At-Risk (14 page)

The party, because I had longed for it, was a disappointment. The deejay could not mix one song into another. The lights never got very low. We stood in a papered gymnasium, in jeans, stretchy shirts, and too many coats of mascara. Girls from different schools divided themselves accordingly. Even without their uniforms, I could pick out the girls from Brearley, Chapin, and Spence. The boys Heather knew didn't show up until the end of the party. The only people I really knew were Heather, Taylor, Maya, and Ashley, and every time I saw them, they were all dancing, proudly showing
off the moves I'd taught them. I ran into Nadira once that night when we were both getting sodas, but she didn't speak to me. I held up the wall all night. No one asked me to dance. I held my plastic cup of soda and thought of my mother at home, sleeping blissfully, happy and proud.

I had only one chance to talk to Heather at the dance. She came over to where I stood on the wall, her face flushed from dancing. “Did I do okay?” she asked me.

“You look good,” I said.

“How do you like it?”

I shrugged. “It's okay.”

“Aren't you dancing?”

“Nobody asked me.”

“They probably don't want you to embarrass them,” Heather said. I didn't bother to tell her that the dance I'd shown her was the only one I knew. “Don't worry,” she said. “The real party starts when we get to my house.”

At Heather's house, we had carte blanche. Her parents were asleep. Heather brought out the alcohol, I pulled out the small bag of weed, and we wasted no time getting drunk and high. A boy Heather had introduced as Gabe wanted to play a version of spin the bottle.

I was the first victim. Gabe and I looked at each other across the thin neck of the bottle, unsure.

“He's never made it with a black girl before,” Taylor said.

“So?”

“Go in the closet with him,” Heather suggested. “Show him how it's done.” She clapped me on the arm and gave me a push. Gabe held out his hand and I got up, unsteadily, taking it. I wasn't sure that I wanted to go, but I went.

We sat in the deep closet; the hems of Heather's jackets grazed the tops of our heads. I decided I couldn't, wouldn't do it. Gabe slid
a finger up my arm and I shivered, backing away. “Wow, this closet is really big, huh?”

“It's cool,” he said. “We don't have to, you know, I mean unless you want. …” He looked hopeful even in the dark.

“I can't,” I said.

“Maybe if you touch it.” He took my hand and rubbed it against his denim crotch, his hand over mine.

“I'm going to be sick,” I said.

“Whoa, wait a minute,” he said. “Okay.”

“Sick sick sick,” I said.

He leaned back, but in a minute he asked, “Can I touch your breasts?”

“I don't think so.”

“Just once?” He reached under my shirt. My bra was lace, one of my mother's cast-offs. My underwear did not match, but I knew he would never know that.

“Hey,” he said, feeling the lace cups of my bra. “Whoa. Hey.”

“Whoa. Hey,” I said, mocking him, feeling suddenly warm.

His hand closed over my breast and squeezed. It made me think of the old-fashioned cars in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. “Beep beep,” I said, then burst out laughing.

He laughed, too, and then the two of us couldn't stop laughing. We fell against each other, laughing. Then he pulled me through the jackets and across his lap, pushing his tongue into my mouth, banging his teeth against mine, kissing me wet and sloppy. I tasted the strong flavor of weed on his tongue and thought of the boy who'd sold it to me, how beautiful he'd been, how though we lived just a few blocks apart, we were strangers. Like the boy pressing himself against me; we were from different worlds. They were both from the real world, their own distinct ones, but I was somewhere in limbo. Set apart, I didn't know how to let either of them in.

Gabe's hands were tugging my shirt down, and I knew that in
a minute they'd be working the latch of my bra, but I didn't stop him. In the dark of Heather's closet, I tried to see what Gabe saw. I pictured an image of myself that was Heather's body and face, only it was black and it was me. I saw how much of me would change; I saw the girl I would become. And I decided to go ahead and miss myself right now, knowing that the girl I would become wouldn't know how to appreciate me at all.

