TO DO: Calm down, count to ten (or ten thousand)

THE FIRST THING I do in the morning every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday is send Ma a text message of a smiley face, just to let her know I’m thinking about her on the days she has to get her blood cleaned. And when I say cleaned, I don’t mean cleaned like scrubbed. You try to scrub blood, you just gonna wind up with nasty red hands. What I mean by cleaned is the doctors do this thing where they run the blood out of one of her veins through a tube that’s connected to a machine, and that machine takes all the bad stuff out, and then pumps the blood out of the other end through a different tube and back into a different vein. Takes like three or four hours, and leaves her super tired, but she gotta do it because the sugar also broke her kidneys, and when your kidneys don’t work, your blood gets dirty. And when your blood gets dirty, it basically messes all kinds of other stuff up inside you. Think about it like this: When you get dirt in your shoe, do it feel good? Nope. It makes you walk with a limp, like there are little fires blazing between your toes. And when you get dirt in your eye, can you see? Of course not. And it burns like crazy, too, every little speck of dirt like a teeny-tiny lit match. So imagine having dirt in your blood. Mess your whole body up. Make your organs feel like they in a microwave.

So, yeah, I text her to let her know I’m thinking about her on those days. I text her on other days too, but especially on the blood-cleaning days. She always sends a smiley face back, which I appreciate because I know how much she hates texting. She loves getting them, but really hates sending them.

Momly is who goes to pick Ma up, who takes her to the hospital’s dialysis—another word with “die” in it—unit, where she gets the treatment, who then brings her back home. And because Momly gets to Ma’s house at the butt crack of dawn, Ma goes to bed dumb early on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays so she can be up and ready to go. And whenever Ma’s not at treatment, she’s recovering from it, which means she’s usually lying in bed drifting in and out of sleep watching TV, or as she always puts it, “letting the TV watch her.” So the morning smiley faces we send each other are important.

Correction: the smiley faces we send to each other are important to me. Almost as important as Vicky Tines’s boyfriend is to Vicky Tines, who she announces is in high school every single day in homeroom. Mrs. Stansfield takes roll by going down her list and looking to see who’s there and who’s not. At Barnaby, Ms. Simmons used to call our names out loud. Needed to hear our voices. But in homeroom at Chester, there were a lot of voices already being heard. Like Vicky Tines’s. Ugh. All of Vicky’s friends be having heart eyes when they listen to Vicky go on and on (and on and on and on). Macy Franks pays no attention to her and just folds paper. Like, what’s the name of that thing . . . that way you fold paper into animals and all that? Mrs. Richardson used to help me and Cotton make paper fortune-tellers when she was babysitting us back in the day. Used to give mine to Momly when she picked me up. But my fortune-teller ain’t never predict this, that’s for sure. Anyway, Macy just be doing that. Making birds and stuff. Laurie Brenner wants a belly-button ring. Jasmine Stanger already got one. I saw it when she was showing Laurie. Pretty sure something’s wrong with it.

First period, English. Mr. Winston is teaching us poetry. Which means Mr. Winston is teaching us boredom. My uncle said, “Tell Mr. Winston to teach y’all some Queen Latifah.” At Chester? Right. Remember the whole “think about cannons” thing? That’s because we’ve been learning this one called “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Cannons are mentioned in it, and Mr. Winston reads it like he some kind of actor or something, all bass-y and slow, like the man who narrates the previews at the movies. Like his dramatic voice is gonna make the poem any less wack. But hot sauce on cardboard is still cardboard.

Then comes math. Geometry. Ms. Teller says “perpendicular” and “hypotenuse” like her life depends on it. My life depends on math being over as quickly as possible.

Then lunch.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking, what you think I’m gonna say. You think I’m gonna go on some kind of rant about how the cafeteria is basically like some kind of “meanie mealtime” and little ol’ Patty Watty doesn’t have a group so she can’t find a seat, right? Wah wah wah! Right? Well . . . right. Kinda. But not exactly. See, the real issue with the cafeteria is that it’s tiny. Like teeny-tiny. It’s almost as if when they started this academy, they didn’t expect there to be so many people who would actually come to get academied. They probably never thought regular kids from regular neighborhoods and regular schools would end up here. But here I am. Looking for a seat in a space as small as the church we go to, and with just as much noise, but none of the spirit.

