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  It messes with my head that she smiles and nods at me, and I think about what will happen tomorrow or the next day. I think I know why she is called Yo-Yo. Three days in solitary confinement gives me plenty of time to decide how I will stay awake around the clock, lying in wait.

  They put my psycho cellmate in the solitary hole next to mine, and I hear the pattern of her breath all night and all day. There is nothing for me to do but listen to it, so I do. I recite numbers along with the huffs of breath I hear coming through the vent, count all the way to one thousand and start all over again. Sometimes she sings nursery rhymes, of all things, and sometimes she talks to me.

  “Can you hear me over there?” Yo-Yo calls out in the middle of the night.

  The first ten times she asks me I ignore her. Then I stop doing crunches long enough to give her what she wants. I am between fifty and fifty-one when I say, “I hear you. What the hell do you want?”

  “How many years you say you got?”

  “I didn’t say.”

  “Well, say it now. How many you got?”

  “Five,” I pant, on crunch number eighty. “Five fucking years, and I hope I don’t have to kick your ass every night, the whole time.”

  “You musta been dreaming you was kicking my ass, sweetstuff.” She laughs like she is watching a hilarious television show instead of a concrete wall. I think about a show I used to watch on television every chance I got, and giggle too. Mama’s Family was my all-time favorite.

  “You ought to make your eyes focus on one thing at a time,” I come back. “Then maybe you can see shit how it really happens.” She cracks up even harder and I join in.

  “Tell you what, sweetstuff. You got a decent right hook, but you need to cut out all that scratching and shit. Don’t fuck around when somebody comes at you, either. Hit a bitch so hard you fart and make her think about coming at you a second time.”

  “I knocked your ass down,” I tell her, feeling slightly competitive.

  “Yeah, but I got back up. One thing you don’t want a bitch on the inside to do is get back up.” She huffs harder than I do, releases a steady stream of sharp breaths, and I wonder if she is masturbating and just psycho enough to want me to know it.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Push-ups. Two hundred of them motherfuckers. You?”

  “Crunches.” I wait a minute, so I can finish the set I’m on without losing count. Then I fall back against the concrete floor and swipe sweat from my top lip. “A hundred and ten.”

  “See how many squats you can do,” she says, challenging me. “And then after that, run in place like you skipping rope.”

  I roll to my feet and get in position for the squats that she can’t see me doing. “You ready?”

  “Go on the count of three.” We count together, and I make it to ninety-seven before I tell her that I have to stop and she calls me a lightweight.

  We step out of our cells at the same time and catch each other’s eyes. Three days in solitary seems like three months, but one thing I notice is that the food is better. Sandwiches with meat I can actually recognize and bread soft enough to chew. The food is the reason Yo-Yo claims she doesn’t mind solitary, that and the fact that they actually make you sleep in pitch-black darkness as a form of added punishment. I look back into the emptiness of the cell and think about being safe as I sleep. That is what I don’t mind.

  “Jeffrey,” Yo-Yo says to me a little while later. We are back in our cell, looking around like we have lost our minds. It’s been shaken down, shaken up and shaken all around. Searched from top to bottom and side to side. My artwork is gone from the wall and I’m pissed.

  “What?” I take my eyes away from the freshly painted spot on the wall and put them on her face, see she is looking where I’m looking.

  “My oldest son’s name is Jeffrey.”

  “My daughter’s name is Beige,” I say, “just like these walls. And she’s gone . . . again.”

  Chapter Three

  I suck in a breath as she comes back to me. It’s been eight years and now she’s back. I lie there and listen to her tip across the basement to my room. I know it’s her because I have already memorized the sound of Vicky’s footfalls. They are heavy, like she is stomping, leading with the heels of her feet and gripping the floor with her toes after the fact. The steps I hear now are softer, lighter, and I know their owner is slender and a little bit awkward.

  Before I can stop myself, I begin to calculate the distance between me and my middle of the night visitor, to strategize on the best method of attack. If I move fast enough, I can be standing by the door with seconds to spare, time enough to catch her off guard and do my damnedest to snap her neck in two pieces. It is after three in the morning, and experience has taught me that late-night footsteps never mean anything good.

  My eyes dart around my room and I gradually take control of my thoughts. I remind myself that I am in my sister’s home and that I am safe. I stare at the doorway and know the exact moment that she fills it.

  “Beige.” It is the color of her skin as much as it is her name, and she glows in the darkness because of it. She is tall and thin, small-breasted and missing most of the curves girls her age usually own. Hers is a body that clings to childhood, stubbornly refusing to round out and fill itself in. There are no hips to speak of, only long arms and legs, with a swan’s neck.

  She is beautiful to me. A glorious sight to behold, like setting eyes on the Messiah and living to tell about it. I have seen her face in the pictures that Vicky mailed to me, seen the gradual disappearance of baby fat and the eventual emergence of dimples deep enough to swim in. In third grade, her teeth were scattered all over the place and crooked beyond belief. In the seventh, they were forced into compliance and neatly lined up next to each other behind the braces Vicky had installed in her mouth. I know she hated having them because in every picture I received after that her smile was missing.

