The Life I'm In by Sharon G. Flake

Author:Sharon G. Flake
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

* * *

I need to pay him back. I can’t keep taking and taking. I could go by his place, scrub the floors on my knees, wash the windows by hand, do his dishes, anything he want. But he won’t accept no help from me. He don’t want his money paid back either. “Accept it, baby girl. I like to do for you. No strings.”

“Is that what you say to April?”

He tell me that I’m different. Smart. Only him and Maleeka ever said that about me. His words feel like honey on my skin, a warm sun in the sky. I laugh because some words that come in my head now don’t sound like me at all. Coloring is changing me inside and out. How something that little do that? I don’t know. But I like it. Like talking to Maleeka all the time now too.

“You got a baby, right?”

I ain’t sure exactly what to say. Only, I don’t want April to get in trouble. So, I lie. Tell him that Cricket is mine. Then I make up a whole story about us. Might as well. Once you start lying, why stop along the way?

“Well—there you go. I help you, and you help me.”

“Yes, Anthony. Anything you want.”

Usually our conversations end quick—faster than a mouse running ’cross the kitchen. Seems like he got all the time in the world today. I’m at my desk, one leg tucked, coloring. Cricket’s on her back on the floor pulling on a one-dollar-store mobile, trying to lift herself up.

“Anthony.”

“Yes.”

“Did you go to college? You talk real nice, sound smart.”

He went to community college, he say. And took a few courses at the university downtown. He quit once his mother got sick. “We had a family business. She died. I had to take over.” He sound disappointed, like he sorry he did that. I ask what business she was in. Only, he don’t say.

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