Point is, there was never enough seats, which was okay, because I never sat down anyway. I would basically just do a few laps around the room, scarfing my pasta Bolognese, which I found out was not pasta and baloney, but was actually just regular spaghetti. But yeah, I’d just circle the room, because when you keep moving, people think you going somewhere, like you on a mission and shouldn’t be bothered. Like you busy. And that’s better than people realizing that you not busy at all. That you not okay with lunchrooms that don’t have trays, and that ain’t big enough spaces to disappear in, and that don’t stink of week-old dirty mop water, which I now know is the familiar smell of love and friendship.

Usually, on the tenth lap, my food would be gone, and the bell would ring. I had it all timed perfectly. But today, on lap number two, barely into my salmon teriyaki, which, by the way, should be called teriyaki salmon the same way barbecue chicken is barbecue chicken and not chicken barbecue. I swear . . . Chester. Anyway, on lap two, Becca stood up from her seat like a bird who just popped its head out of a nest, and waved at me. Well, not at me, but she waved me over. And I felt . . . funny. Like, confused, and weirded out, and skeptical, and yes, I can’t front, a little excited. I cut between the tables, holding my plate steady, and once I got to where she was, smack in the middle of a crowded table full of . . . well . . . you know . . . girls on either side of her eating and talking and laughing, she said, “What are you doing?”

“What you mean?” I replied, pretending like I hadn’t just been acting like a lunch monitor, trying not to drop my plate while forking my fish.

“I mean, how come you’re not sitting?” she asked. The girl beside her, a girl I’d seen every day but never really met, whipped her face toward me. Two faces looking at mine. Four rosy cheeks. Four mascaraed eyes. Four bazillion strands of blond.

“Oh, I’m good.”

“But you never sit,” Becca pressed. “Like . . . ever.”

And before I could either drop my plate, or say anything, Becca bumped the girl next to her, who then bumped the girl next to her, who bumped the girl next to her who happened to be Macy Franks, folding her teriyaki streaked plate into a Styrofoam half-moon. They all scooted over, squishing together, making a sliver of free space on the seat. Was this some kind of joke? A trick? A scheme for Becca to milk me for info about Frida or something? Either way, I was tired of eating standing up, so I set my plate down, slowly climbed over the bench, and slipped my legs under the table. Then, as if none of this was a big deal, Becca turned back to her conversation—a ditzy discussion about music in space—and I turned back to my salmon teriyaki. Yeah. Kinda awkward.

After lunch it was time for my favorite girl group. I mean, history. Ms. Lanford was standing at the board, chewing the last bit of her lunch, as we all filed in and took our seats in our assigned-group clusters.

“Don’t forget to figure out when you’re going to meet outside of class to work on this. Not everything can be done in school.” Ms. Lanford wiped crumbs from the corners of her mouth. Looked like she may have had crackers for lunch. Definitely not salmon teriyaki. “Hopefully, today everyone is prepared to share with their partners some more new findings about the person you all have chosen.”

“Hey,” I said first, scooting my chair up to the desk. T-N-T sort of spoke back. Sometimes their hi’s sounded more like humphs. But only to me. Their hi’s to Becca came with weird no-touch hugs. But whatever.

“Hey, Patina.” Becca beamed, much warmer than the other two girls. As if I hadn’t just been sitting next to her at lunch. She pulled out the materials we put together yesterday. Well, really, the stuff I put together. The photos of Frida I found on Google. Then the three of them looked at me like I had something magical to say.

I returned the stare. Blank face.

“So . . . anything new we should know about . . . um . . .” TeeTee started but couldn’t remember Frida’s name.

“Frida.”

“Yeah, Frida. Anything new we should know about her?” She cocked her head to the side. I imagined her brain oozing out of her ear.

“You tell me.” Me = running out of patience.

“I watched the movie about her online last night,” Becca blurted out, all excited. “Um, well, I watched some of it. There’s Spanish in it, and that threw me off. But I saw the part where she was in school and on the bus with her boyfriend, who by the way was hot, just saying, and the bus got in an accident and gold dust went everywhere and the next thing you know, Frida is just lying there all bloody. A mess. And then she’s got a cast over her whole body. She painted butterflies on the cast after the cute boyfriend moved to Europe, which I was like, what? No! So . . . yeah.”

