And before the ruckus could even come, Mrs. Stevens shut it all down.
“Okay. Okay… that’s enough for today!” she said, trying not to laugh herself. There was no need to cut Cynthia off anyway, because the punchline landed at the exact moment the bell rang.
* * *
Cynthia’s mother worked all day and went to school all evening, and when Cynthia was a baby, her mother would rock her to sleep with bedtime stories read out of night school textbooks. She was Cynthia’s hero. A hero too busy to save her. A hero too hardworking to even find time to laugh. But a hero nonetheless. But Cynthia’s grandfather was her superhero. Not in the superhuman sense, but in the way that there was something incredible about him. At least to Cynthia. To almost everyone else, he was just the wild ex-soldier who owned the liquor store right in front of her apartment building. The kind of man who would take a wooden crate, flip it upside down, then step up on it and put on a show. Hold court right there in the middle of the store. Jokes were his superpower. The dirtier the better. Cynthia was even named after him.
His name was Cinder. And whenever he’d introduce himself to people, they’d always ask, “Cinder, like Cinderella?”
And he’d say, “Nah. Cinder, like cinder block.”
But really, he was a bit of both. Had a toughness to him. A hardheaded, hardhanded, hard-talking man. But he was also soft. Soft enough to hold baby Cynthia and stare at her and laugh and laugh like she was the greatest joke ever told. Soft enough to know a good sidekick when he saw one. Soft enough to give her a nickname. Sweetie Say-So. Named her that because of all the goo-goos, gah-gahs, and grunts Cynthia would make whenever Cinder would pick her up. A noisemaker. Always a noisemaker. And Cinder would just salute her and say, “Sweetie, if you say so. If you say so, sweetie.”
Cinder’s girlfriend—a gray-haired, lipsticked, cigarette-smoking mail woman named Miss Fran—would always come by his store to deliver letters and bills, always catching him in the middle of his jokester routines. She’d laugh in this way that made all the bottles in the store rattle. Made all the men jealous of the love thing she and Cinder had. And when she came on Saturdays, she’d always catch Cynthia marching around outside the front of the store—prompted by her grandfather—and Miss Fran would stick stamps on Cynthia’s chubby cheeks and forehead.
“I’m gon’ put you in the mailbox. Ship you off to Ookabooka Land,” she’d tease, and Cynthia would laugh and scream no, as if Ookabooka Land were a real place.
Miss Fran died when Cynthia was seven. Hurt Cynthia to lose the only grandmother she’d ever known, but her sadness was nothing compared to Cinder’s. Seemed like Cinder’s mind floated away with Miss Fran’s spirit and voice. Or maybe it went underground with her body, buried in the cemetery across the street from the liquor store. Cinder could see her gravestone from the window of the fourth-floor unit he and Miss Fran had lived in together, five doors down from where Cynthia lived with her mom.
It wasn’t long after Miss Fran’s death that Cinder closed the liquor store. It wasn’t long after the store closed that it was knocked down. It wasn’t long after it was knocked down that the apartment complex built a playground where it used to be. A sliding board. A set of swings. A seesaw. A stage. Not a big, elaborate stage, just a concrete platform about the size of the wooden crates Cinder used to stand on in the store, a bronze plaque bolted to it that read, CINDER’S BLOCK. Cynthia hoped that maybe he’d step up on it someday. Crack a joke or two. But he never would because it wasn’t long after the store was turned into a playground that Cinder started to forget things. How to turn on the radio. How to work the microwave. And every time something simple would slip his mind, Cynthia would have to come over to help.
“Remind me how to turn on the TV, Say-So. Don’t seem to wanna work for me,” Cinder would say, pointing the case he kept his eyeglasses in at the television screen.
Wasn’t long after Cinder started to forget things that Cynthia and her mother moved down the hall into her grandfather’s two-bedroom apartment. Cinder had his room. And Cynthia and her mother had the other, which meant, most nights, because her always-exhausted mother slept like a woman fighting a bear, Cynthia slept on the couch dreaming of the day she could make her mother laugh. Dreaming of the day she could funny her mother free of all the work, of all the stress she seemed to wear on her face like thick makeup the wrong color for her skin. Dreaming of her mother telling her a joke. Knock knock. And Cynthia replying, Who’s there? And her mother saying, Me. And Cynthia not having to say Me, who?
That’s all Say-So ever wanted. A love thing with her mother, the way her grandfather had with Miss Fran—through laughter. And since her mother was too busy to break, well then, anyone would have to do. A smile is a smile. A ha is a ha. So every day she’d rattle off her jokes at the end of class, bathing in her classmates’ crack-ups.
Including today.
As everyone rushed out of Mrs. Stevens’s class, Cynthia stood at the door handing out flyers. Not the kind that are professionally printed with graphics and lasers and cool shadow effects. These were just pieces of lined notebook paper, ripped into squares (with soggy edges because she believed in the lick and rip method) that said, written in red, SAY-SO LIVE ON CINDER’S BLOCK AT THE SOUTHVIEW APARTMENTS. SHOW STARTS AT 3:33.
“Be there or be… Mr. Fantana’s forever-wedgie,” Cynthia teased. She didn’t know where that one came from, but she let it loose and let it live.
Down the hall she went, stopping at her locker, grabbing her things, and heading for the door, pausing only to tell her friend Gregory Pitts that he smells like his last name. She told him this every day just because… just because. And Greg, knowing it was a joke, flapped his arms like a bird, wafting the pit funk toward her.
“Three thirty-three!” she called out to him. “Be there.”
When she got outside, instead of taking the long way she usually took and walking the way most of the walkers went, which was up to the corner where Ms. Post was, orange-vested, waving cars by, blowing her whistle until her face looked like it would pop, Cynthia walked through the grass and headed around the back of the school to take the shortcut. She could’ve gone through the back door, which would’ve been an even shorter cut, but then she would’ve missed snapping on Greg, and who could avoid the opportunity to roast? Plus, she’d learned from her grandfather a long time ago how important tradition was.
She walked along the side of the school, dragging her fingers on the red brick of the building until she reached the line of trees at the back. Not exactly a forest, just a single line of maples that created a barrier between the school and the road. When Cynthia reached the tree line, the trees thick with limbs that looked less like arms and more like outstretched legs—thick-rooted yoga trees—she hiked her jeans up above her ankles and tiptoed, because the land seemed to always be muddy there.
On the other side of the trees was Carigan Street, known for nothing besides the entrance to the Southview Cemetery. The cemetery had a regal iron gate wrapped around it and took up the entire block. Cynthia, after looking both ways, ran across the street and into the cemetery because through the graveyard was the shortest way home. No point in going around when she could go through. Plus, she had to get giggles for her grandfather.