TEDDY BUMP

Down down baby, down down

a rollercoaster

Sweet sweet baby, sweet sweet

won’t let you go…

Melanie kicks her skinny legs out. Her ashy elbows and arms pump and pump, ricochet off the cool wintry air. She wears summer clothes, a flowery church dress that billows around her, like a pink upturned umbrella, and cornrows, neat and lustrous, her Easter Sunday best. Melanie swings from a frayed brown rope. Her ankle socks must have looked good in her shiny black Mary Janes, but one shoe is missing. Her giggles bounce off the shards of ice atop the frozen red earth of Miss Dinah’s playground. They echo around her, crimson crystals glistening beneath her tiny feet. One shoe on, one shoe off, locked somewhere in an old dusty box, the label is faded, her name long since unremembered, unread.

KeKe blows bubbles in her left hand and waves them around like a magician, pops them like iridescent smoke rings. The bubbles float over her shoulder and drift past the slide that is still and silent for now, then disappear into the surrounding trees. The rusted merry-go-round spins ever so slowly behind her. It creaks and growls like the sound of Miss Dinah’s laughter. KeKe sits with her back against a green glacier rock, denim legs splayed out in front of her, like a giant black baby doll. Miss Dinah smiles down at us, then floats from her perch in the willow tree. I shudder then wave from my spot on the prickly grass and hope Miss Dinah doesn’t land near me. Melanie laughs and pumps her little legs harder, swinging from the sturdy oak. Even if someone finds the other shoe Melanie is not wearing, somewhere across the red-stained layers of time, as far as the world beyond is concerned, we are all still missing.

The word ricochets in my mind like a stray bullet, and I rub the side of my head. It hurts sometimes to be, just thinking. Sometimes, when the sky is flesh and Melanie’s dress flies and flutters like a hollow-boned bird, like the butterfly that once carried me far away from home, I wonder if we are truly missed, missing. Those words hurt, the words Miss Dinah is so careful to never say. When it is cold outside and all the land is grieving, when Melanie is swinging like the first days of Spring, I wonder. Are we missing if no one in the world is looking for us, if we are just another random group of little black girls lost?

“Halloo!” Melanie cries and leaps from her swing, arcing through the air, a giggling brown grasshopper. “Come on, Ruby, KeKe,” she says. “Turn for me?” The rope spins slowly, unseen hands, a question mark waiting in the air behind her.

I groan. I was just getting comfortable. It’s not Melanie’s fault that she is the youngest among us, that she still finds some joy in this place. Somehow our littlest playmate holds onto hope, but we’ve be here so long with Miss Dinah, I’m not sure what that means. KeKe coughs, doesn’t even look up. Amber, as always, is carving her name furiously in the bark of a tree. What’s left of her dress hangs in dark shreds. We pretend like we don’t see the wounds beneath them. I pretend the ice on my back is a sailboat. I pretend it will rock me away like a grandmama’s arms, like sleep, drifting down through the river of air, spiriting me back to where I belong, fighting my way back to my own tree-lined street, where the sky is Mama.

“Ruby!” Melanie whines and I can feel Miss Dinah’s eyes frowning down at me. Her eyes are so big, they hold a whole river in them. If I knew how, I would climb up in those eyes and kick and swim. If I knew how, I would snatch that rope and find my own way home.

“Leave me alone, ole wor’sem girl.”

“I ain’t wor’sem,” she says. “I’m ‘sistent.”

“Persistent,” Amber says. Her sparkly scrunchie and messy bun dangles on the side. Amber is always whispering in that child’s ear, as if new words could change our story. Amber was like a house where the lights are always off. You knew someone lived there, but they were never seen. She carves, destroys whole trees with her big seeking words, hiding in the dark bark of her weird scriptures. As if prayer would save us now, trapped on the other side of Miss Dinah’s trees. “You’re too old to talk like that,” I say. “Didn’t she teach you how to read yet?”

