Simone Breaks All the Rules by Debbie Rigaud

Author:Debbie Rigaud
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

* * *

Behind the wheel, I look like the one with the upper hand. Mummy might as well be a tween who’s just graduated to the front seat. It feels good. We ride in silence, walk into the store, and grab a cart. It’s in the Latin American foods aisle next to a colorful array of dried beans that she starts in on me.

“I almost passed out in shock when Rose told me about you and some boy.” She whispers the word boy. A few cart-pushing old ladies do double takes as they stroll past us. This causes my mom to put her lecture on hold until we are in the next aisle.

“You want to let some, some … boy sully your reputation so close to graduation? Is that what you want?” she asks over some eighties tune’s emo sax solo. On the shelf behind Mummy, the Quaker Oats dude’s Mona Lisa smile contrasts with her scowl.

“Mummy, it’s not what you think. The police were just—”

My mother holds on to the cart to keep from blasting off into the stratosphere. “Police? What police?”

Oh no.

How could I be so sloppy? The eyewitness must have been at the game, not at my school pickup.

“Marie Simone Lamercie Thibodeaux,” she fumes. “What. Police.”

“His music was loud and the police asked him to lower the volume. That’s all. They didn’t even come out of their squad car.”

Constance looks defeated, but after seventeen-plus years, I know better than to believe that. “Woy, Jésus qui est l’Éternel.”

“The whole encounter lasted no more than one minute,” I tell her, placing a calming hand on her arm. “And then it was over.”

“Even still, it’s not that boy being passed around in gossip, it’s you.”

“I thought we’re not supposed to care what people think?”

“Don’t get fresh! We didn’t scrape together all that tuition money for you to be jumping into strange boys’ cars. Who even is this vagabond boy?”

I tread carefully. I obviously can’t say he’s my prom date. If I say he’s a friend, she’ll start wailing over me going boy crazy.

“All he did was drop me off at the game,” I say instead. “It wasn’t anything more than that.”

“What happened to your two flat feet? They don’t carry you where you need to go anymore?”

Did she have go there about me lacking a foot arch? That’s petty. I ignore her and pick up some oatmeal and try to keep us moving along.

“You better hope your grandmother doesn’t hear krik about this. She didn’t come to this country and work long hours in housekeeping just to have a granddaughter tell the family what the donkey told the rooster on a Sunday morning! And while she was busy cleaning hotel rooms of rich Manhattan savages, do you think she had dreams of her future grandchildren tearing through the streets with garcons?” she spits out. “Non, mumzelle!”

When we reach the check out, Mummy is still fuming. In the midst of her eye-bulging, lip-pouting, eyebrow-furrowing fit, I pick up and flip through a celebrity gossip magazine.

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