IF YOUR AUNTIE WAKES YOU UP at four in the morning, telling you to get the heck on outta her crib now, you got the right to knock her upside the head—pow! Only I ain’t that kind of dude. I got respect. Even though this little voice in my head says to clock this broad, I turn around, face the wall, and shut my eyes. “Awright, Aunt Philomena,” I say, pulling blankets over my head. “Get on up outta here.”

She’s short, with legs as skinny as the branches on the artificial tree by the window in the basement. But she thinks she’s tough. So she don’t back down. She grabs the covers with both hands and pulls. I have to hold on to the window ledge not to get drug off, too.

Me kicking her arms slows her down, but it don’t stop her. She pulls my right arm. I snatch it back. She grabs my left foot. I use my other one to get her off me. Then I take back what’s mine—the Cleveland Browns blanket she bought for me last Christmas.

Out of breath, breathing hard like she needs that ventilator her friend uses when she comes visiting, Auntie leans against the wall. “God, God . . .”

She is always talking about God.

“God gave you ears, didn’t he? Then get up . . . get out of here,” she says, holding her chest.

I’m yelling too. “This is my room! You get out!” It’s hot underneath the covers; in the house, too. She’s sixty-three, with arthritis in her joints, so it’s always a thousand degrees in here. But I stay covered up anyhow, tucking my feet under the blanket and using my fists to hold down the other ends. “Stop pulling!” I curse at her. I have to.

“You cursing me, boy? You swearing . . . in my house?” Auntie pulls and my hammertoe feels air. But she ain’t no dude, I’m stronger than her, so after my head is free and I’m breathing in deep, I reach back and jerk the covers again. She flies into bed with me this time, smacking my forehead, then my lips—aiming for my head. “What I say? What did I say? Get out!”

I warn her for the last time. “Just because you my auntie don’t mean I won’t hit you,” I say, pulling back the covers.

“You did everything else that you could do to me. Hitting was probably next on the list anyhow.”

For one whole minute she and me just stare at each other, neither one of us blinking. Ain’t no hug coming from her this time. Ain’t no apology finding its way to my lips, like it sometimes do. It’s over, living here with her. No turning back now.

“Screw you.” I come out from underneath the covers. The sheets, too. Then I’m on my feet, heading for my dresser, showing her what I been trying not to show her all this time.

She stands up, her eyes squeezed closed. “Boy! I ain’t your mother—cover up.”

Auntie Philomena is the crazy one. The one everyone warned me about when my father kicked me out and told me to go live someplace else—anyplace as long as it wasn’t in his house, his city, his state. Auntie heard about that. She called me and asked if I wanted to come live with her. “Just you and me, baby.” Five bedrooms, two baths, and a pool. “What’ll say?” Of course I said yeah. Otherwise I’d be homeless. No one else wanted me. And I never had my own room or a pool to swim in before—which is what I’ve done every day since I came here a year ago. Now this nutcase is kicking me out, like she and me ain’t family. “Listen,” I say, pushing her so hard her head knocks against my bedroom door. “I didn’t ask to come here. You asked me.” I open and close drawers, throwing new shirts on the floor, stepping on them like they rags our dog, Malcolm, sleeps on sometimes.

She swears if I don’t put something on and pick up them good shirts she bought, she’ll wring my neck. I take my time stepping into a clean pair of undies that I ironed myself. “I was doing you a favor, coming here.” I sit on the side of the bed, checking out the bags under her eyes. They so black and heavy she puts cucumbers on ’em sometimes. “Who wants to live with you anyhow?” I point to her belly that always looks pregnant. It was my job, she said, to make sure she ain’t eat after eight p.m. To keep her hands off the chocolate milk and out the cookie jar. “Get stanky fat,” I say. “See if I care.”

She sits, staring out the window, not trying to explain why she putting me out.

“What I do?” I want to ask. But I don’t. I walk into my closet and come back with suitcases. Then turn on the fan to cool us both off.