Amber rolls her eyes, brushes away pieces of bark. I watch as she wipes the knife on her bare thigh. I am cold just looking at her. There is no heat from the Jackball sun that spins in the sky above us. It pulses and shimmers, the colors swirling with every move Miss Dinah makes.

Melanie digs her big toe into the hard bright earth, kicks at one of the many weirdly shaped rocks that litter the playground. Her head hangs low, lace white sock buried beneath the ice and snow.

“Be nice,” Miss Dinah says. Her white teeth glisten like new bones, the words whispered this time, not quite a hiss. Why girls always got to be nice? I huff and puff, and imagine a big gust of wind blows all their asses down, like the house in the story Mama once read to me. I feel my eyes swell up, the pressure behind my closed lids rising, an electric black cloud. I bite my lip hard but as usual I don’t taste anything. Not even blood. I don’t wanna be, but I’m mad now. Madder than Amber, who is slaughtering another tree. Madder than KeKe, who is always crying and picking at the frayed threads of her jeans, saying how she used to be fine, so damn fine, Teddy Bump fine and pretty. I want to snatch Melanie by her shiny naps, kick Miss Dinah in her sparkly teeth, her dusty shin. Everything was so good, so right before …. Why they make me remember? It’s cold enough as it is, here. It hurts to remember, and Melanie’s little baby girl voice now feels like a cold fire running through my head, burning right into my brain.

“It’s alright, Ruby.”

Miss Dinah reaches for me with Mississippi Missionary Baptist white gloved hands. Stiff and clean, she looks like an usher at Granddaddy’s old church. I turn and roll over. Don’t want her touching me, rubbing her hurt all over me. I trusted her once, Miss Dinah and her Double Dutch lies promising a new way home. You’ll play all the time, she said. Never grow hungry, never be cold. If I could count all the lies a haint told me, I’d be counting forever.

The icy grass stabs and pricks, tickles my belly. Sometimes I envy Melanie. Even if it is just one foot, at least she gets to feel real air, feel real grass tickling her toes, her heel and her sole. The one not wearing the patent leather shoe. Me, I feel nothing but pain. Miss Dinah says she thinks Melanie went missing in her sleep—as if she does not know how. And who does that? Goes missing in their sleep, like a bad dream except when you wake up, you don’t exist? Only Miss Dinah would tell a lie like that, sing you a lie and make it feel like truth. But for me, it is always the same. My right pinky toe is squenched up in Emerald’s shoes. The black ankle boots are so tight I can almost feel a corn growing. All my big sister’s hand-me-downs were too little for me. My too early breasts were too big, crushed inside her too small shirts. My butt, my height, my mouth, everything too much. Mama called it, “mighty inconvenient.” And though my feet hurt and my heart hurt too, I would laugh, we would roll and gasp together, laughing so hard I could not breathe. Being a little black girl can be mighty inconvenient sometimes. I laugh every time I think of it.

And that is what I miss most. Not the thinking but Mama’s laughter. She looked so pretty with her eyes all big, not full of worry, and her perfect doll baby lips turned just so. She could make the biggest hurt sound like a joke, make you laugh so hard the pain disappeared in your throat. Not like Miss Dinah. When she laughs, the sound is a splinter in your big toe, glass in your ears. She is the crow in the tree, mocking us, each girl one of her shiny things, her own special jewel, a collection she has picked through the ages. When she laughs, you want to hide and disappear all over again.

“I found you,” she crows. “No one else did, maybe no one else will. Remember that.”

What I remember is Mama’s absence. What I remember is spending my first twelve years missing Mama, missing her laughter. Mama worked so hard, but when she laughed you wouldn’t know it. I guess everybody’s got mamas like that. Working so hard to make you the woman they think you should be, can be, worrying so hard that only a little bit of them is left. The girl part almost gone, disappeared. But when Mama laughed there was no more worry. She sounded like light. And though it never grows dark, night never comes here, I wonder if Emerald still turns all the lights on, if she still spends each breath waiting for Mama to come back home, waiting for her to return from work or sleep. Waiting for the sun sound of her laughter, so we could all feel light, pretty, free, safe.