T-N-T turned their attention back toward me to see if Becca was right. As if I was some kind of expert on gold dust, butterflies, and blood.

“That’s wassup, Becca,” I said, smiling, nodding. “But there’s some details you left out.” Here’s the thing. At this point, I had already come to grips with the fact that this group project was going to be a Patty project. Ms. Lanford told us at the very beginning that there would be one grade given, so everybody had to do a fair share. But how in the world was I supposed to tell the T(a/e)ylors to get it together? How was I supposed to say, Yo, I ain’t doing all the work? I guess I could’ve just said it like that, but I didn’t want no static. I didn’t want to be on nobody’s bad side, especially since I wasn’t even really on nobody’s good side yet. Matter of fact, I wasn’t on nobody’s side, period.

Man, I missed Cotton.

I know that’s such a random thought, but in moments like these, I missed her bad. And what made it worse was that I couldn’t even talk to her, because Barnaby Middle was on spring break like everybody else—Chester’s was the next week—and her grandma took her on their annual cruise trip, which Cotton don’t even like because she says she don’t do nothing but sit around with no cell phone service, eating shrimp all day and looking out at all the water she can’t swim in while her granny plays slot machines. But if Cotton was here, if she was in this group with me, she would’ve just made up all types of silly stories. Oh, Frida? She was the first woman in Mexico to go to the NFL. Oh, Frida? She invented the flute. Used to play with James Brown and them. Oh, Frida? She’s the first woman to have a day named after her—Friday. By the way, Thursday was named after Thurgood Marshall. That’s Cotton. She would’ve turned everything into a joke until T-N-T realized it wasn’t. That none of this was. That this was about a . . . number . . . grade. A four. I needed a four. Even if that meant I had to do three other people’s work to get it.

I pulled out my notebook and started running down more facts about Frida, filling in some of Becca’s holes. “She also went to one of the top schools in Mexico. It was probably like this one.” Becca nodded. She was in. The other two were still holding out. I tried one more time to make a connection. “And that’s where she met Diego Rivera, who at the time was painting a mural in the school auditorium.”

“That’s the fat man, right?” Becca interjected, excited to share more of what she must’ve seen in the movie. But it came off kinda mean, so she added, “I mean . . . I didn’t mean it like that. But that’s him, right?”

“Right. And what’s really interesting is she ended up marrying him once she healed from the accident. Not right away, but a few years after.”

“The fat man,” TeeTee chimed in, just to confirm that we were still talking about the same Diego. “What did he look like?”

Becca sifted through the papers until finding one with his picture, and stabbed his face with her finger. “Him.”

“Him? She could’ve done better than him. And he looks so old,” Taylor scoffed.

“He was old. Twenty years older,” I explained. Taylor leaned forward, the drama of that kind of relationship seeming to send some kind of electrical charge through her. Suddenly, Frida was a little more interesting.

TeeTee pinched the corner of a picture of Frida, the one where her neck is too long and a small monkey’s looking over her shoulder, and turned the picture around.

“I mean, she wasn’t like . . . she definitely coulda done better than that guy,” she said, studying Frida’s face.

“Yeah, I agree. But he was a genius with a paintbrush, and I guess that’s why she chose him. People used to call their relationship ‘the Elephant and the Dove.’ ”

Becca’s eyes lit up. “Like Beauty and the Beast!”

Taylor grimaced. “I guess,” she said, and just then it occurred to me that we were all leaning in, analyzing Frida’s and Diego’s faces, looking through the pictures, discussing something . . . interesting. Sure, it was about their crazy love story, but still. It was a start. And if it weren’t for the piercing sound of the fire alarm suddenly going off, we might’ve been able to get to some of the other cool things about Frida Kahlo, but at least we decided whose house we would go over to do the “go over somebody’s house” portion of the project. Becca’s. Taylor and TeeTee basically begged Becca to host it at her place, which I guess made sense because it was right across the street from the school. Becca said the best day to do it at her house would be the next day, Wednesday, because her grandmother was making cookies, which T-N-T said was perfect because Thursday was Taylor’s mother’s birthday, and Friday . . . was Friday. I told them I could do it, but I’d have to come by after track practice, and if it wasn’t for the alarm suddenly screaming over us, maybe, just maybe, they would’ve asked about my running. But I guess fire drills are important too.

