Victor Lavalle - Lucretia and the Kroons

Then her mother opened the bedroom door and led the way out. Loochie followed.

Their apartment was shaped like a capital letter H. Loochie’s mother’s bedroom sat at the top of the left side and it fed directly into the kitchen. Step out of the kitchen and you found their bathroom just to the right. And, at the bottom of this side, Loochie’s bedroom. Her door was shut now. It had an orange and blue Mets pennant taped to it, a gift from her older brother, Louis, to commemorate the team’s 2000 National League championship. It was starting to show its age, but Loochie kept it up. Louis had taken her to one of the games. He was grown-up and didn’t live with them anymore. She reached out and touched the pennant lightly, trying to calm herself. She could feel her heart banging against her ribs.

A small walkway, hardly a hallway, connected this half of the apartment to the other half, the right side of that H. The right side of the apartment was just one room, a living room and dining room combined. The space had seemed humungous to Loochie when she was a toddler, like a long runway for her stubby legs, but by now it felt tiny. There was a dining table in the middle of the room and farther up a sofa and television. At the far end of the room, the top of the H, were three windows that faced the street. The three girls sat in a tight circle on the floor between the dining table and the sofa. Loochie felt embarrassed that there was so little space in here for them. All three girls lived in bigger apartments.

Monique and Susan watched Priya, who held a sheet of paper that she’d folded into a flower shape. Little numbers had been written on different flaps of the paper. Priya flicked the paper so it looked like the flower’s petals were opening and closing. All three girls counted out loud as the petals moved.

“… five, six, seven, eight.” They didn’t even look up when Loochie’s mother walked in the room.

“Ladies,” her mom said, wearing an exaggerated smile, “may I present the birthday girl, Lucretia Gardner!”

Mom clapped and the three girls at least had the good manners to look up from their game. But they all seemed aggravated, as if Loochie and her mother had interrupted them in their homes.

Loochie’s mother stepped aside, still clapping (a bit too enthusiastically at this point), and Loochie inched forward in her role as birthday girl and emerald princess. She told herself not to throw her arms out, that it was too theatrical and embarrassing a gesture, but then she couldn’t help herself. She did feel good in the dress, after all. And it was her birthday. She raised her hands and flung open her arms and because the Shakira song was still playing she even twisted her hips much like her mom had done in the bedroom.

The star had arrived.

But the audience didn’t respond to her shine. All three girls watched Loochie for a moment and then, almost as one, they scanned her green dress from the ruffled front down to the hem. Then Priya offered a tight grin and said, “Happy birthday, Loochie.”

Monique and Susan followed the leader. Same tight grins, same bland birthday wish.

And that was it.

Loochie dropped her hands as her mother left the living room. “I’m going to get the cake,” her mother called with great enthusiasm. “It’s a Cookie Puss!”

As soon as her mother was gone the girls looked at each other again and hunched forward over Priya’s folded paper game, as if Loochie weren’t standing right there.

Monique whispered, “That’s a dress for a six-year-old.”

Susan actually looked up at Loochie again, scanned the dress one more time, and nodded her agreement with Monique.

Priya threw out one hand, mocking Loochie’s gesture. “Look, everyone,” she said. “It’s Princess Broccoli.”

Lucretia Gardner’s stomach dropped. Her cheeks felt hot and her hands trembled. For a moment the living room was silent. Then the silence was broken.

“You whores can get out of my house!” Loochie yelled.

Loochie’s mother walked into the living room with the Carvel ice-cream cake, a candle in the shape of the number twelve on top, and before she could sing the happy-birthday song she witnessed her daughter menacing the girls, hands on her hips, screaming .

“Get up! And get out!” Loochie commanded.

Loochie’s mother almost dropped the cake.

The three girls rose together. They’d lost their cool demeanors. Even Priya, usually composed and masterful, dropped the toy she’d made. The plucked paper flower fell to the floor. Susan took one step toward the door and inadvertently crushed it. Loochie didn’t move aside. The girls had to go around her to reach the front door. Her mother was so confused that she didn’t know what to do so she just stood there, balancing the cake in her hands.

Loochie couldn’t see her mom. Her vision had tunneled. “Walk out the door, whores !”

“Loochie!” her mother finally managed. “What happened? Girls, wait.”

Loochie’s mother tried to step in front of Priya, but Priya frantically stumbled around her and toward the door. The other two girls did the same. Now Loochie stood alone in the living room. Sunlight streamed in from the windows behind her, and to her mother, this made it look as if she was actually on fire, burning with rage.

“You whores can use the front door or I can throw you whores off the fire escape!”

“Where did you learn that word?!” Loochie’s mother shouted. “What happened? I was just gone for a minute!”

All three girls reached the apartment door. Loochie’s mother still hadn’t put the cake down and poor Cookie Puss was already melting. A few drops of vanilla ice cream fell from the serving tray and landed on the living room carpet behind her like a trail of little white tears.

Priya couldn’t get the apartment door open fast enough. She unlocked it and leapt into the hall. The others ran after her. Despite their terror, or maybe because of it, they laughed so loud that people must’ve heard them out on the sidewalk. Loochie’s mother kicked the apartment door closed with her foot and it slammed.

Loochie was already unzipping her dress and kicking it off. She stood there in the living room in a matching pair of green underwear. The dress pooled around her feet, hiding her black patent leather Mary Janes. Someday very soon Loochie wouldn’t be so willing to stand nearly naked in front of her mother. But for now she stood there, in her underwear, shivering with anger.

She finally pointed at the ice-cream cake in her mother’s hands.

“Put it in the freezer. I’m saving it for Sunny.”

It took two months before Sunny was back from her treatment and ready to mingle. The whole time Loochie suffered through school, banished from the clique of Priya, Monique, and Susan. And to her own surprise, Loochie found herself yearning for a second chance with those three. Sure they’d been terrible to her, but when she spied them in the school cafeteria, hunched together and gleeful, she couldn’t help but feel a tug in her gut. She’d see them out in the schoolyard, clumped together like socks that had just come out of the dryer, and she’d want to go talk with them again. Most of the time she found herself sitting alone at the other end of yard, too close to the boys who were busy acting like wild beasts, screaming and wrestling and bashing at one another. At least they had each other. Loochie had no one.

Loochie’s life went on like this for a month and a half. At school and at home, alone on the weekends. Her mother did all she could to help, offering to take her out to movies or even to go outside and play in the winter snow but those offers only made Loochie feel more pathetic. It was starting to look like her best friend was her mother. It was so embarrassing.