But we are not free and there is no safe here. We just is. We exist, between who were once were and whatever we have become. I’ve been here so long I don’t know if I am a girl anymore, grown, or something else in between.

“Push me!” Melanie says, her face twisted up in a little brown knot. I want to push her and hold her at once. I want to push and be pushed, to hold and be held. None of that should matter here, but it does. No matter how many scars Amber carves into the tree, no matter how many holes KeKe digs out of her denim pants legs, as long as I’ve been here, this loneliness, this ache is always here.

I push myself up from the ice crystal grass. The sound is soft wind chimes in the cold air. I can hear KeKe shivering, sniffling behind me, and Miss Dinah—her cold eyes bearing holes into my back, the top of my head. The Jackball sun is a sickly green, a bruised blue now. Miss Dinah is mad. When she looks at you, you feel like you will disappear all over again, and whatever little peace you felt before her eyes is gone.

When Mama was gone to work, Emerald knew I was afraid, so she pretended she was her. She used to sneak into her make-up drawer when Mama was off to her second shift, and make moon faces in the old timey mirror. Emerald said Mama ought to throw it out. Get something black lacquer and new. Emerald would say this and then pucker her lips. “Mama got a lipstick mouth,” she’d say. “Perfect shape, perfect size for wearing any color she wants.” She used to stand in front of Granddaddy’s old green painted dresser and mirror, making faces that looked like her stomach hurt or like she was some kind of strange clownfish. Mama’s mouth didn’t look nothing like that. It was perfect, like the kind they used for the scratch n’ sniff stickers plastered all over my Trapper Keeper notebook, perfect lips that made every hurt feel whole again.

But I don’t know if I have Mama’s lipstick mouth, or if Emerald’s little bitty feet ever caught up with me. I don’t know why my Mama named me Ruby but my favorite, favorite color is blue. I don’t know when real girls start or stop growing. When the pain ever ends. For Melanie, for KeKe, for Amber and me, maybe Miss Dinah, too, for all of the others lurking behind the trees, crying under the stones, waiting in the river, on the side of the road in a ditch, waiting in a hotel’s deep freezer for somebody to come carry us out, every day changes but every night is the same. Nothing grows here, not even our dreams. We are visible and invisible. Just the layers of red dirt, full of time and all of it so full of our tears, the red clay looks like its crying, like the whole earth bleeding, too.

“You’re daydreaming today, better keep up, better keep it lively,” KeKe says, mimicking Miss Dinah. She wipes snot from her face with the back of her hand. She talks so funny, half the time I don’t even know what to say. She talks like Mrs. Aldridge, KeKe’s favorite teacher, the one she used to imitate for us. Said she used to stand in front of the classroom, discussing worlds they had never seen, every detail a new language, then she would weave around the neat rows of their desks, an exotic bird in constant motion. KeKe used to make us laugh so hard, but now she don’t talk much anymore, not since she realized Miss Dinah never plans for us to leave here. KeKe just holds herself now, and cries, digging at her denim jacket, her jeans, the last outfit she chose for herself. When she does talk, she tells us about her friends going to the shows, and the cute boys, and the slick girls who smiled in her face and did her wrong so wrong, and then sometimes, she will tell us about high school.

Mrs. Aldridge sounds nice. The only thing about school I liked was the first day and lunch. But when KeKe talked, she made it sound like some kind of adventure. KeKe is the only one of us to make it to high school, but she missed her prom.

“What is a prom?” Melanie once asked. For a moment, KeKe stopped crying.

“A prom is a promise,” KeKe said.

And after she described getting your hair did, the pretty dresses, the decorations, and drinking ice cream punch, she grabbed Melanie and pretended to dance. The only prom I’d seen was in that scary movie when the mean girls covered the magic one with pig blood. Watching KeKe and Melanie dance was one of the few times since Miss Dinah brought her here that I’d seen KeKe look happy. But she don’t look happy now.