At least they are to six-year-olds.

Specifically six-year-olds named Madison Jones.

“But just in case there is a real fire, it’s good we practice, right?” Maddy went on and on in the car after school. From the moment I met her in the hallway she’d been blabbing, so excited about the hustle and bustle she’d experienced earlier in the day. Fire drill, fire drill, fire drill. It’s like that was the only thing that happened in the north wing of Chester.

“I think we should also maybe practice stop, drop, and roll with Mrs. S,” Maddy barreled on, rolling her hands in the air. “Just in case somebody don’t make it out in time, especially since she make us all walk so slow. I don’t know about everybody else, but if there’s a for-real fire, I’m outta there.”

Momly snorted.

“But what about me?” I asked.

Maddy thought about it for a second. “Patty, I can lift you up, but I don’t think I can lift you and run.”

“Not yet,” I replied, sliding one arm out of my shirtsleeve.

“Right. Not yet.” Maddy flexed one of her arms, squeezed her bicep.

The ride to MLK Park was the one thing that got Maddy to stop yakking about fire drills . . . for some reason she still geeked out at the fancy houses we passed on the way, especially the big white ones, their wooden castle doors with knobs like golden fists. The fountains and wraparound driveways. The windows—no curtains, like they want everybody to know what they got. But can’t nobody really see nothing anyway, because of the gates, the tops of the metal posts curling up into the air like witch fingers. And in front of the gates, shrubs. And then the mailbox, with the address, which is always just one or two numbers. Like 6 Chester Ave. Or 13 Chester Place. And as we moved through town, the numbers continued to climb as the neighborhoods changed. From mansions to weird cereal-box communities, where every house looks like a different version of the one next to it. Then on to older neighborhoods like mine, where the houses are still nice, but have been around for a while, so still made of brick. My address has three numbers. 685 Wallery Street. But Ma’s address, over in Barnaby Terrace, has four—5014. And I think Ghost’s is something like five or six. It’s like the less numbers in your bank account, the more numbers in your address.

Practice was a little less silly today. Well, it got less silly after warm-up laps, stretching, and the usual clowning around. Well, Lu was clowning Curron.

“Yo, Curron, how come yesterday Coach ain’t make y’all do that dancing thing Patty and Krystal did?” he asked, winding up and tossing a live grenade into the mix. He had one of his legs pulled back behind him, doing a final stretch.

“You mean what he made you and Ghost do?” Curron jabbed. “Because we don’t need all that on the boys’ relay,” Curron bragged, cutting his eyes at Brit-Brat.

“Oh, y’all don’t?” That was Krystal’s cue to jump in. Brit-Brat didn’t pay it no mind, and neither did I, because Curron was always trying us. Deja bucked a little, but Krystal beat her to it. “You do know that you can’t keep taking off early in a relay race, right? If you jump the gun more than once, y’all shot . . . is shot.” Krystal laser-eyed Curron. “And everybody know you a gun-jumpin’ fool.” We all laughed. Everyone but Sunny, who was chillin’, trapping his laughter in his face, as usual, so nobody knew what he was really thinking. Krystal moved closer, put her hand on Curron’s shoulder like a concerned parent. “Seriously, is there gonna be one race where you don’t false start?”

Everybody laughed again, but Curron didn’t find it funny at all.

“Seriously, Krystal No-Speed, is there gonna be one day that your breath don’t smell like boiling track shoes?” Curron slapped a hand over his nose. He zinged her with that one, and even though it was super petty, all of us were yikes-ing from the blowback. Then he turned to Ghost. “And I know you ain’t laughin’, Ghost. Maybe you need more practice with your dance partner, because you ran the whole race before you realized nobody was running with you. The. Whole. Race.”

Ouch. I can’t front, just thinking of Lu and Ghost holding each other like that made me want to burst into laughter. But I held it in. But not everyone did, the loudest coming from Aaron, Freddie, and Mikey, who all began fake-waltzing.

“Whatever! It was his first race! His . . . first . . . race!” Lu came to Ghost’s defense. And I was right there for the follow-up.

“Ever,” I dropped in to drive home the point.

