Patina E-Book

Jason Reynolds

• Herausgeber: Knights Of
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Serie: Run
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 251

Beschreibung

It's not the taking part, it's the winning that counts for Patina! Patty, as she's known to her friends and family, has lost a lot in her life - her dad died when she was young, her mum has lost her legs and now she has to live with her uncle and his wife. On top of that Patty has to go to the poshest school that ever existed. Now her running team has become a relay team and independent "I can do everything by myself" Patty has to work with her team mates to win.

Leseprobe

PATINA

Jason Reynolds

Also by Jason Reynolds

Ghost (in the same series)

For Every One

Long Way Down (Faber)

PATINA

Run: Book 2

Jason Reynolds

Published by the Knights Of

Knights Of Ltd, Registered Offices: 119 Marylebone Road, London, NW1 5PU

www.knightsof.media

First published 2019

002

Written by Jason Reynolds

Text and cover copyright © Jason Reynolds, 2019

Cover art by © Selom Sunu, 2019

First published in the USA by Atheneum, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, Inc,2018

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author and illustrator has been asserted

Typeset design by Marssaié Jordan

Typeset by Laura Jones

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. If you are reading this, thank you for buying our book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book will be available from the British Library

ISBN: PB: 978 1 9996425 5 6

ISBN: ebook: 978 1 913311 59 9

ISBN: ibook: 978 1 913311 88 9

For those who’ve been

passed the baton

too young

PATINA

1

TO DO: Everything(includingforgetting about the race and braiding my sister’s hair)

THERE’S NO SUCH thing as a false start. Because false means fake, and there are no fake starts in track. Either you start or you don’t. Either you run or you don’t. No in-between. Now, there can be a wrong start. That makes more sense to me. Means you just start at the wrong time. Just jump early and break out running with no one there running with you. No competition except for your own brain that swears there’s other people on your heels. But there’s nobody there. Not for real. There’s no chaser. That’s what they really mean when they say false start. A real start at the wrong time. And at the first meet of the season, nobody knew this more than Ghost.

Before the race, me and everybody else stood on the side-lines, clapping and hyping Ghost and Lu up as they took their marks. This was of course after they had already hyped each other up, talking to each other like there was no one else on the track but them. Funny how they went from mean-muggin’ each other when they first met, to becoming all buddy-buddy like they their own two-man gang or something. Lu and Ghost – sticking together like glue. Ha! Glue! Ghost and Lu, Glue. Get it? That could be their corny crew name. Lost would also work. Matter fact, there was a moment where I thought that name might even be more fitting. Especially after what Ghost did.

See, at first, I thought he’d timed it perfectly. I thought Ghost pushed off from the line at the exact moment the gun went off, as if he just knew when it was coming. Like he could feel it on the inside of him or something. But he didn’t hear the second shot. Well, I take that back. Of course, he heard it. It was a loud boom. It was impossible not to hear it. But he didn’t know it meant that he’d jumped too early, that he’d false started. I mean, this was his first race, so he had no clue that that second shot meant to stop running and start over. So . . . he didn’t.

He ran the entire hundred metres. Didn’t know that people weren’t cheering him on, but were yelling for him to pull up, to go back to the starting line. So when he got to the finish line, he threw his hands up in victory and turned around with one of them million-toothed smiles until he noticed all the other runners – his competition – were still up at the top of the track. He looked out into the crowd. Everybody, laughing. Pointing. Shaking their heads, while Ghost dropped his. Stared at the black tar, his chest like someone blowing up a balloon inside him, then letting the air out, then blowing it back up, then letting the air out. I was afraid that balloon was gonna bust. That Ghost would burst open like he used to do when he first joined the team. And I could tell by the way he was chewing on the side of his jaw that he wanted to, or maybe just keep running, off the track, out of the park, all the way home.