She has placed snow-covered ice blossoms in the four holes in her matching denim shirt. It looks almost pretty, like her blouse was made that way on purpose. I don’t feel like arguing so I just dust myself off, even though I know my parachute pants can never get wet. I’m so sick of them. I wish I could take a knife and rip them up, too. But whatever I do to them, they just turn back the same way they were when I came here.

I can’t think of anything more embarrassing than dying in some bright red parachute pants that barely fit, dying in some too shiny polyester nylon that don’t even cover your ankles good. Even Michael Jackson wouldn’t be caught dead in that. And Melanie might be a wor’sem baby who can’t even read but at least she looked right when she went missing, even with her one little shoe. Me, I am trapped here in Miss Dinah’s world looking like Who-Done-It-and-What-For forever. But then I think of Amber. Poor thing. Can’t get more pitiful than that.

Shimmy, shimmy cocoa pop

Shimmy shimmy down

Shimmy shimmy cocoa puff

Shimmy shimmy break down

“I said, who wants to play?”

“I do!” Melanie raises her hand, hopping around like a cricket. Amber, KeKe, and I just look at each other. “I do,” we say in unison but it’s not enough. Miss Dinah wants razzle and dazzle, but I feel like my voice has seeped right out of me, or frozen under the ice. I don’t feel like playing. I don’t feel like singing. I don’t feel like….

“Oooh,” Melanie says. If her eyes weren’t so big, her little hand covering her mouth, I would’ve thought I’d only imagined it, but the shock on Amber and KeKe’s faces says everything: I messed around and said that aloud.

The Jackball sun darkens and the air feels like fire.

“I don’t understand!” Miss Dinah roars. “I do everything for you. I take you from that scary darkness, I carry you in my arms and bring you to the light. I fill your world with toys and games, and none of you can still bring me laughter? None of you can show me gratitude?”

As she speaks her ropes hiss and sputter, twisting like serpents. The frayed edges shake with electric flares. Miss Dinah grabs one rope in each hand and begins whipping them in the air, lashing them out right near our feet.

Melanie screams and dives into my arms. I hold her and cover her eyes so she will not see which one of the stone ones, the stone dolls would be brought back to whatever it is Miss Dinah calls our new lives.

Miss Dinah’s right rope sizzles and sparks as she whips it across a small boulder. When I first arrived and crossed over the blueness into Miss Dinah’s light, I thought the wet stones were just part of the park. But now I know they had once been little girls, too. Miss Dinah had turned them into stones that remained wet with tears. I once saw her turn a new girl who had never learned to play jacks. She turned another because she could not keep time well. She always stumbled and missed during our hand-clapping games. Clapping when she should’ve been sliding, stomping when she should’ve been crossing her heart. I can still hear her screaming.

Miss Mary Mack Mack Mack

All dressed in black black black

With silver buttons buttons buttons

All down her back back back

The new girl was still screaming when Miss Dinah’s rope hit her and her face turned gray. Her raised palms froze mid-air and her body changed shape. All that was left was her tears on a stone. After that Miss Dinah had us clapping “Miss Mary Mack” so long, it felt like my whole hands were on fire, the skin blistered, red and sore.

To survive Miss Dinah, a girl had to have rhythm, had to have a good memory, too. Little Melanie had neither, as long as she had been beyond the blue, but Miss Dinah kept her anyway.

“All I ask is for a little affection, some cooperation,” she says. “Joy is what we are supposed to be here! Joy!” The sky roiled above her head, covering the Jackball sun.

“All I ask for is just a little love, a little companionship, a little ‘thank you, Miss Dinah,’for all I’ve done for you, but you have the nerve to fix your lips to tell me what you ain’t gon’ do, how you feel?Let me tell you about feelings…”

Melanie trembles and KeKe shakes. Amber grips her knife, the blade digging into her hand. The rope writhes back and forth in the air, a spinning cyclone one moment, a whip the next. As it cracks through the air, we wait for Miss Dinah’s anger to pass, her black hole eyes an ever changing storm. She hovers above us, her stained palms raised upward, toward the sky, their redness trembling against the black and blue.

