Upside Down in the Middle of Nowhere (22 page)

“But she's my
sister
.” I thought maybe the driver just didn't understand.

Sealy was whimpering and trying to wiggle her way over to me when that triflin' lady stuck her leg out and blocked the whole dang aisle so Sealy couldn't get to me.

“Armani!” Sealy yelled again.

Khayla felt like ten sacks of sweet potatoes weighing on my arm, and it didn't help when she went to crying about her belly aching. I was drenched in sweat. Somehow I kept from plowing my fist into the ugly woman's fat head and knocking her good eye loose. “But, ma'am,” I said as sugary-sweet as I possibly could and pointed at Khayla hanging off the right side of my body. “This one here is gonna sit on my lap. You can't really count her, right?”

“I don't care if she sits up on your nappy head. She counts.” The lady wasn't no lady at all. She was a low-down simple mess. Other people on the bus went to fussin' and hollerin'.

“Either you two go sit down and that one there catches the next bus, or all three of you can just get off,” she said. “It don't make no difference to me.”

I opened my mouth to say something I most likely would've regretted when someone came walking up the aisle from the back of the dark, sour-smelling bus. There was something familiar about the shape of the person who was all but taking up the whole narrow aisle, but I couldn't figure out why.

The driver looked up in her mirror and told the person in the aisle, “Go sit back down.”

“No. They can have my seat.”

Danisha
?

She stepped out of the dark of the bus's belly, and sure enough, it was Danisha. My eyes filled with tears. “Danisha . . . what . . . where . . . ”

“I know, Cuz.” She wrapped her thick arms around me and Khayla.

“That's it,” the stupid bus driver said. “I want all of y'all off my bus. Go on. Get off.”

Danisha took hold of my hand. Tears sprung to her eyes. “I lost Bugger. I don't know what happened. Charlie brought us here.” She glanced out a window toward the Dome. “Something happened, Armani. Something
really
bad.”

“Thirty seconds,” the triflin' bus driver said.

A fat tear slowly made its way down Danisha's cheek and dropped to the floor. “My mama was attacked last night. They beat down Charlie, and Bugger took off runnin'.” She rubbed up under her nose. “Next thing I know, he's just gone, Cuz. I been looking for him ever since. He was standing
right
next to me.”

“Maybe he's with your mama or Charlie.” I wanted to tell her about Daddy and Georgie, but I didn't have no energy for it. The driver tapped her watch with one finger.

“Look, I don't wanna leave without Bugger and my mama anyhow.” She sniffed loud. “Take my seat, then y'all will have three.” Danisha's swelled-up bottom lip started to quiver.

“But, Danisha, you can't stay here. It's dangerous. You have to come with us.” I turned to the driver. “
Please
let us all stay on. This is my cousin an' these are my sisters and . . .”

“Yeah, and I'm your long-lost mama.” The evil driver snickered at her own bad joke. “Time's up. Someone, I don't care who, but someone gets off
now
.” People outside the bus were screaming and shouting almost as much as the ones inside the bus. “I'm gonna count to three and then I'm gonna throw
all
of you out on your butts. One, two . . .”

Danisha smiled a lopsided smile and hugged me again. She squeezed past me and glared at the driver until the mean woman's good sense told her to move her leg before my second cousin moved it for her.

Danisha walked backward toward the steps to the door. “Keep your eye out for Bugger, hear?”

“I will.”

Sealy wrapped herself around one of Danisha's legs so tight I thought she was gonna knock her down. Then my little sister looked up at my cousin with tears running like a river down her face. “Find Mama and tell her where we are. And Daddy and Georgie.”

Danisha took one more backward step down and the stupid driver slapped the folding doors shut right in her face. Sealy scooched past me and flung herself across the laps of three old ladies sitting in a seat. She stuck her head out the open bus window and shouted, “Find Mama! She'll take care of you. Thank you, Danisha!”