Coach walked over to him, whispered something in his ear. I don’t know what it was. But it was probably something like, “It’s okay, it’s okay, settle down, you’re still in it. But if you do it again, you’re disqualified.” Nah, knowing Coach, it was probably something a little more deep, like . . . I don’t know. I can’t even think of nothing right now, but Coach was full of deep. Whatever it was, Ghost lifted his head and trotted back to the line, where Lu was waiting with his hand out for a five. Ghost was still out of breath, but there was no time for him to catch it. He had to get back down on his mark. Get ready to run it all over.

The starter held the gun in the air again. My stomach flipped over again. The man pulled the trigger again. Boom! again. And Ghost took off. Again. It was almost like his legs were sticks of dynamite, and the first run was just the fuse being lit, and now, the tiny fire had gotten to the blow up part. And let me tell you, Ghost . . . blew up. Busted wide open in the best way. I mean, the dude exploded down the line in a blur, even faster this time, his silver shoes like sparks flicking up off the track.

First race. First place.

Even after a false start.

And if a false start means a real start at the wrong time – the wrong time being too early – then I must’ve had a false finish, which also isn’t a fake finish, but a real finish, just . . . too late. Make sense?

Just in case it doesn’t, let me explain.

My race was up next. And here’s the thing, I’ve been running the eight hundred for three years straight. It’s my race. I have a system, a way of running it. I come off the block strong and low and by the time I’m straight up, my stride is steady, but I always allow myself to drop back a little. You know, keeping it cool for the first lap. Pace. That’s where eight-hundred runners blow it. They start out too fast and are tired by the second lap. I’ve seen a lot of girls get roasted out there, showing off on that first four hundred. But I knew better. I knew the second four hundred was the kicker. What I didn’t know, though, was just how fast the girls in this new league were. What kinda shape they were in. So when the gun blew, and we took off, I realised that the pace I had to keep just to stay with the pack was faster than I was used to. But, of course, I’m thinking, these girls are stupid and are gonna be tired in twenty seconds.

In thirty seconds.

In forty seconds.

Never happened, and instead it ended up being me saying to myself, Oh God, I’m tired. How am I tired? And as we rounded into the final two hundred metres, I had to dig deep and step it up. So I turned on the jets.

Here’s how it went.

Cornrows, Low-Cut, Ponytail, and Puny-Tail in front of me. Chop ’em down, Patty. Push, push, push, breathe. Cornrows is on my side now. The crowd is screaming the traditional chant when someone is getting passed – Woooop! Woooop! Woooop! Push. Push. Cornrows is toast. One hundred metres to go. Mouth wide open. Eyes wide open. Stride wide open. Chop ’em down, Patty. Arms pumping, whipping the air out of my way like water. Low-Cut is slowing up. Her little pea-head’s bobbling like it could snap right off. She’s tired. Finally. Woooop! Woooop! Got her. Two more to go. Ponytail can feel me coming. She can probably hear my footsteps over the screaming crowd. She knows I’m close, and then she makes the biggest mistake ever – the one thing every coach tells you to never do – she looked back. See, when you look back, it automatically knocks your stride off and it gets you messed up mentally. And once Ponytail looked over her shoulder, the woooops started back up like a siren. Woooop! Woooop! Woooop! Fifty metres. That’s right, I’m coming. Chop ’em down, Patty. I’m coming. I could see Puny-Tail just ahead of her, that little twist of hair in the back of her head like a snake tongue. She was running out of breath. I could see that by the way her form had broken down. Ponytail was too. We all were. And even worse for me, we were also running out of track.

I got Ponytail by a nose – second place – then collapsed, people cheering all around me, jumping up and down in the stands quickly becoming a wavy blur of colour as the tears rose. Second? Stupid second place? Ugh. No way was I going to cry. Trust me, I wanted to, water pricking at my eyelids, but no way. I wanted to kick something, I was so mad! Coach Whit came over and helped me up, and once I was standing, I yanked away from her and limped over to the bench. My legs were burning and cramping, but I wanted to kick something anyway. Maybe kick the bench over. Kick those stupid orange slices Lu’s mother brought. Anything. But instead I just sat down and didn’t say a word for the rest of the meet. Yes, I’m a sore loser, if that’s what you wanna call it. To me, I just like to win. I only wanna win. Anything else is . . . false. Fake.

