Page 2 of Shelter
My face grew hot. Considering I had a towel over my ear and a bag of onions over my feet, I guessed I looked pretty dumb. On top of that, I was one of the few kids in Mrs. Sonnier’s class who wasn’t reading in picture books yet, and I wondered if he knew that just by looking at me. The thought made prickly-heat rush up my chest and down my back.
I realized then that looking dumb and feeling dumb were two different things, and the second one was a whole lot worse. Wanting to make Cole Whitehurst feel just as bad, I tried to think of the ugliest names I knew, combining them in my head to come up with new, fancy insults. I was drawing in a breath to call him a fat-fart-booger-butt, when he lowered his scowling face to mine.
“And if you weren’t just some dumb girl whose mother works for my mother, I’d do to you what I did to the kid who did this to me,” he said, jerking a thumb in the direction of his still bleeding nose. “And you’d see that I didnotlose that fight.”
Without giving me the chance to do anything, fire back or cower under my hot towel — and I was probably leaning toward the latter in that moment — Cole Whitehurst spun away from me and stormed into his kitchen. He slammed the door behind him, but instead of shutting, the door bounced in its frame, standing open about two inches. Wide enough for me to hear Mama.
“Cole! Good heavens, what happened to you?!”
I sat back on the edge of the swing, knowing not to follow him inside but listening as hard as I could. I heard nothing.
Mamatsked.“Baby, who did this to you?”
A moment passed. “I’m not a baby.”
My mother made a sound. A sound I recognized. A snorting kind of swallowing sound. Like she did when she was trying not to laugh.
“Don’t laugh at me, Flora.”
My head snapped back as if I’d been slapped. Because I knew I would’ve been if I'd talked to Mama the way Cole Whitehurst was talking to her now. Kids didn’t talk to grownups that way, but instead of hearing Mama’s swift and sure justice, I just heard her clearing her throat.
“Let me get you cleaned up,” she said. And that was all she said.
They must have gone to one of the first-floor bathrooms because I couldn’t hear them anymore. I was left frowning on the back-porch swing with my feet still in a bag of onions.
Who was this boy who didn’t cry when he got beat up? Who could tell I was dumb just by looking at me? Who could talk to Mama that way, even call herFlorawithout say ma’am or Ms., without earning at least a swat on the leg?
At five years old, I had little experience with hatred, but I decided I’d start learning with Cole Whitehurst.
Chapter 2
ELISE
I didn’t see Cole Whitehurst for almost year after he told me I stunk and was as dumb as I looked.
I would like to say that the second time I encountered him, I kept my dignity intact, but that didn’t happen. Far from it.
It was Halloween, and I was six.
Two weeks before Halloween, Mama had asked me what I wanted to be. I have no idea why she needed to ask. I’d seenMulanthat summer, and since then, I’d eaten, breathed, slept, and lived Mulan.
I’d even had Mama cut my hair like hers — which worked well enough since it was dark and fairly straight. But cutting bangs revealed a cowlick over my right eye that wouldn’t smooth down for anything.
Still, with two weeks, Mama was able to put together an outfit that mostly looked like Mulan’s costume in the final battle scene when she saved the emperor. With an old half-slip of Mama’s that she pulled up under my arms and secured with safety pins, a long-sleeved light blue T-shirt she borrowed from one of her church friends, a navy-blue jumper she found at Goodwill, and her pink scarf that she tied around my waist as a sash, I almost looked like Mulan.
Since I was good at art, I drew and colored Mulan’s dragon medallion out of a small paper plate, poked a hole in it, and strung it onto a red ribbon so I could wear it around my neck. Then I took a broken broom handle I’d found by the dumpster behind the Coin Laundry and turned it into a sword with a hilt made out of aluminum foil. It didn’t have the curvy shape of Mulan’s sword, and it wasn’t silver — or even gray — but without any paint or the craft foam Miss Leaky my art teacher had, it was the best I could do.
All in all, I guess I was a pretty shabby Mulan.
Because that was exactly what Cole Whitehurst mumbled under his breath when Mama dropped me off to trick-or-treat with him and his little sister Ava. Now, I had been trick-or-treating since I was two, but I always, and I mean always, went with Mama. She would drive us to Our Lady of Fatima Church, park the car, and get out and walk me over to the Twin Oaks neighborhood. The houses were real nice. The people were nice. And they gave lots of candy.
We lived on Silkwood Street on the wrong side of Four Corners. I was not allowed to trick-or-treat on Silkwood Street, even with Mama. Although it was just two-and-a-half miles away from Twin Oaks Boulevard, it may as well have been another world. But that year, I would not be trick-or-treating on Twin Oaks because Mama couldn’t take me. She’d dropped a jar of imported Italian olives on her left foot that morning and broken a toe.
Of course, this had happened in the Whitehursts’ kitchen. We did not have imported Italian olives. We didn’t have imported Italian anything.
And Mrs. Abigail Whitehurst, Cole and Ava’s mother, feeling awful, had insisted that I join her children on Myrtle Place for Halloween.
After my one humiliating and, frankly, frightening encounter with Cole Whitehurst, I wasn’t keen on spending an entire Halloween evening with him.
