“Y’all okay?” Aunt Joanie asked.
“Yes.”
“Where they got y’all at?”
“Some lady house named Ms. Waters. She’s nice, though. I just called to tell my mom that we were okay and don’t forget to go to family court.” My Aunt Joanie said she would give my mom the message. After I called my mom I called John again.
“John, I don’t have any clothes. My friend let me wear her sister’s stuff and the lady have me wearing these messed up clothes. You think we can go see if we can get anything out of the house?”
“Kendra, there is nothing in that house,” John said.
“Let’s at least go try and see.”
“I’ll come and get you from school tomorrow. Wait on the Thirteenth Street side.” The main reason I wanted to go back to the house was to see if I could get clothes and see if there was anything we could use now.
We went to my old house and saw that they’d put a big padlock on the front door and an orange sticker that read NO TRESPASSING. It wasn’t as bad as I’d thought—it was worse.
The building structure looked sturdy from the outside, but you could see the imprint on the wall where the flames left their mark. Our neighbors were watching us as we looked at our house. I wished they’d go in their own houses. Nobody wants to be looked at, I thought.
“Let’s go around back,” John said. “Maybe we can get in that way. Matter of fact, let’s wait until it gets dark. Nobody won’t see us. I can get Marcus and he can help us. You want to get something to eat?”
“I don’t care.”
We went and ate at Taco Bell. I ordered a Nacho Bell Grande and he had four soft tacos. I carried the food to the table and sat down. John made sure we had napkins.
“Are you okay with that lady?”
“I’m fine, and Bilal and Bubbles seem like they’re having fun. There are a bunch of kids there and she has games. And she has been taking them somewhere every other day. You talked to Mommy?”
“Yeah, she supposed to go to a custody hearing tomorrow.”
After we ate we went to go pick up his friend Marcus. I had only met Marcus a few times before. He would come around, say hi and keep it moving.
“Who’s that?” Marcus asked when he got in the car.
“Man, that’s Kendra, my little sister. Don’t be looking at her.”
“Come on, man, I’m not. She just look different. She grew up. Man, I’m twenty-two.”
“Exactly! She’s only seventeen. What tools did you bring?” he asked.
“I brought this lock cutter my pop had and this sledgehammer.”
“That should work.”
We parked around the corner from my old house.
“Stay in the car,” John told me.
“No, I’m coming with you. We walked to the end of the block and came down the alley. A neighbor’s dog was barking at us but we just ignored it. John climbed the gate and Marcus pushed me over it, then climbed over himself. They took out the sledgehammer and John hit the door twice hard at the lock, and the door popped open. There was no electricity but we’d brought a flashlight to look around. Everything in the kitchen was how we’d left it. Cereal was still on top of the refrigerator and dishes were still in the sink. Just about everything was ruined—there was black soot everywhere. I grabbed trash bags out of the drawer and went to the basement to see if any clothes might be salvageable. Marcus followed me. Everything was still wet from the water the firemen sprayed all through the house. Some of the clothes had already started to mildew, and everything else had a heavy smoke smell, but I managed to find a few things I thought might be okay after they were laundered.
“Come upstairs,” John yelled.
Everything in the living room was destroyed. The steps were just about gone. John took a few things out of his room that weren’t damaged.
The whole ordeal of coming back to the house that I’d lived in my entire life and seeing it basically gone was so devastating that I got depressed. After we left we went to the Laundromat and washed the clothes.
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