I am always packing; always leaving someplace. So it don’t matter, leaving her too. It’s just this time I didn’t see it coming. I screwed up; forgot myself. Thought this was really home. That won’t happen no more.

Auntie keeps her eyes on me. “I know how to pack,” I say. “You don’t have to watch.”

She is stubborn. Everyone in our family is. So she just sits, ignoring Malcolm when he walks in and lies by her feet. Ignoring me too when I say for the ninetieth time for her to leave. She’s so talkative usually. This morning her lips are sealed, except to tell me what I need to do to be out in the next two hours.

“Fake.” The word comes out long and slow. I wanna make sure she hears me, so I say it again. “Fake.” It’s like a smack to the face. It makes her hold her cheek, then wipe her lips with the back of her hand.

Auntie pats her head, checking for rollers that fall out like her hair sometimes does. Then she’s out of the chair; hot as red peppers. “I’m just as good as they are! A lottery winner’s money spends as good as a doctor’s money do.”

Once I told her she was fake for living in this neighborhood like she some kind of executive, or a doctor, like the woman from Pakistan who lives up the street and got a lawn as big as the new kiddie park the city built. But that’s not what I’m talking about now. I say it again, looking at her the way the man up the street looked at me once—like I was lower than the slug holes I find in the lawns sometimes. “You a fake. The biggest one ever.”

She picks at the eczema on her hands and the side of her face. Sometimes it was me that put medicine on it. “I know they talk about me,” she says, scratching too hard.

“I know they think I don’t belong up here.” She’s quiet for a while. Thinking about them, I guess. “But I earned the right to be here.”

“So did I.”

Auntie was the one who said there was nothing I could ever do to get kicked out of her house. That was one whole year ago, the longest time I’ve ever stayed with anyone except my dad. I thought it was forever, her and me. But grown-ups change the rules when they want.

I go to the closet, take out more pants. I shut her up, for a little while anyhow. She hates when I talk about her living in this neighborhood. She wants to fit in. She never will. Me either, I guess.

Auntie points to the attic. “You got more suitcases up there.” She bought them before I got here; before she drove me across three states, showing me places I never seen or heard of before. I look at the Statue of Liberty she bought for me. And pack it. Then sit it back on the dresser that I dusted yesterday. “Why don’t you just get out?” The plastic statue hits the wall and breaks.

I got a temper. She’s got a temper. When we both get angry, it’s like World War Ten up in here. One day after we finished arguing and making up, we watched a television show on Greek gods. For a while she called me Zeus—the god of love and thunder. I’m never gonna forget that, ’cause it was like she was comparing me to someone important; powerful, too. And when I hooked up with my crew, that’s the name I took—Zeus—’cause when I’m pissed I spit fire, and when somebody do me wrong I’ll destroy ’em, one way or the other.

“I just . . . need to be by myself doing this,” I say, feeling tired from getting up so early.

Sometimes Auntie listens. She gets out of the chair. Tells Malcolm to come and eat, and leaves me alone. I keep packing, thinking, wondering. Where to next? I’m running out of relatives. My father has three other sisters who pretend to care about me too. They send cards on my birthday. They always have. And they call every few months or so. But they don’t want me living with them. No one does.

I lock my door. I sit on the bed. And think about what I did. Nothing. I didn’t do nothing. She’s just old. Mean. Fronting.

When one suitcase is filled, I start on another one. Open more drawers; stare inside. My shirts and sweaters are perfect—sitting in my drawers the way they sit on department store shelves. I’m good like that. She never had to tell me to vacuum or clean up—I did it just for fun. I clean like a thousand-dollar-an-hour maid, my father always said. But I can fire you up like Zeus.

This is real. The words come into my head like a warning. You gotta leave. And you don’t have nowhere else to go.

