I JUMP OUT of bed. Run across the room. Turn on the overhead light. “Dang, Char,” I say, walking back to my bed. “You peed yourself.” I stare down at the dark spot on my spread and sheets. I was asleep, dreaming, on my knees under the bridge. “How come you ain’t get up and go to the bathroom?” I touch the front and back of my pajama bottoms—they soaked. Stepping out of ’em, I kick ’em in a corner. And change into more. Grabbing the wet blanket and throwing it on the floor, I shake my head, then yank off the sheets. The mattress gonna take forever to dry.

I don’t know how long I’m at the window staring, but when I call her, the sun is almost up. “He wasn’t always mean to us.”

“Okay, Char.”

“Sometimes, he bought us candy and clothes, gave us money.”

“What did you say his name was again?”

“I forget.”

I ask about school so she don’t ask no more about him. She got a twenty-five-page term paper due at the end of the semester. They reading Anna Karenina, she say. It’s got almost nine hundred pages. Her English teacher is like Miss Saunders. She want to turn their room into a Russian palace, she tells me, like all palaces ain’t the same.

Maleeka’s quiet a long time before she say, “I ever tell you that I’m in the National Honor Society.”

She was always smart, I tell her.

“In middle school, I bet I would have told them no I wasn’t joining.”

“Why?”

“’Cause I wanted to be like everybody else. And you—” She clears her throat. “Char, you liked me smart but not too smart.”

She right. I wanted her smart enough to do my homework, stupid enough to do whatever I told her without asking no questions or thinking she was better than me.

“Are you ever going back to school, Char?”

“Miss Saunders’s Saturday school?”

“That too.”

“One day.”

“Saturday’s coming in five days.”

“Leave me alone, Maleeka.”

“I’m just saying—”

“I slept with a whole bunch of people.” Sometimes I try to figure out how many, but it was so many, hundreds, I lose track. Get sick thinking about it.

She say it wasn’t my fault, but it was. I ran away from home. And I coulda left that life sooner or tried harder anyway. I don’t know why I didn’t. “Don’t blame him,” I say. “Blame me.”

She bring up her mother again. Maleeka say she blamed herself a lot back then, and again once she got the cancer.

“Why? You ain’t do nothing wrong.”

“Sometimes our house was so dirty—” She breathes in and out. “I couldn’t clean it like it needed to be cleaned. I couldn’t get her into the bathtub every night. She was heavy. Too sad to wanna get in, so she got mad at me for trying. I ran away once. I ever tell you that?”

“No.”

“Well, I did. Only for two hours. But I wanted to stay gone forever.” I ask why she didn’t keep going. “’Cause all my mom had was me. And all I had was her.” Clearing her throat, she says, “I write when my brain won’t shut up. What you do?”

“Nothing.”

“Okay, then, write. Something. Anything. A rap song, a poem. Or I could teach you how to sew like my mom.” We laugh. She yawning when she tell me to get a pen or pencil. I dig around in my dresser drawer, my desk. Don’t think, just write. Those her words, not mine. I do it ’cause she won’t leave me alone if I don’t. The words come out quick as snot from a sneeze. I stop to tell her I’m not reading it out loud to her or no one else.

“That’s cool, Char. I need to go anyway.” Before she hang up, she say she’s proud of me.

“Why? You don’t even know what I wrote.”

“That don’t matter. It wasn’t for me anyhow.”