Read Online Who Am I Without Him? by Sharon Flake - Free Book Online

Cool,” Noodles said.
    â€œGet a brain, Noodles.”
    â€œWe could rip off teachers. Take the money right out their purses,” Noodles said.
    E liked that idea but turned it down. He didn’t want to be kicked out of school if they got caught. Then he thought about something Ona had said. People around her way rarely locked their doors and windows. He was telling her about his neighborhood with women walking the street in hot-pink furs and no underwear. She was talking about hers, where people kept big dollars in upstairs drawers for hard times that never seemed to come.
    Later that night, E and Noodles figured out just when and how they’d get the money. Come midnight, E put Noodles out of his house. Said he was going to bed. He couldn’t sleep, though. His brothers kept coughing and snotting. “I shoulda stepped up to the plate a long time ago,” he said to himself. “Shoulda been a man long before now.”
    They noticed it right away: the houses in Green Oak Park looked like small apartment buildings. People had smoking chimneys and pretty green shrubs, even though it was January and frost covered everything.
    Nobody was outside and not too many houses had cars out front. So they walked from house to house, peeking inside, since people didn’t have their shades down or their curtains closed.
    â€œThey live right out in the open,” Noodles said. “You do something like that on Death Row, you gonna get shot just for being stupid.”
    E liked the beige-and-white house with the statue out front. It had a curved brick walkway and a welcome sign out front with the family’s name on it. He walked around back. The rose-colored kitchen was empty. He tried the doorknob. No problem. “People here don’t lock doors, just like Ona said.”
    Noodles went in first. Said if somebody answered, he’d just act like he was in the wrong house. But nobody was home. So they ran upstairs. Dug in the drawers. Made up a rap song when they found $600 in the drawer in the master bedroom. They snatched cupcakes and cinnamon rolls on the way out. Then walked, like nothing was up, all the way out of the neighborhood.
    E gave Noodles half the money. Said he wasn’t doing this anymore. But it felt good when he told Ona that he’d paid for the tickets. It felt good wearing new jeans and sneakers and having kids fuss over him. But the money ran out before he gave his mother any. So two weeks later when Noodles said they should do it again, E was game.
    â€œFriday’s our lucky day,” Noodles said. “So let’s do it again on Friday.”
    Noodles picked the house this time. They walked in, sat on the furniture, and even watched a little TV. E looked around the room, at the shiny white piano and the fluffy cream-colored furniture. “How some people end up with all the money in the world, and other folks end up poor as dirt? Like us.”
    Noodles flipped from channel to channel. “That’s why God gave people a bad gene. So they got the guts to even this money thing out and get some of what other folks got too much of.”
    It made sense, E thought. So he picked up a clear candy dish with pink swans for handles and took it with him when he left. “For Momma,” he said.
    Ona knew that more girls would like E if they saw what she saw in him. But she didn’t know that it would happen so fast. Since he dressed better, the girls spoke to him more, looked at him longer. Ona asked E how he dressed so fly all of a sudden. He lied. Said his mother finally got herself a decent man to take care of their family. She believed him. Didn’t see anything different in him. He still came to class. Did all his homework. Looked at her like he would die without her. He was still E. So she invited him to her house. “’Cause my father won’t let me go to the dance with anyone he hasn’t met.”
    She told him that her dad would pick him