After outrunning Stacia, something strange started happening by the time I got to the seventh floor. It was like what I saw got blotted out by white lights, and then I missed a step, slid down a few more, and landed at the bottom of the stairs. I was on my feet, but still unbalanced. I stood up straight, but everything looked cloudy, like I was in a dream. I tried to walk down the rest of the stairs, really looking at each foot placement, but the world continued to appear hazy.

I started to worry that maybe I was high. Stacia always talked about contact highs, and how if you breathed in the weed in the air, you could feel it. I didn’t think weed made you dizzy, but I didn’t really know. When I got to the third floor, I looked down the porch at my door, but went the other way. I didn’t feel well, like my breakfast was on its way up. I wanted my brother in that moment, someone safe and comforting. If Mama saw me, she’d ask me too many questions, and I’d let something slip about the Buchanans and be in trouble.

I got the idea to go down to Mama Pearl’s. Mama Pearl was a lot like my grandma who had died before I was in kindergarten, though I never treated her like my grandma. She was more like an aunt, but that’s not quite right either. That summer, she became my friend. I could count on her to tell me things, real things, to hold nothing back.

You couldn’t get Mama Pearl to talk bad about Grandma, but I knew that she hated my grandfather and how Grandma got married and stopped talking to her for a long time. Mama Pearl still wore wigs that had the same hairstyle Grandma had in all her pictures. They even talked the same, saying things like “Baby, retch around that chair and gimme a blanket,” or “I reckon so,” instead of “Yes.”

It was Saturday afternoon, and I knew she’d be home from church, napping or sitting in her recliner. Just like Grandma, she grew up Seventh-day Adventist, so her holy day was Friday night to Saturday night. When you went to her house between those times, she’d let you in, but you couldn’t turn on the TV or get her to take you to the store. She sat there with her Bible or little books about God. If you were quiet long enough, she’d start humming a church hymn.

I knew what I was walking into. It wasn’t bad; it just wasn’t what we did in my house. After Grandma died, Mama stopped going to church, so God was a big mystery to me.