“Nah, it’s cool,” Ghost said, calling off his newbie goons. “How ’bout this, Curron. How ’bout you pick the distance, and we line up and—”

“Okay, okay, knuckleheads,” Coach cut him off, sauntering over, swinging his stopwatch. “Let’s get done with the funnin’ so we can get down with the runnin’. I swear if you all could move your legs as fast as you move your lips, we wouldn’t even have to practice.” Time for Coach’s daily pep talk.

“We got three practices left before the next meet. Today, tomorrow, and Thursday. Then it’s go time. If you came here to play around”—he looked at Lu, the instigator—“when Saturday comes, don’t cry when I don’t run you. If you came to be lazy, I’ll make sure you have a comfortable seat this weekend at the meet. Are we clear?” We all nodded. “It’s Technique Tuesday. I watched some of your forms break down last week, out there looking like wet noodles. I don’t wanna see that this week. Let’s keep it tight.” He tucked his elbows in, stuck his chest out. “Keep your stride wide, and remember to breathe. Come off the block like you got a point to prove.” Coach then told the relay teams what Coach Whit had already told us at the last practice—that we would also be working on baton passing. Thankfully, he didn’t mention dancing.

Me, Brit-Brat, Krystal, and Deja went off to one end of the track with Coach Whit. She was holding small orange cones. Not the kind that you see at construction sites, or in school cafeterias whenever there was a spill. These were small. Where the heck do you even get such tiny cones? If Maddy saw them, she’d want them for pretend megaphones.

“Okay, ladies, I need you all to pay attention, because what I’m gonna show you could make or break you,” she said.

Then Whit placed one of the cones just before the curve on the track, and another, I don’t know, maybe twenty feet into the curve. “This is the handoff zone,” she said, coming back from the second cone. “Or as Coach calls it, the hot zone. This is the amount of space you have to hand off the baton. Now, I know the three of y’all”—Whit pointed to Krystal, Deja, and Brit-Brat—“are used to standing at the starting line with your arm out waiting for the stick, but this year Coach and I have decided to shake things up. You’re going to run the eight-hundred relay as if it were a one hundred relay.”

We looked at Whit like she had grown a second head. Once she realized that none of us understood what she was talking about, she explained, “What I mean is, we’re gonna do blind handoffs.”

“Wait, what you mean, blind?” Deja asked.

“Now she ’bout to blindfold us, y’all,” Krystal joked.

“No, I’m about to show y’all how to win. That is, if you can shut up and listen. Especially you, Krystal, seeing as though you run the slowest leg.” Krystal sucked her teeth, burned. Probably would’ve sucked her teeth hard enough to turn her whole face inside out if she could.

“Now, watch and learn,” Whit said, and started demonstrating the blind handoff, a technique that usually only sprinters do during relays because of the momentum of the incoming runner. The runner who’s receiving the baton has to time it exactly right, start sprinting before the runner with the baton reaches the line. So there’s no slowdown.

“This is why I had you dance, ladies,” Coach Whit was saying, moving Krystal and me to imaginary positions on the track. “Now, Krystal, you’re coming in fast.”

“Wait, we’re running the eight hundred, not the four hundred,” Brit-Brat said.

“So?”

“So . . . I mean, how fast do you really expect us to be coming in? By the time I get to the final stretch, I’m rigged. This is the hardest race to run,” Brit-Brat argued, her arms spread wide, as if, what the? I nodded, thinking the exact same thing. The eight hundred ain’t no dash.

“As fast as you possibly can. Our job is to run to win. If that means you have to run until your legs detach from your body, then that’s what you do.” Whit’s face went dead serious. “Because the rest of your relay team is depending on you. Got it?” Brit nodded sheepishly. So did I. Coach Whit wasn’t playing no games today.

“So, Krystal, pretend you’re coming in, final stretch,” Coach Whit gave Krystal the baton, stood beside her. “You want to line your right arm up with Patty’s left shoulder. Now, whoever’s receiving has the hard job, because they have to time the transition. In this case, it’s Patty. When you see Krystal about to enter the red zone, where this cone is, you gotta take off, full speed. If you wait too long, you two will collide and get jumbled. If you go too early, the person passing the baton won’t be able to catch up to hand it off. Make sense?” We all nodded.

