A Certain October Read online

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  Contents

  Part 1: Sometimes Tofu Is Just Tofu

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part 2: Superman

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part 3: If I Could Tell What I Wanted

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part 4: Funeral for a Friend

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part 5: Folks

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Part 6: Autumn

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  About Angela Johnson

  For Alyssa

  PART 1

  Sometimes Tofu

  Is Just Tofu

  IN THE FUTURE, WHEN I IMAGINE I MIGHT BE famous or infamous for something I’ve done, I suppose people will ask what it was that brought me to that place. Well, if I’m infamous I will say—no eyewitnesses and a good lawyer. If I’m famous I will say, I guess I just wanted it bad enough. One of these scenarios will probably be true, but more than likely neither will happen.

  Most likely I’ll live my life like most people on the planet. Highs, lows, buy some shit, read some books, love some people, try not to eff the world up, and be kind to animals so they won’t eat me, as I’ve chosen to try not to eat them.

  But if I’m ever asked if there was a time in my life that made me the person I am, I will point to a certain October that stays with me like a song played over the radio a hundred times at the start of a day. You can’t get it out of your head so all you can do is go through it. I never did finish my book report on Anna Karenina and I went through so much with people I loved and hung out with. I got to see the world through their eyes that certain October, although my own were slightly unfocused.

  FIRST I HEAR,

  “Where are the damned cookies?”

  Then.

  “Where the hell are the damned cookies?”

  Then, “Paul, did you do something the hell with the damned cookies?”

  Then, “Scotty—get down here.”

  I stumble down the steps from my warm, train-wreck, and totally needing a makeover bedroom, walking over picture books about trains and planes and automobiles; then I walk over more picture books about planes and trains and automobiles in the living room. By the time I trip out of the living room and walk down the hall towards the kitchen, I’ve passed more bookshelves filled with books about trains and planes. They are all my brother Keone’s.

  My father is always chilled and never raises his voice. My grandmama says that they always worried about him getting run over by people ’cause he was so laid-back. Not to diss my grandmama or anything, but you don’t have to scream louder than anybody in the room to get your way and shut people up.

  So Daddy, at the kitchen table, whispers—“Laura, why are you screaming about cookies at eight o’clock in the morning? Why are the cookies damned and why would you think I’d involve hell in my plot to keep them from you?”

  Damn!

  My dad’s a mediator with the union.

  Laura looks at me sucking down my first cup of coffee and shakes her head because Dad hasn’t taken his eyes off of what he’s reading. That’s a mad skill in my book. One day I hope to answer Mr. Permowitz’s algebra questions while I calmly read about where all the movie stars are going for summer vacation while drawing french fries around the ones who might soon need an underweight intervention.

  Something doesn’t feel right around the kitchen—you know, besides the fact of Laura’s cookie obsession. I love Laura. She’s funny and she doesn’t take shit from anybody. And she’ll go to the end to help you. Mostly, though, she gets a little too pumped up about things. Now that I’ve put some caff in my blood I’m feeling friendlier and decide to ask about the cookie thing when out of nowhere my wet naked seven-year-old brother Keone shoots out of the pantry past us in the kitchen, flies out the door, and makes a Usain Bolt sprint for the street.

  We all start running.

  We don’t find him in the front yard or the street. We look for him in the garage and behind the garage. We look to see if he’s hiding behind the dead ten feet of garden sunflowers back by the fence. We even look in Daddy’s toolshed—but we know Keone won’t be there ’cause he hates the noise the tools make. Just as we start jogging out of the backyard, Laura takes off running across the street in her fluffy pink robe with matching mules.

  There sits Keone in the neighbors’ front yard among the dead and dying lamb’s ears, naked as the day he was born—eating a bag of gingersnaps. We all stand breathless in our pajamas. Even Daddy looks a little upset. I need more coffee.

  Laura grabs the bag of cookies out of Keone’s hand and turns to me and Daddy like we are the criminals she always knew us to be and says,

  “Who the hell left the cabinet unlocked so he could get cookies?”

  I THINK DECLARING YOUR LIFE OUT LOUD MUST BE like drinking too much. You hear people talking about how they made promises to God, Buddha, Vishnu, or whoever that they’d never drink again after they almost drowned drunk in somebody’s toilet. But there they are at the next house party, leaning and grinning.

  WHEN I LOOK OUT THE window of the Endangered Species Café I feel like I’m in a submarine while it rains all over the planet. I can hear the buses blowing by and taxi drivers using their horns instead of their brakes.

  The last time it rained like this I stepped into a Ninth Street pothole that swallowed half my body. But there was Falcone—grinning under a hoodie—standing over me.

  “Oh, Scotty, my poor baby girl, did you stumble? My, my—let me help you up before Middle-earth sucks you down there.”

  Middle-earth wouldn’t be so damned bad right now. I’m here at the Endangered because they’re serving tofu casserole in the lunchroom and I feel bad for all of us. I’m vegetarian and not ever do I feel tofu anymore. Anyway, the Endangered serves meat; I just don’t eat it. So I’m wolfing down wild mushrooms and tomatoes on toasted buttery French bread.