“Fast tailed girls, now you’ve ruined my gloves.”

There is no sound, only the dry rattle of our watching breath trapped in terrified throats. Our tongues and voices turn back on ourselves. Now Melanie moans. KeKe curses. Amber bites her lip, grinds the blade into the tree’s hard flesh. Still the red hands remain outstretched, a prayer or a curse, we cannot tell. Miss Dinah lowers herself until her bare feet touch the floor. The church shoes now gone, I turn away from the dark, curled nails on her toes. Miss Dinah spins slowly, turning her head to stop and stare at each of us, her wintry eyes great gaping holes of rage, her lips frosted popsicles. She walks stiffly, her long skirt and bare feet dragging in the stiff, frozen grass with a sound that chills me, makes my bones ache. Long toenails scraping across ice.

Melanie twists out of my arms, and turns to face me, her eyes pleading. She grabs my hand. “Turn for me?” she asks. She presses her palm into mine and tries to get me to begin the game.

“Ruby,” Miss Dinah says, waving my name on the bitter tip of her smile. “Join the circle or the circle will join you.”

The rope spins in the air behind her, a warning. It spins then splits into two.

I rise and take my place. The ropes feel like fire in my hands but I hold onto them. The rhyme is the same as before. Miss Dinah likes the old games.

KeKe bends down to pick up the frayed ends of the ropes from the icy ground. She drops it, as if she is burned. Sucks her fingertips. “Why can’t Amber turn today?” she cries. I glance over my shoulder at Amber. She is gripping her blade with two hands, stab, stabbing at the heart of Miss Dinah’s favorite tree.

“You are wasting your time, Amber. That is not where my heart is buried, child.”

The smile on Miss Dinah’s face makes me grip the ropes tighter. “Come on, KeKe,” I say. “Begin.”

“High John saw the mighty number,” she sang. “High John, High John.”

“High John saw the mighty number, High John, High John…”

Miss Dinah is a master jumper. No one can beat her jumping. We start off easy then speed the doubled ropes up. She gets real mad if we turn the ropes too slowly.

“High John was a mighty number, High Jo—”

“Enough of that wearisome ditty. Sing something else,” she cries.

We are just about to turn the ropes when I hear Amber whisper behind us. We are so astonished to hear her speak, that we let the ropes drop and fall slack. They hiss and groan as they touch the cold ground. The ropes only like heat, they hate the ice crystals prickling their frayed little bellies. The faster we turn, the hotter they get. I hate the ropes. They hiss and move like snakes and shed like them, too.

Miss Dinah whirls, turning to face Amber. “What did you say, Amber dear?”

Miss Dinah is trying to resume her nice voice, the friendly voice that comforted me when I awoke to find myself waiting in the dark blue.

Amber takes a deep breath, her eyes intent, her mouth a straight line, unsmiling.

“I said, can we hula hoop here?”

“Hula?” Melanie is confused. We have been jumping rope and pattycaking so long that we barely remember other activities.

“Is that another way to turn, another way to jump?” Miss Dinah asks.

Suddenly, I catch KeKe’s eye and motion for her to lay the crying ropes all the way down. They hiss in protest.

“Yeah,” I say. “Yes,” with more enthusiasm. “Can we, Miss Dinah? I haven’t hula-hooped in a long, long time.”

“It’s so fun,” KeKe says, finally catching on. She sounds corny as all get out, but she fixes her face to something that looks like excitement.

Melanie hops over to us, her shoeless foot lightly skipping over the snow and ice. “I wanna hula, too! Me, me, me!” she cries, tugging on Miss Dinah’s tattered dress.

Miss Dinah narrows her eyes into sharp slits. “What does this hula look like?”

“Like a big skinny, hard donut,” Amber says. “You spin it around your waist and keep it spinning with your hips. You can spin it as fast or as slow as you want, but you can’t let it touch the ground.”

