Who Am I Without Him? by Sharon Flake Page A

head. Told himself to give the money back, but he didn’t. He bought a piece of pizza and a drink, then listened to Noodles say how he was gonna get that girl to buy him some new sneakers and take him out a few times.
    On the bus ride home, E wondered what Ona and her family did on weekends. On Mondays, she always seemed to have on some new outfit or a new piece of jewelry. E always looked the same: jeans, run-over sneakers, and a coat with sleeves much too short.
    â€œThat’s how it is when you got eight brothers and sisters,” he once told a boy after he’d cracked on the hole in his shirt. Two days later, E stole some jeans off a clothesline in the backyard near his school. Now every year before school started, he stole one pair of jeans. Even so, kids still teased him about his clothes. But not Ona. She never seemed to notice. E never told his boys, but he dreamed about that girl at night. The dreams always ended the same, too—with Ona and him kissing and holding each other tight.
    Ona knew better than to be making eyes at a boy like E.
    â€œDirt poor,” her friends called him behind his back.
    But Ona liked him anyway. Figured you could always make a nice person look like something. But a no-class knucklehead like Noodles is gonna be just that, no matter how much you dress him up, she thought.
    Over the weekend, she finally did what she’d been wanting to do. She got her sister Brenda to drive her past E’s house. She’d never seen anything like it. “A shack,” Brenda called it. Her boyfriend said the fire marshal should condemn the whole block, then strike a match and keep on walking.
    â€œSee?” Brenda said. “You never know who you’re gonna sit next to when you go to a public school.”
    Brenda was in her second year of college. She’d gone to private school all her life. So had their older brother, Melvin. By the time Ona came along, her parents had softened. They told her she could go to high school wherever she liked, as long as the school had a good reputation and a scholars’ track for really smart kids.
    E wasn’t in the scholars’ program. But he and Ona still had a few classes together: art, music, and civics. Since their last names started with the same initial (hers was Bleton, his Boven), they always ended up sitting next to each other. She liked him right away. When she slipped and fell the first day of class, he was the only one who didn’t laugh.
    She noticed him at lunch. Not eating or drinking. Stuck over in the corner reading, unless Noodlehead Noodles was messing with him. She saw his outdated clothes and high-water pants, his perfect teeth and chestnut-brown skin.
    â€œLoser,” her friends had said, when she’d first said she liked him.
    â€œHe’s cute,” she’d told them.
    Maria whispered, but she’d meant for E to hear. “He lives on Death Row. Gonna be on Death Row for real one day, too.”
    Every night Ona took out E’s picture—the one she’d taken from his notebook when he wasn’t looking—and kissed him good night. “Ask me to the homecoming dance,” she’d say to the picture. “Ask me, and just watch if I don’t say yes.”
    In civics, E leaned over and asked Ona if she had a pencil. She gave him one that her dad had bought from a New York City bookstore for $8. “Keep it,” she said, twisting her hair.
    E sniffed. Ona smelled good, like always. He touched the tip of her soft brown hair and wondered what it would be like to dance with her. Slow dance. In a nice place, not in the basement of the school where the kids stank with sweat and danced like they were already in bed.
    Ona tried to be cool. To act like she wasn’t about to jump out of her skin ’cause E was so close to her. But she couldn’t help it. Her fingers were shaking. Her eyes blinked more than they should. “I . . .” Ona couldn’t