  I know she struggles in math. She will not eat cauliflower, even under threat of death. She bites her fingernails down to the quick. She first menstruated when she was twelve, and cramps incapacitate her each and every month. She is on the volleyball team. She thinks the rapper Nelly is fine as wine in a jelly jar, and she has been grounded at least twice for writing his name on her bedroom wall. Since she can’t have Nelly, she has settled for entertaining the advances of a boy in her fifth period Biology class—a sophomore named Ulysses. Another boy, Darrick, is after her too, but she is undecided.

  But that is all I know. I don’t know what she thinks or feels. I don’t know any of her secrets and life goals. I don’t know what her favorite color is or if she likes chicken more than she does beef. I don’t know her at all.

  I raise up to my elbows and push my locks from my face. “Come in,” I beg her. She does not move from the doorway, and I reach to turn on the bedside lamp so she can see me and I can see her. The sudden light blinds me, and I spend a few seconds with my eyes closed before I open them and look for her. I don’t see her, and then I hear the sound of her feet hitting the stairs.

  I am hallucinating, I try to tell myself, wanting something so badly that I have conjured it up. Then I tell myself to snap out of it. I know the sound of running feet when I hear them.

  There is no sign suspended from the ceiling that says Welcome Home Lena and there are no celebratory balloons taped to every available surface to help me feel like I have made the right choice by coming here. Vicky’s house is all Vicky, expensive furniture and gleaming glass tables. Spotless carpet and precise places for everything to go and to be. After I rifle through the bathroom for a spare toothbrush and use it, I take a shower and walk around naked, looking at what I didn’t feel the need to see the day before.

  Vicky graduated from college cum laude and her inevitable success shows in every room of her house. She likes shiny-looking things, and everything in her home reeks of newness, like the price tags should still be attached. I lift a lamp and check the bottom of the base for
the tag just to test my theory. I remember when we were kids, she was always ready to tell people how much something cost when they complimented her on it. How she always measured the worth of something by how much it had set her pocketbook back. I’m convinced this is the reason she is still single, because she cannot conceive of a garbage man being worth more than the trash he hauls. I’ll never admit it, but I think she lives in a dream world, doesn’t see things for what they really are, and that is her greatest flaw.

  There is a note for me on the kitchen table, held in place by two keys and the edge of a coffee mug. The sips of coffee still in the mug are cold and starting to thicken into something no one will want to wash out. Whoever was drinking it is long gone. The house is just waking up; it stretches and yawns around me, nothing like what I’m used to. Its quiet is slightly disconcerting.

  I look at the note. Lena, keys to the house and some money for bus fare. Or cab fare, whichever you prefer. Call your PO.

  I take a cup of yogurt with me down the basement steps and into my room. None of the clothes Vicky saved for me fit anymore, and I have to poke a whole new set of holes in the belt I loop through the outdated jeans I hop into. I don’t own a single pair of sneakers, and I feel silly in the dressy loafers I have to wear. I feel even sillier rummaging through Vicky’s closet, looking for a jacket to wear over my mismatched outfit. I come away from my scavenger hunt with a short Burberry raincoat, and I put it on with a frown on my face.

  I try to remember if I have ever been like Vicky, consumed with the need to prove my worth with material things, and I can’t. All I know is what I am like now, who I am now. I can’t even decide if I am upset about the fact that I seem to have lost my past somewhere along the way.

  Isolde Jamison looks nothing like a parole officer. She looks more like an aged porn star.

  I watch her flip her blond hair from one shoulder to the other, see her rub her lips together to smooth her lipstick and then pick up a pen from her desktop. After all that, she gives me her eyes. “You were released yesterday?”

  “Yes.” I pull a folded envelope from my jacket pocket and hand her copies of my release paperwork. They have labeled me a dangerous felon, which means I am required to meet with her once a week, for the first three months of my parole. From there, she will decide if I merit a reduced visitation schedule. I stop staring at the way her red lipstick bleeds into the wrinkles around her mouth and look around her office. “It was too late to call or come by yesterday.”

  “Oh, well, you still could’ve called and left me a voicemail.” She flattens the papers on her desk and reads them slowly. I notice that her lips move as she reads silently, and I wonder if there is any truth to the old saying about blondes. Then I remind myself that I am black and I should know better than to lend credibility to old sayings of any kind. She glances up and sees me staring. “Let’s talk about the stipulations of your release, Helena.”

  “Okay,” I agree, wondering if I have given her permission to call me Helena.

  “It says here that the parole board wants you to complete an anger management class.”

  “I completed a year-long program in the joint.”

  “You’ll need to do another one in the community, sort of like aftercare. You’ve also been ordered not to consume alcoholic beverages or to enter into establishments where they are the major items offered for sale. Oh, and a psychiatric evaluation too. Which one should we start on first?”

  “If it’s all right with you, Isolde,”—I call her by her first name on purpose and notice a slight widening of her eyes—“I’d like to find a job first. The evaluation probably costs money I don’t have right now. Same for the anger management program. I need money to pay for those things.” I can’t help smiling. “I guess we could start with not consuming alcoholic beverages, since that’s free, huh?”

