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I’d ask Naomi to tell me how she got those scars on her back every once in a while but she never told me, not til I was fifteen. We were laying on the couch in her apartment watching TV. We was both blazed and kinda drunk. She and I had been sharing a dutch and shotgunning the smoke back and forth between us. I was sweating so I took my shirt off. I leaned against the armrest and she laid against my stomach, rubbing her thumb across the scar on the back of my hand. I asked for the dutch, she passed it to me. As the smoke filled my lungs she told me her stepdad raped her.
“What?” I’d heard what she said just fine, but it seemed like the kinda thing you’re supposed to say when someone tells you they were raped.
“When I was eight,” she said, “He wasn’t really my stepdad, but he and my mom had been going out for a while. The first time he was real gentle, he kissed me on my lips and on my stomach and between my legs.”
I looked out the window. The streetlights was on and you could see the sun setting behind the tenement rooftops, they was all flat and square and I thought it looked like the rooftops was hammering the sunlight into gold foil.
“Did you tell your mom?”
“I think she knew what was goin on, but she didn’t wanna leave him or else she’d never get her fix.” Nye’s mom was a dope fiend. You can always tell when you’re in a dope fiend’s house cuz they keep the heater on all the time. Heroin makes you cold. “Every time I asked him to stop he’d slap me across the face. One time he busted my lip open and I started crying. He burned me with his cigarette til I stopped.”
I thought I could feel them little circle shaped scars on Nye’s back through my stomach. They was like flat bubbles in her skin. I thought about Nye when she was a little kid, curled up in a ball with burns all down the middle of her back and the top of her butt cheeks. Her home was all warm like an oven. I pulled her closer to me and she curled her legs around mine, we both wanted to be inside each other. The weed made my skin tingle all over, hers too probably, but not as much as mine cuz she’d been smoking longer than I had.
She turned around and told me to shotgun it to her again. I took a toke from the dutch, held the smoke in my lungs for as long as I could and then pulled her close to me so her open lips was on mine. I breathed the smoke into her and she held it in for a little while. Then she laid down on my chest. The smoke tickled my skin when she exhaled it through her nose. I could tell she was feeling it now cuz she started rubbing my jock through my jeans. I unhooked her bra under her shirt.
“I want you to hit me.” She whispered, her breath tickled my skin even more.
I started laughing. “What?”
“And pull my hair too.”
“You must got me confused.” I laughed til I started coughing.
She lifted herself up, sat on my stomach and told me she was serious. I told her I wasn’t down for that shit and she got mad. Even though she was older than me I knew she liked it when I acted like I was in control of her. Sometimes when we were having sex I’d push her up against the wall and pull her hair a little bit. I’d bite her sometimes too, never hard enough to make her bleed, just enough to leave little dimples in her skin for a few minutes, but that was about it.
Nye got up from the couch and fixed her bra.
“Aw come on, don’t act like that.”
She didn’t say anything, just walked into her bedroom, put on a pink skirt and some tennis shoes and left. I knew she wanted me to chase after her, but I wasn’t gonna do it. She pissed always got on my nerves with those little games of hers. It was a party going on that night at the Rec, but I didn’t feel like going just then. Thought about going over to Joseph’s place for a minute but I decided to just chill in Nye’s apartment til I lost my high, just in case she came back.
She did come back but not til after it was dark outside. My high was pretty much gone but I still had a kinda light headed feeling. Her right eye was red and she had a little bruise on her cheek. I asked her what the fuck happened and she said, “What the fuck do you care?”
She walked over to the coffee table to get the bottle of gin that was sitting there. When she picked it up I could see she wasn’t wearing any underwear beneath her skirt, I was sure she had some on when she left. I got up, grabbed her by the arm and turned her around.
“What did you do?”
“Lemme go!” She shook my hand off her. “I do whatever the fuck I want!”
She stared at me for a minute to see what I’d do. I think she wanted me to hit her. I thought about doing it for a minute, but I just punched the wall instead. Put a hole in it. She didn’t flinch.
I put my shirt back on and snatched the bottle of gin outta her hands. “You’re a dumb bitch, you know that?”
“Is that so?”
“You’re right, I don’t give a fuck what happens to you. I hope he kills you nex time.”
