Revenge of a Not-So-Pretty Girl (16 page)

“Whatever,” I say quietly. “What Curvy Miller does is none of my business.”

The boys who are hanging out in front of the barbershop next to the bodega call out “Yo, baby” as we approach. I kind of want to thank them for not singling any of us out like boys usually do. You know how they’ll yell “Yo, baby in the blue jacket,” or “What’s up, beautiful, with your little pink scarf on.” That can get pretty embarrassing, especially when you’re never the one wearing the blue jacket or the pink scarf. And I especially want to thank them for not making any comments about my hair. See, Keisha’s a cute girl. She looks like a slightly chubbier version of Janet Jackson. And even though Nicole shows miles of gumline when she smiles, she does have a fashion model–type body. With my recent physical alteration, I kind of feel like the third man down on the totem pole.

Fort Greene is a pretty crazy area. It’s like the neighborhood has multiple personalities. Keisha’s house is eight and a half blocks from the station. We walk down a street lined with trees and the most beautiful old town houses,
only to turn a corner and find ourselves in the middle of what looks like Armageddon. Two blocks later, it’s back to the tree-lined and elegant again. Unfortunately, Keisha’s street happens to be one of those that looks as if it barely survived the final world conflict. It must have been a great street once, but now there are all these gutted homes with boarded-up windows and doors. And half of these abandoned places are covered with graffiti. Keisha’s house is one of only a few that seem to have been spared whatever firebombing occurred. She said her mom and stepdad bought it three years before they were even able to move in. It took them that long to fix it up. But her stepdad is banking on the area getting better again. For now, they all live on the first floor and rent out the second and third floors to two other families.

When we arrive at Keisha’s brownstone, our first stop is the living room. She yells out her brother’s name to make sure he’s not home yet, then heads straight for the liquor cabinet, where she grabs a bottle of rum, which she hands off to me, and three glasses, which she hands off to Nicole. She takes another little detour to the kitchen, where she throws a bottle of Schweppes ginger ale into the mix. Once she has all her ingredients, we run down her hallway and hole up in her room. Nicole plops down onto the bed while I curl up on a nearby armchair, and Keisha stands at the dresser and goes to work on her alcoholic concoction.

Her room couldn’t be any more girly. Everything is pink or green or flowery, or a combination of the three.

“When will your folks be home?” I ask.

“Not before six, so we have plenty of time,” she says as she holds the bottle of rum up to the side of her face, as if she’s in an ad for it. “Now, this is a ten-year-old. The good stuff. Ray’s friend from Guyana got it for him for special occasions.”

It’s kind of weird that she calls her stepdad by his first name, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

“And today most certainly qualifies as a special occasion,” Keisha continues as she goes back to her bartending, mixing a little bit of soda with a whole lotta rum. Since I can’t really drink much alcohol without getting sideways, I can already tell that this is going to be an interesting afternoon. But I decide to go for it anyway. The rum doesn’t really taste that great, kind of like an all-purpose household cleaner that’s been set on fire. After every sip, I feel as if some of the skin on my throat is being peeled off. Keisha definitely didn’t add enough soda to it.

Nicole’s face is as contorted as mine as she drinks her portion, but Keisha seems to be handling it just fine.

Halfway through the drink, my head starts to spin. And I’m laughing so loud that Keisha has to shush me, but her shushes are almost as loud as my laughing.

“My brother’s gonna be home any second now. If he hears us laughing like this, he’s gonna know.”

“Who cares?” I howl. “But what if Ray notices there’s not as much rum in the bottle as there should be?”

“He’s not the one who usually drinks it. It’s my mom. She probably has to, to put up with him. He’s a handful.” And we giggle some more.

“What if she notices?”

“She’d probably think it was Kevin. But even if she found out it was me, she’d just sit around and lecture me about drinking and what it can do to my brain cells.”

“You’re so lucky your mom doesn’t hit,” I say.