“It’s so much fun, Miss Dinah,” I say, trying to sound bright, light.

“And there are songs, too!” KeKe says.

“Songs?” Miss Dinah cocks her head like a bird of prey. “Try me,” she says, both a warning and an invitation.

Amber walks to the center of the playground, away from the ropes that have finally quieted down. She adjusts the ragged remains of her dress that barely cover her chest, the strips of dark-stained fabric around her waist and begins to sing. After a while, we join in.

“Hula, hula, now who think they bad?”

“I do!”

“Hula, hula, now who think they bad?”

“I do!”

“I think I’m bad ‘cause Amber’s my name. Yellow is my color don’t you worry about my lover, honey.”

“Mmmf, she think she fine.”

“Fine, fine, fine enough, fine enough to blow your mind.”

“Mmmf, she think she cool.”

“Cool, cool, cool enough, cool enough to skip your school!”

“Hula, hula, now who think she bad?”

Miss Dinah’s face, first pale with anger, now darkens and shines with pleasure. Her long teeth recede back into her mouth as do her claw-like nails. She turns back into the motherly creature that had come to the blue oneness and smiled and grinned and lied to our face, the haint that claimed us like a fairy godmother in a bad, bad dream.

“I will get this hula,” she says and rises to go. Her ugly feet levitate off the ground.

“We need five,” Amber says quickly.

“Five?” Miss Dinah lowers herself, looks at us, suspicious. “Why can’t we share the one?”

Amber glances around uneasy. KeKe begins to stutter. I start to speak but then Melanie interrupts me. Any other time I’d be annoyed by that but not this nightday.

“Because I want a pink one with sparkles on it! Sparkles and stars! And Ruby,” she raises my hand. “Ruby wants a red one of course.”

“No,” I cut in. “Blue.”

“I want blue,” KeKe says, her voice soft, quiet.

Miss Dinah smiles, revealing normal teeth now. “Yellow for Amber, RED for Ruby, Blue for KeKe, pink for my Melanie, and… and gold for me!” Delighted, she shoots up into the air like a witch without a broom. She is heading straight for the Jackball sun, the bright colorful sphere that seems to embody her every mood.

“That’s it!” I say.

“That’s what?” KeKe asks.

Amber motions at the ropes. I signal agreement.

“I know where she buried her heart.” I point up to the fake swirly, swirly nebulous sky, the spinning Jackball where Miss Dinah disappears.

“We’ve got to get her ropes. Quick, KeKe, I know you hate turning, but we’ve got to hide them and keep them quiet somehow. Distract her with the new game.”

“There are three ropes now. I know just what to do,” KeKe says. “I can twist anything, I can braid anything, I just need a little help.”

We sneak up on the ropes while little Melanie distracts them and grab them by their tails. Before they hiss and holler, KeKe ties one set of their ends into a tight knot.

“Now turn!” she says.

“Turn?” Melanie asks.

“Not you. Keep watch. Amber, Ruby, help me braid this.”

The ropes jerk and yank, trying to get free. They sparkle and sting us but we keep braiding, one loop over the other loop, under the rest.

“It hurts,” Amber says. We nod, yes it does, what doesn’t here, but keep folding over and over until we are done.

Melanie hops over one of the rocks to us, the little pigtail ends of her cornrows shaking, frantic. “Miss Dinah is on her way back here. She has the hula hoops.”

“Back to your places,” I whisper. Melanie runs to Amber, then runs back to the me.

“What you doing over here?” I ask.

She looks worried. “I don’t know how to hula hoop.”

“It’s easy,” I tell her. “Just watch me.”

“What if I drop it?”

“Miss Dinah loves you.”

Melanie screws up her little chubby face. “Miss Dinah don’t love nobody.”

I think about this as she lands, spinning on one foot.

“Hulas, hulas,” Miss Dinah sings. She hands them out, one by one. “Now let’s get started,” she says.