  I pledged to eat nothing with a face on it for the rest of my life since I visited that dairy farm last year in my earth science class. Laura, my stepmother, says she respects me for being a vegetarian. Daddy thinks it’s something we can bond over. Honestly, though, I’d rather Laura bond with me by buying me a fake ID and taking me and my friends to Vegas.

  So Laura makes tofu desserts, tofu tacos, tofurkey, tofu stir-fry, tofu . . . whatever.

  I’m tofu screwed at home.

  But I’ve made other pledges that aren’t working out like they should.

  I haven’t learned Kiswahili—they don’t offer it at my school.

  I haven’t stopped buying eight-dollar fashion magazines and drawing spaghetti and french fries on the too-skinny models’ mouths.

  I haven’t volunteered anywhere since those two and a half days at the public library where I was asked to leave in the middle of my shift on the third day. I even
heard a librarian tell an aide she thought I was a sociopath. I had refused to remove my big furry purple hat, and that Jack the Ripper book Laura wanted me to pick up fell out of my bag.

  But that hurt my feelings.

  Misha and Falcone, being my best friends, tried to make me feel better about my crashing of all the library’s computers. They took me to the Endangered Species Café for the first time then about a year ago, where I commenced to eat two veggie Reubens, drink four glasses of iced pumpkin-spiced coffee, and inhale a bucket of sweet potato fries. The Endangered Species has a good vibe so I try to have an empty belly when I get there.

  Falcone said the librarian was wrong about me being a sociopath and—she wore ugly shoes. He also said the library probably feared me because I was a dangerous intellectual. I kinda defended the librarian because she spoke Kiswahili. Misha said someone else probably crashed the computers and the library was covering for them.

  I smiled at Misha and Falcone—remembering when we all used to get caught eating paste together underneath the art tables in kindergarten. They even stayed friends with me when I was a bald nine-year-old after Kris Jones perpetuated a particularly nasty chewing-gum crime throughout my hair.

  This was so much better. I said the whole thing made me feel stupid and that we should order another bucket of fries.

  MY LIFE IS LIKE TOFU—it’s what gets added that makes it interesting. It might be good for me, sometimes it’s kinda bland and needs hot sauce to spice it up, and most times I complain, silently, that I don’t like it, but I think that’s normal. I like to whine.

  Forget it. I’m late leaving the Endangered for my fifth-period class and if I don’t hurry past all these little freshmen looking confused in the hall (still after two and a half weeks) I’ll have to go back and beg the secretary in the office for a late pass. And nobody wants that.

  AFTER SCHOOL ME AND MISHA GO TO KEN’S HIS and Hers for Misha’s homecoming dress. She spent two hours last week picking out her favorite one.

  “Is it gonna fit?”

  “It’ll fit.”

  “I don’t know, girl. Can you breathe?”

  “Is it important to breathe—much? See the way the fabric flows?” Misha twirls around the dressing room.

  The store clerk smiles at her and says, “I think it’s almost perfect, but it needs a little tailoring. Your aunt Caroline called earlier to say it might. She says most of your tops need to be let out. Said she might drop by.”

  Me and Misha look at each other and roll our eyes at the same time, then start to giggle. Misha’s aunt Caroline dropping by isn’t going to be a good look for anybody. And it gets to be so funny we end up howling on the floor. It would have been better if the store clerk had told Misha she’d be rounding up flying monkeys to help her try on clothes and make suggestions. We keep laughing till it’s just us snorting and hiccuping, then finally we get serious. Kind of.

  “What she means, Misha, is they can let it out in the bodice or you’ll end up passed out with your dress over your head near the punch bowl.”

  Misha shoots me a cross-eyed look.

  “I should’ve asked Nick to do this with me. Only Falcone probably would have found out about it, been pissed at me. He hates missing the fun.”

  “Ah, you should have asked Nick. I miss him.” And I think that when they broke up we were supposed to act like Nick never existed. I guess we’re showing real loyalty to Nick by staying friends with him.

  “Tell that to Falcone. You know how he is . . .”

  Misha just shrugs and twirls again.

  “That boy needs to stop being bitter about the breakup,” she says.

  “It looks like for now, bitter it is.”

  “Maybe he needs a new boyfriend.”

  “Don’t even think about it—he hates people messing with that.”

  “Damn—he’s such a boy.”

  MISHA, BEING HARDHEADED, WON’T LET the salesgirl make arrangements to have the dress altered—until her aunt Caroline blows in. . . .

  Imagine a tropical bird who speaks in declarations and won’t take no for an answer, wears long dangling earrings, and always carries an umbrella, antacids, a copy of “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” and nicotine chewing gum (thirty-year cigarette habit) while trying to control her niece.

  She walks in and says “Girls” and she’s off and around the entire store with the clerk having to duck, dodge, and run to keep up with her.

  Misha stands still in the lacy black dress.