As the bus rolled away from that awful place, all I could see was the long, dark walk lying out in front of me. Another cinder block took up space up inside my crowded chest. I slowly started making my way down that long, narrow aisle, putting one clumpy boot in front of the other, searching, praying for an empty seat through blurry eyes. A heavy feeling of dread spread through my body like a fever as I headed further and further to the back of the stinky, hot, shadowy bus with all that was left of my family clinging to me, making it so I could hardly breathe.

The bus rolled along as slow as molasses. My head rested up against the cool glass of the window. Sealy pulled out her swirly green and white journal and the matted-looking feather pen. She stared for the longest time at the blank pages in front of her with her pen froze between her dirty fingers. All I could think just then was how mad Mama would be that Sealy had dirt up under her nails. She'd have me leaning over the tub scrubbing those nails with the little blue nailbrush when Sealy took her bath, the smell of lavender soap floating up my nose.

“Armani,” Sealy said, still staring at the blank pages. “What's a refugee?”

A lady fanning herself, holding two snotty, sick-looking babies on her lap in the seat across the aisle from us, said without even turning her head or glancing in our direction, “We are, baby. You. Me. All of us.
We
are the refugees. Cast from our homes.”

Sealy looked at me and said, in a quivery, quiet voice, “Armani?”

I just sat quiet. I pressed my nose into the top of Khayla's head and took a deep sniff. The lavender smells were gone for good.

Sealy closed her journal and put it back in her book sack.

“Ain't ya gonna write in there?”

“No, I don't feel like it.” Sealy sighed. She zipped up the sack and let it sit in a blob between us on the seat.

I ain't never in my life rode on a school bus that was so spooky quiet, except for the sniffling and coughs and mumbles. One old lady up front wailed and prayed. She was crying for all of us.

We rode like that for a long while, zigzagging down the chunks of tore-up interstate with police cars—one in front and one in back of the bus—flashing their lights and all. Creeping along, slower than a slug, dragging me further and further away from my home, while I seen outside my window how New Orleans was all but worn away from being touched by that storm.

I sat with my head bouncing up against the window and watched the sky turn from bluey-orange to patches of shadowy gray and snake-berry red. Hurricanes must not reach all the way to the sun, 'cause it was moving across the sky just like it always did, like nothing had happened at all.

My eyelids were puffed up and wouldn't stay open. When most of the orange was gone from the sky and it was almost completely chalkboard black, I seen the reflection of a girl I didn't recognize in the glass of the window. I turned my head to see if she was sitting behind me. But I only seen Sealy, who sat with her face turned away with Khayla's head rested on her shoulder.

I looked back at the window. There she was again, the girl with the frizzy lopsided head and the swelled-up eyes. My heart thumped in the sides of my head. I was fixin' to check behind me one more time when I noticed the girl in the window-mirror turning her head too.

I froze solid. The girl I didn't recognize was
me
?

I rubbed my eyes and forced them wide open. I moved in closer to the window till me and the reflection in the glass were all but touching noses.

A tear inched down the face of the girl in the glass, a tear holding the color of orange from the sky outside. With every little bit the tear moved down the face in the window, I could feel all the blocks sitting up inside my chest crumbling. Every single one of them.

All at the same time, they turned to dust. The dust pile they made settled down into the very bottom part of my belly. The heavy feeling I'd been carrying around up in my chest was gone. It felt empty. When the teardrop finally slid from the face in the glass, wetness fell onto the top of my hand.

I slowly tore my droopy eyes from the window-mirror and stared down for the longest time at the way the tear just sat there. I wondered if my hands would ever get a chance to be as old and soft as Memaw's.

Sealy's eyes were on me. I didn't care.

I picked up her book sack and unzipped it. My sister didn't say a word.

I found the fat, crinkled-up Bible Sealy had fished out of the black nasty water, still wrapped in Mr. Oscar Dupree's bandanna. I pulled it out. I zipped the bag back up and put it in a nice pile between me and my sister.

I slowly lifted my head and looked up at Sealy. She was staring with her mouth half-open and her lips quivering something terrible.

“Wanna sit next to the window?” My voice sounded groggy, like I'd just woke up. I blinked one long, slow blink.

Sealy shrugged, never taking her eyes off my face.

