J

The smell of singed hair woke me before the alarm did.

Not my hair. My sister's. Tuesdays were her morning for the hot comb, and she did it in the kitchen because the bathroom mirror was too small and the outlet by the toaster was the only one that didn't spark. I lay still and listened to the hiss of the iron through the wall, the little yelp she always made when she caught her ear, the radio playing low so it wouldn't wake Mama.

I got up. The floor was cold. It's always cold in that house, even in July, because the landlord painted over the vents years ago and nobody ever came to fix them.

"Morning," I said, coming into the kitchen.

Nadia didn't turn around. She was seventeen, two years older, and she'd decided sometime last spring that I was a person she could ignore. The hot comb hovered near her temple. She had a towel around her shoulders and her jaw set the way it got when she was concentrating.

"You want me to do the back?" I asked.

"I got it."

"You always burn the back."

That got her. She turned, and the comb was still hot, and I saw the little red mark under her ear where she'd caught herself twice. "You want something, Jo?"

I opened the fridge. Nothing but a half jug of milk and a jar of pickles and a plastic container of rice that had been in there since Friday. I closed it.

"I'm going to the shop after school," I said. "I need you to cover for me. Tell Mama I'm at the library."

"The library."

"Yeah."

Nadia laughed, but it wasn't a nice sound. She turned back to the mirror she'd propped against the window. "You think Mama's stupid?"

I didn't answer that. Mama wasn't stupid. Mama just had a way of not seeing things she didn't want to see, and I'd learned to use that. It's not lying if the person decides not to look.

I got dressed in the bedroom. The uniform was clean because I'd washed it Sunday in the sink with dish soap. My shoes were scuffed but the scuffs came off with a little spit and a paper towel. I checked my reflection in the dark window. Good enough. Good enough wasn't the same as good, but it was what I had.

---

The bus came at 7:14, and I sat in the back like always. The seats were cracked vinyl and smelled like old rain. A boy in my grade, Marcus, was asleep against the window with his mouth open, and I watched the city slide by and thought about the money.

Ninety dollars. That's what the shop wanted for the jacket I'd been looking at since March. Cherry red with white stripes down the sleeves. It wasn't a need. I knew that. But there was a girl at school, Tanya, who had one, and when she wore it she walked different. She walked like the sidewalk belonged to her. I wanted to know what that felt like.

So I'd been working. Not a real job, because I was fifteen and nobody hires fifteen, but a job anyway. Mr. Adeyemi at the corner store paid me under the table to stock shelves on Saturdays. And there was other stuff. Little stuff. Running packages for a man named Sweets who ran numbers out of the back of a barbershop on Vernon. I didn't ask what was in the packages. I just delivered them and got paid.

I'd saved sixty-three dollars. Twenty-seven to go.

That was the plan. That was the whole plan. Get the jacket, wear it to the spring dance, and for one night be a person who walked like the sidewalk belonged to her.

---

After school I walked to Vernon. It was a long walk, maybe forty minutes, past the laundromat and the church with the sign out front that said GOD IS WATCHING YOU and somebody had scratched AND HE SEES YOU TOO underneath in red marker. I liked that. Somebody had a sense of humor.

The barbershop was called King's, though it wasn't King's anymore. It had been King's twenty years ago and nobody bothered to change the sign. Sweets was in the back, in the room past the two chairs, sitting at a card table with a phone and a notebook and a fan that turned back and forth, back and forth, doing nothing.

He looked up when I came in. Sweets was maybe forty, with a face that didn't give you anything you didn't already have. He wore a gold chain and a white undershirt and he was eating sunflower seeds, spitting the shells into a cup.

"Jo," he said. "You're early."

"You said two."

"I said around two." He pushed the cup aside. "You got somewhere to be?"

"No."

"Then you're early." He reached under the table and pulled out a brown paper bag, folded over at the top and taped. Small. Lighter than the last one. "Take this to the address on the slip. Don't open it. Don't stop. Don't talk to anybody."

"Same as always."

"Same as always." He looked at me for a second. "You look tired."

"I'm fine."

"Everybody's fine." He went back to his sunflower seeds. "Go on."

I took the bag and put it in my backpack, under my math book. The slip said an address on Delmar, which was a twenty-minute walk the other direction. I didn't ask what was in the bag. I never did. That was part of the deal, and the deal was simple, and simple was how I liked things.

---

Delmar was quiet when I got there. The house was a two-story with peeling paint and a chain-link fence and a dog that barked at me from behind the gate. I rang the bell. Nobody came. I rang again.

The door opened a crack. A woman's face, older, with a scarf tied around her head. She looked at me like I was a bill she didn't want to pay.

"You got something for me?"

"Yeah."

She opened the door wider and held out her hand. I gave her the bag. She didn't say thank you. She closed the door.

I stood there for a second. The dog kept barking. I turned around and walked back the way I came, and I felt something I couldn't name, something that sat in my chest like a swallowed stone.

It wasn't guilt. I knew what guilt felt like. This was something else. This was the feeling of being a pair of hands that belonged to somebody else. I'd been doing this for four months, and I'd never felt it before, and I didn't know why I felt it now.

---

When I got home, Mama was on the couch with her feet up, watching a game show. She didn't ask where I'd been. Nadia was in the bedroom with the door closed, doing homework or pretending to. I went to the kitchen and made a sandwich and ate it standing up over the sink.

The phone rang. Mama didn't move, so I answered.

"Jo?"

It was Sweets.

"Yeah."

"You deliver that package?"

"Yeah."

"Good." A pause. The fan turned back and forth in the background. "You want more work?"

I looked at the sink. The faucet was dripping. It had been dripping for a month and nobody had fixed it. "How much more?"

"Double. For the next one."

I should've said no. I knew that even then. But I thought about the jacket, and the dance, and the way Tanya walked, and I said yes.

"Come by tomorrow," Sweets said. "Same time."

He hung up. I stood there with the phone against my ear for a minute longer, listening to the dial tone, and then I put it back on the hook.

That night I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about the woman on Delmar. The way she'd looked at me. Like she knew something I didn't. Like she was already sorry for me, and I hadn't even done anything yet.