I’M ON THE back porch for the first time since me and Cricket was here. Maleeka got her back to the door, not me. She almost done reading Maya’s book. I get to pick the next one. No reading out loud, we both agree. I wouldn’t do as good a job with the voices anyhow. Sometime I wonder will I ever be as smart as her or Sister.

“You like words? Anthony did.” I tell her about his dictionaries, that he went to college.

“Pimps that smart?”

I jump up, mad. “He wasn’t no pimp. He was—” I can’t pull the word up in my head. “He was—”

She apologizes. Backs down. Says let’s get back to the book. Only, I don’t wanna listen to her read now. “You messed it up, Maleeka. And what you know anyhow? Anthony was good to me.”

That word keep coming in my head, pimp. Them the guys with girls on the street. I knew that before I knew him. But Anthony, he different. I look down at her, wish I could smack her. “If he was a pimp, what do that make me?” I go over to one of the windows and stare past the trees, houses on hills, buildings downtown. I think about them in the house. Carolina marching us through the woods. Having more clothes than I could ever wear. Good food. “Daddy—” I bite my bottom lip. “He”—I try to find the right name to call him, but I can only come up with one—“Daddy was Daddy, that’s all I know.”

How I know JuJu standing there. “Men like him prey on young girls like you and Maleeka.”

Bet I got fire in my eyes.

“I don’t care if you call him a pimp, Daddy, or the man next door. It’s wrong, a crime, Char, what he done to you and the other girls.”

I try to get past her. She blocks me. Stops me. Forces me to go back the other way past the windows to the door with the lock with the dead bolt that always got the key in it. I hear her say sex trafficking, bring up abuse, rape, yell that people who do them things should be locked up for life—put on death row. Finally, she screams, “If you only listen sometimes!”

The lock turns.

Maleeka calls my name.

JuJu say something about the police, I ain’t sure exactly what ’cause I’m out the door, running in the rain barefooted like the night I escaped. My tears mix with the rain, making it hard to see. But I hear them both. They behind me, not far back, yelling my name. It ain’t Charlie, either. Not even Char. “Charlese Katherine Jones!” I hear my sister say. “You ain’t getting away from me never no more!”