“Boy, please!” Bianca put her hands on her shapely, fourteen-year-old hips. “You aren’t hardly grown,” she said. “I’ma need for you and your friends to bounce so I can straighten up in here before Grandma get back from bingo.”
Peanut checked his phone then smacked his lips. “Momma gonna be at bingo for at least another four hours. Holla back,” he said.
“Let her chill,” said Peanut’s friend, the one who’d won the bet. They called him Cockroach. “Baby girl reminds me of my baby’s momma.” He licked his lips as if he were thirsty.
If Bianca could’ve read Cockroach’s mind, or had been a little more streetwise, she would’ve beat the pavement and got as far away from those fools as her feet would carry her. But she couldn’t read his mind, and she wasn’t streetwise.
Cockroach, with a slippery smile, said to Peanut, “Aren’t you going to introduce us? Shit, we may be able to work something out on that bread that you lost, plus let you make a li’l sum-sum on the side. Ya feel me?”
Bianca saw Peanut nod to Cockroach. Cockroach grinned that same slippery smile, like the guy in the movies that no one likes, or the villain who eventually gets killed by the time the ending credits roll.
Cockroach said to Bianca, “Come sit beside me, ma. We can clean up later. Don’t worry. I’ll help you.”
“No, thank you.” She didn’t need to be street smart to know that Cockroach wasn’t anyone she wanted to sit next to. She told Peanut, “I’ll just come back later.”
When she turned to leave, she felt a hand take hold of her wrist. It was Cockroach.
“Why you in a hurry?” he said. His breath smelled like onions. “We ’bout to have some fun.” He forced her hand onto his crotch. It was hard.
She frowned her face up and tried to pull away, but he was too strong, his grip too tight. He palmed her ass real hard. She cocked back and slammed her fist into his face with her free hand. The blow surprised Cockroach, but it didn’t hurt him. It only seemed to make him more eager to finish what he’d started.
Bianca screamed, “Help me!” to Peanut.
Peanut laughed. “Don’t act like you ain’t already fucking, girl. Go ’head and give ol’ boy some of that, so I can squash my bill.”
Bianca didn’t want to believe what she’d heard. She knew Peanut was a follower, but she never would’ve imagined that he would stand by and watch her get raped in their grandmother’s house.
Cockroach spun her around, yanked down her jeans, and bent her over the couch. He had both her hands pinned behind her back. The other friend said, “My next! That li’l bitch thicka than a bowl of oatmeal.”
Peanut said, “You gotta pay if you wanna play, playa.”
“You ain’t said nuttin’ but a word, my nigga.”
While Peanut was negotiating payments for Bianca’s body, Cockroach was digging his fingers inside of her. Bianca tried to jerk away, but Cockroach kept pulling her back. When she screamed, the one who said he wanted to rape her next put his palm over her mouth, silencing her protests and pleas to stop.
Bianca couldn’t have imagined, not in a million years, that anything worse than this could ever happen to her. Why hadn’t she seen this coming? How was she to know she was not safe in her grandmother’s house? To paraphrase what Sophia said in Alice Walker’s novel, The Color Purple, a girl child ain’t safe in a houseful of men.
But Bianca had always been safe in her mother’s home. Say what negative things she could about her mother, Ella never brought men in the house near her daughters. Unlike a lot of her friends’ mothers, who naively brought men home to live with them and their children, often getting their daughters molested, Ella had never exposed her girls to that trauma. After Bianca’s father abandoned her, she gave up on men. She was also careful about whom she brought around her developing daughters.
The other reason Bianca hadn’t seen danger brewing was she had grown up in a houseful of women. She had never been around horny boys growing up in a house. Therefore, she had thought she was going to be safe going to her grandmother’s house. How wrong she was, though.
A pain so sharp and intense reverberated throughout her entire body that it felt as if she would split in two. Her last thoughts, she remembered before passing out, were: How could something like this be happening to me? I wanna kill these motherfuckers. I swear I never in a million years thought that I’d be losing my virginity like this.
CHAPTER 8
“Bianca! Bianca! Bianca!”
Hearing Bella’s voice snapped her out of the daze she was in. She had not thought about that night in a very long time.
“Look, sis, you know I love you. God knows you know I do. I will do anything for you. But I can’t back you on this one.”
“Huh? What?”
“I just can’t,” Bella informed Bianca.
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t have your back after you killed my nephew.”
“Killed the baby?” Those words snapped Bianca out of her trance. “Bitch, are you fucking crazy? I mean, fucking out of your got-damn mind? Do you really think that low and little of me, like I would do some sick shit like that to the one thing that did look to me for real love?” At this point, she had flipped out and was screaming at the top of her lungs.
“Look, I don’t want to believe it,” Bella whispered into the phone as if hoping no one would hear, “but I see them bagging up the remains of a little baby.”
“That has nothing to do with me.”
“It’s almost impossible to believe, but I hear you and want to believe you.”
“I will explain everything.”
“Okay, cool, so just come over here and talk to the police. You just needs to get over here