I stood up with my back against the seat in front of us and looked down at her and my half-awake baby sister.

“Are you sure, Armani? You always like sitting by the window.”

“Not no more.” It was impossible to keep my heavy eyelids open.

She scooted over, dragging Khayla with her. I sat down in my new spot and gently pushed Khayla's head down on my leg and went to rubbing her sticky forehead. I ain't sure how long Sealy sat looking at me.

I tucked the smelly, used-to-be-waterlogged book all wrapped in red up under my arm. I closed my eyes, and went to sleep.

The shelter. Soldiers stood guard outside the bus and in front of the doors of the building we were being told to go into—long guns in their arms just waiting to be used.

I ain't sure if the soldiers were there to keep bad people from going in, or to keep people from going out. I kept my head down and my mouth shut, trying my best to ignore the screaming blisters up inside my muddy boots.

As soon as everyone piled off the bus, people in red vests shuffled all of us into lines with signs overhead reading INTAKE. We got in the line that didn't move. We stepped maybe one whole inch forward every hour. I wanted to sit on the floor like bellyaching Khayla, who scooted forward on her butt whenever the line decided to move.

The smell of sweat and boiled beans was thick in the air. My empty stomach went sour. Noise. Hollerin'. Loudspeakers. Crying babies. The scraping sound of metal cots dragging across the hard, shiny floor. Every sound in that place echoed off the concrete walls with no windows and the sky-high ceilings. Bright yellowy fluorescents flickered and lit up everything, shining too much light on the confusion everywhere. It was like the hurricane had brought its chaos up inside the
building to shake us up some more, just in case we hadn't had enough already.

There was commotion at the front of our line. Two kids holding hands caught my eye. The smaller kid was fussin' and the older one with a huge flat Afro was arguing with a tall, mean-looking man in a red vest with hair the same tacky color as his carrot-orange shoes.

“I'm going to ask you one more time,” the orange-haired man said to the older kid. “Are you with an adult or not?”

I held my breath waiting for the older kid to answer.

“Armani.” Sealy tugged on my arm.

“Shhh. Not now, Sealy.” I never took my eyes off the Afro kid and the orange-haired man.

“Ummm.” The kid turned and looked at the fussy little boy standing next to him. I knew the answer to the man's question.

People in our line were hollerin' for the kid to hurry up and answer. I slipped my hands over Khayla's ears on account of all the cussing up in there.

The orange-haired man was speaking into a walkie-talkie. He finally looked at the older kid again. “Step over here, please,” he waved, showing the boys where to stand.

My heart was beating faster and my head was starting to buzz like the overhead lights. I'd been watching people for hours get to the front of that stupid line. They'd jabber for a bit with the man in his ugly red vest, get handed a trash bag and a paper with the word RULES printed all big across the top, and then walk on over to one of the other hundreds of lines in the overcrowded crazy place. Every single one of them went somewhere, except them two kids.

My insides took to shaking.

The two kids stepped off to the side like the man told them to. The little kid was hanging tight to the older one. The older kid turned, and for a long second we seen each other. He looked right at me with his scrunched-up mad self. He lifted his chin in a nod just enough so that I could tell he did it. I nodded a “hey” back.

The line moved an inch. Khayla scooched forward.

While my eyes were still locked on the kid, out of nowhere came a lady who didn't look like she belonged in that dreadful place at all. She was wearing a red vest, but it looked like part of her outfit the way she wore it. Her long, dangly, apple-red earrings were the same exact color as the dang vest. She even had red accessories stuck up in her praline-tinted wig that was piled on top of her pointy head.

I wasn't the only one staring at her. Truth is, a person couldn't help but stare. She was shiny and
clean
—all done up, looking like a brown Marge Simpson on her way to a Mardi Gras parade. I could all but smell the soap on her even from where I was standing. She was just a-smiling and went right up to the two scared-looking boys.

“Armani.” Sealy tugged again.

“Hang on, girl.” I shrugged her hand off my arm. I squinted my eyes and put all my focus on my ears, tilting my right ear in the direction of the kids and the shiny lady.