Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [79]
He leaned in again as if to kiss her, and her arm went up like the arm of her vintage walkie-talkie doll that would just spring up for no reason, straight up like a missile, her arm reached for his eyes, caught a line of skin along his cheek instead.
“Awl,” he hollered out, and grabbed at his face. “You little cock teaser. You little Goody Two-shoes bitch.”
She pushed past him, straight through the house and out the front door down to the corner to where she’d left Bliss jumping rope.
She was shaking when she got to the corner and sat on the steps to catch her breath. Bliss had her coat off, it was on the ground next to the steps, and Shern picked it up and put it in her lap and watched Bliss in the middle of the rope, her hands and feet going in sync to the chant, “You can turn all around, you can touch the ground, you can tootifie, tootifie, side by side. Hands up, lady, lady, lay-dy; hands down, lady, lady, lay-dy.” Bliss was still jumping, doing as the chant commanded; even when she touched the ground, she didn’t miss. A circle of a crowd of other children was forming, and they were cheering Bliss on. Clapping and singing the rhyme, and in between, saying, “That girl can really jump. Go on, girl, with your bad self,” they said.
“Who she anyhow?”
“She one of Miss Mae’s fosters?”
“What grade she in?”
“Sixth, I think.”
“She can sure jump.”
“Yeah, yeah, that girl’s all right with me, anybody can jump like that gotta be all right.”
Shern just sat on the steps seeing and not seeing. Hearing and not hearing. She felt like she was falling inside herself, and if she did fall, she’d sink so deep she would never be able to climb outside herself again. She tried to focus on the color of the air, which was blue mixed with orange; the words and the beat of the rhyme; the smack of the rope hitting the concrete; Bliss’s light-brown bang flopping against her forehead to the beat; even the scent of turnips and liver coming from the holy girls’ house. She tried to hold on to everything outside herself because inside her there were no anchors, no poles for her to grab to keep her from drowning, just mud-filled rivers. And now she was up to her waist and now her neck, and she was going to suffocate inside herself if she went any deeper. She pulled Bliss’s coat tighter to her; she balled it up against her stomach and tried not to remember her mother’s gaping wrists, the bronze and black casket that carried her father’s shoes, the scar on Larry’s face, the sneer of her cigarette-smoking schoolmates who’d threatened to beat her up, the sound of the air in the basement when Mae cursed and hit Ramona, the green wooden floor of that shed, the feel of the word “pussy” sliding up her throat, Addison’s tongue darting in and out, in and out. She couldn’t breathe anymore, and she just gave up and started to sink. That’s when she was pulled back by a hand against her arm; it was a thin, strong hand. It was the holy girls’ mother’s hand.
“Do you know Jesus?” the mother asked Shern.
Shern looked at her and squinted, but she could hardly see her because her sight was blurred. “Huh?” she said. She was confused and dizzy. She shook her head, trying to shake away the confusion. “Huh?” she said again.
“What a beautiful face you have. Do your insides match your beauty on the outside?”
“I—I, huh?” Shern was trying to say that she didn’t know what she was asking her. That she was confused and dizzy and here and not here, that she was falling inside herself because the reality of her life was much too much for her, that she was only thirteen anyhow, so why was she even talking to her?
“Have you accepted Jesus as your personal Savior?”
Shern wanted to answer her, wanted to have to think and talk right now, anything to save her from herself. But she had been warned about the fanatical by her mother. “They take religion to the extremes, let it get in the way of the life God really intended for them,” her mother used to say.
“What life did God intend