She holds on to my shoulders. “Bye-bye rotten old tooth. End of story.”
She’s nearly laughing but I’m not.
I think maybe I did swallow him by accident. Maybe he’s not going to slide out in my poo, maybe he’s going to be hiding inside me in a corner forever.
In the night, I whisper, “I’m still switched on.”
“I know,” says Ma. “Me too.”
Our bedroom is MA’S ROOM that’s in the Independent Living that’s in America that’s stuck on the world that’s a blue and green ball a million miles across and always spinning. Outside the world there’s Outer Space. I don’t know why we don’t fall off. Ma says it’s gravity, that’s an invisible power that keeps us stuck to the ground, but I can’t feel it.
God’s yellow face comes up, we’re watching out the window. “Do you notice,” says Ma, “it’s a bit earlier every morning?” There’s six windows in our Independent Living, they all show different pictures but some of the same things. My favorite is the bathroom because there’s a building site, I can look down on the cranes and diggers. I say all the Dylan words to them, they like that.
In the living room I’m doing my Velcro because we’re going out. I see the space where the vase used to be till I threw it. “We could ask for another for Sundaytreat,” I tell Ma, then I remember.
Her shoes have laces that she’s tying. She looks at me, not mad. “You know, you won’t ever have to see him again.” “Old Nick.” I say the name to see if it sounds scary, it does but not very.
“I’ll have to just one more time,” says Ma, “when I go to court. It won’t be for months and months.” “Why will you have to?”
“Morris says I could do it by video link, but actually I want to look him in his mean little eye.”
Which one is that? I try and remember his eyes. “Maybe he’ll ask us for Sundaytreat, that would be funny.” Ma does not a nice laugh. She’s looking in the mirror, putting black lines around her eyes and purple on her mouth.
“You’re like a clown.”
“It’s just makeup,” she says, “so I’ll look better.”
“You look better always,” I tell her.
She grins at me in the mirror. I put my nose up at the end and my fingers in my ears and wiggle them.
We hold hands but the air is really warm today so they get slippy. We look in the windows of stores, only we don’t go in, we just walk. Ma keeps saying that things are ludicrously expensive or else they’re junk. “They sell men and women and children in there,” I tell her.
“What?” She spins around. “Oh, no, see, it’s a clothes shop, so when it says Men, Women, Children, it just means clothes for all those people.” When we have to cross a street we press the button and wait for the little silver man, he’ll keep us safe. There’s a thing that looks just concrete, but kids are there squeaking and jumping to get wet, it’s called a splash pad. We watch for a while but not too long because Ma says we might seem freaky.
We play I Spy. We buy ice cream that’s the best thing in the world, mine is vanilla and Ma’s is strawberry. Next time we can have different flavors, there’s hundreds. A big lump is cold all the way down and my face aches, Ma shows me to put my hand over my nose and sniff in the warm air. I’ve been in the world three weeks and a half, I still never know what’s going to hurt.
I have some coins that Steppa gave me, I buy Ma a clip for her hair with a ladybug on it but just a pretend one.
She says thanks over and over.
“You can have it forever even when you’re dead,” I tell her. “Will you be dead before I do?”
“That’s the plan.”
“Why that’s the plan?”
“Well, by the time you’re one hundred, I’ll be one hundred and twenty-one, and I think my body will be pretty worn out.” She’s grinning. “I’ll be in Heaven getting your room ready.”
“Our room,” I say.
“OK, our room.”
Then I see a phone booth and go in to play I’m Superman changing into his costume, I wave at Ma through the glass. There’s little cards with smiley pictures that say Busty Blonde 18 and Filipina Shemale, they’re ours because finders keepers losers weepers, but when I show Ma she says they’re dirty and makes me throw them in the trash.
For a while we get lost, then she sees the name of the street where the Independent Living is so we weren’t really lost. My feet are tired. I think people in the world must be tired all the time.
In the Independent Living I go bare feet, I won’t ever like shoes.
The persons in Six C are a woman and two big girls, bigger than me but not all the way big. The woman wears shades all the time even in the elevator and has a crutch to hop with, the girls don’t talk I think but I waved my fingers at one and she smiled.
There’s new things every single day.
Grandma brought me a watercolor set, it’s ten colors of ovals in a box with an invisible lid. I rinse the little brush clean after each so they don’t mix and when the water goes dirty I just get more. The first time I hold my picture up to show Ma it drips, so after that we dry them flat on the table.
We go to the hammock house and I do amazing LEGO with Steppa of a castle and a zoomermobile.
Grandma can come see us just in the afternoons now because in the mornings she’s got a job in a store where people buy new hair and breasts after theirs fall off. Ma and me go peek at her through the door of the store, Grandma doesn’t seem like Grandma. Ma says everybody’s got a few different selves.
Paul comes to our Independent Living with a surprise for me that’s a soccer ball, like the one Grandma threw away in the store. I go down to the park with him, not Ma because she’s going to a coffee shop to meet one of her old friends.
“Great,” he says. “Again.”
“No, you,” I say.
Paul does a huge kick, the ball bounces off the building and away in some bushes. “Go for it,” he shouts.
When I kick, the ball goes in the pond and I cry.
Paul gets it out with a branch. He kicks it far far. “Want to show me how fast you can run?”
“We had Track around Bed,” I tell him. “I can, I did a there-and-back in sixteen steps.”
“Wow. I bet you can go even faster now.”
I shake my head. “I’ll fall over.”
“I don’t think so,” says Paul.
“I always do these days, the world is trippy-uppy.”
“Yeah, but this grass is really soft, so even if you do fall, you won’t hurt yourself.”
There’s Bronwyn and Deana coming, I spot them with my sharp eyes.
It’s a bit hotter every day, Ma says it’s unbelievable for April.
Then it rains. She says it might be fun to buy two umbrellas and go out with the rain bouncing off the umbrellas and not wetting us at all, but I don’t think so.
The next day it’s dry again so we go out, there’s puddles but I’m not scared of them, I go in my spongy shoes and my feet get splashed through the holes, that’s OK.
Me and Ma have a deal, we’re going to try everything one time so we know what we like.
I already like going to the park with my soccer ball and feeding the ducks. I really like the playground now except when that boy came down the slide right after me and kicked me in the back. I like the Natural History Museum except the dinosaurs are just dead ones with bones.
In the bathroom I hear people talking Spanish only Ma says the word for it is Chinese. There’s hundreds of different foreign ways to talk, that makes me dizzy.
We look in another museum that’s paintings, a bit like our masterpieces that came with the oatmeal but way way bigger, also we can see the stickiness of the paint. I like walking past the whole room of them, but then there’s lots of other rooms and I lie down on the bench and the man in the uniform comes over with a not-friendly face so I run away.