“It’s on account of her always reading black history books,” Keisha says as she sits down on the bed next to Nicole. “She’s convinced that black people beating their kids is a learned behavior from slavery times. She says masters used to beat the slaves, then those same slaves would beat their kids. She says if she beats us, she’ll only be perpetuating the slave masters’ brutal ways.”

Keisha and Nicole both have those “sit down and discuss it” type of civilized families. They met the first day of the school year and have been pretty tight ever since. They have a lot more in common with each other than I have with either of them. Nicole’s parents also own a house, nearby in Clinton Hill. And they have no problem paying full tuition for her to go to Bishop Marshall. Sometimes I wonder if Nicole would even talk to me if Keisha wasn’t in the picture.

“You’re lucky,” I say to Keisha.

Nicole closes the
Vogue
magazine she’s been flipping through and pops up from the bed.

“I think we should play truth or … truth,” she says.

“Don’t you mean truth or dare?” I ask as I drape my legs over one side of the armchair.

“Nope. In this game, you have to admit something about yourself no one else knows.”

“Like what?” I sip some more of my drink.

“Like, for instance …” But before she can say anything else, she bursts out laughing. There’s a faint door slam and Keisha shushes us. I hear footsteps and voices, then another door slam.

“Yuck. Kevin and his Neanderthal friends are here. Wanna go check and see if your boyfriend is one of them?” Keisha teases me.

“No. I wanna play truth or truth,” I say, trying to ignore her. Actually, I don’t really want to play, but it’s better than Keisha ribbing me about Curvy Miller. “So you go first, Nicole.”

“Okay. Lester Johnson from my global studies class—I made out with him.”

Keisha gulps half her drink and nearly rolls off the bed. “What? When? Details, details!” she shrieks as she pulls Nicole back down onto the bed next to her.

“It was down in the basement. Music class. I got a pass to go to the bathroom and ran into him. He started telling me how much he liked me—”

“He always tells you how much he likes you,” Keisha interrupts.

“Yeah, but usually I ignore him,” Nicole continues. “But something about the way he said it this time … and he has such nice lips. Next thing I know, we’re in the stairwell.”

“Oh man, if one of those nuns had caught you …,” Keisha whispers.

“I know, but they didn’t.”

“So how far did you go?”

“Only to second. If I had had more than ten minutes on that hall pass, well, I don’t know which base we would have ended up sliding into.”

“Okay, wait. I just wanna be clear. When you say second base, what exactly is included in that?” I ask.

Nicole looks around as if she’d forgotten I was sitting in the armchair.

“You know, everything above the waist in front and below the waist in the back.”

“Oh,” I mumble. “What’s first again?”

“You know, Faye, a long, juicy kiss,” Keisha answers.

“Then I guess home base would be nothing, then, huh?” I wonder out loud. Based on that explanation, I suppose there might have been one occasion where I happened to trip and fall somewhere between home base and first. Wow! How pathetic is that?

“So what’s the deal? Do you really like him?” Keisha asks Nicole.

“Kinda. I mean, your brother’s not paying me any attention, so … And like I said, Lester has really nice lips. And he wants me to come to his brother’s birthday party in a couple of weeks.”

“Oh my God. Nic, you have a boyfriend!” Keisha shrieks. And the two of them giggle and flop around on the bed. And I’m left in the armchair feeling like a third wheel.

“Okay, well, what about you?” Nicole asks Keisha. “And make it good.”

Keisha is silent for a while. I can’t imagine what secret she could possibly have.

“Okay, I’m gonna show you something,” she says. “But neither of you can tell anybody.” And she bounces off the bed and disappears into her closet. A few seconds later, she comes back out with a couple more magazines.

“Is it the new
Right On!
with the Michael Jackson interview?” I ask.

“Not even.” Keisha reveals the cover of one of the magazines. There’s a blond woman with the biggest breasts imaginable.

“Hustler!”
Keisha says, all giddy. “It’s the worst. Ten times worse than
Penthouse
. Fifty times worse than
Playboy
.” She opens it up and I’m bombarded with skin and tongues and body parts.

