“I don’t want to depend on anyone else for my happiness. I always used to hate my mother for not letting me mix wid certain people. But after seeing fah myself what hopelessness really looks like, I realize why. She was trying to save me.”
Charles is very quiet, so quiet Thandi thinks she can hear her own heartbeat. “All right, then. Ah get it.”
“Charles. I’m sorry.”
“No apologies necessary. Ah can’t blame yuh. I’m nothin’ but a hopeless street yout’. It’s funny, because ah kinda know dat one day you’d come to yuh senses. Ah fool myself into thinking yuh was a different type of girl, dat you’d be above dem t’ings an’ jus’ follow yuh heart.” He’s shaking his head and peering at his dusty old shoes where she can see his big toe. Thandi begins to wish that she never said anything. He’s not looking at her anymore. His shoulders are rounded and his eyes are trained on the small pebble he kicks with one foot.
“Well, ah hope dem people deh worth mixing wid,” he says.
The disgust that she sees on his face when he turns to leave fills her with disgust too. It’s disgust from trying so hard to fit in with everyone else. Where has it gotten her? She likes herself when she’s with him. With him she doesn’t fumble over herself to be someone she’s not. She remembers the day on the beach when he risked his own life to save her; the times afterward, when he told her that she’s beautiful.
Charles is several feet away, his head still down as he walks in the direction of the hill. “Charles!” she hears herself shout. Saint Emmanuel girls are warned against raising their voices in public. The world should see them as quiet vessels of God. But Thandi throws all this away when she runs after him. “Charles!” As she jogs, her bookbag slaps her back with its heavy weight. She lowers her umbrella; the sun is in her face, but she doesn’t care. She’s aware of the people watching, some stopping to let her pass. “Charles!” she calls in a panic. He continues to walk through the crowd. Only the back of his head is visible. Thandi picks up speed, knowing deep down that if she doesn’t reach him, something inside her will crumble. “Charles!” Her voice is shrill, naked, broken. He stops. When he turns, she runs right into him. Her face is pressed to his chest, and she allows herself to be held by him, inhaling his ripe pawpaw smell. She imagines how it looks for her to be carrying on this way in public, but doesn’t care. She’s too tired to care.
“Thought yuh was in a hurry to get somewhere,” he whispers quietly into the top of her head.
He takes her to his zinc shed. They pass the main shack, where his mother is probably staring at the ceiling, debilitated by the one thing Thandi now knows intimately—yearning. Charles takes off her clothes. He’s gentle. The panic and desperation she felt earlier makes her willing to take him as he is—uncultivated, uneducated, unkempt, hard.
“Let me put it in, jus’ a likkle,” he whispers in her ear. She lies down on his bed, her back on the cool, rumpled sheet in complete surrender to this boy—the type of boy she was sheltered from. She opens up for him, but Clover appears in her mind. It’s his breathing she hears; his rough kisses that she feels down her neck; his touch that makes her muscles clench like a tight fist. And that pulling and tugging and grunting to get inside, all of that his. She writhes with this memory, thrashing her limbs, her nails digging inside flesh, her teeth pressing into an earlobe. There’s a sharp yelp. Clover is restraining her. Thandi spits in his face and screams until she’s weak and exhausted.
When she opens her eyes a few minutes later, Charles has moved away from her to the other side of the bed, his naked body perched on the edge like a gargoyle in repose, his penis flaccid between his legs. He’s staring at her, his pupils holding in them so many things that she cannot read, mostly questions. Pieces of his skin are under her nails, the moisture of his blood fresh on their tips. What has she done? In the silence he rolls a spliff and smokes it. He doesn’t bother to tell her to get dressed, though she lies there naked, trembling, and covered in sweat. There’s a cut over one of his eyebrows. Another one on his right cheek. A couple scratches on his arms and, she’s sure, on his back. She reaches to touch him, but he flinches.
He lights the wick of the small kerosene lamp by the bed with a flick of his lighter. The lamp glows inside the shed. Thandi rests her head in the crook of her elbow and studies him in this light. A single tear runs across the bridge of her nose. “I’m sorry,” she says finally.