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“You know, I’d like to get to know you better. We never talk that much outside of the church,” I admitted.
Jack looked at me meaningfully.
“I’d really like that, too, Journey,” he said.
We shared a friendly hug and I walked back inside the house to see everyone assembled at the table.
“So, tell us about that Dame,” my mother said as I sat down. “What was he like? And when are you going to be on BET?”
Chapter Twelve
As they did most Mondays, that fourth-period class put a beating on me. No one had their music sheets, every section forgot their notes, and when I tried to get them warmed up by singing “Lift Ev’ry Voice” to get ready for the opening at graduation, anyone listening would’ve thought not one person in the room had ever heard the song. I’d rolled my eyes and frowned so many times that I was sure if someone walked up behind me and hit me on the back, I’d have a cross-eyed scowl on my face for the rest of my life. I’d had good days te
aching, but this unquestionably wasn’t one of them. The students were too busy talking about Dame and BET to hear a word from me.
As they hurried out of the room when the bell rang, I tried to remind myself that I only had three weeks to go until it was all over.
“You busy?” Zenobia asked, slowly strolling behind the crowd.
“Well, that depends on if you intend on having a ‘Student Death Match’ outside my classroom again,” I replied. Zenobia had just returned to school the previous week from her suspension for fighting with Patrice.
“No, I ain’t fighting, Mrs. DeLong,” she said, amused by my comment. “I know I be acting up in your class and stuff, but I ain’t no fighter. Patrice stepped to me, so I had to do what I had to do.”
“Fine with me. Just do what you have to do someplace else next time. Maybe by the science lab,” I said. She sat down in the chair next to my desk. “So what’s going on with you?” I pointed to her stomach.
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” She looked down. “My mama’s making me have an abortion. She said we can’t afford another baby.”
“How do you feel about that? You don’t look too happy.” I was against abortion, but my personal feelings aside, I also felt Zenobia couldn’t afford to have another baby. Not only financially. Psychologically, she was already going through enough. She wasn’t even seventeen yet. And if she was going to make anything out of her life, the second baby was about to make it almost impossible.
On the news, people always talk about how there are poor people in Africa and in other far-off places. But there was poverty in Alabama, too. Women like Zenobia had three or four kids they couldn’t afford to feed and they worked twenty-four hours a day at the minimum-wage jobs they were lucky to have.
“I ain’t happy about it,” Zenobia said, answering my question. “I want to keep my baby.”
“Zenobia, I’m sure your mother respects your right to choose. But she also wants what’s best for you and Mikayla.”
“I know she do,” she said sadly. “But she just don’t understand, you know? She been alone and stuff all the time and she don’t know what it’s like to love a man like I love Michael. She always saying we ain’t gonna be together, but she just mad because she can’t find nobody. But I know when I have this baby, Michael gonna help me and we gonna get our own place and everything.”
“But I have to ask you again, Zenobia. What about the other baby? How can he do all of this for you and do the same for Patrice’s baby?”
She just shrugged her shoulders and kept her head down. I saw a tear fall from her eye and stain her red tank top.
“I can’t lose him,” she said, sniffling now. “I can’t lose Michael.”
“Why do you keep saying that?” I remembered her saying that when we first talked about the baby. “You make it sound like your whole life is wrapped up in being with him.”
“It’s just the way he make me feel when we together. You don’t understand. It’s like I ain’t even alive if I ain’t with him,” she said, and I could see in her face that she meant it. “And when he be with Mikayla, just holding her, I’m like that’s what I wanted from my daddy. Somebody to just hold me and love me. But he was never there for me.” She crouched over in the seat and covered her face with her hand.
I moved my seat near her and began to rub her back.
“I do know what love feels like, Zenobia,” I said. “And I also know that you won’t find the love you’re looking for from your father in any other man.”
She looked up at me.
“Having another baby isn’t going to bring Michael closer to you,” I said as compassionately as I could. “And it’s not going to erase the pain you feel for never having a father.”
Soon I started crying, too, and Zenobia and I sat there talking and crying until my lunch period was over and the next section of students started filing in.
Before Zenobia left, I embraced her and told her I’d be there for her, whatever the decision was.