“Eww. Where’d you get this from?” I ask. And I’m trying to figure out whether I find it disgusting or appealing or both.

“Ray hides them in the basement.”

“Look at all the veins in it,” I say.

“I think it’s kind of cool,” Keisha says. “Have either of you ever seen one?”

“Are family members stumbling out of the bath without a towel included?” Nicole asks.

Keisha shakes her head.

“Then, no, I’ve never seen one up close and personal.”

“Me neither,” I say.

“I have,” Keisha says.

“What?” Nicole and I yell at the same time.

“Jason. You know, the guy I told you guys I like. The one who lives around the corner? Well, he showed me his.”

“Just like that?” I ask.

“Well, we’d been talking and I told him I’d never really seen one, so … And he’s asked me out to the movies.”

Nicole lets out this high-pitched, alert-all-dogs squeal, and she and Keisha bounce off the bed and begin dancing around and laughing.

“We both pretty much have boyfriends,” I hear one of them say. I kind of watch them for a while, realizing I don’t have any good truths. I’ve got no stories about circling bases, or naked men, or boys kissing me. They’d think I was a loser if I ever divulged the whole babysitter situation. And they’d get depressed if I went into detail about my mom knocking me upside the head. I take another sip of my drink. When I look back up, I notice both Nicole and Keisha gawking at me.

“Well?” Nicole says.

“Yeah, Faye. It’s your turn,” Keisha joins in.

All I can think of are some of the biggest, baddest things I’ve ever done. And maybe I’m a little drunk, because my lips start flapping before my brain can catch up.

“Okay, have you guys ever done something that’s wrong, that you knew was wrong, but you feel good afterward, like excited good? But then suddenly, you start feeling not so great about it?”

“You mean like drinking Keisha’s parents’ liquor?” Nicole asks, then bursts out laughing.

“No. Something bigger. Something you could really get in trouble for. Like, for instance, stealing something. In your
whole entire life, have you ever taken something that didn’t belong to you?”

“Sure I have,” Keisha says. And I turn to face her, a little surprised at her answer.

“You? What did you take?”

“A pack of Juicy Fruit. Once. I was gonna buy some potato chips and a Sunkist, then I decided not to, but I forgot to put back the gum.”

“Oh,” I say, trying not to sound deflated. “That doesn’t really count. You have to mean to do it for it to be stealing.”

“Oh. I guess I never really stole anything, then.”

“I take stuff from my sister,” Nicole admits.

“You do?” I realize I sound kind of hopeful.

“All the time. But I always put it back, so I guess that’s more like sneaking than stealing. But to really take something that didn’t belong to me and never give it back? Nah. ’Cause if somebody did it to me … that just wouldn’t be right.”

“Exactly,” Keisha chimes in. “Like when that junkie stole the steering wheel from Ray’s car. I mean, he didn’t even steal the whole car. What are you gonna do with just a steering wheel? Anyway, I don’t like thieves.”

“Yeah, me neither.” I try to cover for myself.

“But you didn’t tell us a truth,” Nicole realizes. “What about Curvy Miller?”

“Oh, Faye never has anything good,” Keisha blurts out. “She won’t even talk to him. What truth could she possibly have there?”

“No. I don’t have anything good,” I mumble. “I was just
gonna talk about the robber I walked in on, but Keisha knows that story already.”

Thank God for the effects of alcohol, because once Keisha gives Nicole the Cliff’s Notes version of that incident, they quickly move on to another topic.

Bad thing about alcohol
, it wreaks havoc on my bladder. Two glasses of rum and I’m running to the bathroom at twenty-minute intervals. So I roll off Keisha’s armchair and head for the door.

“Hey, don’t let Kevin or any of his friends see you,” Keisha calls after me. “You’re kind of buzzed, and he’ll never let you live that down.”

I flash Keisha the okay sign and creep along the hallway, careful not to knock into the walls, which are lined with family photographs that all seem to have been taken in the seventies. I’ve never seen so many Afros, giant collars, and bell-bottom pants in my life.