A Small Pride

A Small Pride

         We were all three sucking on Freezies on the curb outside Ailee’s house. Well, it was Kaela’s house too, but only since last year. Ailee had lived there her whole life, or at least she said so. But I told her I remembered when she lived in a blue house that was only one story and had a big white shed out back and a kitchen floor the color of macaroni and cheese. Pulling a crunchy leaf out of her lemon strands, Ailee glowered at me. With her tanned skin and soft white brows wrinkled in disgust, she said that I was either a liar or pretty dumb. And besides, she was older than me and remembered stuff better.

          I squeezed the last juice out of my Freezie and stood up with hand on hips, my scrawny bottom sticking out to one side and looked at Ailee as mean as I could. But Ailee never got scared.

         It was on account of the fact that she was in sixth grade and got up early every morning even before her daddy, to ride the dirty yellow bus with bulging foam and bad words on it for forty minutes with boys named Gerrado and George, who should have been in ninth grade and who threw rocks at dogs. She said it gave her credentials. We were arguing about this and flicking rolli polli bugs off the curb when Ailee’s daddy came out the front door in his cycling shorts and bare feet, drinking Ailee’s strawberry milk and holding a white envelope.

         Ailee picked up a little piece of broken sidewalk and felt the rough part with her thumb.

         “Those are for my lunch.”

         Ailee was always mumbling at her daddy. She threw the cement at the ground and kicked at the little pieces that broke off.

         Sometimes I thought Ailee was too mean to her daddy. I mostly liked him a lot. He was handsome with white hair like Ailee and brown, brown skin and when he would come to ride bikes with my daddy he would always say I was pretty and talk about how sweet I was because I was happy to see him and gave him hugs when he came over. Ailee only liked to hug her momma. I knew that because one time my momma had to go to the hospital when my daddy got his car smashed and Ailee was with her momma and I had to go with them. I told Ailee her apartment was small and there was a lot of dirt on the floor, but Ailee got mad and said she didn’t care. The whole time Ailee sat in her momma’s lap and we watched a PG-13 movie.

         I could tell that Kaela liked Ailee’s daddy too. She always got all blushy and smiley when he would talk about how good she did in school and how when she got big she might be even prettier that her momma. Sometimes Kaela’s mom would get mad when he said that and say that she wasn’t gonna make any dinner, but I would just tell Kaela and Ailee to eat with me.

         “Kaela, babe, I forgot your daddy sent you something.” He tossed the envelope off the porch and onto the sidewalk, then turned around and went inside to finish cleaning out the worms that the dog had left in the blue flowered couch.

         No one liked Ailee’s dog but Ailee, and she only liked him some of the times. He ran away too much and smelled like a sandbox. Kaela’s momma was always screaming and hollering at him. That was when Ailee would go and hug him and tell him “good boy” and let him in the house and on the couch. My momma would have spanked me, but Kaela’s momma always just tattled to Ailee’s daddy. No one liked Kaela’s momma either.

         Kaela was fixing to get up and get the envelope but Ailee scrambled in front of her, nearly skinning her knee, and began ripping open the bulging envelope. We cluttered around Ailee’s shoulder and swatted at her bare freckled arms trying to lower them. But she kicked at our feet and kept turning around to make us antsy on purpose. Ailee liked things to be dramatic. Kaela started to cry and hit the back of Ailee’s knees—which only made things worse because she just got more defiant. Ailee hated criers. I stood as tippi-toed as I could with my hands on either side of Ailee’s bony ribs, and looked over from behind.

         I had forgot Kaela might have a daddy of her own. She never said anything about him, but she never really said anything at all. He had probably sent her a comic strip; my grandpa was always sending me those.

         “I bet it’s a cartoon thingy,” I said, and Ailee looked at me funny.

         “Let me see!” Kaela finally screamed in a panicked and shrill voice and then trailed off into a pathetic whimper—as if she were afraid the sound bursting out of her mouth would rip the leaves right off the tree limbs. Her hair was sticking out in weird places and tears and sweat were shining on her red face.

         Ailee looked down at her with giant brown eyes and pulled from the envelope a browner bunch of hair tied with a green rubber band.

         “Ew,” I said. The hair was pretty, but I had never seen hair by itself like that without a head. There was also a note handwritten on the back of a daily tear-off calendar with a picture of a lady in a bikini sitting on the hood of a fast car. Remember how you would braid Daddy’s hair? Now you can remember Daddy wherever you are. Love you. It had a smiley face drawn at the bottom next to the name Carl. I wondered for a second if it was the same Carl who always wore a white tank top and sold snow cones at the Tampico stand by the hardware store with Rita who yelled all the time. He had the same sad black eyes and empty look Kaela always had—like he was lost and didn’t know where to go.

         “Kaela, this is diss-gusting.” Ailee started jingling the ponytail like she was playing with a cat and I fell on the patchy grass with tears of laughter. “Your dad sent you his nasty old ponytail?”