We sing, each girl stepping into the center of the ring, spinning the hulas, singing of personal glories. Melanie drops her hula many times, but Miss Dinah only laughs and orders us to play again and again.

Finally, when I think I can’t sing another note anymore, when I can’t think of another boast to share, Amber steps forward to take my hoop.

“One hoop is easy. It’s really for beginners and babies,” she says, cutting her eye at Miss Dinah.

“Amber, you know I hate babies.” Miss Dinah hates babies because babies can’t survive here. What would she do with something that needed more attention than her?

“A real master hooper can spin one, two, maybe even three hulas at a time.”

Miss Dinah looks curious. “Are you a master hooper, Amber?” She is always ready for a challenge.

“I am,” Amber says and Melanie gasps. She plops her hand to cover her mouth.

“No, Amber, you’re going to drop them,” Melanie whines.

“No, I won’t, Melanie. Watch me!” Amber wraps her bun tighter in her scrunchie and smooths down what is left of her dress. She adds my red hula and KeKe’s blue to her own yellow hula, one by one. She begins to spin around and walk as she hoops.

“Teddy bump, teddy bump! Teddy bump, teddy bump!” she sings as she swivels her hips, the hoops spinning slowly at first, then faster and faster.

Melanie looks like she’s thrilled and terrified all at once. Her little eyes are about to pop.

“Oh, you want to try me, I see,” Miss Dinah says. She unfurls her razor sharp fingers, her flat palm up. “Give them to me.”

Amber shakes her head no. “Miss Dinah, if you think you can beat me, get your own.”

Miss Dinah throws her head back, surprised at Amber’s tone, her newfound confidence. But she loves a challenge more than anything. What is a game worth if there is no risk? Her explanation for why she mixed danger and pain with all her playground games. But Miss Dinah liked to win every game. The weeping rocks were all that was left of the girls who lost.

Before Melanie can speak, Miss Dinah shoots back up to the Jackball sun. When she returns, she has hula-hoops stacked on her arms and waist. She doesn’t even wait to land before she is spinning like a top.

“Hula, hula!” she cries. We cheer her on. “Miss Dinah, Go Dinah, Miss Dinah, Go Dinah!” The more we cheer and clap, the faster she spins.

Miss Dinah spins so fast, she and the hulas begin to sparkle and glow.

She is really showing out now. Doing a little shimmy shimmy limbo shake while she flows.

“Go Dinah, Miss Dinah!” Amber cries, then she nods at me. “Ruby, KeKe, add the heat!”

KeKe and I have unbraided and untangled the ropes. We crack the spinning Miss Dinah Ball like rodeo whips. Miss Dinah squeals with delight at first. “More! More!” she cries. She holds herself tightly, spinning as the hula hoops rotate around her. “Faster, faster!” The ropes respond, spinning her faster than any top we’ve ever seen.

“Oooh!” Melanie cries. We crack the ropes harder. They rip through the air like lightning bolts. Miss Dinah’s ragged, tattered gown catches afire.

“Wait!” Miss Dinah screams, panic spoiling her smile. She tries to slow down, but she can’t.

We have her and we have her ropes.

We lasso her with the remaining hulas and the Dinah Ball hovers in the air, just a few feet above the ground, crackling and rising the angrier she gets.

“What have you done?” she screams and levitates a few feet higher, trying to escape but the hula hoops are weighing her down. She can’t go far.

“No!” I yell. “We can’t let her get to the sun. If she makes it out of here… “I don’t finish. We all know if she does escape, we are all finished. If we lose this game, we will become wet stones, or pebbles, or worse, dust.

“Give me the ropes,” I say. KeKe looks confused. Melanie is wailing, and Amber takes out her blade. I think she understands.

She carves a deep groove into her favorite tree. I steer the Miss Dinah Ball with the ropes and use the tree to wrap the ends of the spitting, hissing ropes and anchor myself.

“You are going to have to climb up and ride the ball like a bull.”

“Like a skateboard!” Melanie says.

Surprised, now even Amber looks unnerved.

