Keeping Up With the Wind: A 'Burban Tale by Suleyma Moon

11.

            This time when I woke up, my whole body was sore. I sat up slowly and worked the crick out of my neck. Looking around, I found that Li'l Jay had disappeared and Whisper had magically appeared in his place. She was sitting patiently in a chair watching The Oprah Winfrey Show. This kind of thing always happened in my room.

            I looked at her and smiled. "Where is he?"

            Her eyes never left the television screen. "Who?"

            "Li'l Jay."

            "Oh. He went down to the spot," meaning the bridge.

            I rubbed my sore head. "He has to go home."

            "Wow! You're banged up pretty bad! You ok?"

            "Never better," I answered sarcastically, then quickly tried to come up with a convincing story. "I...fell out of the window." With a forced chuckle, I added, "You should have seen it..."

            Whisper, sensing that I might just go on forever, quickly interrupted me. "Shadow told me to come and get you."

            "Shadow! You saw him?"

            "He told us what Johnny did," she said, nodding to my face. "Ace is gonna flip when he sees that. You shoulda seen him when Li'l Jay told him you were hurt." She paused, waiting for my reaction.

I didn't have one and sat forward, waiting for her to spit it out.

"He jumped up and started yelling about where the hell Li'l Jay had been, but the kid just looked away. We figured that he must have been off somewhere gettin' blowed, as usual, right?"

Again, I remained silent. I didn't even want to go there in my own mind, much less with her, about how Jay had brought a whole new dimension to the word "blowed" last night. I wished she would hurry up and get to the point.

"Then Ace started going off about how he was going to kill Shadow...because, you know, he still thinks Shadow's the one that hit you at Magic Island...and then Li'l Jay told us the whole story and said that we had to find him. Ace didn't even hear Jay for a good five minutes. And that was after he had already broken a bottle and started heading for the door.

I let out an overdramatic sigh, not quite sure whether I was being funny or serious. "I need to get some new friends. Y'all fools are too high strung, always lookin' to jack somebody up all the time. I mean...whatever happened to all the love in this world?"

It was a half-hearted joke, but I still couldn't shake the feeling that whatever happened from that point on would be all my fault.

Whisper looked at me a little more closely, suspicious of the lulling sound in my voice. "You didn't let Li'l Jay...fix you, did you?"

"Oh, no..." I waved my hand fluidly, causing Whisper even more reason to be suspicious.

"You must have lost more blood than I thought. Li'l Jay said that Johnny was banging your head up against a tree trunk when he found you."

Oh, so that's what happened!

 "Anyway, Li'l Jay was finally getting the whole story out when all of a sudden Faith looked up at the door. We all looked over at her, then at the door. Shadow was leaned up against the frame like he had been standing there the whole time, listening." A devious glint came into her eye. "Girl, he looked good!" She smiled and nodded approvingly. "There's no telling how long he was standing there, just watching everyone like he always does. It was so bright when the door first opened, all we could see was that shadow around him." She looked at me and made an outline with her fingers, forming a silhouette. "That shadow thing around him...that...you know what I'm talking about..."