“I have to pee,” Nerissa said.
“Me too. I have to pee too,” said Charine.
“We going to have to go in the woods.”
“I don’t want to go in the woods,” Nerissa said.
“Me neither,” Charine said.
Joshua followed us as I grabbed Nerissa by the hand. I led them around the yard and into the woods we’d walked through with our father to get to the video store; we weren’t allowed to walk all the way to Dedeaux Road without him. Fifteen feet into the woods, next to a trail on the right, was a dense cluster of bushes. Further behind the cluster of bushes was a full-size mattress that someone had dumped, probably the previous tenants who’d lived in our house. This, I thought, would have to do.
“Come on,” I said. I led them behind the screen of bushes. Charine began to cry. She was convinced that when she pulled down her pants something would bite her. A snake, she said. Or ants.
“Ain’t no snakes,” I said, although it was summer and hot, and the underbrush could be teeming with them, reptiles cooling themselves in the hottest part of the day.
She resisted.
“You want to pee on yourself?” I threatened. Sobbing, she squatted. I felt guilty for bullying her. “That wasn’t that bad,” I said. Charine nodded and wiped the snot from her nose with her hand. Josh, who’d watched the path for us, ran past us to the mattress.
“I’m going to do a flip,” he said. He sprinted and leapt on the mattress. I expected to see him spring high into the air, soar into a flip. He bounced about a foot or so. The ground had no spring, and the mattress was a sorry trampoline. Still, he did the front flip and landed on his back. When he stood, he smiled dizzily, swaying, and began to bounce again. Nerissa skipped to join him, and Charine let my hand go and ran for the mattress as well, snakes and ants forgotten.
Even though I felt the weight of responsibility with my father gone, as my mother had felt it when hers left (except in even larger measure), I was still a kid. We were still kids, in love with the mystery and beauty of the woods, deriving a certain pleasure out of our scrappy self-imposed exile from the house. We ran wild in the hours between our dismissal from school and my mother’s return from work.
One day, while I was sitting with Charine and Nerissa and weaving flowers into rings and necklaces, Josh appeared and sat with us. He’d been off exploring.
“I found something,” he said.
“What is it?”
“A secret room,” Josh said. “I’ma show you.”
We followed him further into the woods, along the trail that curved to the right, the trail that would take us through the subdivision and to a corner store on Dedeaux Road if we followed it. We walked in single file because it was so narrow. Underbrush and weeds grew thickly off the dirt path, scratched our calves, our shins. I picked Charine up and carried her. She was four. Joshua led and Nerissa trotted on his heels, proud to be keeping up with him, even at six. Then he led us off the trail, and I hoisted Charine around to my back and bent, all of us burrowing our way through thorny, leaf-drenched bushes, stumbling through blackberry brambles as the pines shivered above our heads. Suddenly the woods opened up into a small clearing. The ground was soft and spongy below our feet, padded with layers of pine straw.
“Watch,” Josh said, and knelt. He felt in the straw along what looked like a shallow ditch, then pushed the earth. There was a scraping sound. The straw moved, and there was a black hole where the ditch had been. “Look,” he said.
We clustered behind him. I grabbed Nerissa’s hand and leaned over Josh’s narrow back before I understood what I was seeing. Someone had dug into the earth, made a cellar, and then covered it over with two-by-fours before strewing pine straw to camouflage it.
“Who made this?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Joshua said. He had friends in the neighborhood, too, Black boys and one White boy, all who, like my girlfriend, lived there with their single mothers. Maybe they made it, I thought, but it seemed too large an undertaking for skinny little kids with knees like doorknobs, shirtless boys whose ribs you could count when they rode their bikes through the streets. So much digging, I thought. And planning.
“Let’s go,” I said. I pulled Nerissa’s arm.
“You don’t want to go down in it?” Joshua asked. I could tell by the way he said it that he hadn’t gone down in it yet, and that he thought we might explore it together.
“No,” I said. “Let’s go.”
I yanked Nerissa to walk.
“Hold on,” I told Charine, and she tightened her legs around my waist, locking them at the heels. I pushed branches out of the way, began shouldering through the underbrush back to the trail. Josh stood behind us, still at the mouth of that hole.
“Come on!” I said.
He hesitated, then followed. When we reached the trail, I began trotting, Charine bouncing up and down on my back, laughing.
“Run,” I said.
We ran, stumbling on roots, plants whipping us like fishing line at the ankle. When we reached the end of the trail, we ran past the mattress, leapt over the ditch that bordered the woods and our yard, then let ourselves into the fence and the backyard, where we stopped, breathing hard. I turned on the hose and made everyone drink, and I kept us close to the yard for the rest of the day. Josh did a few desultory flips on the mattress, but he was the only one who reentered the woods before coming back out again.
That night, after my mother had fussed at me for forgetting my key again, after we’d all been bathed and ordered to bed, I lay awake in the dark, staring at the ceiling, trying to see the dresser, our stuffed animals, my lonely fish in its small, plastic rectangular tank the size of a saucer. I wanted them to glow brightly, to pacify me and let me know I was not alone, but they stood silently in the darkness, beyond my view. I was tempted to shake Nerissa awake so she’d open her eyes because I knew they would be white in the dark and she would at least grunt at me, but I did not. Along with the responsibilities I’d resumed when my father left again, his departure renewed my sense of abandonment, worthlessness. While I lay next to my sleeping sisters, questioning my father’s love, I equated the cellar out in the woods with my deserved misery. Instead of waking Nerissa, I pictured the open mouth of that cellar off in the darkness, in the future, gaping as a grave.
The next day, I didn’t ask my friend Kelly about the cellar, or my friend Tamika, or my friend Cynthia. Instead, I stood barefoot in the empty lot next to our house, still thinking about it, while half listening to Kelly talk.
“Girl, have you heard that new song by that White rapper?”
I looked confused.
“He is so fine,” she said. I was thirteen by then, all slim lines and teeth and unruly hair that my mother had first given up on combing, and then attempted to tame with a relaxer. When Kelly said this, she smiled and her entire body shook, the woman parts of her moving like water. Kelly was fourteen. She rolled her eyes.
“Wait till you see him.”
When I saw him on television, the White rapper was all hard lines and sequins. There were other boys I saw in the neighborhood who I thought were more attractive, boys with prominent cheekbones and black hair and dark, almost black eyes. Boys who looked like my father when he was younger. But I had no boyfriends. I thought I was too skinny and ugly to get a boyfriend: I would never approach and speak to a boy I didn’t know, and most times they wouldn’t approach me either. And if they did, I didn’t feel flattered. I felt embarrassed. But Kelly had boyfriends, and so did Crissy, one of my friends from the middle school in Pass Christian. We still talked on the phone sometimes, and she told me stories.