“There’s no other way out of here. You’ll have to ride her evil tail right up out through the Jackball sky. All of you.” They nod, recognition slowly registering in their eyes.

“But what about you, Ruby?” Melanie wails. I don’t answer.

“And Amber…” I say, yanking the ropes. “Be still you evil thangs.” They sputter in protest.

“Yes,” Amber says.

“When you get to the Jackball, to the sun, I need you to carve out the heart she has buried there and toss it down to me. Don’t let her get it. Can you do that?”

“Yes.” Amber is crying. Melanie is crying, KeKe, all the wet stones, we are all crying. But I know what I have to do. I’ve seen a lot of movies, and in the movies folks, especially black folks, don’t always get free. I’ve been knowing for some time, but hoping all the same. Truth is, I might never see my mama or my sister again. I’d already gotten used to that, but these girls, these plain little black girls missing just like me, they were the only family I had here.

The Jackball pulses, its colors flickering from bright blood reds, oranges, and yellows, to purples and blues so dark, they look like bruises. Each time Miss Dinah winces with pain, the Jackball changes colors and seems to wince, too. The Jackball is not only where Miss Dinah hid her heart, it is her heart.

I wrap the ropes even tighter around my wrists though it burns, and I scream, “Run, now!”

Miss Dinah has managed to get a few of her bony fingers loose. She’s trying to cut through the hula hoops with her nails but they are too strong. The see-saw, the merry-go-round, the slides on the dark playground are twisting and undulating. Soon the metal will transform and they will run after the girls, after me.

KeKe takes Melanie by her hand and they take a running start before they leapfrog onto the Dinah Ball. Amber follows, slips and runs to try again.

“You better stop playing girl,” I cry, “and get on out of here!” I don’t know how much longer I can hold onto these ropes, how long before Miss Dinah manages to take over the tree.

I yank my arm in a long rippling motion, bouncing the Dinah Ball up, up into the sky, like one of those Atari games. Amber, KeKe, and Melanie are holding onto the hula hoops, clutching them like a ladder. “Now climb!” I say, “climb like they monkey bars!”

Melanie is the first to get free. She pinwheels up and out into the force that circles the Jackball sun. KeKe and Amber follow her. Amber grabs her knife.

“Noooooooo!” Miss Dinah screeches, her face contorted, her lips and mouth stretched out like a bottomless hole. “You can’t leave me! Never, never leave me! I cannot bear this place alone.”

And there it is. Miss Dinah, a creature as powerful as she, is just as lonely as any of the children she pretended to befriend here in the in between world.

As much as I hate what she has done to us here, I wonder if Miss Dinah was ever missing. I wonder if she is not only a trapper but is trapped here, too.

Amber plunges her blade deep into the center of the Jackball sun. KeKe and Melanie sadly wave goodbye. None of us know what is on the other side of the Jackball sky or the big, wide blue. I do know I will never see them again.

Maybe out there in the blue, there is more than darkness. Maybe in its depths there are more than scary things that just want to run you down. I realize I didn’t linger long enough to find out. Miss Dinah had called to me, maybe before anyone else had a chance.

When Amber tears the sky in two, and rips the Jackball sun to shreds, Miss Dinah lays in a smoldering heap, and the ropes fall asleep in my hands. The stinging stops, the burning, too. Real light, real warmth returns to the playground. I watch in wonder as ice melts for the first time in what might have been many ages. First the air is filled with the sound of exhalations. Then laughter. The music of little girls awakening from a long, cold nap. Silver and gold rainbow bubbles float in the air above our heads. Then I discover what the ropes can truly do. We each take turns, turning, each take turns, jumping, changing. I reach inside the memory of my oldest girlhood dream, of Trapper Keeper notebooks, scratch n’ sniff stickers, new back to school clothes, freshly done hair—fried, dyed and laid to the side—and Granddaddy’s old dresser painted green. I hold the rope and remember my sister Emerald and my Mama’s face, then I lay the ropes down and skip all the way home, thinking of the color blue.