She says she’s coming.
I hear someone calling my name, and I think it’s her or Donna. But when I turn around, I see Tonesha with five other girls approaching the bus stop.
“Oh, shit!” Tammie whispers.
“That’s her right there,” Tonesha says to the girl walking next to her.
The other girl is about my height, my weight, and has on all black. She’s wearing a hood that covers most of her face.
“Hey, Fabulous! This is my cousin Raquel. Y’all can talk about Kasim, woman to woman,” Tonesha says.
This Raquel doesn’t say anything.
So I say, “Okay. . . .”
“You messin’ with Kasim?” Raquel finally asks.
“Yes, he’s my boyfriend,” I say, and wish that I knew a cooler word than boyfriend.
“And did you call my cousin a bitch?” Raquel gets closer to me.
“She called me a bitch, too!” I shout. “And she had an attitude!”
“No, you have a fucking attitude. So I’ma call you a bitch, then.” She steps closer to my face. “And I don’t care who your fucking cousins are. The Three Bees aren’t here to save you. You started this shit. So let’s squash it right here, right now.”
“Keep my cousins’ mouth out of your name!” I shout. I’ve heard my cousins say this, but it’s the first time that I’ve tried to wrap this curse around my tongue and I say it all wrong.
Tonesha and Raquel and their three friends laugh at me. I hear the kids around the bus stop giggle, too.
I try again. “Keep my cousins’ name out of your mouth, bitch!”
Tonesha is the first to step closer to me. “Yo, call me a bitch one more fucking time and see if I don’t drag you across this sidewalk just like Dray be dragging your cousin with her cheap-ass weave all over Detroit. Go ’head. Try me.”
“And you could keep Kasim and his broke ass,” Raquel says. She moves her head so much that it looks like it will fall off. She’s so close to my face that I can smell today’s lunch on her breath. So the first thing I do is put my hand in her face. She slaps it away.
With that, I am hot red again. I am burning coals. I am a sharp dagger and Scotch bonnet peppers in rum. I am a volcano. I am Ezili-Danto. Everything—Haiti, my mother, my cousins, my aunt, the house, school, Kasim, the detective, Dray, America—comes to a boil: sizzling and popping and oozing hot, red lava. I clench my fist and punch her in the face. She punches me back. Then the punches come fast and hard. I’ve been here before—fighting when someone tries to steal my money, fighting when someone tries to cheat my mother out of her money, fighting jealous girls, fighting boys off me, fighting men off my mother. Fighting. Fighting. Fighting.
Someone starts pulling my hair. It’s Tonesha. I’m fighting two girls now. And I hear everyone else around me with their “Oh, shit!” and “Fuck her up, Fabulous!” and “Where Pri at?”
Darkness. Not black, but red. Like blood from the deepest part of being alive. It pumps fire—hot, sizzling in the pit of my stomach. I want to destroy her. Destroy them. Destroy everything. I don’t even feel my fists pounding on faces, on bodies, the hair being pulled from my scalp, the fingernails across my own face, the pounding on my back. Maybe I punch concrete, too. I don’t know because the red is so hot it numbs me. Maybe I’m fighting the wind, this place called Detroit, my cousins and their walls, the prison that keeps my mother, my broken home country floating in the middle of a sinking sea. Then the hot red wraps its fiery hands around my throat, and I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe.
TWENTY-SIX
EVERYTHING HURTS—MY HEAD, my hands, my neck, my shoulders. My scalp, ears, and face burn, and Donna is pressing something cold against my forehead. I wish Pri and Donna would just shut up, but they’re cursing and asking me too many questions. I can’t understand anything they’re saying because the hot red color has cooled off and is now a dull pink that makes me just want to rest my pounding head and sleep.
“Fabiola,” someone says, and it’s not one of my cousins. It’s Ms. Stanley, the principal. “We’re going to have to speak with your aunt. She’ll need to come in next week after your suspension ends.”
“But Ms. Stanley, Tonesha instigated the whole thing,” Donna protests.
“That’s why she’s suspended for a whole week. And Fabiola only gets three days.”
“Oh, come on, Stan, it wasn’t even in school,” Pri says.
“You know better than that, Pri. If it involves two students within a few yards of the school, then fighting is grounds for suspension,” Ms. Stanley says.