I made some cold cereal and strawberries with skim milk, but I didn't finish it. My stomach was still twisted. Afterward. I put on a jacket and went for a walk with my hands in my pockets and my head down. I didn't even notice where I was walking. Direction didn't matter.
After Brenda had left for college. I thought about the day I would leave for college, too. Despite what I had said at the dinner table about going far away. I often fantasized that I would follow Brenda and go to the same school. I'd be there while she was still there, and my big sister would show me around. I'd be proud, because by then, she would surely be a star on the campus, and just being her sister would allow me to share some of the spotlight, the way it had when she was attending public school. I'd be thinner by then and maybe would have a boyfriend. There was even the possibility Brenda and I would go out on double dates with our boyfriends. We'd finally become real sisters in every sense of the word, confiding secrets about our love lives to each other, looking out for each other, loving each other the way sisters should.
How childish all those fantasies seemed now. As we grew older, the distance between us would only grow as well, I thought. I could never catch up to her. Brenda would be off on a whole new path that didn't include me at all. I'd be just like any other fan in the stands watching her play. Maybe. Maybe I would gradually stop going altogether,
With Daddy gone, with Brenda moving off like a planet that had broken its orbit, and with Mama drifting. I felt lost and very insecure. I wished Uncle Palaver could run his hand over my head and simply make me disappear. I walked along, feeling sorry for myself. I didn't even notice that the sky had become thickly overcast and was threatening a cold rain. The wind strengthened, slicing through my jacket. but I didn't care about being cold. I wanted to suffer.
The blaring sound of a car horn jerked me out of my thoughts, and I looked up to see David Peet, Luke Isaac, and Jenna Hunter laughing hard in David's car. They were all in the front seat. Jenna sitting on Luke's lap. They had pulled alongside the sidewalk and apparently had been following behind me for a while, amused by my slow, thoughtful pace. The three of them were seniors, but I imagined it was questionable that any of them would actually graduate this year.
I really hadn't spoken at all to David since I met him in the dean's office last year. He would wink at me and tease me, asking if my father had taken away my scooter, and his friends would laugh along with him. I would ignore him and keep walking, Both Jenna and Luke had been in trouble almost as often as David. I would look at them and their friends in school and think how true that old saving was: "Birds of a feather flock together."
"Where's your scooter, Scooter?" David asked after he rolled down his window.
"I don't have a scooter." I said. "The joke is getting tired. I'm going to have to send it to a retirement home," I quipped, and Jenna shouted. "Whoa. I guess she told you, David."
David held his smile, but I could see he was surprised by my quick comeback.
"Where you going, Scooter? There's no Big Mac down this street.
Jenna giggled.
"Leave me alone." I said, and kept walking, but he continued to drive slowly beside the sidewalk, even though he was on the wrong side of the road.
"You need to loosen up, Scooter. Hang out with some real people for a change, and have some fun." David said. I kept walking. "I've been watching you, and so has Luke. Right, Luke?"
"Yeah," Luke shouted over him.
"We see you've lost weight. You might even turn out to be a good-looking woman, right, Luke?"
"Yeah."
I caught my breath and turned. "What do you want?"
"Just want to be friends, don't we, guys?"
"David is right. April. Relax," Jenna said. "Luke here likes you, so when we saw you walking, we thought we'd come by and see if you wanted to go with us to the mall."
I smirked. Sure, I thought, or, as Brenda would say. Yeah, right.
"It's the truth," Jenna insisted. She was leaning over David and looking out the window at me. Luke sat up so he could gaze over her as well.
Luke Isaac wasn't a bad-looking boy. He had thick black hair he wore long in the back and swept back on the sides, a dark complexion, and light blue, sexy, sleepy eyes. I suppose he was attractive to me and to most other girls because he just looked dangerous, as if he could rape you with his eyes. He wasn't the sort of boy you played eye tag with. Give him the sense you had some interest in him, and he would smile and leer and swing his eyes suggestively before he started in your direction. It was enough to make younger, innocent girls like myself turn and walk away as quickly as we could without attracting too much attention.
"Why do you want to tease me so much?" I asked the three of them.
David shook his head. "I told you she was too young, man. I told you we were wasting our time fooling around with her."
"We're not teasing you. April. Where are you going, anyway?" Jenna asked me. She surprised me by getting out of the car and coming around to talk to me.
Jenna was tall, as tall as Luke and David. She had light brown hair cut stylishly. Her mother was a beautician with her own shop. Jenna usually wore tight pants and a tank shirt with a leather jacket. Some days she had a ring in her nose, and some days she wore it in her belly button. especially when she wore low-hung jeans. She had already been suspended this year for smoking in the girls' room.
All I could think at the moment was that Brenda would be so angry if she saw me talking to these three. When she was still at my school, she was always warning me about staying away from this one or that one. She had picked up an expression from Daddy she loved: "It only takes one rotten apple to spoil the barrel."
"Keep away from the rotten apples," was her constant warning.
"I'm not going anywhere special," I told Jenna. "I'm just walking," I said.
She drew closer and played with my hair.