“Now,” she went on, “what this means for the incoming runner is that you have to dig deep and run with everything you got on that final stretch, because once you yell out, ‘Stick!’ you still have to run fast enough to catch the next runner, who will have her arm out, but will also have fresh legs. So we all have to feel each other out. Know when to go. Know when to hand off. It’s waltzing without touching. Just moving in rhythm. Now let’s run it slow-mo a few times.”

Coach Whit moved Krystal back twenty more feet and told her to jog toward me. Once Krystal got to the first cone, I started jogging. “Good,” Coach Whit said. “Now call it!”

“Stick,” Krystal said, no oomph behind it.

“No.” Whit thrust her arm out across the Krystal’s body like Momly does to me after slamming on the brakes. “I said, call it. Not say it.” Whit took the baton and stepped back a few feet. “Stick! Stick!” she shouted, running toward us. “People are going to be screaming. You need to make sure your teammate hears you. Now, run it again.”

When “stick” is called out, my job is to stretch my left arm behind me, without looking, while running full speed until Krystal slaps the baton in my hand. It’s tricky, because our running has to match up. She has to have enough juice and enough time to get to me.

We ran it again and again, faster and faster, working on the timing of it all. Deja had to practice the handoff to Brit-Brat, and Brit-Brat had to practice the handoff to Krystal.

“Now remember, these cones won’t be on the track. So you’re gonna have to learn to eyeball when the transition should happen,” Whit said, picking them up. “This time, full speed. Run it.”

She told Deja to start back at the two-hundred-meter mark, outside lane, and do the handoff to Brit-Brat. It wasn’t bad. Then she had Brit-Brat do the same to practice the handoff to Krystal.

“Stickstickstickstick!” was Brit-Brat’s way of calling out, which made us all laugh, even Whit. But, hey, whatever works. Next it was my turn to receive the handoff from Krystal, but when she reached the red zone, and I broke out running, she couldn’t catch me.

“Try it again,” Whit said. So we did, and I got out too far ahead of her again. I wasn’t trying to, but she’s just . . . slower.

“Yo, what you tryna do?” Krystal asked, panting.

“What you talkin’ ’bout? I’m waiting on you to call it out,” I explained.

“No, you tryna play me,” she said. “You over-running.”

“Over-running? That ain’t even a thing. Maybe you under-running—”

Coach Whit cut us off. “You two, cut it out and get back on your mark. Save that drama for the other teams on Saturday.”

But Krystal wasn’t ready to be cut off. Maybe it was because Curron snapped on her and Whit threw her a little shade earlier, but now Krystal was fuming. “Nah. See, I try to be nice to the new girl”—she looked around at Brit and Deja, all fired up—“but she always correcting me. And being all goody-goody, like she think she better than us.” She raised her chin at me. “What make you better? Your white mother?”

My white . . . mother? Ohhhh . . .

“What?” My left eye twitched, a sign that things were going to go bad if Krystal didn’t shut up. Nobody had ever tried to call me out about Momly before. Nobody had the nerve to even pretend to know something they really ain’t know nothing about. Until now.

“You heard me.” Krystal didn’t shut up.

“Enough.” Coach Whit slid between us, but that wasn’t enough to stop what was coming. Because now I wasn’t shutting up.

“I don’t think I’m better than y’all. I think I’m better than you.” I jabbed a finger over Coach Whit’s shoulder right at Krystal. “And not because of no so-called white mother. But because I’m actually . . . better . . . than . . . you. I just am. You run like your feet made of oatmeal. Like your whole life is in slow-mo. I’m faster, because I work harder while you sit around and pout like some spoiled brat. Like somebody owe you ribbons. Like it’s our job to carry your lazy—”

“Patty! THAT’S ENOUGH!” Whit yelled, whirling around to face me.

“Better watch who you playin’ with,” I snarled at Krystal, last dig in.

“PATTY, I SAID THAT’S ENOUGH!” Coach Whit grabbed me by the arm and dragged me off the track to the gate. My heart was pounding so hard that my chest felt like it had stopped pumping blood and was pushing those red beads I put in Maddy’s hair through my veins instead. “Are you serious?” Whit asked when we were out of earshot. “What was that?”

