“Not even a thank-you.” Marquise rubs his braids.
“Thank you!” Junior screams.
Big Henry rests his elbows on his knees, shakes his head. Huddled over, his face a surprise emerging from the broad bowl of back. He glances over at me, and it is as if he passed the money to me, as if he dropped it in my hand like chalky pecan candy, like mealy pecans, sun-blackened blackberries. Skeetah is blinking half-lidded at the game, where Randall and his teammates are already glazed with sweat, shining darkly in the dim light like the rain- drenched stone that lines the muddy beach of the pit. Big Henry asks the air in front of him, but everyone knows who he is speaking to.
“You want something?”
His hands are so different from Manny’s, so large, and they are slow-moving as the sheaves of the stunted palm trees planted at odd places along the beach, alien to the Mississippi Gulf, as they bear the dragging wind made slow by the barrier islands.
“No,” I say. I have to go to the bathroom.
I maneuver around clumps of boys and girls, some I go to school with, some from Bois Sauvage and St. Catherine, until I reach the bottom of the bleachers. Still, the gym is more than half empty. All of the parents, six or seven of them, and their toddlers sit on the first row only. Girls slap and slide along the benches while still sitting; boys wear white tees, sleeveless shirts, caps, basketball shorts. There is laughter, shrill calls. Everyone is flirting, saying in nudges and jokes and blushing what they would do in private.
On the court, Randall is already blinking hard at the sweat blinding him. His shirt sticks to him on the sides, close as a bud. He goes up for a rebound, rises up out of the cluster of players, but they buzz angrily, and he falls. The referee whistles, and Randall walks to the foul line, bouncing on the balls of his feet. Nothing about him seems to touch anything else: the court, the ball, his shirt that he picks at so that his skin can breathe. He is a bayou crane, alighting so he doesn’t even sink into the black marsh before taking off in flight.
“Excuse you.”
Bumping into him is a shock. He is solid, stocky, with the kind of chest men get when their bulky muscles start softening to seed. His fresh fade has a tinge of red in the brown, which lights up when he tilts his head at me as it catches the light coming in through the door. He has a gold grill in, the same grill that he had in on the day that he and Skeetah mated China and Kilo. He opens his mouth further, and the letters are stamped in spit-shined jewels, one on each tooth, into the gold: R-I-C-O.
“Sorry.”
Manny stands to one side behind him. He is wearing blue, and he and Shaliyah and Rico must be fresh from the barbershop, for his curls have been cut close so that they are only black waves, but his face stands out without the hair framing it, beautiful: the strong nose, the jaw leading to a hollow where there is a fresh purple mark, the shiny scar on his face making the rest of the skin even more vivid. He jerks his head up, raises his eyebrow in the easy
“What’s up?” Rico says, and I am veering over the edge of the court as he barrels past me. Manny pulls at Shaliyah’s hand, and they follow Rico. I wade through a tide of kids at the door, all Junior’s age or younger, trading small candies they are sucking from wax paper and salty cheesy chips and neon cold drinks they’ve scraped the labels off of with their small, bony fingers. The bathroom is around the back of the gym in a separate, smaller building, and I run to it.
The bathroom is dark, darker even than the gym, and it is small, with only one sink and two dark green stalls. The walls are gray cinder block. I go in the stall farthest from the door, lock it behind me, pee while squatting and then flush, wipe down the seat, and sit on the bowl, which is narrow enough to feel like a seat. I wedge my nose between my thighs and breathe. My stomach and my shirt, bunched together, feel like a pillow wedged in my lap. I wish I could pull it out. My eyes burn. Inside my chest, a machete swings, back and forth, up and down, breaking the living, clearing a pulpy path behind it where green things lie, leaking. My face is wet against my leg. I stay like that until it stops, until the toilet stops ticking, the door creaks open, and the machete pauses, smelling of sap and metal.
I wipe my face with my shirt, open the stall, and he is standing there, pulling the outside door shut behind him, sealing the darkness.
“This is the girls’,” I say weakly.
“Been thinking about you,” says Manny, and then he has pushed me back into the stall, closed it behind us, grabbed my arms and turned us so that he is sitting on the toilet. He unzips his pants, and I grab his dick hard enough to hurt. I want it to hurt. He doesn’t wince, intent on my loose shorts. He pulls me down on him so I am straddling him, and then he is inside. It is easy and wet. He grips my shoulders, pulls me down hard, rolls back away from me, pulls me down again, his face in my chest. It is the first time he has grabbed me over my waist, kept his hands on me closer to my face. Touched me.
“Wait,” he says, and then he is making me stand up, pulling off my shorts and underwear, bearing me back down on him. My clothes catch on one ankle, hang like they’re half-pinned from a clothesline. We have never done it like this. His hands are on my ass, and he tries to look down, to see, but it brings us face-to-face. Sweat gathers at his hairline, catches on the red grooves left by the clippers, like ant trails, across the top of his forehead. He grimaces, looking down, away, over my shoulder, up to the ceiling.
I grab his face.
Under my hands, his jaw, freshly shaved, feels like a cat’s tongue. My fingers are black as bark against his paler skin.
He will look at me.
He shrugs, twists his head to the side. Flipping like a caught fish. I roll my hips. It is too sweet.
He will look at me.
He snorts, puts his head down into my shoulder. I pull hard, and my hands slide along his face. I grab again.
He will look at me.
He grunts, grabbing at my sweaty sides, his eyes closed. His lashes are longer than those of any girls I know. Beautiful. The thumbs of his long hands press into my stomach, so he can pull again, but then they stutter. He presses hard again: my belly pushes back. He looks down and back up, eye to eye: all I have ever wanted, here. He is looking. He is seeing me, and his hands are coming around to feel the honeydew curve, the swell that is more than swell, the fat that is not fat, the budding baby, and his eyes are so black they are all black, and they are a night without stars. All I have ever wanted. He knows.
“Fuck!” Manny yells, and he is throwing me up and off of him. I hit the door behind me, the rough cat tongue of his face gone, and I grip steel, air, nothing. The bathroom smells like the salt of marsh mud, like tadpoles dying in their shrinking shallows, and he is zipping his pants, folding me into the corner of the stall when he opens it, leaving me standing in the dark bathroom, runny at the legs, breasts aching with bloom, one of Mama’s hair clips hanging from one string of hair before it falls into the toilet, lost in the scummy bowl. I wipe myself, flush the toilet, watch the water spin in a spiral, a baby storm, as it sucks the clip down and down and away.
I’ve crossed the threshold out of the bathroom three times, and each time that I think I am done crying, that I can go back into the game to sit next to my brothers as if nothing has happened, my eyes start leaking and my chest burns, hotter than the bright air with the bees drowsing in the crape myrtle, and I have to go back into the bathroom. I go in the other stall, pull my feet up, squat on the toilet. Smash my face into my salty knees. When I can breathe, I leave the stall to splash cold water on my face, but my eyes still look red, my eyelids swollen in the funhouse mirror. And then I think that Manny saw me, and that he turned away from me, from what I carry, pulling his burnt gold face from my hands, and then I am crying again for what I have been, for what I am, and for what I will be, again.
“Esch, you all right?”
“I’m all right.”
“Big Henry told me to come check on you. I told him that I didn’t want to come in the girls’ bathroom, but he said…”
“I’m coming. Hold on.”
At least my face is dry. Maybe everyone will just think that I am high. I want to let Junior go ahead of me back
