Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks

Chapter 4 opens with a look into the life of Fatima Moss, who “talks to only one person on her way home from school” (61). Fatima keeps a list of all the things that have changed or stayed the same since last talking to that one person. The list includes the length of the school bell’s ring, her classmates’ antics, and various other details of her daily life. She observes her environment closely and chronicles them in her notebook. Fatima even measures how many steps it takes for her to move from destination to destination. She references the title of the novel and shares that, even when reaching a one-way street, “I still look both ways” (64). In her list, Fatima wonders “if all the houses are empty like mine” (65).

Fatima meets Benni Austin, an odd older woman, at their usual spot. Benni likes to sing “old songs like they’re new songs” (66). Fatima recounts her first meeting with Benni on her first day walking to school. On this first day, as Fatima attempts to follow her parents’ “strict instructions on what to do and which way to go” (66), she falls over a crack in the sidewalk and lands hard on the pavement. As she struggles to pick herself up, a school bus passes. Fatima observes one boy on the school bus with “thick ropes of hair sprouting from his head like antennae” who does not laugh at her like the other students and hides his face behind a notebook (67). Benni emerges on the sidewalk after this encounter, “[…] bopping up the street, pumping her arms as if banging on the biggest invisible drum set ever imagined” (68). After noticing Fatima flinch at her screaming, Benni “just stopped, dead in her tracks in the middle of the sidewalk, her face become loose, sloshy” (68).

Fatima does not tell her mother about her bizarre encounter with Benni because she fears it “would be the end of a babysitterless life” (69). Fatima likes to be alone after school and “pretend to be a flight attendant like her father” (69). Fatima attempts to be more careful the next day as she returns to her same route home from school. A rainstorm “drenched her in seconds” (70). She observes the same school bus as yesterday full of mocking riders, and the same boy with “no jokes in his eyes” and the notebook covering his face (71). Benni appears once again and offers Fatima an umbrella, which she pretends is a guitar.

Inspired by the boy with the notebook and how the notebook “somehow made him feel safer,” Fatima decides to use a notebook herself “to write down things in her life so she could pay attention to how they stayed the same and know whenever they changed” (72). She also recalls how her mother, an environmental scientist, taught her to complete the same process during her science experiments a year earlier. Fatima begins to record her experiences the next day. Fatima quickly notices that Benni “stayed the same in that she’s changed every. Single. Day” (73).

In present day, Benni accompanies Fatima on their routine walk home. Benni sings and then begins to scream repeatedly, “‘How you gon’ change the world? How you gon’ change the world? How you gon’ change the world?!’” (74). Fatima ignores Benni until Benni stops walking and asks Fatima the question one more time. She tells Benni that “I don’t know how to change the world” (75). She thinks about her homework assignment for the night, which asks her to write about being something else. She asks Benni if she can borrow one of her instruments.