I glared over at Krystal. Made sure she knew I wasn’t scared. But I didn’t answer Whit. Didn’t want to, because if I did I would’ve said that that was me offering Krystal a seat and that she better take it before I showed her what it meant to lay down. I was so mad. So mad. White mother? I’m the daughter of Bev Jones. And she don’t make no junk. Momly ain’t even my real mother, but even if she was . . . what? I lasered in on Krystal’s face. Her eyes, tearing up, her tough, tearing down. You don’t even know what you talkin’ about, over there about to cry. What you about to cry for? You started it. Why you even have to go there? Why?

“You hear me talking to you, Patty?”

I glanced at Coach Whit. “Yeah.” I closed my eyes for a second, told myself to get a grip. Deep breaths, Patty, my mad slowly mellowing. This temper ain’t a new temper. Breaking invisible teacups. Smashing them everywhere. No, this ain’t new. I just be keeping it pushed down, all the way down in my legs. See, there was this weird period between my dad’s passing and my mother losing her legs that my mom always calls “the funky zone” because I was acting, well . . . funky. Temper on a billion. As soon as somebody started with me—even if they looked like they wanted to start—I would finish it. Talk people down. Talk them out of whatever they thought they wanted with me. And I was just trying to let Krystal know, that’s all. But it had been a long time since I had to get funky. And now that I had—and now that I noticed Krystal was really hurt—the “funk” was fading.

“So then I need you to answer me,” Whit pressed, steely. “What was that?”

“Look, I’m sorry,” I said, feeling somewhere between embarrassed and satisfied. But then I looked over at Krystal pretending I ain’t cut her deep, doing her best to hold in her tears. Deja and Brit-Brat pretending like they minding their business but really they being nosy, watching us.

And . . . I felt bad. A little bit bad. I didn’t want to, but . . . I did.

“What’s going on here?” Coach had now made his way over to us.

“I’ll let Patty tell you,” Whit said, her voice still furious, stalking off to go talk to Krystal.

“It’s nothing,” I said quickly.

“Nothing?” Coach looked down at my hands. “Since when does ‘nothing’ make you look like you’re about to punch somebody?”

I guess the funk hadn’t completely faded yet.

I looked Coach in the eye but didn’t say nothing. He mumbled something like, I’m getting too old for this under his breath. Then he startled me by shouting, to everyone, “Y’know, I’m not your daddy. I’m not your teacher, or your principal, or even your friend. I’m your coach. Your coach! My job is to coach you, to hopefully make you all better runners, but more importantly, better people!” He closed his eyes. “Krystal, Deja, Brit-Brat, right here.” He pointed to the ground in front of him. When they all came over, he took the baton from Krystal.

“Take one end,” he ordered. I grabbed it, thinking this was going to be a revisit of the whole “energy of the team” speech. “Krystal, you take the other.” She took the other end of the baton, looking like it was the last thing in the world she wanted to do. “If either of you let go, you’re both off the team.” Then he looked at Deja and Brit-Brat. “If you two see either one of them let go, you tell me. And if I find out they did and you didn’t let me know, you’re gone as well. Now, fix it.”

“Coach—” I begged.

“Don’t try me,” he cut me off, his voice ice. “There are Patinas and Krystals all over the place, begging to be in your spot. Praying to form the bond that y’all are so determined to break. Fix it.”

Coach went back to the boys, who were practicing their blind handoff, leaving me and Krystal standing there, holding the metal stick, trying our best to not let our hands touch, which was pretty much impossible. Deja and Brit-Brat stood in front of us, awkward.

“Come on y’all, just squash it so we can get back to work,” Brit-Brat said. “We a team.”

“I ain’t start it. She came for me for no reason,” I pleaded my case.

“That’s because you were purposely trying to make me look bad,” Krystal said.

“Make you look bad? I was running. Running. This is a track team.”

“Yo, you think I don’t know that? I was on this team before you!”

“That’s the thing. You don’t think I know that!” Krystal didn’t say nothing back. She just looked at me with a screwface, then yanked the baton. I almost let go.

“Whoa, whoa! Chill,” Deja said, eyes wide, hands up.

“Yeah, y’all trippin’. Let’s just talk it out,” Brit-Brat said. “I’ve watched enough Iyanla Vanzant to know how to do this.”

