She looked down at me. She had taken off the T-shirt and was just in her bra and jeans now.
“How old are you?” The way she asked it sounded more like an accusation than a question. “You could pass for eighteen, but you sound like a kid when you open your mouth.”
I looked down at the new body I had developed since first meeting James back in the fall. Did I really look eighteen now? I had felt like a woman when I had seen myself in that yellow dress for the first time. But after the Farrell Manor Incident, I saw a child playing dress-up when I looked at myself in the mirror again.
Maybe sometimes I looked like a woman and sometimes I looked like a child, depending on the circumstance.
And in this circumstance, Mama Jane was confirming what my health textbook had promised: My body had developed from girl to young woman. Unfortunately, that didn’t erase the fact that I was still a minor.
I answered Mama Jane with book knowledge, being totally and utterly without street knowledge. “If the police pull you over, you’re not going to want to know how old I am. I don’t have any ID, so there’s no way for them to tell, unless they find my birth certificate. But I’ve got that hidden real well.”
Mama Jane kept on standing over me. “If the police pull me over?” she repeated. “I thought you said your mama wasn’t going to look for you.”
“She isn’t. I’m talking hypothetically.”
She looked at me. “You got some big words for a little girl I found in the boonies.”
I got quiet then. I could feel her anger, hot like Cora’s, coming off of her. But I didn’t know what to do about it or what I had said to cause it. I wanted to become like the soft white girls on television. Wanted to whine, “Are you angry at me?” Wanted to gaze at her with beseeching eyes until she started being nice to me again. But I was loath to say anything else at this point. And my beseeching stare was hit or miss, considering that I hadn’t spent a lot of time practicing it.
So I stared at my feet.
On the edges of my vision, I could see her go sit on the bed.
“I like women. You know what I mean when I say that?”
I nodded my head.
But that wasn’t enough for her. “Say it then, so I know you understand it.”
I thought of telling her about The Color Purple. How I knew all about the love that could happen between Southern black women, since I had read it about a thousand times. Instead I just said, “You’re a lesbian.”
“Yeah, I’m a lesbian.” She was pulling off her shoes now. Dirty white New Balance tennis shoes that had seen better days. “And you cute, so that’s going to make this trip a little harder for me. But I’m pretty sure you a minor. Plus, you don’t need a lover right at this moment. You need a decent mama. So you and me ain’t going to happen, okay?”
Later, when I looked back on this conversation, I would feel intense love for Mama Jane for not taking advantage of the position I was in. I liked men and until that point James exclusively, but if she had asked me for my body, I would have given it to her. And I would have thought that it was more than a fair trade for her facilitating my escape from Glass.
I wouldn’t properly appreciate the danger I had put myself in by traveling across the country with a woman I didn’t know until I grew up and really examined my life. Though my picking-a-woman logic had felt one hundred percent sound, the fact was I still could have been raped, mugged, or killed—my first sexual experience could have been completely commercial. Later, I would review those three days of my life and feel such profound relief and gratitude that I had survived them with my body and soul intact.
At the time, though, I didn’t feel any of that.
I was only fifteen.