“Miss Billie, would you like a rum cola?” Mama asked.
Miss Billie said yes and Mama got up and went in the kitchen. Miss Billie took me around the waist and sat me up on the couch beside her. “Don’t let that old man mess with you, now, cause he ain’t nothing but a shit.”
“He ain’t messed with me,” I said.
The one in the building who had was a little boy with a dirty popsicle stick. We were playing in this empty apartment the landlady had left open. He said he wanted to do me first and then I could do him. I couldn’t feel him doing anything, just moving the stick around, and then he let me squeeze him like a milkweed.
“Do me now.”
“What y’all childrens doin’ in here? I’ma tell y’all’s mama,” the landlady said.
She never did tell anybody, though. I got blood on the toilet paper.
I was sitting up on the bed watching him. We were in his hotel room now. I had my shoes off and my feet up on the bed. I was hugging my legs.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“I’ll be okay after tonight. It’s the first couple of days I get the cramps, and then I’m okay.”
“Ain’t you got nothing to take?”
“Naw.”
He reached in his pocket and threw me a little tin of aspirins. He kept a jar of water on the night table. It had little bubbles in it. I poured a little in a glass. I handed him back the aspirins, but he said to put them on the table, I might need them again.
He was looking at me and then he came and rubbed his hand across my forehead. “Your forehead is like butter,” he said.
I said nothing. I’d never liked for anyone to touch me around the head, but I let him. I reached up and touched his wrist.
“How long?” he asked. “Three days,” I said.
The boy’s name was Freddy Smoot. After he had that popsicle up in me I wouldn’t play with him any more. Sometimes when I went down the steps and he saw me he’d corner me, or he’d corner me downstairs inside the door. He was eight, but I was big for my age and almost as tall as he was.
“Leave me alone.”
“You let me do it once.”
“Naw.”
He had another dirty popsicle stick he pulled out of his pants pocket. “Let me ‘zamine you again.”
“Naw.”
Just then Mr. Logan was coming up the stairs. “Mr. Logan, make him leave me alone.”
Mr. Logan just looked at me, grinning, and walked on by.
He kept cornering me until he rubbed himself up against me and then he ran up the stairs laughing. I didn’t even like to go outside unless I was with Mama and then he wouldn’t bother me. Once we were with Miss Billie, and Freddy Smoot passed us.
“That boy’s just like a little rooster, ain’t he?” Miss Billie said. “Just like a little banny rooster.”
“He is bad,” Mama said.
“I caint even stand for him to look at me,” Miss Billie said when we got in the house.
“Who, Freddy?”
“Naw, that shit out there. That ole shit out there.”
“You let me do it once.”
“She don’t know how to act,” Miss Billie said. She was talking about her daughter, who was fifteen. “All she do is think about that boy. That’s why she got her hand caught in the door, cause she too busy thinking about that boy. Come crying to me. I told her she didn’t have no business with that boy.”
“How’s her hand?”
“It’s coming along all right. It hurt her like the devil, though. I told her to go and let the doctor cut it a little so he can release some of the blood. But she said naw. That’s why it hurt so bad, all that pressure on it. I told her to go and let him cut it a little right by the nail, and it would stop hurting. But naw, all she got her mind on is that boy. They get like that when they that age, though.”
“Some of them like that before they that age,” Mama said. “Yeah, well, all I hope is she ain’t let him had none, cause once she let him get some, she ain’t gon rest till he get some more.”
“Naw, once they done it, they ain’t satisfied till they done it again.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m worried about,” Miss Billie said.
“You let me do it once.”
“I ain’t gon let you do it no more.”
“When you gon let me fuck you again, Eva?”
“You didn’t fuck me before.”
My mother said his mother wasn’t no good. The men she had coming in there. White and black men.
“She ain’t nothing but a whore,” Elvira said about one of the women in the psychiatric ward.
“She don’t look like one,” I said.
“Don’t none of them look like none,” she said.
“I only knew one whore,” I said. “Some woman that lived in the same building we did.”
“Did she look like one?”
“Naw. Mama said she was.” Elvira laughed.
“Once you open your legs, Miss Billie said, it seem like you caint close them.”
“What you say?” Elvira asked.
“I said what they used to say when I was a little girl.” She asked me and I told her.
She looked at me hard. “What about once you close them?” she asked.
I sat squeezing my legs together, holding my knees. I had on a long skirt.
“You look like a lion,” Davis said.
He was standing at the table peeling onions. He was going to make me his favorite salad, he said. Tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, lettuce, hard-boiled eggs. Sometimes bits of ham and cheese, if he had ham and cheese. Today he didn’t have ham and cheese.
“You look like a lion, all that hair.”
“It’s the male lions that have a lot of hair.”
“Then you look like a male lion,” he said, laughing. “Eva Medusa’s a lion.”
“Medina,” I said.
“Medina,” he