“Shoot.” I pat my pockets, check underneath my bed for my cell. Then I remember. “Dag.” She took it last week. I was on punishment and she grabbed it while I was in the shower. When my punishment was over, she said Malcolm got to it. It looked like a hammer smashed it; not like a shepherd chewed it up. But she said she’d buy me a new one this week. “All that time, you was lying to me!” I shout. Sitting down, holding my stomach, feeling sick. We talked and laughed and joked around. And all that time she was planning to kick me out.

“Think. Think. Think,” I tell myself. But all my numbers were in my phone. She stepped on it once before— right in front of me. “Because of them,” she said. “Bad influences.” She’s putting me out because of them too, I guess.

I open the door and lean over the hallway railing. “You crazy, you know that?”

She keeps singing about Jesus. Auntie ain’t never been married. Who would want to marry her? Big mouth. Know-it-all. Think she’s hard. Think she’s blessed ’cause she hit the big one for six million. Man. I seen her bank account. I’ve watched her writing checks to that stupid church and putting money aside for my college education when I don’t even want to go to college. “Your mother would want you to.” She always said that.

My mother left when I was three. For four years they told me she had died. But she wasn’t dead, just gone. By the time my father decided to tell the truth, she was living in Nevada, married to a man from Jamaica who had two kids before he gave her three more. She asked if I wanted to come and live with her. For what? That’s what I tell her when she calls twice a year. If she wanted me, she would have taken me with her. But she left me with him. And he never liked me. Maybe that ain’t true. Never got me; understood me. That’s it. He was ex-military, a workaholic who stayed gone more than he stayed at home, so by the time he knew anything, I was twelve and a half and had my own way of thinking and doing things. Military dudes only know how to do things one way—their way. So I skipped school, stayed out whenever I wanted, and got to liking blunts and the taste of gin—straight up. He couldn’t make me do what he wanted, and the cops couldn’t either. So he said I had to leave. I tried living with my mother for a while. But it turns out I ain’t like her much either. Then there was Auntie Marcella and Auntie Champagne. The uncles on my mother’s side all passed on me. They said I’d make ’em hurt me. I lived with Aunt Chrystal on my mother’s side for three days. But she said if I didn’t get out right that minute, she was turning me in to the police. My dad picked me up and kept me for twenty-four hours. I got here, I guess, by way of my father’s baby sister, whose house I ended up at next. The family had a conference call about me. Auntie Philomena was on the line, saying she’d come for me. They warned her not to. They said foster care or a group home might be just what I needed. In the middle of the night, Aunt Philomena showed up anyhow. She had to drive all night. But she did it. “ ’Cause family do that kind of thing,” she said.

I changed—tried to anyhow, once I came to live here. I didn’t sport no colors. I didn’t go to the mall unless it was her and me. I never asked to go to the neighborhoods that kids like me live in. I stayed in the house. I didn’t mind the quiet or the stares or that time someone called the cops ’cause they didn’t know I lived around here.

I tried so hard to do good; to do right. But high school ain’t nice like they always portraying it on TV. It’s hard-core. Scary. Even here in the burbs. The school was so white. And the teachers and classes were so different. I been behind since first grade. Ninth grade just means I’m plain lost. So they might as well be speaking Portuguese at that school.

Cutting class is easy for me. Hitching a ride is like breathing: I do it all the time. Besides, they live in every city, in every town, on just about every block, I bet. Here wasn’t no different. So one day, it happened. They found me. Or maybe I found them. You have to have somebody, even if you don’t want to, I guess.

“Auntie.” I open the door. Close it. I can’t ask her to let me stay. She’d just say no. But I don’t have no place else to go. I open the door wider. “I’m not going to live with her.” I throw the words into the hall. They fall down the steps and she catches them.

“You go where I send you. Or get locked up—which is most likely to happen anyway.”

I slam the door, almost catching Malcolm’s tail when he walks in. “I’m not living with her.” I kick hangers out my way. Pick up the lamp she bought at Macy’s on sale for a hundred fifty bucks and aim it at the wall. If I could remember one phone number, get to just one of them.

