“BUT YOU KEPT YOUR FINGERS CROSSED, right?” Mo demanded.
“Of course! What kind of traitor do you think I am?”
“So it doesn’t count!”
Mercedes threw her hands over her eyes as if she couldn’t bear looking at Mo a second longer. “You insist on searching for a bright side, no matter what.”
Mo shrank back like a poked pill bug. “Something wrong with that?”
“You don’t get it!” Exasperation zapped Mercedes’s voice. “Sometimes there is no bright side. Okay? Da’s getting old! Understand? She’s only got six toes.”
“But…but she gets around fine on those…” “Stumps” stuck in Mo’s throat.
“Sugar’s a treacherous disease,” Mercedes lectured. “You can lose your leg if you’re not careful.”
A bad taste rose in the back of Mo’s mouth. A taste that, if it had a color, would be greenish black.
“Monette says Da shouldn’t be on her own anymore. Her pension’s not big, and she’s got too much to worry about between her health and taking care of the house.” Mercedes waved her hands in the air. “Not that I agree, but my bedroom? Monster water stains down the walls. It even kind of…smells. You know how Da is about cleanliness! That leak in her roof must have gotten bigger. If it rains…”
“It’s not going to,” the Wild Child said soothingly. “Daddy says it’s a freaking trout.”
“Drought!”
Mercedes sank her poor head into her hands. “It feels like everything’s falling apart here.”
“Feels!” Mo was on her feet. “Another measly word, just like ‘looks’! Nothing to do with the real, actual truth!”
“Go ahead,” said Mercedes from behind her hands. “Philosophize away. Be my guest.”
“Let me think.”
Mo concentrated. She fed a chip crumb to a passing ant, who immediately began dragging it home to share. Share. A meteor shower lit up her mind.
“Your mom can move up here!” Mo cried. “Three-C’s got oodles of money-let him fix up Da’s house. He’s a lawyer-he can get a job here easy. And your mom can go to Cleveland State, and we’ll all live here together. You and I will be in the same class at school!” Shooting stars, zing, zing! “Just like we always wished, Merce! Sleepovers every weekend! You and me, twenty-four seven! It’s been nice to know you, Greyhound bus!”
Dottie bent her knees and pretended to stir a big pot. “The dance of victory!” she proclaimed.
But Mercedes shook her head. “Don’t you think I already tried that?”
The stars began to fade.
“Monette will never come back. She said good-bye to Fox Street because she’d made a mistake-namely, getting pregnant with me.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Mo protested. “Nobody thinks you’re a mistake. Not anymore.”
Mercedes smiled. “Thanks, Mo.”
“It’s true! Why does Monette have to be like that? It’s too dumb!”
“When she lived here, everybody was so proud of her. After they got over their witless shock at a black family moving onto the street, everybody acknowledged she was brilliant, and stellar, and so excellent at so many things-”
“Like you.”
Mercedes smiled again. Mo knew all the stories about Monette-how people predicted she’d go to Harvard, or Hollywood, or who knows.
“Everyone pinned their hopes on her,” Mercedes went on. “Well, maybe not Starchbutt. As if she counts.” Mercedes bit her lip. “I’d run out of fingers and toes if I tried to count the number of times circumstances have gotten really, really low and I said, ‘You know, Monette, we could always move back in with Da.’ She always tells me, ‘No, we can’t. Retreating to Fox Street would be a giant step backward.’”
“I can walk backward. Want to see?” Dottie demonstrated.
Heavyhearted, Mo closed the toolbox and snapped shut the combination lock. They trudged back up the hill. On Fox Street, Ms. Hugg, the piano teacher, perched on her pink steps, painting her toenails the same purple as the streak in her hair. The younger Baggott boys were tearing around the A.O.L. (Absolutely Off Limits) House, machine gunning one another with sticks. As the girls approached, Pi Baggott executed a perfect 180 across the Crater.
“That was for your benefit, Mo,” said Mercedes, striding on. “That boy is stupefied with love.”
Mo tripped over her own feet.
“Shows what you know, Mercedes Walcott.”
“Unless he’s stupefied, period.”
“All he loves is his skateboard!”
“A blind man could see it.”
Mo snuck a glance over her shoulder. Pi stood on the edge of the pothole, and when their eyes met, his lips curved. Those lips! They were the one soft thing in that long skinny face. It was as if Pi Baggott had another, gentler side he couldn’t manage to keep secret.
Not that Mo liked secrets.
Up on Mrs. Petrone’s porch, the hair trimmer hummed like a bee in your worst nightmare. Mrs. P was giving her boy Nickie his summer buzz cut and waved as they went by.
“Welcome home, Mercedes! Nice hairstyle!”
By now Mercedes’s long legs had carried her far ahead of Mo, and she wasn’t slowing down. Mo fixed her eyes on her friend’s arrow-straight spine. Mercedes was no traitor-she was caught between a rock and a hard place, that was all. Mo dug her fists into the pockets of her shorts. There could be absolutely, positively, without a shadow of a doubt, no question where Mercedes’s loyalty lay.
Fox Street without Da and Mercedes? The only thing harder to imagine was Fox Street without the Wrens.