would be gossiping about her-at the Village, at the club, at the gym, at every restaurant and in every dressing room. They would all be gossiping and laughing-at her expense.
How could she ever show her face in this town again?
She was crawling back under the comforter when the phone rang.
Boo quietly pushed open the door to her parents’ bedroom and stuck her head in. She saw her mother sitting on the far side of the bed and heard her talking on the phone. Her voice sounded strange.
“ What?…Sleeping with Trey?…Where’d you hear that?…It’s all over town?…Everyone knows?… Oh, my God! ”
She hung up the phone and put her hands over her face.
“Mother?”
“Oh, God.”
“Mother?”
“Oh, God.” Finally she turned to Boo. Her mother looked like a frightened little kitten. “What, Boo?”
“Are you okay?”
“No.”
“Can I help?”
“No. What do you want?”
“Is it okay if Pajamae and I go to the Village? We’ll be real careful crossing the street.”
Mother waved her hand. “Fine, whatever.”
“Okay. See you later.”
Boo started to shut the door, but her mother said, “Boo, wait. Come in. I need to talk to you.”
As soon as Scott stepped inside the lobby of Dibrell Tower, he stopped whistling. A tidal wave of reporters and cameramen came rushing toward him, all shouting questions on top of each other.
“Mr. Fenney, what’s her name, the woman Clark raped?”
“What are the names of the other women he raped?”
“You brought down Senator McCall-are you happy?”
“Do you think Senator McCall will be indicted?”
“What about Tom Dibrell-will he be indicted?”
Scott squinted at the bright camera lights and ducked and weaved his way toward the elevator bank. But at the speed at which he was advancing against the mass of reporters defending their ground, he wouldn’t get into an elevator before noon. He was about to retreat when two enormous blue blazers stepped in front of him. Two black men, Dibrell Tower security guards, were now running interference for Scott Fenney. The reporters had a choice: get out of the way or get run over.
They got out of the way.
The two guards pushed forward until they arrived at the elevators where a third guard stood blocking the doors of an empty elevator. He stepped aside to allow Scott entrance, then again blocked the way. He was joined by the other two guards, three huge bodies in blue blazers protecting Scott Fenney from the reporters and cameras, black guards whom Scott had never before even acknowledged; they were just inanimate objects in the lobby, like the big bronze Remington sculpture. Scott reached over and punched the FLOOR 62 button, then fell to the back of the elevator. Just before the doors closed, the middle guard turned to him and said, “Thanks, Mr. Fenney.”
“For what?”
“Standing up for that girl.”
Pajamae followed Boo out the front door and down the walkway to the sidewalk. Boo said, “Boy, my mother was acting really weird this morning. The stuff she was saying.”
“Is she sick?”
“I don’t think so. Why?”
“’Cause Mama says weird stuff when she takes her medicine.”
They turned left down the sidewalk. Boo was talking, but Pajamae was watching. Mama had taught her to keep her eyes peeled when she went outside in their neighborhood, watching for strange people. Of course, in their neighborhood grown men hung around outside the liquor stores on every corner and drank malt liquor out of brown paper bags and peed right into the street whenever nature called, so strange here in Boo’s neighborhood was a different thing altogether. But Pajamae still noticed something strange.
A man in a car.
He was sitting across the street and down one house from Boo’s. He stared at them as they came down the sidewalk. He was a big man with a bald head in a black car. When she and Mama were outside and a white man looking like him drove into the projects, everyone would stop what they were doing and shout, “The man!” The police. The bald man in the black car looked like a policeman.
Pajamae noticed the car door open partway and the bald man’s black shoe come out. She was about to grab Boo and hightail it back to their house when an old man stepped out the front door of the house they were walking in front of. He came down the path toward them, but he stopped and picked up a newspaper on the grass.
Boo said, “Good morning, Mr. Bailey.”
The old man smiled and said, “Why, good morning to you, Miss Boo Fenney.”
Pajamae looked over at the black car. The bald man’s foot was back in the car and the door was shut, but he was still staring. They continued down the sidewalk and came to a busy road named Preston and turned right. Pajamae glanced back and saw that the black car was gone. She shook her head at herself for being so silly: You’re not in the projects, girl!
They walked on and Pajamae soon found herself enjoying the stroll through Boo’s neighborhood, what she called the Bubble. She always felt nervous and scared if Louis was gone and she and Mama had to walk alone through their neighborhood to the nearest liquor store to buy some bread or eggs, even in the middle of the day. Mama always told her, “If I say ‘run,’ you run, girl.” But she wasn’t nervous or scared at all in this neighborhood. The sidewalks were so clean, no beer cans or liquor bottles or syringes or those funny long balloons Mama told her never to touch. And no men hanging around outside liquor stores-in fact, there were no liquor stores. No pimps or pushers trying to recruit her or sell to her, no older boys driving by and yelling out nasty words, no loud rap music from cars and boom boxes, and nobody cussing each other ’cause they just got evicted. It was so quiet!
Boo’s Bubble was nice.
They stopped at an intersection and waited for the light to change. When it did, they looked carefully both ways and hurried across four lanes of traffic and a short parking lot and onto the sidewalk of-
“Highland Park Village,” Boo said.
They were standing outside a store named Polo/Ralph Lauren in a fairyland place Pajamae had never imagined existed, fancy cars lining the sidewalk shaded by little trees and fancy white women getting out of those cars followed by pretty little white girls looking like princesses and giving her second and third glances like they had never seen a black person their whole lives, and leaving behind a smell so sweet that Pajamae breathed it in several times and was reminded of the old fat ladies at church each Sunday morning-only these ladies weren’t fat and they didn’t gush over her and pinch her cheek. The white women and white girls just hustled by and into the store, the cool air from inside rushing out, making Pajamae’s face feel like it did when she stuck her head in the freezer to cool off, as she often did down home in the projects.
Boo said, “Do y’all have shopping places like this?”
“We don’t have any place like this.”
When she and Mama went shopping, it was generally at yard sales and the Goodwill store, not someplace where she couldn’t begin to pronounce the names, and sometimes one of their neighbors would get a good deal on sneakers or stereos or TVs and sell them right out of his car trunk, at real good prices ’cause the stuff was a little warm, Mama would say, although Pajamae was never exactly sure what she meant. And before school started each year, Mama would work extra and Louis would take them to buy her school clothes at the JCPenney, but it wasn’t like this.
“Where- as,” Pajamae said.
They walked down the sidewalk in the shade of the awning, Pajamae feeling like it was Christmas, checking out every window display, fancy clothes on skinny mannequins wearing makeup, and past a kid’s store-
“That’s Jacadi Paris,” Boo said. “My closet is full of clothes from here.”
“Does this stuff cost a lot?”
