All of the lights were out at her home when Tracy had gotten back in. She opened the door and nearly tripped over four trash bags. She curiously looked inside of them and found much of her clothing. She then looked over to the living-room couch and noticed her mother stretched out as if she had fallen asleep while waiting for her. Too upset to think about the message her mother was sending, Tracy headed up the stairs to her room. Once she had made the journey up the steps, she crawled into her bed, which felt extra-soft after the shock she had been through. She ran her fingers over her face and through her honey-blonde-topped hair. If she had heeded her mother and stayed in the house, maybe she would have never experienced the nightmare.
Patti clicked on the light. “Get up, girl, ’cause you’re getting out of this house!”
Tracy buried her face in the pillow. “Please, mom, I don’t feel so good.”
“Why, are you pregnant?”
“No, but I seen something that’s making me sick.”
Patti was still fuming, but she calmed down after seeing how distressed her daughter was. “You should have stayed in this damnhouse,” she huffed, as she walked over and sat on Tracy’s bed, tending to her. “So what happened?”
Tracy sat up and said, “Mercedes is messed up on drugs.”
Patti shook her head and pondered. “Well, how do you know this?”
Tears rushed down Tracy’s face. “I saw her. And she spoke to me.”
“What did she say to you?”
“She said that it was her life and that she didn’t care what I thought about it.”
Patti muttered, “Mmm, mmm, mmm. What is this world coming to? Where were you at when you saw her?”
“I saw her on the street, and I went to go talk to her.”
Patti frowned, knowing better. “You think I’m really stupid, don’t you? I know that damn boy you been sneaking around with is probably mixed in with them damn drugs. And you probably seen her in one of those crack houses. Didn’t you, Tracy?”
Tracy sat silently.
“See, girl, you think that your father and I don’t know anything, and that you somehow got all of the answers. But I’ve been there myself, Tracy, and times don’t change, they just look different.
“When I was growing up, it was the gang-war era, where you didn’t date a guy unless he had a jacket. People were using heroin back then.”
Patti got up to leave and said, “I hope that you learned something from this, because I don’t know what else to say to you. This is your battle. I don’t have the time nor the energy to be out here chasing you around in these streets. I have my own damn life to live, Tracy.”
Patti walked to the door and added,” Oh, by the way. I paged your father. He’s going to be here any minute after work. I told him that I was ready to throw your ass out.”
Tracy looked up at her mother from the pillow and remembered that her clothes were stuffed inside of trash bags and setting at the door.
“Do you think I should let you stay in this house, Tracy?” her mother asked. Patti figured that her hard-headed daughter may have learned a big enough lesson to stay.
“I’m sorry, mom,” Tracy pleaded.
“Answer the damn question, girl,” Patti snapped at her.
“Yes,” Tracy answered meekly.
“Why?”
Tracy thought of a good answer and came up empty. “I don’t have no place else to go,” she mumbled.
“You act like you got somewhere else to go. Do you wanna move in with that boy you’ve been running around with?” Patti had a lot of assumptions about her daughter’s whereabouts. All she needed was the proof.
“No,” Tracy answered.
Patti nodded, pensively, deciding that she would let her stay. She ain’t ready for them damn streets anyway, she told herself. She’s been spoiled all of her life. Philadelphia would eat her alive, just like it did Mercedes. “You know that you’re back on punishment, right?” Patti was telling her more than asking her.
Tracy nodded, conceding to it.
“And I want them earrings, and the chains,” her mother added.
“Hunh?” Tracy uttered, confused.
“You heard me. Take them off and give them here.” Patti walked back over to the bed and reached out her hand.
Tracy was still reluctant. “What are you gonna do with it?”
“Tracy, give me the damn jewelry! I’m gonna put it up, until I feel like giving it back to you.”
Tracy took off her jewelry and handed it over.
Patti held the relatively weightless gold in the cup of her hands. “Mmm,” she grunted. “Cheap. If you tried to pawn this stuff downtown, they’d barely give you fifty dollars for it.” She then put the seized items away in her room and went back downstairs to wait for Dave.
Dave unlocked the front door with his key as soon as Patti had gotten comfortable on the couch. It was close to eleven o’clock.
“So what’s this about?” he asked her, stumbling over the trash bags of clothing, just as Tracy had done earlier.
Hearing the front door creak open and close, Tracy snuck into the hallway bathroom, which was right by the stairway, to eavesdrop on her parent’s conversation.
“I’m kicking Tracy out,” Patti lied to him. She was ready for an argument. She wanted one. I’m ready to kick his ass in here, too, she thought to herself. She had done a lot of maturing in the nine years that they had been apart.
“For what?” Dave asked her.
“Because she’s grown.”
He walked over and joined his wife on the couch. “Let me speak to her.”
“She’s asleep.”
“Well, let’s go wake her up.”
“For what?” Patti snapped at him.
“So I can see what’s going on here.”
Patti looked at him crossly. “I just fucking told you what’s going on here. Tracy thinks that she’s grown, so she’s moving out.”
Tracy stood inside of the bathroom door enjoying it, especially since she knew that she wasn’t going anywhere. “Get him, mom,” she whispered to herself. Dave had not been a good daddy.
“Patti, the girl is barely fifteen years old,” he argued.
“And?”
“She’s nowhere near grown.”
