Suddenly his hands were on my shoulders, pushing me down. “Hey . . .” I said, struggling to sit up. But he was so strong, pulling my legs toward him, until they were dangling out the car door.
I could feel his hands tugging on my shorts. “No!” I cried, gripping my waistband and holding on. “Noooo!”
Mr. John leaned over me with his face near my ear. “Let go, Rabbit,” he said, real low. “I ain’t gonna hurt you. It’s gonna feel nice, like kissing. That’s all I’m gonna do.”
My heart was racing and I felt trapped, pinned down by Mr. John’s words and his big hands all over me. He knelt in the grass and pulled on my shorts. I felt my bare bottom against the car’s leather seat, then his wet mouth between my legs. I grabbed at the hem of my T-shirt, trying to pull it down to cover my privates.
I looked up through the windshield at the leaves against the blue sky high above.
I pretended to fly away.
Afterward, Mr. John took us to Church’s just like he promised. And gave us each a crumpled-up five-dollar bill. “You know I help your mama out so y’all don’t go hungry,” he said, pulling up to the curb in front of our house. “If y’all tell her about this, she’ll be mad. She’ll whoop your ass real good. I won’t be able to come over and help out. Then y’all be hungry for real.” He told us this every time he took us to the cemetery, which he did for years.
Sweetie and I never talked about what Mr. John did to us in the front seat of his El Camino, but I always wondered if Mama noticed what was going on. I wondered if she ever asked herself where her boyfriend took her babies, or what he was paying for with those five-dollar bills. I know Mr. John gave Mama attention and he kept us all fed. Maybe when she looked at him that’s all she wanted to see.
Chapter 6
First Dance
Puberty hit me like a brick to the chest. By the time I was twelve, my face was a mess of acne, and my dried-out Jheri curl looked like somebody set a bowl of burned curly fries on top of my head. To make things worse, I was suddenly busting out all over the place with curves that made my T-shirts stretch tight across my chest. Compared to me, Sweetie had it easy. She had good hair, clear skin, and dimples. She wasn’t just pretty, she was grown. She wore eyeliner and lip gloss, and when she walked she switched her hips in a way that had grown men following her down the street. “Daaaamn, girl!” they’d say. She was only two years older than me, but next to her I was invisible.
As jealous as I was of her good looks, I couldn’t get away from Sweetie even if I wanted to. Mama had moved us again, this time to a one-bedroom duplex on Baldwin Street, and Sweetie and I shared a small room right off the kitchen. By “right off the kitchen,” I mean we were actually in the kitchen. At night, Mama laid a mattress on the floor and hung a thin sheet up to separate our room from the fridge and the stove. If I woke up sweaty in the middle of the night, I could roll over, open the fridge door and stick my head inside to catch a breeze. With Mr. John still messing with me, my personal AC was pretty much the only good thing I had going on.
Back then, Sweetie couldn’t be bothered with me. She was best friend with our cousin Peaches. On Saturday nights, the two of them would smoke Newports, drink forties, and head to the teen dance at the YMCA rec center. Then they’d spend the rest of the week whispering and laughing about all the good times they were having without me. It drove me crazy. All I wanted was for them to let me tag along so I could get out of Mama’s house and have me some fun, too.
“C’mon,” I begged Sweetie one night when the two of them were getting ready to leave, filling our side of the kitchen with the smell of cheap Primo perfume they stole from Woolworths. “Why can’t I go with you?”
I expected her to say the same thing she did every other time I’d asked: “Nah, you too young,” like we weren’t practically the same age. But it turned out to be my lucky night. Sweetie’s boyfriend, Crispy, was bringing along a dude named Fresh, and he didn’t have a girl.
“You can hang out with him,” said Sweetie. “He prolly ugly as fuck anyway. So you two be a perfect match.” Peaches and Sweetie bust out laughing like a couple of hyenas. But I didn’t care, I was gonna get my dance on. I left the kitchen and went into the bathroom to practice my moves in front of the cracked vanity mirror. I could only see myself from the chest up, so I focused on getting the top half of my body right, snaking my neck from side to side, and hoped that the bottom half of my body was following along.
When the boys came by to pick us up later that night, I could see Sweetie wasn’t lying; Fresh was corny as hell. He was rocking a long-in-the-back Lionel Richie Afro and British Knights tennis shoes laced up real tight. “Wut up?” he said, giving me a shy nod.
“Nigga, why your shoes so tight?” I asked, with my hands on my hips. “Your mama tie them like that so they don’t fall off your feet? You look like you take the short bus to school, like you retarded.” Sweetie, Peaches, and their boyfriends, Crispy and Mike, fell out laughing.
“Yo, your sister can jone,” said Crispy. I could tell he was impressed. Joneing—or what old folks called “the dozens” and white people called “being mean”—was a survival skill I’d recently picked up. I learned that if I could crack a joke—about somebody’s musty clothes, nappy hair, stanky breath, or pretty much anything about their mama—before they had a chance to jone on me, folks would leave me alone. I didn’t know all that when Mercedes, Porsha, and them were coming for me. But by the time I hit sixth grade I’d found my secret talent: I had a lot of mouth.
Fresh didn’t talk much on the way to the dance. He just shuffled beside me looking down at his sneakers, while the rest of them walked ahead smoking Newports and trying to act cool. Maybe everything would have been different if I’d stuck with Fresh and his corny ass. He wasn’t a greasy Jheri-curled bad boy like the type my sister went for. He barely had the nerve to look me in the eye; he was harmless. I would have been okay with a boy like that. Instead I met Derrick.
We were a few blocks away from the dance when I first heard the music.
Freaks come out at night
Freaks come out at night
Somebody was blasting Whodini through the open window of a beat-up Chevy Nova, and they were headed our way. “Yo!” the driver yelled. “Yo, Crispy!” He made a U-turn, pulled up beside us, and stepped out of his car.
Crispy gave his friend a pound then turned to us. “This my boy, Derrick,” he said.
Derrick was short, with a chipped front tooth, and wearing tight-ass jeans with stiff creases down the middle of each leg.
“Where y’all headed?” Derrick asked.
“To the dance,” said Mike.
“Oh yeah?” Derrick leaned back on his car.
I watched his eyes move from Crispy to Sweetie to Peaches, then land on me. He eyeballed me like he was dead broke and I was a pay-what-you-can hooker. He cocked his head to the side and stared harder.
“What you looking at?” I asked.