Fifteen and too shy to do anything on her own, Melanie waits for Chandra to come down. Waits at the large, wide window—the thin curtains Bernice has hung do not cover the width of it—for just a glimpse of Chandra, because Bernice will not let her come over. Will never let her come over. And so she and Chandra must meet here outside on the stoop, in full view of the wide window and the neighborhood, where Bernice can, as she is fond of saying, “keep an eye on things.” Bernice is in the kitchen baking, though it is much too hot for that and Melanie hardly ever eats anything. Bernice has the radio going in the kitchen. The music, which Melanie tries to ignore, has her mother moving in time as though she were still young and still slim. It is the Isley Brothers. Or the Whispers. Or some such quartet or quintet of men with outdated hairdos.

Chandra emerges from their building, sunglasses perched on her head, holding a small brown bag and a section of newspaper. “I'm going outside!” Melanie calls, as she steps into her shoes, glad
to be away from her mother, who she always calls Bernice, even to her face, just to show that she feels no closeness.

They spread the newspapers out on the hot concrete steps and sit down. Chandra passes the bag of sunflower seeds and Melanie grabs a handful, cracking them open between her teeth and spitting the shells onto the stoop. Chandra waves at a boy across the street, motioning him over. “Watch this,” she says.

“You know him?”

“I'm about to,” Chandra says. She calls out, “Hey boy! Give me a dollar, and I'll give you something in return!”

Once he gets closer, she wrinkles her nose in disgust. “Phee-eew! Your breath stink so bad I can smell it from across the street!” The two girls laugh at the boy's retreating back.

As they sit, Chandra makes a game of it, teasing the boys, selecting them at random, rewarding some and ridiculing others on a whim. After a while, she turns to Melanie and says, “You next.”

“Not me.”

“Scared?”

“I just don't like young boys,” Melanie says. “They immature.”

The boys are the same age as Chandra and Melanie. Melanie is tired of these kinds of boys. Boys that dress in oversized but expensive fashions, boys without a dollar to their names, or as Bernice says, boys “without a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of.”

Music blares from an opened window on the third floor of their building and down into the street. The two girls listen to it and idly watch the traffic slow to a stop at the light. Chandra pushes Melanie, pointing to an old black Oldsmobile three cars behind the light. “That's what you need.”

“That old man?”

“You said boys too immature.”

“If I give him some, he probably have a heart attack.”

“Let's see.” Chandra calls out to him, “Hey Pops! My friend says she likes you.”

“Stop,” Melanie whispers.

The man looks at them, shaking his head in annoyance.

“For real!” Chandra cries.

“Then let her say it herself,” the man says, his voice carrying.

Chandra turns to Melanie, waiting.

“I got something you might like,” Melanie says, not knowing she is going to say it until it comes out.

“And what's that?” he asks. The light changes and he lets the cars behind him go around.

“I can't show it to you here,” she says. “It's private.”

“You young girls playing games with me?” he asks.

“Age ain't nothing but a number,” Melanie says.

“That's right, you tell him,” Chandra encourages.

He parks in front of the hydrant. When he starts to get out of the car, Melanie shrinks back and retreats up her steps. “You better go get you some Viagra first before you think you can handle me, grandpa!”

One week later, Melanie is outside on the stoop, enjoying the early fall weather that still feels like summer, still thinking of the afternoon when she'd teased the old man. Feeling a thrilling rush of pleasure at the thought of him. Days after she had humiliated the man, she found herself thinking of him. More than once, she thought—hoped—she sighted his car. She'd even offered to run errands for Bernice. Taking her mother's clothes to the cleaners, Melanie found herself staring into the faces of the older men she encountered, sure that each one was him, following her, watching her, waiting for a chance to take her away.

Children rush out of the apartment building and Melanie grabs the railing to avoid the swinging door and to steady herself. She
looks up at the sound of a horn, sees the black car idling alongside the hydrant.

It is him. The old man from a week ago. She quickly smoothes her denim skirt and crosses her legs at the ankle, partly afraid, partly brimming.