But real.

So real, I didn’t even want to talk about it on the way to church the next day. Not with no one. Not even with God. I’d spent all morning braiding Maddy’s hair the same way Ma used to braid mine when I was little. Only difference is Ma got fat fingers and used to be braiding like she was trying to strip my edges or make me bald. Talkin’ ’bout, “Gotta make it tight so it doesn’t come loose.” Right. But I don’t even do Maddy’s that tight, and I can knock out a whole head full of hair in half an hour if she sits still. Which she never does.

“How many more?” Maddy whined, squirming on the floor in front of me.

“I’m almost done. Just chill out, so I can. . .” I picked up the can of beads and shook them in her ear like one of them Spanish shaker things. And just like that, she calmed down and let me tilt her head forward so I could braid the last section, the bit of curls tightly wound at the base of her neck. I dipped my finger in the gunk on the back of my hand, then massaged it into Maddy’s scalp. Then I stroked oil into the leftover bush-ball, tugging it straight, then letting it go, watching it shrink back into dark brown candy floss.

“What colours you want?” I asked, separating the hair into the three parts.

“Ummmm . . .” Maddy put a finger to her chin, acting like she was thinking. I say acting, because she knew what colour she wanted. She picked the same one every week. Matter fact, there was only one colour in the can. “Red,” we both said at the same time, me, of course, with a little more pepper and a little less pep. Maddy tried to whip around and give me a funny face, but I was mid-braid.

“Uh-uh. Stay still.”

Then came the beading. Today, thirty braids. So, three red beads on each braid. Ninety beads. I used tiny bits of tinfoil on the ends to keep the beads from slipping off, even though I knew they would anyway. But who’s got time to use those little rubber bands? Not me. And definitely not Maddy.

When we finished, Maddy did what she always did – ran to the bathroom. I followed her, like I always did, and lifted her up so she could see herself in the mirror. She smiled, her mouth like a piano with only one black key, one front tooth missing. Then Maddy ran back to the living room and blew a kiss at a picture propped up on the table next to the TV – the same picture every time – of me at her age, six, with a big cheese and a missing front tooth and braids, red beads, tinfoil on the ends.

I do Maddy’s hair every Sunday for two reasons. The first is because Mumly can’t do it. If it was up to her, Maddy’s hair would be in two Afro-puffs every day. Either that, or Mumly would’ve shaved it all off by now. It’s not that she doesn’t care. She does. It’s just that she doesn’t know what to do with hair like Maddy’s – like ours. Ma do, but Mumly . . . nope. She never had to deal with nothing like it, and there isn’t any rule book for white people to know how to work with black hair. And her husband, my uncle Tony, he isn’t any help. Ever since they adopted us, every time I talk about Maddy’s hair, Uncle Tony says the same thing – just let it rock. Like he’s gonna sit in the back of Maddy’s class and stink-face all the six-year-old bullies in hair clips. Right. But luckily for everybody, especially Maddy, I know what I’m doing. Been a black girl all my life.

The other reason I always do Maddy’s hair on Sundays is because that’s when we see Ma, and she doesn’t wanna see Maddy looking like “she ain’t never been nowhere.” So after Maddy’s hair is done, we get dressed. As in, dressed up. All the way up. Maddy puts on one of her church dresses, white patent leather shoes that most people only wear on Easter Sunday, but for us – for Ma – every Sunday is like Easter Sunday. I put on a dress too, run a comb through my hair until it cooperates. Ugly black ballerina flats because Ma doesn’t want me “looking fast in the house of the Lord.” Then Mumly drives us across town to Barnaby Terrace, my old neighbourhood.

