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Me and Ti’s duplexes were just like all the rest—white one-story boxes, stretched out like Play-Doh, they were so narrow and long. Our house was teeny—nothing like my grandparents’ big, swanky place in Dallas—but I liked it anyway. Had my own room, my treehouse. A screened porch on one side where the nights were cool and nice.
With her key, Tiana let herself into the house next to us. Over at ours, the carport was empty, ’cept for my brother’s Schwinn, slumped all sad-looking against one of the supports. The front door was half-open and nobody home—a Mason jar bursting with calla lilies on the dining table the only sign of life. My big brother Kyle would be around someplace, drawing probably. He was three years older than us, but such a spaz. Don’t think he had a single friend.
I shut the door to my room, ditched my pack and fell backward onto my bed. That day had been a nightmare. I got detention sixth period for shooting spit wads. Plus, this crazy girl nearly pulled out a bunch of my hair, fighting on the playground. I did call her boyfriend a freaking dork, but still. . .
Flopped there on my bed, I scanned the trig tables I’d written out in marker on heavy board and tacked to the celling. They were the first thing I saw in the morning and the last at night. I thought maybe, if I wasn’t so up-in-your-face all the time, Dad would love me, and anything to do with numbers cooled me right down. Turned out I was a big success in math class, which shocked the heck out of everybody, since my grades were mostly the pits.
The low afternoon sun lit up the inside of my little matchbox, making me warm and drowsy. I woke up when Ti squiggled in through my window like she always did, though now she was getting a little too big in the butt. She wore blue jean short-shorts, frayed at the edge, and a tight tank top that showed off her new breasts. The top was a brag meant as a put-down, me having only nubs yet. But I’d started my period already, so, really, she wasn’t all that.
She moved her shoulders quick, swinging her teeny purse around and smacking me in the face with it. Plopping down on my bed, she grabbed the copy of Teen from my nightstand and leafed through the pages of models in cute skirts and flounced tops. After a bit, she tossed the magazine aside and said, “What do those stuck-up white girls have to do with me? Squat. Rae Rae, let’s go get ourselves into some trouble.”
Since we were all the way out in Venable Village, our options in the trouble department were pretty much zilch. After a minute, though, I said, “I got it. How about we go find my brother?”
We barged into his room, guns blazing, a couple of lean, mean commandos. He wasn’t there, but, taped to the wall above his bed, the portraits he’d sketched glared back at us. My parents, darkly shaded, fingerprint smudges at the edge of the paper. Ti and me popping bubblegum. Our grandparents, penciled in thin, shaky lines. People he’d drawn out of magazines.
Since that was a dud, we ran out behind the house to the patio table. He drew out there sometimes, if it wasn’t too hot and the bugs not too bad.
But we got diddly.
Ti pointed up with her pinkie finger, mouthing the word treehouse. Sure enough, in an opening in the wooden box Dad built in the fork of a bodark, the top of Kyle’s head was swiveling back and forth.
Ti and me kicked off our shoes and snuck up the ladder, this time a couple of Special Ops ninjas, climbing real slow and quiet. Ti pulled up the rear, head-butting me in the behind at the top, making me jack-in-the-box partway through the hole in the floor.
Kyle was cross-legged, drawing, hunched over, flopping across his brow that long light-blond hair—strawberry, Mom called it, though I don’t know why. His nose was super straight and he had a jaw like the blade of a plow. He was prettier than me by a mile. “Hey, brother,” I said, scrambling through the opening. “What’s shaking?”
He covered the drawing super quick with his hand and jerked up straight. He was mega tall and nearly bumped his head on the ceiling. His sketchbook was balanced on one knee; on the other was the magazine he was copying. He slapped the magazine closed and crammed it under the sketchbook. Flipped to a fresh page and started penciling the outline of his hand.
“What’s it look like I’m doing?”
“Look to me,” Ti said, barreling up the ladder, “like you hiding something. What you hiding, Kylie Ky?”