Leaving Atlanta Read Online Free Page A

thought that she was of the same caliber as Forsythia Collier; in reality, she didn’t even carry
     a purse. She stuffed whatever she needed into her pockets or in the front flap of her book bag.
    “Oh. I left them at home.”
    Jashante didn’t say anything. He looked at her slowly. Tasha was fragmented as she watched him seeing her. He took in the
     babyfied hairstyle, seeming to count each plastic barrette. Eyes lingered on the faint outline of an undershirt over a chest
     almost ready for a training bra. Her bony wrists, a generic brown with no warming hints of red, sticking out from the too-short
     sleeves of a striped turtle-neck, narrow hips fastened into pink jeans.
    “I gotta go,” she said. “It’s cold out here.” She wanted the sanctity of the girls’ room where she could reassemble herself.
     She walked past him.
    “Say,” he said.
    She pretended not to hear.
    “Say, Fancy Girl. What your name is?”
    By then Tasha had reached the swinging door. She pushed it and went inside. Inside the warm, safe building, she made an effort
     to breathe slowly. She felt tingly, itchy, and warm all at the same time, like she was loosely bound in a wool blanket.
    The television, a small black-and-white with long antennae tipped with foil, was perched on top of the refrigerator. Tasha
     noticed it immediately when she and Shaun came down for dinner.
    “What is that TV doing up there?” she asked. It hadn’t been there an hour earlier, when Tasha had come home still crackling
     from the electricity of her hallway encounter.
    “Surprise,” said Mama.
    “I thought you said we didn’t need a TV in the kitchen.” Her good mood was losing voltage fast.
    “Well,” Mama said, “I knew how much you wanted one. And I saw this one on sale …”
    This was bad, Tasha knew. When she had first brought up the subject of a kitchen television, three years ago, it was after
     she found out that Monica Fisher watched cartoons in the morning while she ate her breakfast. She could imagine Monica giggling
     contentedly as she downed countless bowls of Lucky Charms. Tasha, on the other hand, had to amuse herself by endlessly rereading
     the back of the box of Shredded Wheat. When she brought this inequity to her mother’s attention, her request was unequivocally
     denied.
    “This family,” Mama had sniffed, “
talks
to one another while we are at the table. We don’t need TV to keep us company.”
    “But what about in the morning? We don’t talk then. All you and Daddy do is drink coffee. Me and Shaun end up reading the
     cereal box.”
    “Shaun and I,” Mama corrected, and the case was closed.
    Reversal of opinion was not Mama’s style. This TV thing had to do with the separation. That was obvious. Since Daddy was gone,
     dinner conversation had dwindled to “pass this” and “eat your broccoli.” The TV meant he was not coming back to lively up
     the evening meal with knock-knock jokes or funny stories from work. Daddy was gone for good and in his place was a raggedy
     little TV that probably couldn’t even get Channel Forty-six good.
    And Mama didn’t even let them choose what to look at. She insisted that they watch the news at dinnertime.
    “But we wanna watch
The Flintstones,
” DeShaun whined.
    “No,
The Dating Game,
” Tasha complained.
    “We are watching the news,” Mama said, in her that’s-final voice.
    “But—”
    “But nothing. You need to know what’s going on in the world, or else, white people could reinstate slavery and you wouldn’t
     know it until they came to take you away.”
    That was something that Daddy liked to say. Mama had been doing that a lot lately. Like in the morning when she woke them
     up, she said, “Get ready to greet the world!” instead of “Rise and shine.” It was depressing to hear Mama say Daddy’s lines.
     It was a pitiful substitution, like the time when she lost her shower cap and had to bathe with a freezer bag on her head.
    As it turned out, the news