I left the boarding house. It was less than a half bottle of gin left, but I figured I’d be okay since I was already kinda tipsy. I drank another quarter of gin by the time I got to Joe’s crib. He and Larry was getting ready to head off to the Rec. At first Joseph was glad to see me, but he could tell I was pissed off. He asked me what’s wrong.
“Nothin, Nye’s jus actin stupid is all.”
“Well fuck her then. C’mon wey, let’s scoop up some new bitches from this party.”
They don’t let you carry drinks in with you at the Rec so I killed the rest of that bottle before we got there. I offered some to Joe but he said he was cool; Larry drank about a shot’s worth before I downed the rest. I chucked the bottle at the other side of the street; it hit the sidewalk but didn’t break.
When I first got to the Rec, they was playing the Electric Slide and everybody was dancing to it. Joe and Larry jumped in but I stayed posted up against the wall. I knew the dance but I was still kinda pissed off. I thought about Naomi walking around on Third Street in her little pink skirt. The hotels there all have peeling wallpaper and missing doorknobs. They had hotels like that near my neighborhood back home. When I was nine years old this big German looking dude in a leather jacket gave me a pack of purple Now-and-Laters and promised me a whole box a whole box of Mr. Goodbars if I went with him into one of those hotel rooms. It was another guy when we got there, a black guy wearing leather pants and a silk shirt. It was also a pretty white lady there, she had long red hair and wore fishnet leggings. They started arguing. The black guy said I was too old and the red haired lady said she wanted a Mexican, not a Black boy. The German guy made me give him his Now-and-Laters back and told me to get lost. As I leaned up against the wall I pictured Naomi walking up to that German looking dude, grabbing his jock through his jeans just like she did to me the first time we fucked. I imagined him bent over her with his pants around his ankles and punching her in the face while she laughed her ass off. Then she’d give him her panties. Token of appreciation.
“Dumb bitch,” I mumbled.
I was drunk so I didn’t really give a fuck about being modest. The good thing about gin is I can drink a lot of it without getting sick. If I’d drank half as much of Vodka I’d have been throwing up by then. I danced on a few chicks. Then I chilled on the wall with Larry for a little bit. This cute White girl walked by and I grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her close to me. She looked kinda surprised but I could tell she wasn’t mad, she had a little bit of a smirk on her face. In the corner of my eye I saw Larry giving me the thumbs up.
I told the girl I was sorry, but she was too beautiful to just be walking in and outta my life like that. She laughed and we talked for a little bit, til she told me she had to get back to her boyfriend. I looked to where she was heading and saw Jeffrey’s older step brother posted up against the other wall, watching us. Jeff’s step brother was this athletic light skinned dude, kinda like me only about three shades lighter. The look on his face said he was pretty shitty about me talking to his girl, but I could tell he wasn’t gonna do nothing, especially not with my boys there. I probably could’ve talked to her a little bit longer but I decided to fall back and move on to some other girls.
Nye’s buddy Keisha was there and she was pretty cute too. Had a crush on me since I was eleven. Our eyes met and I could tell she was so thirsty I could’ve snapped my fingers and had her ass ready to walk out the door with me. The only problem was, everybody else knew that too and I didn’t want them to think my game was weak. Maybe if it wasn’t so many people there I might’ve gone for it. The girl named Nicole was there, she was the only girl at the Rec who was old enough to drink. She was dark skinned but still pretty cute. I bet could’ve smashed her if I played my cards right, but I decided not to go for it. I’d heard bad things about her. Rumor was that she had niggas with guns hiding in her closet. She’d go to parties, find some random dude, take him to her crib, wait til they ass was butt naked and have the dude with the gun jump out and rob they ass. That wasn’t a good look so I passed.
This other girl was there, I forget her name, but I remember she was a hundred percent American Indian, finer than all outdoors. She was going out with this older dude named Ricky. Ricky was dark skinned and happened to be the only dude in the neighborhood who still had a jheri curl. Used to live in Queen’s Bridge, called everybody “dun” or “dunny”, and nobody knew what the hell it meant. Ricky was real tall and real skinny, always wore thick rimmed glasses and shirts that was too small for him. Not too small so that it looked real tight when he was wearing it, but just kinda goofy looking with his long arms and shit. Goofy was exactly the word to describe Ricky, but we respected him cuz he ran through so many females it put the rest of us boys to shame. I learned a lot watching him. I decided not to mess with that Indian girl cuz Ricky was pretty cool. I would eventually ended up fuckin her anyway. And Ricky would find out about it too, but he never got mad. He said he used to do the same shit when he was my age, so he just called it karma. That’s what real players do, don’t get mad, just charge it to the game and move on to the next one.
