Page 14 of It's Me They Follow
She then called Signarama, who said there was no way to replace the awning before her opening in twenty-six days. But they could remove it, and she could push back her opening date. She thought for a good long minute. But she kept hearing ME reading her poem out loud to her:The path with no beginning is worth beginning. The path with no beginning is worth beginning.“Let’s just push forward,” she said to Signarama. “They’ll get the point.”
That evening, after the rain, Signarama sent out a newdelivery driver, who barely acknowledged her presence. He popped the misspelled awning into place while she chewed apples and chugged water and released toxins with ME still hiding in the storage closet. In less than an hour, the driver was done.
“Can you take my picture?” The Shopkeeper said to the installation guy. “Under my awning?” He reached for her phone. “No, you take it with your phone and send it to me.”
He did.
She sent the photo of herself, dripping wet under the awning, to her sister and said, “‘The path with no beginning is worth beginning. It’s worth it to walk, to stomp, to drag, or to DRIP.’” And finally, without speaking, ME left as well.
Chapter 7
JANUARY 7, 2020
12:33 P.M.
The Shopkeeper was out in front of the bookshop the next day, waiting for a pizza delivery guy, when a round woman with a short haircut came up to her and said, “Yo.”
“Yo,” The Shopkeeper responded, looking past the woman for the delivery guy.
“What is this place?” the round woman asked.
“A bookshop,” The Shopkeeper said pointing to her new awning with her customer-service smile.
“A bookshop in Fishtown named after Harriett Tubman. My grandmother would never...” Then she added, “We ain’t a bunch of That Energy,” as though she’d been accused.
DEEP, The Shopkeeper thought.
Legend has it that, once upon a time, The Land of Fishtown was the original tribal meeting place of Indigenous leaders from all across the Americas. The Land of Fishtown was blessed with the prosperity and abundance that fish represent. But of course, That Energy heard there were a lotof fish in this land and a lot of prosperity, and they came and took over. They turned The Land of Fishtown into a fishing village in the 1700s, kicked most of the Indigenous people out, and sold as many fish as they could to build their empire. By 1960, The Land of Fishtown was a tight-knit working-class community of German and Irish Catholics who “weren’t That Energy” but “didn’t like other people”; then drugs took over in the eighties, and by the nineties, it had turned into a wasteland of those who also reminded everyone that they “weren’t That Energy.”
When The Shopkeeper arrived in Philadelphia in the early aughts...
Her sister was introducing her to the city for the first time and said, “You can go anywhere—South Philly, West Philly, Germantown,” but told The Shopkeeper, “Whatever you do, please do not go to Fishtown. It is not safe there because of That Energy.” Her sister continued her warning and asked The Shopkeeper to promise she’d never ever, ever go near The Land of Fishtown.
“My sister, remember Nana used to say, ‘God protects babies and fools,’” The Shopkeeper joked.
Thinking back, The Shopkeeper realized that she first encountered That Energy during her childhood. Her neighborhood had been on the Chesapeake Bay in Hampton, near NASA’s research center. She grew up with friends whose parents studied That Energy for a living, and her house had only been separated from the base by a small canal that wasrumored to swallow bad children and feed them to That Energy for dinner.
She’d had an apple orchard in her backyard. The Shopkeeper would lie out in the yard, reading under the sky—her favorite books had been about nature and the supernatural.
Many of the houses in her neighborhood had the same Stepford style: two stories with a garage and backyard. But across the street from her, in almost the exact same house as hers, had been a Confederate-flag-waving family with knocked knees and motorcycles. The mother was missing three fingers on her right hand, and she was missing the whole bottom row of her teeth—she looked unexplainable, so they called her That Energy.
The Shopkeeper would taunt the two Confederate-flag-waving brothers with middle fingers and rocks because they threw sticks at her and called her names.
“At least my mama got a middle finger,” The Shopkeeper said.
“At least my mama got two ey—” one brother called back until The Shopkeeper looked up from the Harriett book that she had just brought home from the library and cracked him in the forehead with a rock.
“Don’t ever talk about my mama,” The Shopkeeper said.
And just as she was turning the next page, their mother grabbed her by the back of her windbreaker, and that was the last thing The Shopkeeper remembered before she passed out cold. This was the first time she met That Energyup close, and it was the first time that a touch ever put her to sleep. People in the neighborhood said her neighbor had cursed her, but others said it was simply trauma because she hit her head. She thought it had something to do with Harriett.
“Yeah, that’s false what they say about Fishtown,” the round woman continued, missing the fact that The Shopkeeper was in a flashback. “It’s not that we are all That Energy; we just don’t likeotherpeople.”
“That sounds like the definition of—” The Shopkeeper snapped back.
“You should keep the lights on all day and all night in your... bookshop,” the round woman said.
“Why?”