I put it down. Sit back on my bed. Try as hard as I can to remember a number. Only I can’t. It wouldn’t matter anyway. I owe a few of ’em money. And they want it. Auntie told me she was gonna open an account for me. “Putting five thousand bucks in it for starters.” She wanted me to learn to manage money. Big money. “ ’Cause one day it’s all gonna be yours anyhow.”

I pick up the picture frames, wrapping them in between my shorts and shirts. Leaving the one with her and me dressed in cowboy clothes right where it is. But I take the one we took at the mall. It was after church. We was eating someplace special. One of my boys saw us in the window and came in to say hello. Auntie doesn’t understand. My boys are not like me. Old people are just old people to them—nothing special. So when she gave him a piece of her mind, like she was packing or something, he told me about it later. Said he would hurt her, and still might. “ ’Cause you gonna get the money anyhow, so why should we wait?”

I think that’s why they lent to me. Why they let the debt build up so high. “I’m good for it,” I always said, when I lost at craps.

“Malcolm, come.” I let him get in my bed. Then I lay across it, too, patting him. Remembering how Auntie would come and find me when I stayed out too late, or all night long, even. I don’t know how she did it, but she’d show up wherever I was. She’d tell my boys to keep quiet and for me to come home. Not leave when they’d say she’d better get gone or else. She grew up with six brothers. Two got killed in the war. One died of lung cancer and two more was shot on the street. “Bad boys run in our family like cancer,” she’d say to them. “Dying don’t scare me, so don’t mess with me.”

I couldn’t figure out if they was joking or not when they’d say, “Let’s just off her. Tie her up. Burn her up. Get all that dough.”

But I would always tell ’em straight up, “No. She my auntie. Y’all nuts?”

Now I’m here wishing I’d listened to them. The money. The house. It would all be mine.

I go to the bathroom and turn on the shower. Tiptoe up the hall and listen for Auntie, who is downstairs frying bacon and praising God. Her bedroom door creaks when I push it open. Perfume and pink are everywhere. I open the closet door slow so the creak don’t give me away. The crystal clock on her dresser says I’d better hurry. The first drawer I open says I’m wasting my time. Her jewelry box plays music, so I stay away from it. The drawers with underwear and shirts, stockings and scarves don’t even have any change in them.

“Jeffrey!”

She’s at the bottom of the stairs, so I can’t answer or she’ll know where I am.

“You gonna miss that plane if we don’t get moving.”

She makes the best bacon. Coffee too. It’s like her, I’m thinking, to give me a last meal—like they give prisoners in jail before they kill ’em.

I go into the third bedroom. Once I found a hundred bucks in a drawer. Nothing this time. Her emergency money ain’t here. She’s gonna make me leave broke. That’s like her, too.

“Jeffrey!”

I lean over the railing. “Okay. I’m coming.”

I take a quick shower, then get dressed and take one last look at my room. I never had one so nice; so big. I picked out the furniture. Painted the room myself. Got the most expensive bedding in the store, just about.

I sit, trying to get myself together, wondering why I can’t never seem to get it right.

The front door downstairs opens. Auntie’s speaking to a woman across the street, the jogger who starts out in the dark and is home before most people have their breakfast. Neighbors here ain’t like the ones where I come from. They talk too much. Tell everything they see—me and my boys out front having a little smoke; me and my boys sitting ’round back on my own property drinking a forty, which ain’t nobody’s business but ours. Next thing I know Auntie knows about it. And I’m on restriction and my boys can’t come visit, which is crazy because I am sixteen not six.

Did someone snitch? Did they say I was there with my boys when that thing with that kid went down?

Auntie talks to her about the weather. She asks how her husband’s business is going. She mentions how the gardener is killing our trees and how she is going to Savannah in a few weeks—which she never told me.

