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By the time Chess figured out that she could just shave her legs quickly then wear the beige skirt and pair it with a white blouse and black pumps, five minutes had already been wasted. She wasted more minutes going to the bathroom to shave her legs.
By the time she started to dress in her chosen outfit, she had only an hour or so to get to work.
Don’t worry, Chess! We can still make it on time.
Putting on her makeup took seven minutes. Afterward, she slung her purse over her shoulder, walked out of her room and headed to the front door. Just as she was snapping the locks open, her son, Jay, came shuffling from the kitchen with a thermometer in his mouth.
Chess’s jaw dropped. “Jay?”
The moment the boy saw his mother, he stopped moving. A wily look flitted through his eyes before he quickly covered it up with eight-year-old innocence.
“You’re supposed to be in school.” Chess demanded, “What are you still doing here?”
As soon as she’d woken up, she’d helped him dress, fed him, then packed him up for school. Normally, she would’ve walked him to their complex’s gate so that they could wait for his bus together. But she was running late today. Luckily, one of her neighbors had a kid who went to the same school as Jay. The neighbor had offered to wait with Jay, and Chess had gratefully handed him over.
Clearly, that was a mistake.
She asked, “Did you miss the bus?”
“No,” he mumbled. “I’m sick.”
He tried to do that trembling thing with his lips that he usually did when he was trying to score pity points, but failed because of the thermometer stuck in his mouth. So he settled on his best sad-puppy impression. His eyes even teared up a little.
“You weren’t sick an hour ago. Come here.” Chess closed the distance between them. She pressed her palm to his forehead. It was cooler than a piña colada, so no fever. Frowning, she took the thermometer out of his mouth and read it. Immediately, her eyebrows flew up. “One seventy-two?”
He nodded sadly. “See, Mama? See how my temperature is high? I told you I was sick. I can’t go to school now, right?”
Rearranging her expression so that she looked just as sad as him, she bent until they were at eye level. “Baby, you’re not sick. You’re dying.”
Horror filled his expression. “What?”
“Normal humans have a temperature of ninety-eight Fahrenheit,” she explained while hiding a smile. “If your temperature is one-seventy-two, then it means that your blood is boiling. You’re about to burn up from the inside out.” She turned her wrist to look at the silver watch there. “I predict that within the next ten minutes, you’ll drop down dead. Kaput. Out like a light. It’s over for you, baby. You’re dead. I promise I’ll put many flowers on your grave.”
Instead of panicking like a normal kid would, Jay stared at her for a long while before sulkily demanding, “How did you know I was lying.”
Chess laughed. “You might be smart, but you’ll never be smarter than your mama, little man.” Straightening to her full height, she asked, “What did you do to the thermometer?”
“I put it in boiling water,” he confessed sheepishly.
“Next time you do that, I’ll putyouin boiling water,” Chess threatened, but on the inside, she was a little impressed.
Jay had taken the best of both her and Tazeem. He had Chess’s smarts and his father’s charm and sneakiness, which meant that he was always finding new ways to get in trouble. Because he was so young, it was easy for Chess to figure out when he was trying to punk her, but he was getting smarter by the day. Imagining the things he’d get up to when he became a teenager gave her nightmares.
Still, his trying to skip school was a bit strange. Jay loved,loved, lovedschool. Most kids cried on their first day of school. Not Jay. He had practically shoved her back into the car so he could be with his new friends. Like his father, he was a social animal so he thrived in places where there were many people. School was where all his friends were, so there was no way he’d try to skip it unless something was up
Chess checked her watch to see just how much more time she had; forty minutes and some seconds to spare. That was enough time for her to figure out why her son felt the need to boil their thermometer just so he didn’t have to go to a place he loved.
“Come here.” Taking his hand, she moved to the dining table then sat down on one of the chairs there. With Jay standing in front of her, she asked, “Okay, why don’t you want to go to school?”
His gaze on the floor, Jay chewed on his bottom lip for some time before mumbling into his t-shirt. “Math.”
“Math?” she prodded gently.
Instead of answering, he moved away from her to go to the door where his backpack was. While crouching, he opened the bag and extracted a balled-up paper from it. Anyone would’ve mistaken the paper for trash. But instead of throwing it, he moved closer to Chess and handed it to her.
Frowning, she straightened out the ball of paper so she could read what was on it. It was nothing good.
“Jason Khan Winters!” She scolded sternly, “You got a D on your Math test? We don’t get Ds in this family.”
