Silver Sparrow

“Dana,” Raleigh said again.

“Are you scared of me?” James said.

“No,” I said. “You’re wrong.”

“I’m not,” James said softly. “You’re scared of me. I’ve been a good father to you. You have no cause to be scared of me like that.”’

“I’m not scared,” I said, pleading now. I knew the feeling was cal ed deja vu. “I’m not scared,” I’d said to Marcus in the dark of his parent’s bedroom. “I’m not,” I’d said, bal ing my shaking hands into fists and stuffing them under my thighs.

THAT HAD BEEN only two weeks earlier. I’d taken the 66 Lynhurst bus to Marcus’s house. When the bus passed right in front of my father’s house with its orange-sherbet bricks, I opened my mouth and swal owed air. The address was written out in cursive letters, SEVEN THIRTY-NINE, instead of just numbers like regular people. The sign staked in the yard read CHAURISSE’S PINK FOX. After West Manor Elementary, I pul ed the cord and the driver let me off. Marcus’s parents, whom I had never seen, were away at a bridge tournament. The house was stuffed with kids, some of them from other schools. I went into the bedroom looking for Marcus but found only Angie, a wild girl who wore keyhole tops even to school. She lay on his bed, talking on the telephone, looking up at the poster of Jayne Kennedy mounted on the ceiling. When I lay on Marcus’s bed, I always closed my eyes against the beautiful woman spread above me.

Wandering back into the living room, I found Ronalda who asked me what was wrong.

“Angie’s in his room.”

She corrected her eyeliner with her finger and frowned. “Are you going to leave?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Ronalda gave a deep sigh like she had already seen everything in the world. “You know what my mama says? ‘Your pride or your man. You can’t have them both.’”

The guys came in then from the backyard, where they had been working on the barbecue gril .

“The coals are hot,” Marcus said. He smel ed dangerous, like lighter fluid.

“Hi, Marcus,” I said, and waved. Maybe I sounded a bit too eager, because he tensed.

“Don’t get carried away,” he said. “It’s not that serious, babygirl.”

Everyone in the room laughed, except Ronalda.

Now I must have looked hurt, because Marcus approached me from behind, touching my waist and saying hel o into my hair. He greeted me like my father greeted my mother, except we were in front of other people. “You look good,” he said, pressing himself against my backside. I wanted to melt into him, but the laughter of his friends stil hung in the air.

“It was a joke,” Marcus said softly, stil directing his words into my scalp. “A joke. Why do you have to be so serious al the time?”

“I’m not mad,” I said.

“It wasn’t funny,” Ronalda spoke up from the couch.

Now al his friends laughed at him, although Ronalda hadn’t even made a joke.

“Bald-headed bitch,” Marcus said, but if Ronalda heard him, she didn’t react.

IT WASN’T LIKE on television. It wasn’t The Burning Bed. I wouldn’t even cal it violence, real y. Sometimes it was like a shove with a bit of a shake. Yes, there were slaps, but with a slap, the shock was in the sound more than anything else. It scared me, that was al . And I shouldn’t have asked him about Angie. The two of them had known each other forever. They went to the same church. Their houses had identical floor plans. They were bathed together as babies. I needed to learn how to trust people.

My mother says that if a man hits you once, leave. But the truth is this — my father smacked my mother across the jaw when I was six months old.

She stumbled out of the room, and he sat in front of my crib and cried. She says that was the first and only time. So it happens. But you can’t go around saying that.

I went into the kitchen to pour myself some cucumber water. James and Raleigh fol owed me like bodyguards. According to the clock on the microwave oven, Marcus was ten minutes late already; for once I was grateful for his habit of rarely keeping his promises. There was even the possibility that he wouldn’t show up at al . His life was busy, and he had many friends and obligations. That was just the way things were. Love didn’t always look and act the way you expected it to.

“So who’s the boyfriend?” my father wanted to know. He turned to Raleigh. “She’s too young to be going out this late at night, right?”

Raleigh picked up his camera and aimed it at my father’s face. When James repeated himself, I heard the click of the shutter. Raleigh turned the camera toward me, and I felt myself straighten, improve my posture.

“Not looking like that, Raleigh. Don’t take her picture,” James said. “What’s wrong with you?”

Raleigh lowered the camera.

I said, “I didn’t even say I had a boyfriend.” The lie reminded me of what Marcus had said on the night of the barbecue. I am not your boyfriend.

The memory made my left arm tingle. It wasn’t right for Marcus to talk to me like that, not in front of people, but I knew my father was a man to care only about what Marcus did to me, what I did with Marcus, or the things we did together. James stood before me with his fist throbbing like a human heart. He wanted to hit something. I took a step back.

“What?” James said.

“Nothing,” I said.