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“You will?”
“Of course I will.”
By the look on her face, you’d think I’d given her the present.
Penn Station is mobbed, but I find Dee right away, under the departure board, wearing a pair of lemon-lime paneled nylon shorts and a tank top with UNICORNS ARE REAL emblazoned on it. He scoops me up in a big hug.
“Where’s your suitcase?” he asks.
I turn around, show off the olive backpack I got from the Army-Navy surplus store in Philadelphia.
Dee whistles. “How’d you fit your ball gown?”
“It folds down really small.”
“I thought you’d have a bigger bag, and I told Mama we’d come back home before we went out exploring, so she made lunch.”
“I like lunch.”
Dee throws up his hands. “Actually, Mama planned a surprise party for you. Don’t tell her I told.”
“A party? She doesn’t even know me.”
“She thinks she does by how much I talk about you, and she’ll use any excuse to cook. My family’s coming, including my cousin Tanya. I told you about her?”
“The one who does hair?”
Dee nods. “I asked her if she’d do yours. She does white-girl hair too, works in a fancy salon in Manhattan. I thought maybe you could get a bob again, go all Louise Brooks. Look just like you did when you met. You gotta do something with that mop.” He fingers my hair, up, as usual, in a clip.
We take the subway all the way uptown, to the last stop on the train. We get out and transfer to a bus. I look out the window, expecting the rough-and-tumble streets of the South Bronx, but the bus passes a bunch of pretty brick buildings all shaded by mature trees.
“This is the South Bronx?” I ask Dee.
“I never said I lived in the South Bronx.”
I look at him. “Are you serious? I’ve heard you say a bunch of times that you’re from the South Bronx.”
“I only said that I was from the Bronx. This is the Bronx, technically. It’s Riverdale.”
“But you told Kendra you were from the South Bronx. You told her you went to South Bronx High School. . . .” I pause, remembering that first conversation. “Which does not even exist.”
“I left the girl to her own jumped conclusions.” He gives me a knowing smirk. He rings the bell to get off the bus. We exit onto a busy street full of tall apartment buildings. It’s not fancy, but it’s nice.
“You are a master pretender, D’Angelo Harrison.”
“Takes one to know one. I am from the Bronx. And I am poor. If people want to translate that as ghetto boy, that’s their choice.” He smiles. “Especially if they want to throw scholarship money my way.”
We arrive at a pretty brick building with cracked gargoyles hanging over the front entrance. Dee rings the buzzer—“so they know we’re coming”—and then we take one of those ancient caged-in elevators to the fifth floor. Outside the front door, he looks at me and tucks some strands of stray hair behind my ear.
“Act surprised,” he whispers and opens the door.
We step into a party, about a dozen people crowded into the small living room where there’s a BON VOYAGE ALLYSON sign tacked up over a table laden with food. I look at Dee, eyes wide in shock.
“Surprise!” he says, twinkling jazz hands.
Dee’s mother, Sandra, comes up to me and wraps me in a gardenia-scented bear hug. “He told you, didn’t he? That was the worst look of surprise I ever saw. My baby couldn’t keep a secret if was stapled to him. Well, come on, then, meet the folk, have some food.”
Sandra, introduces me to various aunts and uncles and cousins and gives me a plate of barbecued chicken and mac and cheese and some greens and sits me down at a table. “Now you hold court.”
