Indigo Summer Read Free Page A

You could put her in that place just two blocks from here.”
    Pop’s demeanor softened. I could tell. He was falling under her spell.
    â€œI could talk to Barbara. See if she wants that old place. It’s a lot older than the one she lives in now, but I could fix it up for her,” Pop reasoned. “The rent over here would be a little cheaper than what she’s paying now. That way she wouldn’t be out on a limb every month. She’d have to uproot her kids and send them to another school, but…”
    â€œIt’s better than being homeless,” Gloria added.
    â€œIf I’m going to do it, I’d better do it before school starts again in the fall.”
    â€œIs that a yes?” Gloria asked my father.
    â€œI’ll call Barbara when I get to the office,” he said.
    Gloria always seemed to get her way no matter what.
    Â 
    On moving day, I carefully placed all my CDs—50 Cent, T.I., Kanye West—into a cardboard box. Packed away my DVDs— Friday, Next Friday, Friday After Next , and some of my old Kung Fu movies—into the same box. And I couldn’t forget my all-time favorite DVD, Rush Hour, and every episode of The Dave Chappelle Show, which was packed in the same box. I didn’t want the movers packing my sacred items. I needed to pack them myself, to make sure they made it to the new place safely.
    I placed the box on the backseat of my ’92 Jeep Cherokee that I’d saved up for and bought with money that I had earned by working the drive-thru at Wendy’s. As 50 Cent’s “Just A Little Bit” blasted through my speakers, Killer took his place in the passenger’s seat of my Jeep, his head hanging out the window as I pulled out of the subdivision I grew up in…a place where I had chased the ice cream man down the street at full speed every day just to buy a red, white and blue bomb pop; the same neighborhood where I had my first kiss with Ashley Thomas right in between Mrs. Fisher’s house and the vacant house at the end of the block, the place where I was chased by Mr. Palmer’s Doberman every time I took the short cut through his yard, and where I fell out of the tree in Miss Booker’s front yard and broke my arm when I was nine; the same place where I pushed a lawn mower up and down the street and made money cutting lawns every summer since I was twelve, and where the entire neighborhood gathered for cookouts and block parties every Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and on Labor Day.
    The neighborhood was all a kid like me had. That and Kim Porter, the girl who broke up with me the same day she found out that I was moving to the south side.
    â€œIt’s too hard trying to go out with somebody at another school, Marcus,” she’d said.
    Then she said those four words that pierced my heart.
    â€œLet’s just be friends.”
    The words still rang in my head, long after they had lingered in the air. Let’s just be friends.
    My life as I knew it was over.

Chapter 3
    Indigo
    My breasts had grown a little bit over the summer, even though I was still in the same A-sized cup, I could tell they were just a little bit bigger than they were at the beginning of the summer. I wore my pink low-cut top that I’d picked up at the mall on Saturday just to show them off a little, my low-cut Mudd jeans and pink, black and white FILAs.
    The first day of school was not the same without Jade. We’d made so many plans before she moved away. Times had gotten too hard for her mother and she decided that they should move in with Jade’s grandmother in New Jersey. Jade hated living there, too, because her grandmother was nothing like Nana. She was mean and stuffy, Jade told me, and she made them go to church three nights a week and on Sunday, too. She hoped it wouldn’t be long before her mama found them an apartment or something. She’d have to find a job first, and that was the hard part. Thank