Barnaby Terrace is . . . fine. I don’t really know what else to say about it except for the fact that there’s nothing really to say about it. Nobody’s rich, that’s for sure. But nobody’s really poor, either. Everybody’s just regular. Regular people going to regular jobs having regular kids who go to regular schools and grow up to be regular people with regular jobs, and on and on. And I guess everything was pretty regular about me, too, until six years ago. Follow me. I’d just turned six, and me and my dad were having one of our famous invisible cupcake parties. Kinda like how little girls on old TV shows be having tea parties, but you know how it doesn’t ever really have tea in the cups? Like that. Except I didn’t have a tea set, and my mum wouldn’t let us use her real teacups, which were really just random coffee mugs, plus my dad always said tea doesn’t even taste good enough to pretend to drink it. He also said “tea” and “eat” are made of the same letters anyway, so pretending to eat was pretty much the same as pretending to drink. And what better thing to pretend to eat than cupcakes. And that’s what we always had – imaginary cupcakes.

But on this night, my mother cut the party short because it was a school night, plus she was pregnant with Maddy at the time and needed my father to massage her feet. So he whispered in my ear, “Sleep tight, sweet Pancake, your mama and the Waffle need me.” Then he kissed me goodnight – first on the forehead, then on one cheek, then on the other cheek. I don’t know what happened next. My guess is that after rubbing Ma’s feet, he kissed her goodnight too. And Maddy, the “Waffle” who was probably being all fidgety in Ma’s stomach. I bet Dad smooched right on the belly button, then rolled over and went to sleep.

But he never woke up.

Like . . . ever.

It was crazy. And if we had been allowed to drink pretend tea from my mother’s real cups, they all would’ve been shattered the next morning after she woke me up, her face wet with tears, and blurted, “Something’s happened.” I would’ve smashed each and every one of them cups on the floor. And I would’ve smashed more of them two years later when my mother had two toes cut off her right foot. And six months after that, when she had that whole foot cut off. And six months after that – three years ago – when my mother had both her legs chopped off, which, I’m telling you, would’ve left the whole stupid cabinet empty. Broken mugs everywhere. Nothing left to drink from.

But I didn’t. Instead I just swallowed it all. And wished this was all some kind of invisible, pretend . . . something. But it wasn’t.

And just so you don’t get the wrong idea, it’s not like my mum just wanted her legs cut off. She got the sugar. Well, it’s really a disease called diabetes, but she calls it the sugar, so I call it the sugar, plus I like that better than diabetes because diabetes got the word “die” in it, and I hate that word. The sugar broke Ma’s lower extremities, which is how doctors say legs. It just went crazy all in her body. Stopped the blood flow to her feet. I used to have to rub and oil them at night, just like my dad used to, and it was like putting lotion on two tree trunks. Dry and cracked. Swollen and dark like she’d been standing in coal. But at some point, she just couldn’t feel them no more, and I went from moisturising them to trying to rub them back to life. And after that, they were basically . . . I guess the best way to explain it is to just say . . . dead. Her feet had died. Like I said, I hate that word, but there’s no other way to say it. And I guess death can travel, can spread like a fire in the body, so the doctors had to go ahead and cut her legs off – they call it “amputate,” which for some reason makes me think of something growing, not something being chopped – just above the knee to keep more of her from dying.

Maddy’s only six now, and ever since she was born, I’d been helping out the best I could with her. But with Ma losing her toes and feet, helping out became straight-up taking care of. I’m talking about keeping lists in my head of things I had to take care of.

TO DO: Make sure Maddy’s bathed.

TO DO: Make sure Maddy’s dressed.

TO DO: Make sure Maddy’s fed.

TO DO: Everything.