         Somehow Kaela snatched it from Ailee’s dancing hand and turned around to hide her face. I stopped laughing and watched as she fingered the ponytail with purple Freezie-stained hands. The tears had begun to dry, leaving behind shiny spots on her dirt-sprinkled face, and it seemed like she was far away. I watched her for a while longer. No one was talking.

         “What are you gonna do with that?” I finally asked, uncomfortable with the quiet and the look on Kaela’s face. Silence. I looked questioningly at Ailee who had leaned against a tree and was picking dirt out of her nails and thinking like she was making a plan.

         “You could put in on your handlebars like a streamer,” I said leaning back on cracked elbows. I said it like a joke, but secretly wanted to see what the shiny hair would look like on Kaela’s brother’s old bike that we had taped pink crepe paper on to make it more pretty. I hope Ailee couldn’t tell I was only half-way joking. I looked up at Kaela and she was looking at me with a crooked, almost sympathetic smile like I was crazy and she was grown up. It was the same look my momma gave me when she knew something I didn’t, and she would say, “You don’t understand.”

         Suddenly Ailee stepped away from the tree and yanked me off the ground.

         “I’ll tell you what she’s gonna do with that. Put it down the drainpipe. Cuz I
can not sleep knowing that creepy thing is in my house.”

         With a look of confusion and horror Kaela turned towards Ailee and took a step back.

         “Oh, don’t be a baby Kaela. That thing is so nasty. And what are you gonna do with it anyways?” Ailee looked at me with a look I knew meant I was supposed to support her. I was feeling sort of bad for Kaela and I still kinda wanted to see her use the ponytail for a streamer, but I was tired from the fighting about Ailee’s blue house and wanted to start playing something anyways.

         “Yeah, what are you gonna do with it anyways?”

         Kaela just shook her head and stepped back again but Ailee whacked her on the arm and we both knew there was no arguing with her.

         “Come on.”

         We both followed Ailee to the backyard and I watched Kaela silently stuff the ponytail down the drainpipe by the back alley. Ailee made her take off the green rubber band first and then she hovered over her until all the pieces of hair were pushed down the hole. When Kaela was done Ailee grabbed both of our scrawny arms and dragged us back without a word to the front yard.

         We started burning holes in marshmallows with Kaela’s magnifying glass until it started to get dark and my mom called and said it was time for me to come home. I said bye to Ailee and Kaela but neither of them even looked up.

         When I looked back from halfway down the block Kaela was still sitting in the yard, sticking little sticks into the marshmallows and Ailee was eating the leftover ones and halfway watching Kaela from the porch. They weren’t talking and in the kinda-dark they looked like little statues.

         Ailee was my best friend but I was still glad we weren’t sisters, even though one time at the grocery store some lady asked if we were sisters and I told Ailee after we left that I wished we were. But watching Kaela and Ailee sit quietly in the yard I started thinking that Ailee was too mean sometimes and I was happy that it was just me and Momma and Daddy.

         On the way home I took too long picking up leaves for gluing to paper at home and when I got to the house with the scary Chihuahua and peeling paint and windows covered in soft dirt it was already almost all the way dark. But my daddy was waiting for me by the fence because he knows I am scared of the dog, even though I never really told him. I didn’t even ask if we could run past the yard because the dog never barks at me when my dad is there.

         The next day on the way to Tampico, I asked Ailee about if the ponytail was still there in the pipe and if I could see it when we got back. Overnight while I was laying in the dark listening to cats fight outside, I had felt braver and thought that maybe if I bought Ailee a snow cone she would let me take some of the hair for a streamer. But she didn’t say anything. She just kept walking, folding her dollar bill into a tiny neat square with her eyes on the uneven sidewalk. I decided to never mind and skipped a few steps in front of her, jumping up and tearing soft leaves from the low hanging branches and I heard Ailee mumble behind me, “Sometimes forgetting is better than remembering.”

         “What?”

         I turned around and started walking backwards with my arms sticking out to the sides and making little circles.

         “Nothing,” Ailee said with her head still looking down. “You’re gonna fall over dumbhead.”

         “Nuh uh.”

         But she was right. There was lots of roots chunking up the sidewalk and I fell so hard the skin on my elbows pretty much split open. I tried not to, but I cried so hard that Ailee had to take me home. But only after we got a snow cone because Ailee said it was stupid to go more than half the way there and not get anything. Plus she said I was overreacting.

         When I got home Daddy gave me a band aid to feel better and we went to the park with the double slide until it got dark because it was Saturday and Momma had a headache.

         I started raining outside when we got home and I was sitting in my footsie PJs on our cheap hardwood floor with a bowl of cheerios, watching a momma lion on TV chase her baby away so it could learn to hunt and eat by itself. It made me cry big rolling tears that salted my Cheerios, but Daddy said it was the only way the baby could learn to survive. I didn’t really get what he was saying and it still seemed mean to me because I thought that my momma would not do that.

         But either way I didn’t want to watch TV anymore. I wanted to play make-believe. I asked Daddy to play baby and momma lion. But this time I got to be the momma. When me and Kaela play with Ailee, she always makes us the babies.