toward the doors at the far end of the mall, yakking on about my new jacket, storing that picture of Hud and Fleur in the corner of my brain where I keep stuff I can’t possibly explain.

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