“I wasn’t being rude. I just don’t have time for foolishness. Yeah, he still out there looking all pitiful,” Nehemiah’s grandmother says to a voice I barely make out. “Like I care what some boy who still smells like his momma’s milk thinks.” She pauses again. The curtain shivers. A loud huff follows. The door opens, Nehemiah’s grandmother’s backside walks away from me. “Come on in here, boy. I ain’t got all day to mess with you.”

I putter behind her. The inside of the house stirs even more sadness. The house suffers from neglect like no one cares about anything and anger has seeped into the walls. Scuff marks scrape the dingy and chipped paint. Holes in the plaster have been mortared over in crude swatches when covered at all. Chunks are missing from the ceiling tiles. Cracks splinter the doorframes as if they had been kicked in once or twice. The trim around the bathroom door shifts loose. The carpets, which once had been green or tan, are worn to a dull gray.

“Why’d you come around here?” Nehemiah meets me at the end of the hallway, cutting me off from the rest of the house. A bandage wraps his wrist.

“To make sure you’re okay,” I whisper.

“Now you worried?”

The words sting, but I deserve them. Perhaps a part of me still hopes that Nehemiah didn’t see me freeze. Didn’t see the fear on my face. That Nehemiah doesn’t know what it feels like to be completely alone, abandoned even by his best friend. I think that’s part of the reason I had to come. To hear Nehemiah yell at me, saying what he needs to say. He turns on his heel and stalks into the next room.

“Well, well, well. Look who decided to come down from the mountaintop and pay a visit to little ole us.” The source of the mystery voice who kept yelling at Mrs. Johnson is Nehemiah’s mother, Rhianna. Shimmying down the stairs, she acts like she’s not that much older than us and wants to be seen as cute. Not too much older than Nehemiah—she should still be in college or something. I have to admit, she is kind of pretty. Most times, though, she just seems tired. I can almost hear Moms’s voice say that Rhianna can’t make up her mind which person she wants to be:

1. a young woman with a dream she doesn’t know how to make come true. She still has time to go back to school, get a job, get her own place; she just needs to act like a grown-up.

2. a young woman who wants to forget she has a kid and live the life a girl her age should be living. Her world should be all parties and boys.

“This visit can’t make your moms happy.” Rhianna always acts as if there is some beef between her and my mother that I can’t possibly understand. It’s on both sides, since Moms hates for me to be around her. The two of them all but growl whenever they near or mention each other. “You looking to get my boy in more trouble?”