But after Ma lost her legs, my godparents – my dad’s brother, Tony, and his wife, Emily – stepped in and took over as our “sole guardians,” which, the first time I heard it, I thought was “soul guardians,” which, I guess, is just as good. Kinda like guardian angels. I bet Uncle Tony and Auntie Emily – who Maddy used to call Mama Emily, which became Mumly – had no idea that when they said they would be our godparents they were inheriting all this drama. I bet they just thought they’d have to give us gifts on random days – days that wasn’t our birthday or Christmas. Slip us ten-dollar bills just because. Stuff like that. Not take care of us, all the way. That’s . . . a lot. But they always acted like they were cool with it – like this is what they signed up for – and we grateful, even though I still gotta look out for Maddy because, you know . . . I just do. I still keep a list in my brain. Plus, Mumly can’t do black hair for nothing.

Why am I telling you this long story?

Oh, I remember.

Because, Sundays. On Sundays, like I said, Maddy’s hair gotta be right. For Ma.

2

TO DO: Dance like my mother’s watching (or like I’m killing roaches)

ONCE WE GET to Ma’s house – our old . . . other house – it goes the same way every time. Maddy jumps out and runs to the door, her red beads clacking with every step, the foil on the ends glinting like each braid was a Fourth of July sparkler. I jump out behind her.

“Only ring it once,” I tell her, just because ringing anybody’s doorbell ten million times is one of Maddy’s favourite things to do. But with Ma, a person who can’t walk, it comes across as a hurry up, which is rude.

“I know, I know,” Maddy says, acting like she wasn’t about to go hammer-time on the doorbell.

“Coming!” Ma’s muffled voice comes through the wooden door. By the time she opens it, Mumly has parked the car and is standing with us, still rubbing sleep off her face, dressed in scrubs and those weird rounders shoes that look too uncomfortable to walk in. But that’s Mumly.

“Praise the Lord,” Ma sings, wheeling the chair back to give us enough space to come inside. Maddy gives the first big hug. She always does, and Ma receives it as if she’d just caught a wedding bouquet.

“Maddy, my Waffle.” Big smile. “Girl, you get bigger every time I see you. And prettier.”

“But you just saw me last week.”

“Yep, and you bigger and prettier,” Ma says, beaming. It’s the same thing every week. You would think they’d switch it up, but they don’t. It’s a routine we all need, I guess. Something to remind us that even though life with Mumly and Uncle Tony is good, Ma is who we are. Where we from. Blood.

Once Maddy gets done gushing, I bend down and give Ma a kiss on the cheek. Her skin is dry, rough on my lips, and I know better than to put any gloss on because that’s also “too fast for church.” She smells like flowers dipped in cake batter. And hair oil. Familiar.

“Hi, baby,” she says, taking my hand.

“Hi, Ma.” I squeeze. She squeezes back.

I wheel Ma – always wearing a colourful, patterned dress, her hair in fresh straw curls – out to the passenger side of the car. She can do it by herself, but I like to do it for her. Just used to it, I guess. Sometimes Mumly tries to help, but she knows this is my thing. Take care of Maddy, then take care of Ma. I open the car door, put the brakes on the chair so it doesn’t roll out from under my mother as she hoists herself up and leans into the car. Then she whips what’s left of her legs in. After that, I check to make sure none of her dress is hanging out. Then I close the door and roll the wheelchair to the back of the car, where I fold it up and put it in the trunk. There’s an art to this, because if I do it wrong, and the wheels of the chair bump up against me, it’ll dirty up my dress, and then I’ll have to hear Ma’s mouth the whole way to church and back about how “cleanliness is next to godliness.” But I always do it right, because ain’t nobody got time for lectures.

Next comes the pre-church small talk.

“So, how was the week?” Ma, who always immediately turns off the car radio (Mumly only listens to talk talk talk anyway), asks Mumly as we back out of the driveway. This, of course, is a real false start, a fake beginning to a conversation, only because Ma and Mumly speak like six thousand times a week. But this was Ma’s way of opening up a discussion in a behind- the-back kind of way, to say whatever she wanted to say to me and Maddy. That way, it doesn’t seem like Mumly’s a snitch. Even though I know Mumly be snitching. I mean, she’s our aunt. And our adopted mother. Blabbing just comes with the territory.

