Booyah!

When Danny nishes reading Ti any’s latest letter, he sighs, scratches his Afro, and looks out my bedroom window for a long time. I want his reaction because he is the only person I know who doesn’t already have a strong opinion about Ti any. Everyone else is obviously biased—even Cliff.

“So,” I nally say from my bed. I’m sitting with my back against the headboard and my cast propped up on a few pillows. “What do you think I should do?”

Danny sits down, opens up the Parcheesi box, and takes out the hand-painted wooden board and pieces my mother gave me for my birthday. “I feel like being red today,” he says. “What color you want?”

After I pick blue, we set up the board on the little table my mother put in the room for us when I rst came home with a broken leg. We play Parcheesi like we always do when Danny visits, and it becomes obvious that he isn’t going to weigh in with an opinion regarding Ti any, probably because he knows that only I can make this decision—but maybe because he just wants to play the game. He loves Parcheesi more than any man I have ever met, and when he lands on one of my spots and sends one of my pieces back to the start circle, Danny always points at my face and yells, “Booyah!” which makes me laugh because he is so goddamn serious about Parcheesi.

Even though I don’t really enjoy playing Parcheesi as much as Danny does—and he won’t answer any of my questions about Ti any—it’s nice to have him back in my life again.

We play Parcheesi for so many hours—days pass, and my record against Danny grows to 32 wins and 203 losses. Danny is a supreme Parcheesi player, and the best dice roller I have ever met. When he says, “Papa needs a doublet,” he almost always rolls two sixes. Whatever Papa needs, Danny rolls.