It don’t make sense, but I lay back down underneath the covers, thinking about her. How she always tried to make me something I wasn’t. At home, my dad and I drank soda out the can. Auntie said people don’t do things like that ’round here. I didn’t like it at first, pouring root beer into a glass every time I drank one. But I got used to it. And after a while I didn’t even mind not watching television while we ate. Sitting in the dining room was cool too. I never told my boys about the cloth napkins on my lap, or how she once had a friend of hers teach us how to set a proper table and which forks to use. Watching The Simpsons and South Park was a no-no. And BET was out of the question. Those were Auntie’s rules. I followed ’em, too. My mother . . . my mother is different. At her place in Arizona I will be sleeping with three little boys—like before. And trouble will follow me like hot air.

I ask myself again, how did I blow this? What did I do?

The door shuts. Auntie’s yelling up the stairs for me to come on. “Now.”

But I’m not leaving. Not going empty-handed; broke. And she won’t just give me the money, so . . . “I’m coming,” I say, sitting my suitcases outside the door and locking Malcolm inside my room.

I take my time walking down the steps with them suitcases. Going back up and coming down with more.

“Jeffrey. Don’t miss that plane, boy.”

She’s out the door and clearing more things from her car. I pick up a biscuit filled with bacon, eggs, and cheese and chew and swallow it quick. I down the glass of strawberry milk Auntie left sitting out for me. Then I pick up a knife. It caught my eye sitting in the silverware drawer with cake icing still stuck to it. I’m thinking I might need it.

She yells from outside for me to get myself moving.

It wasn’t there when I first came downstairs. Or maybe it was and I didn’t notice. But on my way to the powder room, I see the chain with the medallion she gave me, sitting on the dining room table. It’s real gold. She paid seven hundred and sixty bucks for it, on sale. Great Men Look Like You, it says on the back.

It’s in my right hand. The knife’s in my left hand when Auntie walks up behind me. I hold on to my medallion, feeling it dig into my palm. The chain broke three months ago. I asked her to get it fixed a million times. It’s like her, to have it all perfect now. She backs up when she sees the knife.

I wait for her to go nuts. She’s waiting for me to make a move.

My fingers squeeze the knife hard.

She says I already broke her heart so I might as well stab her in it too.

Auntie’s old, but her back’s straight. She’s scared, I bet, but she’d never show it. So we stand there. Me, Zeus. Her, Hestia—goddess of goddesses. Her finger shakes when she reaches for my lips and wipes crumbs off. Then she pats my cheek and says, “It shoulda worked out.”

She and me was good for each other, most times anyway. Maybe if I ask to stay. Tell her it will be different this time, she might change her mind.

I throw the knife into the corkboard behind the kitchen sink. It sticks. Her fingers find more crumbs. “Auntie . . . can I . . . sta—”

“No more chances,” she tells me. Then she asks why I can’t do right. Why don’t I want to be good?

She ruins everything with that big mouth of hers.

The next thing I know, I’ve got suitcases in my hands and I’m walking out the door.

I climb into the backseat. Auntie gets behind the wheel. She looks nervous, talks a little too loud about the weather. “Wait a minute,” she says, getting out the car and going back inside. When she comes back, there’s a baseball bat in her hand. She puts the car in reverse and pulls into the street. The sign says stop; she keeps rolling. It might as well say do whatever you want. She flies through two more stop signs anyhow.

We pass the lawns that I mowed and the houses where people gave me iced tea or lemonade to fight the heat. Before we leave the complex, I look at the medallion again. “Great Men Look Like You.” I read it out loud and sit back. She smiles, and relaxes a little.

But not for long.

Her eyes bug when she sees my colors. My eyes dare her to say something, anything, ’cause this is just the way things are. Doing right comes out wrong no matter where I go. And grown-ups get just as tired as I do of trying to make things work. But when I get to wherever I’m going, I don’t have to be all by myself. They’ll be there. Not my father. Not her. Them—my crew.

I finish tying up my head, checking out my colors in her mirror, laughing at the look on her face. Then I sit back, feeling taller, stronger than I have all morning.

The chain breaks when I try to put it around my neck. The medallion hits my knee, then jumps under her seat, like it wants to get away from me too. “Fake,” I say, sending the chain after it; leaning back and wondering where to next.