We climbed into the cab’s backseats. Chase pulled away from the Hay.
—Heard you got offered, Devonté said to me.
I heard a foamy crack and watched a can of Natty Light rise up from Devonté’s seat. I accepted it.
—Welcome to—
—Don’t spill that shit, Chase snapped.
He didn’t turn when he said this. Come to think of it, Chase hadn’t looked at me once since I stepped into the truck.
—Chill, Devonté said, cracking open another beer and handing it to Reshawn.
—One of my tires is worth more than your whole shitbox, D. I don’t need some retard pre-frosh stinking up my truck.
—I’ll be careful, I said, but Chase ignored me.
Ten minutes later we arrived at Central Campus, forty hilly acres of tan-and-brown apartment complexes built in the 1970s to accommodate the expanded student population after King went coed. We parked on a sodium-lit street in front of one of the complexes and started up a small knoll. Chase hurried ahead of us and disappeared into the apartment.
—Did I do something wrong? I asked Devonté.
—Nobody knows how to read McGerrin’s ass. He’s, what’s the word, volatile. He’ll be all happy-happy when he doesn’t think you’re a threat. You’re a Will? Yeah. He’s probably tellin’ himself you’re his fuckin’ enemy now.
It was imperative I find Chase, tell him this couldn’t have been further from the truth. But I couldn’t see him in the living room we entered, packed as it was with a hundred-plus players, loud as it was with all the drunk voices, heady as it was with warring smells—hormones, cheap cologne, Black and Tans, the faintly fecal scent of weed, alcohol breath of every variety. Reshawn and I were handed red Solo cups of huge-headed Natty Light and sat on two of the twelve wooden desk chairs arranged in a circle in the room’s center. Reshawn sat to my left, bored again. Charlie settled unsteadily onto the chair to my right: out of sympathy for not being offered today, Charlie’s host had gotten him drunk.
Bodies heaved and the temperature swelled, the room abuzz with the erratic electricity of too many waiting men. I started to hope the main event wasn’t going to happen, that the night was going to be a bust, when a gush of cold air swept over me. Voices grew even louder now as the wall of players parted and a woman stepped into the center of the room. She was bigger and brawnier than I was, wearing heavy Timberland boots, baggy black cargo pants, an untucked red flannel shirt, and a purple King College baseball cap with the school’s logo, a gold crown, glistening in its center.
Its owner’s face glared from beneath the cap’s unbent bill.
—The rules! she shouted, silencing everyone. You do not touch my lady—my lady touches you. You give my lady words of respect—call her a bitch and we gone. You follow her instructions—
She looked straight at me.
—She tell you to jump? Jump. She tell you bark like a dog? She flashed a smile, showing a front tooth encased in silver.
—Then do that, motherfucker! My lady is chief from now till we walk out that door.
She surveyed the recruits one last time.
—And tips is more than welcome.
The bouncer stepped away from the center of the circle and set up a boom box on the floor next to my chair. R&B started slinking out of the speakers. The overhead lights dropped, and now there was just a single bright beam from a standing lamp in the corner, used to illuminate the inner circle.
The dancer stepped into the center. Even in vertiginous heels she stood well under five foot, dressed only in a lime green G-string and matching bra. Her greased ass and hips and thighs shone in the lamplight; her tummy sported a long scar northeast of her navel. Braided hair extensions spilled all the way down to the top ridge of her buttocks, which I noticed had stretch marks running across each cheek—stretch marks that matched the ones I’d developed myself after I’d started lifting weights.
The lap dances commenced, the dancer moving clockwise along the chairs to ride each recruit, making Charlie third-to-last, me second-to, and Reshawn last. Bra still on, she pushed her cleavage into the recruit’s nostrils while the players behind us whooped and laughed, and when she dismounted you could see the jean-clad erection left to long after her. She hadn’t even settled onto Charlie’s lap before Charlie slapped her ass so hard I heard it over the loud music. The boom box was paused and the bouncer scolded Charlie to keep his hands to himself. The dancer abandoned Charlie and moved onto me. I thought it wise to show her how assiduously I followed directions, so I gripped the underside of my seat to ensure my hands went nowhere forbidden as she slid up and down my lap.
Reshawn’s turn. Only now did the dancer remove her bra, and in the first genuinely sexy moment of the performance she lowered her crotch softly onto his lap and paused her gyrating to make eye contact with him. She guided his hands to her nipples, rocking slowly, tilting her head back so her braids cascaded down to his knees. But was Reshawn smiling, licking his lips as the others had? No. He was more bored than ever. The dancer noticed this when I did, and her face registered, in lightning succession, confusion and sadness and rage, sealing it all off with a stony blasé.
She pushed herself away from Reshawn and retreated to the center of the circle. Up to then the music had been slow, smoky ballads, but now the mix turned to the apocalyptic sirens of a rap anthem. The dancer began making circles within the circle in the center, hard stepping mock-militantly in her stilettos, hand up in a salute. She dropped precipitously down into a crouch and, hands on knees, swayed from side to side while the bouncer stepped behind her to lay down a lime green beach towel. The
