Fighting Words

by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

My name is Delicious Nevaeh Roberts. Yeah, I know. With a first name like that, why don’t I just go by Nevaeh? I never tell anyone my name is Delicious, but it’s down in my school records, and teachers usually blurt it out on the first day. I’ve had a lot of first days lately.

If I can get it in before the teacher says Delicious out loud, I’ll say, “I go by Della.”

Once a boy tried to lick me to see if I was delicious. I kicked him in the— Suki says I can’t use

bad words, not if I want anybody to read my story. Everybody I know uses bad words all the time, just not written down.

Suki says whenever I want to use a bad word, I can say snow. Or snowflake. Or snowy.

My mother is incarcerated. Her parental rights have been terminated. That just happened lately. Nobody bothered to before, even though by the time she gets out of prison, I’ll be old enough to vote.

Can you say God in a story? ’Cause I wasn’t taking His name in vain, right there. I really am thanking God, whatever God there is, that Clifton ain’t my daddy.

if the same guy stuck around long enough to be the daddy to both me and Suki, he should’ve stayed and helped us out of this mess.

Instead of a family tree, I drew a wolf. I’m getting better at wolves. I made her eyes dark and soft

but her mouth open, showing fangs.

“I want you to do the assignment I gave you.” I said, “The assignment is snow.”

“I’m not doing that assignment. I can’t fix my family tree, and it’s nobody’s business but mine.” “Oh,” said Dr. Penny. Then she asked what I was doing instead of the assignment, and then she agreed that drawing a wolf seemed like a reasonable compromise. She said she’d have a word with Ms. Davonte.

“When I said snow I got to come down here and explain this to you. If I didn’t say snow, I’d have to say why I don’t want to draw a family tree. The whole class would have heard my business. And then I’d get made fun of on the playground.”

don’t like books much, but there was one about dinosaur poop that was interesting.

She took the plastic grocery bag out of my hand and dropped it into the top drawer of the first dresser. Dropped her own plastic bag into the top drawer of the second. That was all the stuff we had. We were in a hurry when we left Clifton’s place. We were running.

“Hey,” I said. “I’ll be starting school wearing all new stuff.” It’d be fabulous. Like I was one of the kids with a real mom who had a job and everything.

Then I saw a hot-pink hoodie with OLD NAVY written on it in purple glitter. It wasn’t on sale, and August wasn’t exactly hoodie weather, but I loved wearing hoodies any time of year. All the fabric snug around my neck, and when I put the hood up, I could see people but they couldn’t see me. Also I had two hundred dollars. I threw the hoodie into my cart.

Me, tomorrow, first day of school: new blue jeans, glitter hoodie, purple velvet high-tops. For the first time in my life, I was going to look fine.

When the pizza came, Francine slapped it on the table and passed out paper plates. “I keep foster kids for the money,” she said. I didn’t mind her saying that. I liked to know where we stood. “I only take girls,” she said. “Mostly old enough to do their own thing. Two at a time, when I can.”

“How many foster kids have you had?” I asked. “Six,” she said. “What happened to them?” She didn’t even blink. “None of your blessed business. Their stories are their own.” I thought for a moment. “Okay. What’s your superpower?” Teena said everybody had at least one. Francine tapped her hand against the steering wheel. “I work with idiots all day every day and never lose my temper,” she said. “Given some of my customers, not to mention my co-workers, that’s a daily miracle.” She took another sip of coffee. “What’s yours?” I said, “I don’t take snow from anybody.”

“Do you have a pencil, Della?” I shook my head. Her eyes traveled from my face down to my glitter hoodie past my new blue jeans and purple high-tops, to my total lack of backpack or school supplies. When she looked me in the face again her expression had changed. Like, Girl, maybe you should have got yourself a pencil along with those new shoes. I rolled my eyes and said, “My mama said the school had plenty of pencils I could use.”

there wasn’t room for math inside my head when it felt like the whole class was still staring at me. I had hoped my new shoes would help more.

asked Suki what did I do wrong. She said, “You can’t tell people about the meth. Or about Mama or Clifton or any of this.” She made a list of stuff I wasn’t never supposed to talk about: Mama. Clifton. (Especially not Clifton. Not that he was gone most of every week, not that he wasn’t our kin.) Meth. Prison. Who or what or where our daddies were. None of that.

should have guessed, you know? I should have guessed the parts of the story that weren’t about me. I should have guessed what had happened to Suki. I’ve learned that some things are almost impossible to talk about because they’re things no one wants to know.

That was my first understanding that what happened to us was going to be hard to talk about not just because I didn’t want to or really know how. It was going to be hard to talk about because people didn’t want to hear it.