  I see her shift into guidance counselor mode as she pulls out a desk drawer and flips through file folders. She fans papers in a semicircle on my side of the desk, for me to seriously consider. I scan words like temporary staffing agencies and job readiness programs, and get stuck on the last page, which reads GED programs .

  “You also have an order to obtain a GED,” Isolde informs me.

  “I noticed that,” I tell her, scooting to the edge of my chair and angling my head, so I can read upside down. “I don’t know why they—”

  She cuts me off briskly, waving an impatient hand. “Most of the jobs you would qualify for will require a GED, so that’s why the board wants you to obtain one. That makes sense, doesn’t it?” She looks at me like she is debating whether or not I am able to follow a rational line of thought.

  “It makes sense if I didn’t have a GED, but the thing is, I have a high school diploma.”

  “What is your work history? What kinds of jobs have you had in the past?”

  “I have experience working with computers,” I say. “Data entry and things like that, if we’re talking entry level.”

  “I think we need to start with entry level.” She gives me a whimsical smile. “Have to crawl before you walk. Do you have a copy of your high school diploma?”

  “Somewhere.”

  “You could enroll in a job readiness program, to help with deciding what sorts of jobs you’d like to look for.”

  “I taught those kinds of classes when I was inside,” I say. “I’m not sure what I’ll learn that I don’t already know. I—”

  She is a fan of interrupting people while they are talking, I see.

  “You’ll learn how to put together a resume and a cover letter,” she is happy to tell me. “They’ll also work with you on interviewing techniques and things like that.”

  “Well now, will I learn all this before or after I teach them how to take a computer apart and rebuild it? I know a lot of things have changed while I was away, but I’ve kept up with most of the advances in technology. I had a lot of time on my hands to do research and study, and I can still configure and design software programs with the best of them. I promise you, Isolde, the last thing I need is help creating a resume. I know it’s been a while, but I think I can stand to pass on a job readiness program, if you don’t mind.”

  “Software as in computer software programs?”

  “At a minimum.” She is skeptical and it shows on her face. “My background is mainly in graphic design, but I’ve dabbled in other stuff too. I’m not above washing dishes if that’s what I have to do, but I was hoping I could find something a little more challenging, even if it is entry level.”

  “Okay,” she says slowly, gathering her thoughts. She scoops up the papers she spread out in front of me and stacks them together neatly, fastens them with a paperclip. “With a high school diploma you might be able to find something in data entry.”

  “What about a master’s degree in computer science?” I ask. “What will I be able to find with that?”

  She stares at me, speechless. I have always felt it important to begin as I mean to go on, so I stare right back.

  As a convicted felon and a dangerous one, at that, I admit to myself that a master’s degree means nothing. I will be lucky if someone offers me a job washing dishes and I know it. And if they do, I will take it without thinking twice. I need money to put in my pocket, I need money to repay Vicky, and I need clothes that fit both my size and my life. I think about everything else I need as I reach up and pull the cord to signal the bus driver that I want to get off at the next stop.

  Two blocks back there is a run-down print shop with colorful posters taped to the plate glass windows. A thousand business cards for twenty bucks, color copies ten cents each, and black and white copies a nickel a sheet. A smaller sign wedged in a corner of the window alerts passersby that they can also order rubber stamps and fax transmittals for a dollar a page.

  The HELP WANTED sign taped on the other side of the glass door is what catches my attention. Crawling before I even start to think about walking, I step up to the counter, make eye contact with the elder
ly black man standing there and point to the sign. “I’d like to apply for the job,” I say.

  By the time I make it back to Vicky’s house, I have also filled out job applications to wash dishes in a restaurant, to scrub toilets after hours in a daycare center and to work the counter in a dry cleaners. I let myself into her house, wondering if any of them will call me back for an interview and thinking, probably not. Answering yes to this question will not automatically bar you from being considered for employment, one application after another says. Please explain the circumstances of an affirmative response.

  I smell frying meat coming from the direction of the kitchen and think, yeah right. How do I explain the circumstances surrounding my grandmother’s death in three lines or less? Oh yeah, that’s right. I can attach an additional sheet of paper, if necessary. Either way, I come out looking like the Grim Reaper and I have brought it on myself.

  “How was school?” I try to make conversation as soon as I walk in the kitchen and spot Beige at the stove, flipping a sizzling beef patty in a skillet. The fire is too high and I instinctively step forward to adjust it. My arm brushes hers and she jumps like she’s been stunned. I remember when she would force herself into my arms and refuse to let go, jump into the bathtub with me and take control of the bubbles. I wonder if she remembers.

  “Lunch sucked,” she says, staring into the skillet. “How was prison?”

  After that, the kitchen is quiet as a tomb. I see what I couldn’t see last night—the bony knobs of her spine down the length of the back of her neck. Round, hunched shoulders, pointy elbows two shades darker than the rest of her and a tight little butt covered in jeans so dark that I almost convince myself they are black. Her long feet are wrapped in orange socks, the same color as her tee shirt, and decorating the ponytail at the crown of her head is an orange scrunchie.