Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry Read Free

tried to wipe the sweat off the back of my neck. “We’re not friends anymore, according to him.”
    â€œWhat??” Indri sort of toppled into the lockers, looking about as stunned as I felt. “Why?!”
    â€œHe said his parents won’t let him talk to me anymore. That article in Time set them off.”
    Indri recovered herself enough to stand up straight. “So, the feud.”
    I shrugged like I wanted the feud, Mac, the wrecking of my day, the staring sixth-graders, all of it, to be no big deal at all. “Maybe he just needed an excuse to walk away, so he took the first one that came along.”
    And maybe if I tried hard enough, I could believe all of this truly wasn’t a big deal.
    â€œJust an excuse,” I mumbled. “Indri, I thought—I was sort of—and he blew me off.” A tear slipped down my cheek. I hoped no sixth-graders saw it.
    But Indri did.
    Her eyes narrowed. Then they got more narrow, and more narrow, until she looked like a crazed robot.
    â€œOh, no he did not blow you off,” psychotic-robot-Indri said as she turned toward the crowded hallway, even though Mac was probably long gone. “He did not blow us off.”
    Indri had been friends with Mac too—but mostly because of me.I suddenly felt guilty for her getting her feelings hurt too.
    â€œSorry,” I whispered, trying not to let a second tear follow the first one.
    â€œHey, Richardson!” Indri yelled down the crowded hall. “You’re a worm! You hear me? You’re less than a worm. YOU’RE WORM DUNG!”
    She got hold of my arm, jostling my bag as she pulled me into the ocean of sixth-graders. “Come on, Dani,” she said. “Who needs Worm Dung anyway?”
    Not me.
    Definitely not me.

2
X S AND C IRCLES AND THE D EFINITION OF G ONE
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    Excerpt from Night on Fire (1969), by Avadelle Richardson, page 9
    â€œI’d have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone,” William Faulkner wrote in The Sound and the Fury .
    That book got published in 1929, the same year I was born in Oxford, Mississippi. My name is CiCi Robinson, and time was, I wanted to write like good ole Count No-Count. I wanted to be brave as he was, talking about Black and White and telling the God’s honest truth about the life I lived and the world I saw.
    But I was Black, and I was female, and stuck in Mississippi. The most I could hope for was getting through the winter in our nailed-together clapboardhouse with its dirt floor and newspapers and quilts lining the walls to keep out the wind.
    Black girls who lived in patchwork houses didn’t dare dream of writing stories.
    M Y MOM REALLY DID SEE dead people.
    Okay, so she was a coroner.
    When my dad saw dead people, he puked. I’d probably do the same thing if Mom let me see the actual dead people, which she didn’t, except through the crack in the curtains on the view window at the back of her office, all covered up, just shapes under blue paper sheets.
    Dad was an organic gardener, and all about tomatoes, not death. Mom said he was a hippie. As for me, I was a “late in life child,” according to Mom. Grandma Beans always called me an “oops baby,” or just Oops for short. It really got on Mom’s nerves. Grandma Beans moved in with us five years ago, when I had just turned seven. She had a lot of time to irritate Mom before she forgot how to do it.
    â€œIndri called him Worm Dung,” I told my mother with absolutely no tears at all, even though I wanted to cry. The alcohol stink in her morgue office burned my nose and eyeballs, but I was trying to avoid the whole dramatic tendencies thing, since she was working extra hours plus teaching a class through the summer, and drama made her cranky. I sat in a chair with my back to the view window and pretended