rest of the kids in his class, but it didn’t mean that he was slow. He was just born at the wrong time, which is something that could happen to anyone.
The McCreadys were a good family. His mother taught music to grade-schoolers and his father was a tax accountant. Marcus Senior handled my father’s books, something I discovered quite by accident, but it gave me a thril to be so close to James’s real life. When Marcus’s parents had renewed their vows at Cal anwolde, my father drove the limousine at a reduced rate. His father cal ed mine “Jim.”
We snuck around a lot, Marcus and me. When I passed him in the corridors at school, he looked away. After a month, I learned to shift my attention first. It wasn’t personal. It was just that Marcus had gotten into trouble the year before when he went to Woodward Academy, so he wasn’t supposed to run around with underclassmen. I slipped easily into my role as unacknowledged girlfriend. When you already had one secret life, what bother was it to have another secret within that secret? I even changed my appearance to exaggerate the effects of my doubly double life. For my everyday self, I gathered up my hair into two Princess Leia buns over my ears and stopped lining my eyes. I asked my mother to buy me black saddle shoes like Olivia Newton-John wore in
“What is wrong with you?” my mother wanted know. “There is nothing wrong with fixing yourself up. Is this a phase?”
She took me by the shoulders and searched my face for answers. The deal was that we were to tel each other everything. She touched my forehead and then my ears. “Where are your earrings?”
“In my jewelry box,” I told her.
“You never wear them anymore,” she said sadly.
But I did. I wore them when I was with Marcus.
It wouldn’t be right to say that Marcus changed me, that he took a sweet quiet girl who wanted to grow up to be a pediatrician and turned her into the freak of the week. I know that’s what some people said about me behind my back, but that doesn’t make it true. It was more like Marcus showed me new possibilities. I met him, of al places, in Kroger. My mother and I were there to stock up on canned goods — the weatherman had predicted up to four inches of snow and the city was going crazy. Mother had gotten home late and we had rushed to the store to see if there was any food left. She made herself busy snapping up whatever cans of soup remained and I was sent to find deviled ham. The store was packed with panicked shoppers, snapping up anything nonperishable, even oysters packed in brine. The deviled ham was long gone, but I did spy a few dented cans of Vienna sausages way in the back of the shelf.
I was cradling several cans in my arms when I felt a tug on my belt loops. I looked over my shoulder and saw Marcus. I knew who he was — there was no way you could go to Mays and not know Marcus McCready I I.
Stil holding me at the waist, he leaned toward me, resting his newscaster chin on my shoulder. His breath smel ed of orange rind and something spicy like clove. “Hey, pretty girl. If you wasn’t jailbait, I would ask you to give me a chance.” His hand moved up from my belt to my back. I stood stil and let him push his other hand into my hair. “You are some kind of pretty. Fine, too. Thick.” I could envision my heart like the tiny jingling bel on a cat’s col ar.
I locked my knees, even though I knew that locked knees were how girls made themselves faint when they didn’t want to dress out for gym, but stil , I tensed my legs to hold myself upright. This was desire, pure and uncut. I knew the word from reading Judith Krantz, but stil , trashy paperbacks hadn’t prepared me for Marcus’s fingers against my scalp and his potpourri breath. I leaned into his tug of my hair and he said, “You like it.”
Suddenly, he released me, and said in a brighter tone. “Hel o, Mrs. Grant.”
I turned to see a light-skinned lady pushing a cart piled high. “Hel o, Marcus.” I blinked my eyes, as though someone had just turned on a bright light. I looked at my feet, too embarrassed to face the shoppers al around us who had seen God knew what.
“Give me your number,” Marcus said. “I could go to jail, but I don’t care. Damn, girl. You look so good.”
I didn’t have paper, but I did have a pen in my fake Louis Vuitton. Marcus peeled the corner of the label from a can of tuna and I wrote my number in tiny but clear print. He folded the scrap until it looked like a spitbal and tucked it into his pocket. I stood, unmoving, feeling my body expand and contract just under my skin until my mother rol ed her cart down the aisle.
“There you are.”
I gave her the Vienna sausages and unlocked my knees. I smiled like nothing was wrong, as though I was the same girl I was ten minutes ago.
But in truth, I was different now, burning and anointed.
6
THINK ABOUT IT
THROUGH MARCUS, I FOUND myself a best friend. Ronalda Harris. She was often at his house parties, not because she was part of his crew but because Marcus was always looking for more girls to even the numbers out. Ronalda lived right next door to him and, like me, didn’t have a reputation to protect. Sometimes at the parties, Marcus cal ed me his “girlfriend” and even kissed me in front of everyone. I’d sit on his lap and drink from his cup. Other times, he just acknowledged me with secret winks and smiles over the heads of his guests.
When Marcus didn’t have time to talk to me, I’d hang with Ronalda. She was the new girl and so different from everyone else that she could have been an exchange student. She had tried to give herself a relaxer and as a result she was nearly bald-headed so she wore huge earrings and sparkly eye shadow so everyone could tel she was girl. On top of that, she had a curious accent; it wasn’t so much in her pronunciation but the way she grouped words together. For emphasis, she would repeat a word three times. “That test was hard, hard, hard.” She said “make groceries,” like she was from Louisiana. Her face was ordinary as a loaf of bread, but she had a boyfriend who was a grown man. He was in the army and picked her up sometimes in a navy blue Cutlass Supreme. On a few occasions, I rode in the backseat, staring up at the shiny yel ow fabric covering the ceiling, held in place by a dozen feathered roach clips. I thought she was fascinating, but Marcus thought she was weird. “Bama,” he said, and
“ghetto.”
“Ghetto,” Ronalda said she could live with, but she didn’t want anybody to cal her “Bama.” “How can somebody from Georgia cal somebody else a Bama?” She was from Indy, a real city and it was Up North. “North enough that we don’t lose our minds over a couple snow flurries. Marcus and them may be bourgie, but they are the