“Nothing crazy to report. Maddy brought home all fours in school.” That was Mumly’s lead-in this week.

“Fours, huh? Is that like an A?” Ma asked this all the time, and I couldn’t tell if she really had a hard time keeping up with the grading system of our charter school or if she was just being shady. She always called the grading system new wave and said things like, Charter doesn’t mean smarter.

Ma cracked the window to let some air in. Mumly’s car always smelled like a freshly scrubbed bathtub. Like . . . clean, but poisonous. Cleanliness was next to godliness, huh? So next to godliness that you might die from it. Maddy and me were used to it, but it irritated Ma every single time she was in the car.

“Yes, Ma. That’s an A, remember?” Maddy piped up from the backseat. Ma didn’t turn around. Just nodded.

“And Patty, well, she’s really doing great on the new track team. Patty, did you bring the ribbon?” I caught Mumly’s eye in the rearview mirror. She knew I ain’t bring no ribbon. What I look like bringing a ribbon to church? I knew what she was doing. But if there was one thing I didn’t want to talk about this Sunday, it was running. Like I said, I’m a sore loser. And petty, too. And now, instantly annoyed.

“I forgot,” I said, flat.

“Well, let me tell you, Bev, she came in second in – ”

“But what about grades? Is she gettin’ fours or fives or whatever?” My mother cut Mumly off mid-brag. Ugh. If there was a second thing I didn’t want to talk about this Sunday, it was school.

“We’re getting there. She’s still getting used to it. Still adjusting.”

The “it” they were talking about was my new school. Up until this year, I was at Barnaby Elementary, then Barnaby Middle, which are both state schools in my old neighbourhood. Ma thought it would be best if I “transitioned smoothly” out of living with her by keeping me at my regular school where all my friends go. Brianna, Deena, and especially my day-one, Ashley, who everybody calls Cotton. Me and Cotton been friends since nursey, back when Lu Richardson’s mother was our babysitter and she used to help us make up dance routines to nineties R & B. Dance routines we still know but I don’t do no more. But Cotton still does. And without me at school with her, who was gonna tape her bathroom dance-offs? Better yet, who was gonna blame her stinky farts on the boys? Who was gonna tell her that her hair is gonna be cute as soon as the curls fall? Maybe Brianna and Deena would, but that wasn’t their job. It was mine. But I couldn’t do it like I needed to because now I was in a different part of the city, somewhat settled into life with Uncle Tony and Mumly, and going to this corny new school they picked – because it was a much shorter drive – over in Sunny Lancaster’s neighbourhood (he’s another newbie on the track team). Which means, from Barnaby Terrace to Bougie Terrace. Well, the school was really called Chester Academy, which was a dead giveaway it was bougie. I mean, the cornballs who named the place thought it was too good to even be called a school. An academy? Whatever. Anyway, being at Chester was . . . different. Like, real different. First of all, we had to wear uniforms. Pleated skirts and stiff button-ups. And it was all girls, and let’s just say, not too many of them had real nicknames. Not too many of them had mothers that smelled like hair oil. Hair gel? Yes. But hair oil? Nah.

“Well, I suggest she get used to it soon, or there won’t be no more running,” Ma said. Mumly caught my eyes again in the mirror. Winked. She knew Ma was hard on me about school, but she also knew I had to run.

As Mumly pulled up in front of the church, she said what she always said every week. “Y’all say a prayer for me and your uncle.”

And my mother said what she always said in response: “Lord knows y’all need it.”

Mumly and Uncle Tony never went to church, but when my mother made the arrangements for me and Maddy to live with them, it was under the condition that we wouldn’t miss a service. A whole lot of talk about grace and faith and mercy and salvation, which, to me, all just equalled shouting, clapping, and singing in a building built to be a sweatbox. A constant reminder that all that hair combing I did before coming was a waste of time, as it was a guarantee that I’d be leaving with my curls shrivelled up into a frizzy lopsided cloud.