CHAPTER 14

TONIGHT AFTER THE OPEN MIC, EVERYBODY seems too tired to care about anything else, so Moms and Dad let everybody do their own thing for dinner. Moms tells us we can eat whatever we want as long as it’s in the house and we don’t ask them to do any type of cooking. After announcing this, her and Dad leave us in the kitchen to figure things out for ourselves. Aaron pulls a mostly empty pizza box out of the fridge and takes it into his room. DeShawn and Markus raid the cabinets for all the last packs of ramen we have to make what they call Monster Ramen, where they put a whole bunch of flavors together and add random things from the fridge to upgrade it. But I’ve seen one of their Monster Ramens before: It’s not an upgrade, friends. Not an upgrade at all. I gag just thinking about it, knowing I need to get out of the kitchen before it all goes down.

So I pull a stool up to the counter next to the fridge, climb up, and pull out my stash of Fruity-O’s from the cabinets above the fridge in the back of some baking stuff that never gets used. I pour it into a huge silver bowl. I pull out some milk I hid behind a big pot in the fridge and take it all to the couch, where Markus already turned on the TV. The kitchen starts smelling funny about five minutes later and I realize I gotta eat as fast as I can and get out of here.

In the bathroom I brush my teeth over our sink that’s still covered in all the stuff we left out in our rush to get to the shelter this morning. When I bend down to spit out a mouth full of toothpaste water, my eyes can’t help but go straight to the flash cards full of all the things I scribbled trying to make sure I knew exactly what to say onstage. The school took away my best friend’s after-school club last week. She’d been excited about it all summer. We need your help telling CPS that it isn’t fair. We deserve these programs on the West Side, too. I put my mouth under the running faucet and rinse. I look back into the mirror and can’t help but smile imagining everybody in the room watching me freestyle with nothing in my hands. Somehow I still knew what I wanted to say even though I’d left the things I thought I needed at home.

“Looks like Simon let the Notorious D.O.G. out the house tonight,” Moms says just after she knocks on the already-open door. She folds her arms and leans into the door behind me. Her hair is pulled back into her silk bonnet and she’s wearing a big purple nightshirt that looks like she could fit five Moms in it. She caught me smiling at myself in the mirror and all of a sudden I feel a little weird. “How you feelin’?”

I feel my face get all hot under this question, and I don’t really know what to say. So much happened so fast, and it definitely could have gone a whole different way. The truth is I messed up so many times, forgetting all the stuff I made for our open mic today, and things could have really been bad. What if I can’t magically freestyle the next time I forget my notes? What if leaving all my stuff at home could have cost us a whole bunch of support? What if everything we did doesn’t really matter and tomorrow we go back to a school that has no plans to give my best friend her club back?

“It’s okay if you don’t have the words right now, baby,” Moms says, pulling me to her and kissing the top of my head. “Today was a lot, and it makes sense if you don’t know how you feel about it. I just want you to know me and your daddy are so proud of you and how you showed up for your friend today. You might not know it but what you did was big. Maria is lucky to have a friend like you.” Before Moms leaves me smiling at myself in the bathroom she points to my flash cards with her chin. “Didn’t need those after all, huh?”

My mind replays all the high school kids’ faces looking up at me onstage. Aaron said I got bars and was recording me. Everything went so good that I almost can’t believe it. For a few minutes I’m not in the bathroom that I share with my brothers. I close my eyes and I’m back onstage in front of a bunch of people waiting to hear whatever it was we had to say. Today couldn’t have been more perfect even if it had gone exactly as planned.

“Aye, Smiley Face, your little happy self needs to go on somewhere. I gotta whiz.” Aaron lightly jabs my stomach and puts me in a soft headlock before letting me leave. I trash the flash cards on the sink, turn the light out, and close the door right before he starts to pee. A few steps down the hall, Aaron lets me know through the door that he’s gonna get me back. But for now, I win the bathroom light wars. The soft headlock lets me know I’ll get a pass.

Aye, Smiley Face, he said. Without saying that much, even Aaron noticed how today made me feel. Today was good for everybody.