“WANNA SAY HI to Cricket?” I hold the phone up to Cricket’s ear. She know Maleeka’s voice, sometimes anyhow. Today is one of them times. Whatever Maleeka says makes Cricket laugh and giggle, kick and smile. I take the phone back. “How’s Caleb?”

Seem like she don’t want to talk to me about him sometime. I used to bully her in front of him on purpose so he would quit liking her and wanna be with me. “I don’t like him no more, Maleeka. And I don’t care if you do,” I say. And I mean it.

He taking her to the movies this weekend. He bought her flowers, daisies, for no reason at all the other day. She found ’em in a vase of water on her porch when she got home. “I wish we went to the same school,” she says.

Cottingham High is a charter school in the next county. Black kids from the top of their class come from all over the city, she say. You gotta take a test to get in. Caleb don’t go there, not that he couldn’t. He at the neighborhood school, HR High. Maleeka say he’s running for class president. I ain’t surprised. I used to be smart, got skipped in third grade. I been stuck in seventh grade so long that last year they just said forget it and put me in eighth grade. I punched somebody the first day and got myself outta there. If I couldn’t pass seventh grade, what made them think eighth grade was gonna be any easier for me?

I rush Maleeka off the phone ’cause he calling me. While I’m clicking over my heart beats hard, my hands sweat. “Anthony?”

“How’s my baby girl?”

“Thank you for the Pampers and Similac.” He left ’em at the back door. I ran down quick as I could after his driver called. “Am I gonna see you?”

He hangs up.

Should I call him? What if he mad? Maybe I said something wrong. Did something wrong. “Stupid,” I say to myself. “You ain’t thank him the right way.” Sitting on my desk hugging my knees, I try not to cry.