  “Homecoming does fall on Halloween this year,” she says.

  I just giggle nervously and pull at my ear like when I was little and had to pee. Caroline rolls her eyes and ignores the dress.

  If Falcone was here he would make Misha use her common sense and maybe make a deal. But more than likely he would just crack on the Caroline situation till Misha laughed so hard, ultimately passing out in the dressing room—probably with her dress over her head. But I’m not up to sparring with Aunt Caroline about the homecoming gown. I still have Misha’s back, though, if it gets real ugly and puffed sleeves get involved.

  Caroline keeps running around the shop wrapping Misha in a tape measure saying “No, no, no, and no” to everything, especially the black lace.

  I’m so happy that Misha is even going to homecoming and especially that she will be on the court. We almost had to hide that happy ’cause at first she was going to pass on it. Misha is a feminist and the thought freaked her out. Plus she had an idea the uptight coordinator of the homecoming court might say something about her dreads. But that didn’t happen. She did frown up at Misha’s tattoo of the earth on roller skates, though.

  She said, “A bit of theatrical makeup on your shoulder should cover that up.”

  To be continued . . .

  IT’S BEEN A LONG DAY. I STARTED OFF TIRED FROM helping to wrestle my naked autistic brother back across the street this morning. And I swear, about eight or nine neighbors walked past, but only one looked at our pajama-clad family with the naked cookie-eating seven-year-old.

  She’d smiled and asked how Keone was today.

  When Laura said, deadpan, “Naked and eating off-limit cookies,” the woman just kept smiling, then walked past us while Keone kept trying to get the gingersnaps out of Daddy’s hands.

  So I have to ask myself (while I sit cross-legged under a bunch of silk skirts as I watch Misha sulk in a sea of taffeta) if my brother is living a naked life in the neighborhood none of us are aware of. I mean—is he some kind of naked phantom running in and out of our house, eating cookies, sitting in the neighbors’ gardens when Laura is busy writing? Is Keone living a secret cookie-filled life none of us know anything about? The thought makes me smile while the taffeta starts getting on my nerves.

  IN THE END I TEXT Falcone. I know his soccer match should be over by now ’cause it seems like we’ve been in Ken’s His and Hers for days. I ask him to come save Misha from having to end up on oxygen at the homecoming dance, to stop Caroline from having Misha go to the dance in a chastity belt and flannel gown, and to help stop what feels like a serious headache from knocking me to the ground.

  He finally strolls into the dress shop, messenger bag, dressed in black, with a soft smile on his face—which means we won the soccer match. It takes about thirty seconds of him watching Misha twirl around—still—in the dress she wants before he says, “Girl you look good. But I wonder why anyone would buy a dress that only made them look good from the waist down? Is there a reason you wanted the top half of the dress to make you look like a sausage in a casing? Anyway, I guess that makes sense ’cause the dance falls on Halloween. You could just put a banner on the dress with the words ‘Jimmy Dean Sausage’ running across it.”

  The clerk covers her laugh up with a cough, Caroline laughs out loud but puts down the granny dress she was loving, and Misha makes arrangements to get the dress tailored.

  Falcone hands me two ibuprofen and a bottle of water that he takes from the pocket of his backpack. He
looks at Misha, Misha looks at me, and I look at Falcone right before we all crack up.

  We walk out the door and head up the street. Everybody’s hungry and the best food on the block is at the Endangered. As we walk by the music shop Misha smiles, stops, and presses her face against the window, then taps at it. A brown-haired dude is in the window reaching for a music book.

  He smiles back bigger at Misha.

  “Who’s that?” I ask.

  Falcone is on his phone ignoring us both.

  Misha presses her face closer to the window and the boy in the window does the same towards her. Uuuuummmm, he’s cute I guess.

  When they’ve got lips and nose prints all over the window Misha waves bye to the boy in the window and we both run to catch up with Falcone, who’s lost in his iPhone.

  “Who’s that?” I ask again.

  “I call him Nougat Boy. Ain’t he cute? He’s security over at the market.”

  We get to the Endangered and walk through the door with the bamboo chimes. Falcone has cruelly taken seats over by the huge wooden bear with a top hat on and I am way far from pleased.

  I got bear issues.

  But when we finally all sit down, Falcone is trying out a new app, and Misha’s wondering if she should have the iced mocha, I say again, “Nougat Boy?”

  She decides on the mocha then says—“Yeah, Nougat Boy.” I don’t know much about him or his real name. Or where he lives—but we keep running into each other, so we flirt. We’re flirting.”

  Falcone finally joins the non-app world again.

  “Who’s flirting?”

  “Misha and somebody named Nougat Boy.”

  Falcone shakes his head at both of us and goes back to his phone.

  I get the black bean chili and a pineapple smoothie. Falcone gets the loaded home fries that have so much food other than potatoes in them they come in a huge-assed bowl and are covered in blue cheese. He gets blueberry iced tea to wash it all down. Misha gets a hamburger with everything on it but mushrooms that ends up being bigger than her head, and a root beer float.