Excerpt from Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"What's your name, boy?"

"Richard. Everybody call me Richie for short. Like it's a joke." He looked at me with his eyebrows raised and a little smile on his face, so small it was only his mouth opening to show his teeth, white and crowding. I didn't get the joke, so he slumped and explained with his spoon. "?'Cause I be stealing. So I'm rich?"

I looked down at my hands. Crumb-clean and still felt like I hadn't eaten.

"It's a joke," he said. So I gave Richie what he wanted. He was just a boy. I laughed.

***

Sometimes I think I understand everything else more than I'll ever understand Leonie. She's at the front door, paper grocery bags obscuring her, hitching the screen and kicking it open, and then edging through the door. Kayla scoots toward me when the door bangs shut; she snatches up her juice cup and sucks before kneading my ear. The little pinch and roll of her fingers almost hurts, but it's her habit, so I swing her up in my arms and let her knead. Mam says she does it for comfort because she never breast-fed. Poor Kayla, Mam sighed every time. Leonie hated when Mam and Pop began calling her Kayla like me. She has a name, Leonie said, and it's her daddy's. She look like a Kayla, Mam said, but Leonie never called her that.

"Hey, Michaela baby," Leonie says.

It's not until I'm standing in the door of the kitchen and see Leonie pulling a small white box out of one of the bags that I realize this is the first year Mam won't be making me a cake for my birthday, and then I feel guilty for realizing it so late in the day. Pop would make the meal, but I should have known that Mam couldn't. She's too sick with the cancer that came and left and returned, steady as the rising and sinking of the marsh water in the bayou with the moon.

"I got you a cake," Leonie says, as if I'm too dumb to know what the box contains. She knows I'm not stupid. She said it herself once, when a teacher called her in to school to talk about my behavior, to tell Leonie: He never speaks in class, but he's still not paying attention. The teacher said it in front of all the children, who were still sitting in their seats waiting to be dismissed for the buses. She assigned me to the frontmost desk in the classroom, the desk nearest the teacher's, where every five minutes, she'd say, Are you paying attention, which inevitably interrupted whatever work I was doing and made it impossible to focus. I was ten then, and had already begun to see things that other kids didn't, like the way my teacher bit her fingernails raw, like the way she sometimes wore so much eye makeup to hide bruising from someone hitting her; I knew what that looked like because both Michael's and Leonie's faces sometimes looked that way after fights. It made me wonder if my teacher had her own Michael. On the day of the conference, Leonie hissed: He ain't stupid. Jojo, let's go. And I winced at the way she used ain't and the way she leaned in to the teacher without even knowing it, and the teacher blinked and stepped away from the latent violence coiled in Leonie's arm, running from her shoulder down to her elbow and to her fist.

Mam always made me red velvet birthday cake. She began when I was one. When I was four, I knew it well enough to ask for it: said red cake and pointed at the picture on the box on the shelf in the grocery store. The cake that Leonie brought is small, about the size of both of my fists together. Blue and pink pastel sprinkles litter the top of the cake, and on the side, two little blue shoes. Leonie sniffs, coughs into her bony forearm, and then pulls out a half gallon of the cheapest ice cream, the kind with a texture like cold gum.

"They didn't have no more birthday cakes. The shoes is blue, so it fits."

Excerpted from Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward. Copyright © 2017 by Jesmyn Ward. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.