It got to be about one o’clock and I could feel my buzz coming down by the minute, and that’s never a good feeling. I got anxious, and what I always do when I’m anxious is start doing number problems in my head. I pictured my “drunkenness” (that’s what I called it) as a quadratic formula and tried to plot my level on the bell curve. I knew my math was fucked up cuz I started doing derivatives or logarithms or some shit, but I was drunk so I didn’t know any better. I made my way through the crowd til I came up on that white girl again. She was leaning against the wall with her hands behind her looking cute as she wanna be. She had long blond hair that went down to the top of her breasts and deep blue eyes. I knew I should hate myself for lusting after a white girl, but I didn’t care, I was running outta time. I always feel like I’m running outta time. We talked for a little bit. She looked kinda sad so I asked her what’s wrong.
“Aubrey left.” Aubrey Graham, that’s her boyfriend, I just now remembered his name.
“That’s horrible. Why’d he do that?”
“No, not left me left me. He just had to go home. He’s got choir practice in the morning.”
Didn’t surprise me, Aubrey was a soft ass dude, only showed face in our hood a couple of times cuz his brother used to chill with us and I guess he wanted his little suburbanite buddies to think he was hood or something. Jeffrey was cool, but I felt sorry for him for having to move out to the suburbs with that asshole. Jeff stopped showing up altogether eventually. Heard rumors he pushed Aubrey off a roof. Couldn’t blame him, probably seemed like the right thing to do at the time.
I asked the girl how she was getting back home. Had to be careful with my choice of words cuz I’d forgotten her name. She told me she and her buddy were gonna get a cab. We talked for a little bit longer. Told her it was pretty shitty of her guy to leave her here like that and started throwing hints at her that she should come chill with me at my place and she seemed like she was cool with it. Then her buddy showed up. I forget the other girl’s name, just remember that she was dark skinned but not too dark and her hair was kinda short but in a cute way. You could tell by the way she talked that she wasn’t from the city. I probably would’ve tried to get at her too if the white girl wasn’t down with it.
“Cindy,” said the girl’s buddy, “you ready to go?”
I thanked God she reminded me what her name was. I tried to talk her out of it, but I could tell she wasn’t going for it. Luckily Joe saw I was in distress and joined in on the conversation. Joe was real smooth when it came to dealing with girls and they little buddies. He and I were always on the same frequency. We started talking them up about going to Joe’s crib. Cindy asked Joe if he had anything to drink at his place. He said no, but he had a dutch with some “top quality shit”. It was really just a cigarillo stuffed with some garbage weed laced with tobacco, but we knew the girls wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
It didn’t take them long to decide. I kinda wondered what they was gonna tell their parents when they got home, but I had enough sense not to ask. We got to Joe’s place and smoked up that cigarillo. I only felt it a little bit, Joe couldn’t feel it at all but he was acting like he could. Cindy and her buddy were definitely feeling it, but it might’ve just been a placebo effect. Either way they was pretty much down for anything so me and Joe didn’t care. We all sat in Joe’s living room giggling and talkin about stupid shit like we was three years old. Cindy sat real close to me, feeling on my chest through my shirt. I gave Joe the nod, he nodded right back and said something slick to Cindy’s buddy. She held his hand as he led her back to his room.
When the girls weren’t looking I looked at Joe and moved my lips to say the word condom without actually speaking. He said, “I got you” the same way and went back to his room. A few minutes later I heard him walking up the hallway and he sliding the condom package down the floor next to the couch just close enough for me to reach it without getting up. I probably would’ve gone in raw if I didn’t have a condom.
By then, I was lying on my back and Cindy was laying on top of me rubbing her hands beneath my shirt. She asked me how I had abs like that already, guess she thought I was like thirteen or something. I look like a little kid when I ain’t got no hair on my face. I told her I worked out a lot, which wasn’t really true. To be honest I wasn’t much stronger than most dudes my age. The thing was, since I still had kind of a small frame, my muscle’s looked really toned. Nye once said it was like someone wrapped a rope of muscles around my skeleton a little too tight. I don’t know, she was always saying weird shit like that.
***
For anyone who doesn't think this story doesn't completely suck so far here's the conclusionPart 2: topic62838.html