He watches her alertly, almost daring. “Not so brave without your girlfriend? No one around to bolster your courage?” he taunts.

She doesn't like the way he says it even though it is true. When Chandra was with her, she was fearless, not her mother's daughter. She was a different girl, invincible. The kind of girl that expected men to notice her and then acted like she didn't care when they did.

But Chandra isn't with her now and Melanie doesn't need her to be. She shifts on the stoop, parts her legs wide beneath her skirt. “I don't need courage,” she says.

The man waits, not getting out of the car.

Melanie rises from the stoop and steps carefully around the sections of dirt and weeds between the cracks of the sidewalk's broken pavement and walks to the man's car.

He pushes the passenger door open. “Get in.”

The man doesn't speak for some time after she gets in the car. He doesn't reach over and try to grab her or do anything to make her un-comfortable. He turns the volume down on the stereo; he is listening to an oldies station. Melanie sizes him up on her side. He doesn't look as old up close. He smells of Old Spice, safe and comforting. It was the smell that the men from Bernice's hometown wore when they used to visit. It was the smell that came to Melanie whenever those men crouched to press a dollar into her hand, sending her to play while they sat in the living room with her mother. It was the smell that lingered in the house long after the men stopped coming.

Finally, he asks her, “Do you do this a lot?”

“What?”

“Pick up old men?”

“You the one that came back looking for me,” she reminds him.

“I just wanted to see what you would do,” he says, looking at her. “I'll drive you back now.”

“No.”

“What will your mother think about you disappearing?”

“Bernice won't notice.”

“Bernice?”

“That's my mother.”

“You shouldn't address her so. That's insolence,” he says.

He seems angry, but Melanie doesn't know that word so she nods as if she understands, not wanting to disappoint. She doesn't like him talking about disappearing, though. For the first time, since meeting him, her actions seem foolish to her. “Anyway, I'm not disappearing. I'm just hanging out with you for a little while. Then I'm going back home,” she says, with more confidence than she feels.

“I should take you home now,” the man says, but Melanie knows he won't.

“You smell the way my father used to.” She touches the sharp crease in his pants leg.

“How's that?”

Like Old Spice. Like good times. Like Sunday mornings. “Your cologne.”

He peels her hand off him. “I'm not your father. I have children older than you. I don't need a daughter. You're a foolish little girl; I'm only interested in women.”

“I
am
a woman,” she says, though tears fill her eyes.

The man looks at her, unspeaking. He reaches over her, pulls a handkerchief out of his glove compartment, and hands it to her silently. She dabs at her eyes. “Don't cry. You'll sog my whole car with those tears,” he says. “You don't know what a woman's tears do to me.”

“I don't want to go home yet.”

He considers her. “You have a name, girl?”

Melanie stares straight ahead and refuses to speak. She holds her hands out in front of her to count the calcium deposits on her fingernails, imagining one boyfriend for each white splotch.

“My name is Milton. As in
Paradise Lost
.”

“What's that?”

“A famous book written by a blind poet.”

“If he was so blind, then how did he write it?” Melanie asks, doubting.

“His daughters wrote it down it for him.”

Melanie thinks of how Bernice tries to make her do things she doesn't want to and feels sorry for those daughters. She sees them sitting in a dusty parlor. Hovering over papers and desks, scribbling, squinting, and straining in the dim, mote-filled light. She wonders why they didn't write something else instead. Their own stories. Or love letters. Why they had not fooled their father, tricked him, made him pay. If it had been her, she would have at the very least lain his clothes out in the most outrageous combinations and told him that they matched.

He asks, “How old are you?”

On a good day, she thinks she can pass for twenty. “I'm old enough to do whatever I want,” she says, reveling in her power.

“And what do you want to do? Nice girls don't get into cars with strangers.” She catches him eyeing her again. “Then again, you don't look like such a nice girl.”

He waits for her to answer, but Melanie only shrugs. He can think whatever he likes. She can be anything she wants in his car. Anything at all.