“When do you have time to watch Iyanla Vanzant?” Deja asked. “I didn’t even know she still had a show.”

“I don’t think she do, but my mother recorded every single episode and uses it whenever she feels like she don’t understand me. I keep trying to tell her, I’m tall and skinny with big feet, and therefore a monster. And then she says, no baby, you’re beautiful, and I’m here for you, and what do you need from me to support you—which she steals from Iyanla—and then I say, a bag of Twizzlers, a trip to the mall, and a lock on my door, and then she says, how about a bag of Twizzlers, and then I say I hate everyone and everything.”

“Wait, so you don’t get the Twizzlers?” Deja asked, now laughing.

“What? Oh, of course I get the Twizzlers.”

“I love Twizzlers,” Krystal said, low. It was as if suddenly we were all just thinking about candy.

“Me too. My mother used to sell them,” I said after an uncertain pause. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to join in on this weird Twiz-fest that had suddenly broken out. Especially since I was just about to give Krystal a good old-fashioned Beverly Jones Funky Zone beat-down. But it seemed like it was happening, so . . .

“Your mother?” This from Krystal.

“Yeah, she used to be the candy lady in Barnaby Terrace.”

“Wait, that white lady sold candy in Barnaby Terrace?” she asked.

“That’s not my mother. That’s my auntie.”

Krystal was quiet. For once. Probably trying to swallow down all that “loud-and-wrong” she’d just spat.

Brit-Brat stepped in. “Okay, so what Iyanla would say, now that we’ve broken the ice, is, ‘Patty, what did Krystal say to offend you?’ ” Then she changed her mind. “You know what, scratch that question. I think we know what you both said. Yeesh. How about this. Patty, what’s one thing you want Krystal to know about you?”

Brit-Brat had her hands clasped and was leaning in like she really knew what she was doing. Like she was for real. I couldn’t believe I was actually about to do this, but seeing how serious Brit was, I felt like I had to.

“I wasn’t trying to embarrass her.”

“Say it to her, not to me,” Brit-Brat nudged, her voice over-the-top calm. Seriously?

“I wasn’t trying to embarrass you,” I said, feeling totally ridiculous. But also feeling like Krystal needed to know that, because it was true. “And I’m sorry for not adjusting like we learned when we were doing the waltz. But I’m still figuring everything out.”

“Yes. Yes, we all are. We’re trying to figure out this relay race . . . of life,” Brit-Brat said, her eyes now shut. Now we all shot looks at her, like really? And when she opened hers and realized we were staring her down, she said, “What? That’s what Iyanla would say.” She turned to Krystal. “Your turn.”

Krystal sighed. “Look, even though I talk a lot of trash, I’m serious about this team too,” she assured me. “But . . . it’s real that I’m . . . I’m not as fast as you.”

“Shoot, neither am I,” Brit-Brat seconded. “But that don’t mean we can’t win if we stay connected.”

“Exactly,” Deja chimed.

I looked at Krystal. She looked at me. But for the first time today, neither of us were sizing each other up. You know how you can tell if a person is looking at you, or looking at you? Yeah, there was none of that extra sting in her eyes. She was just . . . looking at me. Like she was trying to see me.

“We good?” I asked, still holding on to the stupid baton. Krystal bit down on her bottom lip, nodded.

“Yeah, we good.”

“Good, because I’m done with Iyanla Van-CANT over here.” Deja smirked.

Brit-Brat palmed both of Deja’s shoulders and looked in her eyes all serious. “Oh, please. You know you want me to fix your life.” Deja rolled her eyes, like tuh. “Okay. But just know, denial is the first step to defeat, Deja.”

A few minutes later we called Whit over. We would’ve called Coach, but he was so mad at us that it just didn’t seem like a good idea.

“Can we drop the baton?” I asked.

“Can you what?” Whit sparked up like I had asked her for twenty bucks. “You can never, ever drop the baton.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“But it is. Subconsciously.” Everybody was Iyanla all of a sudden. “But if y’all are done fighting, you can release it. Krystal, you keep it, and we can get back to practice.”

“We’re straight,” I said.

“You sure?”

I looked at Krystal. Saw her. Saw all of us, and knew we now had each other’s backs. “Yeah, Whit. We good.”