We dismissed the students at three thirty p.m. each day. I rarely left before five, though. I enjoyed hanging around to help tidy up the classrooms, plan the activities for the next day, and sometimes just to chitchat with my coworkers. Today I was anxious to get home so I could visit Yvonne and Milton. They were nothing like Odell and me, but they were fun and entertaining. Like some of the offbeat characters in the novels I read, I had grown attached to them. Besides that, they were so woefully ignorant, they made me feel smarter. The thing I didn’t like was that every time I talked down to Yvonne, she responded by saying something that made me feel bad. I didn’t let that bother me because Odell and I were way above them in so many ways.

As I was about to gather my things and leave, our principal wanted to have a short meeting to discuss our upcoming Thanksgiving program. Patsy Boykin, one of the other teacher’s aides, couldn’t stay because one of her kids was sick. Whenever she couldn’t give me a ride to and from work, I either walked or took the bus. I didn’t feel like walking today. And knowing how much Odell had on his plate, I didn’t want to call him back and ask him to give me a ride home before he went to visit his daddy.

Immediately after the meeting ended at four fifteen, I collected my purse and coat from the cloakroom and left the building running. Since I am six feet tall, my legs are so long it didn’t take but a couple of minutes to get to the bus stop four blocks away. Now all I had to worry about was walking past my parents’ house to get to mine on the same street a few blocks away without them seeing me. I didn’t want them to slow me down. Mama and Daddy spent so much time gazing out their living-room window, one of them would see me for sure. That was the reason I took the back way to get home after I got off the bus. I rushed down the alley behind the houses on our block, proud of myself for outsmarting my nosy parents. The moment I reached their house, Mama pranced out onto her back porch.

“Joyce, why you walking so fast and coming in through the back way? You know about all them lizards and weevils hiding in them tall bushes along the way this time of year,” she yelled, shading her eyes and looking at me like I was crazy.

I stopped and started shifting my weight from one foot to the other. “Um, taking this way gets me home a few minutes earlier,” I explained.

“Why you in such a hurry to get home on a Friday when you know Odell ain’t there?”