We ran from Clifton on a Thursday night. That means when I got to my new school, the Francine school, on Wednesday morning, it still hadn’t been a week. Not even a full week with three schools, half a dozen policemen, two lawyers, two

caseworkers, the emergency witch, and Francine.

Coke. “I like your hoodie,” she said. “Thanks,” I said. “It’s new.” She nodded. “It looks new.” On the one hand, I wanted to say I am not usually someone who wears fancy things. On the other hand, I didn’t want to say I got this new hoodie with my foster-kid clothing allowance after I had to leave all my

old stuff behind. So instead I pulled out the list Francine gave me. “I got shopping to do.”

“What was he even doing?” I asked. “What was that about?” Nevaeh dropped her voice to a whisper. “He was checking to see if I’m wearing a bra.” I said, “Why the snow would you wear a bra? You’re nine.” “Shh!” she said. “Stop shouting!” “I’m not,” I said, though I took it down a notch. “Why would anyone care whether you wear a bra?” “He and his brother Daniel used to go around snapping girls’ bra straps,” Luisa explained.

Y’all ever heard of a shallot?” I shook my head. “Baby onion,” Suki said. “Little thing. But not like a green onion, those are different. Shallots cost about a million dollars a pound, and when I asked the woman buying them what they tasted like she said ‘Onions.’ I was all, then why not just get onions? They’re, like, way cheaper.” She was talking super fast. I waited

“You’re like a pressure cooker,” Francine said, when the caseworker left, “and the water’s getting hot.” Suki said, “What the snow’s a pressure cooker?” “A thing my mamaw used to have,” Francine said. “For canning vegetables from her garden. It’s a pot you put water in and seal tight shut before you heat it up. The water boils into steam and makes pressure. “Thing is,” Francine said, “pressure cookers have this little valve on top. Rattles around, keeps the pressure from building up too high inside the pot. If the valve isn’t working right, pressure cookers can be dangerous. They can turn into bombs. They explode.”

“Trying too hard to keep everything under wraps makes you liable to explode. Getting help—therapy—that’s like putting in a release valve.”

I took a deep breath, and went with the truth. “I want us to be friends. If that means I have to like the book, then I really, really like the book.”

“We lost our apartment a few years ago, after my dad left. Mom and me. We’re doing a lot better now.” I could hear what she was saying even without her saying it. I said it for her. “You had to live in a car.” “Only for a couple of nights. But I hated it.” She drew a circle in the dirt with her toe. “I was glad, you know, to read the book. To know it didn’t only happen to me.”

“We’re better now too,” I said. “Suki and me.” I took another deep breath. “We’re in foster care. Francine, she’s what they call a foster mother.” Nevaeh’s eyes widened. “Foster care is better than what you had before?” “Yep,” I said. “Wow,” she said. “That’s hard.” She sounded like Francine. “Yep,” I said. “It is.”

“They’re words,” I said to Nevaeh. “Everybody gets upset, but cuss words are just words. He’s hurting you. He shouldn’t be allowed to do that.”

didn’t expect much. Also, I never listened to the lawyers. I tried, but mostly when people were talking

about Clifton, it was like my head filled up with bees all buzzing at once. I couldn’t make out a single word.

I didn’t know then about people like Francine, people who would never love you but at least would keep you safe. Safe-ish.

Clifton gave us food and shelter, but we were never once safe with him.

Turns out used swimsuits aren’t as skanky as used shoes. Pool water has chlorine in it, which is the same stuff that’s in bleach, so the used suits were faded and ugly, but they smelled really clean.

Okay. Drowning, not fun. Luisa got some float boards for us and showed me how to hold on to one and kick. Kick, kick, across the pool. It was sort of like dribbling a basketball. Then we practiced in the shallow end without the boards, sort of hopping and flailing and splashing around. I wasn’t swimming, but I could sort of understand how swimming might feel. I could maybe do it, if I kept practicing.

She pulled out a big brown lump of a vegetable and asked Tony what it was. “That,” Tony said, “is a rutabaga.” “What do you do with it?” “Honestly?” Tony said. “I have no idea.”

“I just wondered what, you know, normal families ate.” Nevaeh’s mom laughed. “Oh, honey. There’s no such thing as a normal family.”

All the nights she couldn’t sleep. All the days she slept too much. The price of our staying with Clifton was Suki.

What he’d done to me was just a tiny piece of what he’d done to her.

Even with what happened right after, that moment, that knowing, was the very worst thing. This is it. Th...

A different doctor came in and started talking to Francine about how, now that they’d fixed Suki’s arm, they needed to treat the stuff going wrong in her brain that made her want to hurt herself like that.

Teena pulled me closer. “It wasn’t your fault.” “She always had to take care of me.” “Still wasn’t your fault.” I felt like it was. When Clifton came after me, Suki’d moved fast to save me. No one had jumped in to save Suki. Including me.