Save me, James. I dare you.
8
FIG LEAF
AT THE START of my junior year, without ceremony, without even a big breakup fight, Marcus gave his class ring to a girl with four names: Ruth Nicole Elizabeth Grant. She had long hair like mine but not quite as ful . Her skin was like expensive china, pale and so thin that you could see a network of lavender veins crisscrossing on her eyelids. I would know that ring anywhere — the garnet stone with the one-eighth-karat diamonds on either side. I was sitting in English when my eyes were drawn to Ruth Nicole Elizabeth’s already impressive adda-bead necklace, weighed down in the center with the hunk of gold that was Marcus’s ring. I was so distraught that I begged Ronalda to skip third period so that I could spend some time recuperating in the cool safety of her basement. As soon as we arrived, I surveil ed Marcus’s house through the slats over the corner window of Ronalda’s stepmother’s study.
“Don’t worry about it,” Ronalda said. “You want to go with me to Fort McPherson? There are a lot of guys over there.”
“No.”
“You’re just going to wait him out?”
“He’l explain. Love is complicated.”
“Wel ,” Ronalda said with sympathy, “here go something else my mama said. ‘You like who you like and you can’t help it.’”
The next day I found Marcus in the student parking lot. He was always there when classes let out even though he supposedly worked with his father from nine to five. I snuck away before the last bel so I could talk to him before al the kids swarmed out and underclassmen would be shaking his hand like he was the president. His middle finger looked naked without his giant ring. He once let me try it on but wouldn’t let me keep it, even though I promised never to wear it to school. He had said it was too dangerous. “Evidence,” he cal ed it. It was okay for our friends to know about us, but at school, in front of adults, he had to be more careful. It made sense at the time, but Ruth Nicole was even younger than I was. If I was jailbait, she was super-jailbait.
As I explained this to him, Marcus told me to lower my voice and calm down. Was I trying to get him arrested? He told me not to worry. Ruth Nicole’s family knew his family. He rubbed my arm and spoke so gently that everything he said sounded like love. “Why do you care so much about that ring? It don’t mean nothing.”
I knew that I was supposed to be mad and I should have broken up with him. Ronalda, quoting more of her mother’s wisdom said, “You gotta decide whether half a nigger is better than no nigger at al .”
“Don’t cal him that.”
“You got it bad,” Ronalda said.
Down in the basement, we rifled through Ronalda’s father’s desk drawer and found what looked to be a nickel bag of weed. It wasn’t the greatest quality, more seeds than anything, but we borrowed enough to rol a slender joint, which we shared in her stepmother’s office after jamming a towel under the door. Ronalda took hard pul s, trying to get buzzed quick. No one else was home, but she was paranoid that someone would walk in on us.
“If they catch me,” she said, “that’s it. They’l send me back to Indiana.”
“How can they get mad? You got it out of your father’s drawer.”
“It’s his house; he can do whatever he wants.”
“Al right,” I said, taking the smoldering wad. I put it to my mouth; it was damp from her lips. “I’l hurry up.”
She took the joint back and took a hard drag. “I’l blow you a shotgun.” I put my face next to hers and she blew the smoke right into my mouth.
“It’s not that I don’t want to go home,” Ronalda said.
“For a visit, right?”
“I mean, I wouldn’t mind going back. You know I don’t fit in here.”
“Yes you do,” I said.
“Don’t get al weird,” Ronalda said. “Al I mean is I wouldn’t mind going back home. I just don’t want to be sent back.”
“It’s the same thing,” I said. “Gone is gone.”
“No, it’s not.” She picked up the stub of the joint with her fingernails and lit it again. She held it to my lips.
“Your turn.”
I pul ed hard on the joint, trying to take enough in for the both of us. When she put her mouth to mine for the shotgun, I was going to push the words Please stay deep into her body.
“Don’t cough,” she said. “Coughing wil get you too high.”
“I can’t help it,” I said, hacking until my throat burned and tears wet my face.
BY HALLOWEEN, MARCUS had started hanging out again but only late at night and without anyone else around. A temporary arrangement, he promised. Since he was working, he had more money in his pocket. Sometimes we went to the Varsity or J.R. Crickets and he paid for everything, leaving the waitress a big tip so we wouldn’t get carded. Ronalda and I spent time together in the afternoons, doing homework, smoking dope, and watching Cinemax. It wasn’t a bad way to live. At six o’clock, I would climb aboard the 66 Lynhurst, a little bit hungry and stil a little bit high. This was why I preferred smoking to drinking. Liquor made me emotional while weed put a little daylight between me and my problems. It wasn’t that I forgot my troubles, it’s just that they didn’t trouble me quite so much.
One afternoon, Ronalda had sent me on my way with a smal paper bag fil ed with peanuts and jel y beans. I looked forward to shutting myself in my room and eating them by the handful. When I arrived at our building, the Lincoln was out front. Not the new one with the electric windows, but the
’82 that Raleigh usual y drove. I wasn’t expecting my uncle on a Monday. He tended to drop by on Thursday afternoons, when James worked the line at the airport. On Thursdays, my mother fixed Raleigh a cold lunch before she pul ed out the double deck of cards with which they played Tonk. I don’t know if James was aware of these afternoon games, but they were never mentioned when I was around.
I used my key, trying to make myself seem sober, but I know I must have looked real y confused to find James and my mother seated on the couch. Above them grinned a montage of photos, al of me. I had never real y paid attention until Ronalda pointed them out, but now they seemed stupid, these pictures of me smiling the same way, every year of my life. I was older in each but nothing more. It was just my camera face, perfected by the time I started first grade.
“Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Dana,” my mother said, “I need to talk to you.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let me go upstairs and wash up.”
James said, “You look clean enough to me.”
I licked my lips. I knew the fragrance of the marijuana had snaked itself into my clothes and hair. Even my upper lip seemed to radiate the odor.
“Okay,” I said, remaining by the door, trying not to get any closer. I wondered what I looked like. I knew from television that parents can diagnose their kids with drug use by looking at their pupils, so I kept my eyes to the carpet. The paper bag of jel y beans and peanuts rattled in my hand.
“What’s up?”
“Where have you been, Dana?” my mother asked.
James’s arms were crossed across the front of his uniform. When half a year had gone by after I’d dared my father to save me from Marcus, I’d been foolish enough to think that I had won something. Of course, six months is a long time on the calendar of a sixteen-year-old girl. For James, it was just enough time to col ect his thoughts and get his game together. His round face, squished under his hat and hidden behind his glasses, shone with satisfaction.
“I was out,” I said.
“You see, Gwen. This is what I was talking about.”
When I was a girl, I would have been thril ed to know they had been discussing me, but now, I was just annoyed. Who was he to act like he knew me? From his righteous posture, I knew he hadn’t told my mother about the time he’d let me leave the house half-naked at midnight, al because he’d been afraid to show his face. I would bet anything that he claimed to have found out through his connections, al the people he knows in such high places al over the city.