“At you!” he said. “You got a big ole butt.”
“Fuck you, you dumb-ass,” I shot back. “Your pants is so stiff if you bend down you gonna break both your legs. Robot-looking muthafucka.”
For a second nobody said anything. Then Derrick bust out laughing: “Damn! Girl, you crazy!”
“Yeah,” said Fresh. “Her ass crazy as hell.”
I guess “crazy” was Derrick’s type, because the next thing I knew he was telling us all to get in his car so he could drive us to the dance. “You sit up front,” he said, grabbing my arm. “You gonna ride with me.”
The dance was on fire. It was the summer of 1984, the early days of hip-hop, and the rec center was filled with kids locking, popping, and uprocking. “Candy Girl” came on and Peaches, Sweetie, and all their friends busted out the Cabbage Patch, which they’d been practicing to perfection. I did my signature move, the snake, rolling my body from side to side. But it was Derrick who stole the show. That boy could moonwalk just like Michael and pop the splits better than James Brown. I was checking him out from the corner of my eye when “Purple Rain” came on and suddenly he was grabbing me from behind and humping my ass like a dog in heat.
“Get the fuck off me,” I yelled, peeling his hands off my butt. He just laughed and humped me some more.
“Purple raaaaaaaain,” he sang in my ear, pulling me close.
At the end of the night, Derrick told everybody he was going to drive me home. “She not gonna do nothing,” Sweetie said, leaning her head into the driver’s-side window. “She’s a virgin.” She laughed, grabbed Crispy’s hand, and wrapped his arm over her shoulder. You could tell by the way the two of them were walking down the street, hugged up like they were glued at the hips, that they were on their way to do some very non-virgin activities.
“That true?” Derrick asked, turning to me. “You really a virgin?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool,” he said, pulling away from the curb. “I like that.”
I was proud of my status. In my mind, there were only two ways for a girl to be, a virgin or a ho. Thanks to Mama’s baptism hustle, I had been all over town hearing preachers hollering about the evils of fornication. I knew God didn’t want me to be no ho.
A few minutes later, we pulled up in front of our duplex. I opened the door to get out, but Derrick put his hand on my knee. “Hold up,” he said. “I wanna talk to you.”
“’Bout what?”
“’Bout you.”
He wanted to know what kind of music I liked, what movies I’d seen, and who I lived with. “You smoke reefer?” he asked.
“Nah.”
“Drink beer?”
“I don’t do none of that.”
“What’s your favorite movie?”
“Breakin’.”
“Yeah, that movie’s fresh to death,” he said. “You ever been roller-skating?”
“Nah.”
“I should take you some time. You cute. I like you.”
For a minute I thought I was hearing things. But then he said it again.
“I like you. I’ma take you skating.”
No one in my whole life had ever told me I was cute. And no one had ever said they wanted to take me anywhere, except for Mr. John, but that didn’t count. I sat in Derrick’s car and stared at my hands, trying to stop my heart from beating so loud.
“How old are you?” I asked. I knew Derrick had to be older than me, since he had a car. But I wasn’t expecting the answer he gave. “Twenty,” he answered. He turned to look at me. “How old are you?”
Derrick had eight years on me, but I didn’t want him to think I was a little girl. So I lied. “I’m eighteen.”
He raised his eyebrows. But he didn’t say a thing.
We stayed in his car talking until the sun came up. It was five in the morning when I finally went inside and took my ass to bed. I was so tired I didn’t even remember to put a plastic shower cap on to keep my Jheri curl juice on my hair, where it belonged. When I woke up to the sound of Mama calling my name, there was curl activator grease all over my face.
“Rabbit!” she yelled from the other side of the bedsheet hanging in the kitchen. “Some pea-headed boy here for you.”
“What?” I said, rubbing my eyes.
“Some boy at the door say he looking for you.”
I rolled off my mattress, pulled on my jeans shorts, and stepped into the kitchen. Mama was at the counter, cutting up a turkey wing with her big kitchen knife. “Don’t just stand there,” she said, looking at me. “Go see who it is.”
The only boy I could think of who might come to see me was Petey, my friend who lived up the street. Sometimes the two of us would hang out together and talk about football and practice kissing. Petey was two years older than me, in ninth grade. He was short and thick and had big dreams of being a running back for the Georgia Bulldogs. We’d talk football and I’d watch him “pump iron,” which consisted of him doing curls with the one twenty-pound barbell he and his six brothers shared between them. One time when I was at his house, after he finished describing to me the “dope-ass” play he ran in JV practice, he pushed me down in his bed and tried to grab on my titties. I was so mad, I pinned him in a figure four and punched him in the throat. “We just friends, nigga!” I yelled in his face.
But it wasn’t Petey at the door. It was Derrick, dressed in the same clothes he’d been wearing the night before, only the crease in his jeans wasn’t as sharp.
“Hey,” I said, letting him into the living room. “What you doing here?”
“I came by to see if you had a good time last night.”
“Why?”
“Because I like you.”
I looked at the floor, feeling my face getting hot. Mama must have been listening from the kitchen, because she came back into the living room holding her cooking knife.
“Hey,” she said, squinting at Derrick. “You like my baby?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “We friends,”
“She tell you how old she is?”
“Yeah, she say she eighteen.”
Mama let out a snort. “Girl, stop lyin’,” she said, heading back to the kitchen. “You know your hot ass only twelve. You hear that, boy? She twelve.”
Derrick shot me a glance. But he didn’t get up to leave. He didn’t do anything except tell me my body didn’t look like no twelve-year-old’s. He reached out and gently pulled me to him, rubbing on my arm. “You got a pretty smile,” he said, real low so Mama couldn’t hear. “And nice lips,” he whispered.
I didn’t know what was happening in my body. It felt like somebody had dumped a cup of baby mice in my belly and they were running around, making me all tingly. Derrick was making me feel good. I wanted that feeling to last forever.
On top of the TV was a pencil and an empty pack of Mama’s Winstons. I ripped open the cigarette box, spread it flat on top of the set, and slowly, in my best penmanship, wrote Derrick a note: “Will you be my boyfriend?” Underneath I made two boxes, one marked yes and the other no.
Derrick gave me a funny look when I handed him the paper.
“Rabbit . . .” he started to say.
Then he stopped himself.
He picked up the pencil and put a check in the box marked yes.
Chapter 7
Love Lesson