“Well, since she’s not grown, then maybe she needs a damn father around here!”
Dave fell silent. He wanted to come back home, he just didn’t know how. He had gotten used to his freedom, and it had become destructively addictive. “So what are you saying, Patti?” he asked her, wanting her to cut to the chase. They had not discussed the topic in a while.
Patti took a deep breath. She had been thinking about this moment practically for all of the nine years of their unofficial separation. “Either you’re going to stay here, or you’re not. You can’t have it both ways. Not anymore. So either we’re gonna get a divorce, so you can marry this bitch, or whoever the hell you’ve been staying with, so I can move on with my life, or . . .”
She stopped herself, not wanting to believe that she actually still wanted him back. We’re not divorced yet, she told herself.
Tracy had stopped breathing after hearing the word “divorce.” “Oh my God!” she mumbled. “I can’t believe she said that.” She was listening for her father’s response before she could continue breathing.
“I’ve never been staying with any woman. You know where I stay,” Dave commented to his wife, avoiding her ultimatum.
“Well, I’ve never seen the place,” Patti responded to him. “But that’s beside the point, Dave. The point is: why are you there in the first place?”
Dave grimaced. “Look, Patti, what do you want me to do? I mean, we can’t even have a conversation anymore.”
“Is that my fault? Oh, go ahead, blame everything on me.”
Dave was speechless. Patti was finally backing him up against a wall. “How do you think we can do this, Patti?” he asked her.
Patti was confused. “What the hell, Dave? Is there some kind of a process with you moving back in?” She had been saving up to move into her own place if he failed to agree. Life goes on, she told herself. And she was no longer willing to remain captive in his house.
Dave sighed. “It’s not as easy as you think it is,” he told her. He realized that Patti had matured, but with that maturity, she was also more demanding.
“You don’t have much longer to think about it, Dave. You told me, or us, rather, that you were moving back in years ago, after I had had Jason. What happened to that?”
Dave wanted to run away again to think it over. He knew he did not want a divorce. The only right thing to do was to start over. He had been dating on and off like Patti had, yet no woman could take her place either. She was the mother of his kids, still his wife and still living inside of his house.
“All right, I’ll think it over,” he told her.
Patti got up and walked over to the steps, unsatisfied with his answer. “You can let yourself out. And by the way, I decided to let Tracy stay before you came.”
“Well, you still haven’t told me what she’s done.”
“You ask her.”
Tracy eased into her room before her mother reached the top of the steps.
Dave sat for a while and thought things over. “Well, I guess this is it,” he said to himself. He was as nervous about moving back in as he had been when he first told Patti “I do.” But he had had his way long enough. The stability of his family depended on his presence.
That next day of school was like a funeral for Tracy. She did not want to be in school. There were too many things on her mind. She wore no glamorous outfits on her back that day. No earrings, and gold chains.
“Hey Tracy, you hear about Mark?” Jantel asked glumly.
“What Mark?” Tracy responded, absent-minded.
“You know, the one that hangs out with Victor and them.”
“Oh, Mark Bates. Yeah, what about him?”
“He dead,” Jantel told her.
Tracy stopped what she was doing at her locker. “How? What happened to him?”
“Some guys were after Victor for some money, and they shot Mark when they couldn’t find him.”
Tracy shook her head. “They always get the ones that really ain’t into it, ’cause Mark never knew what he was doin’.”
“I know, and he had started goin’ to night school and all to better himself, too.”
“He should have never dropped out,” Tracy commented. They parted ways for class, and Tracy arrived late.
“Is there any reason why you’re late, Ms. Ellison?”
“No, I just lost track of time.”
“Well, make sure that you keep track of it while in detention today.”
Tracy was appalled. “Oh, so I get a detention for being late one time?”
“Yes you do, and just for your outrage, you’ve earned yourself another one.”
Mr. Roberts was a no-nonsense English instructor, and Tracy hated him.
Bald-headed fool. That’s why he ain’t got no wife, she snapped to herself. Nobody wants his behind.
The detention ended faster than Tracy thought it would. She headed home after school with a girlfriend. A fast-running crook snatched her girlfriend’s earrings right off of her ears. Both girls screamed, but he was long gone before any help arrived. The pull had ripped the corner of one ear. Tracy’s companion bled while crying hysterically.
A concerned citizen summoned a policeman, and Tracy explained to the officer what had happened. The girl was then escorted to Germantown Hospital, with Tracy comforting her until they had arrived. Dag, I’m glad my mom took my earrings, she thought.
Afterward, Tracy rode the bus back home, bewildered by all of the unfortunate occurrences. She dropped her book-bag inside of the house and rushed to pick up Jason. While on her way past the playground, she noticed Victor and his friends loading up into cars. She suspected that they were heading to get revenge for Mark.
Jason was the last child to be picked up, and on the way back home Tracy could have sworn that she saw Mercedes in a long brown coat and wearing a black baseball hat. She turned away, hoping it wasn’t Mercedes who was walking toward them. Tracy still had not gotten over the shock of her desperate drug addiction.
“Tracy, let me talk with you. I feel a need to express myself,” the figure in the long brown coat said from behind. She was wearing a pink sweat suit with brand-new Reebok tennis shoes.
“I don’t want to talk to you out here,” Tracy responded to her. She looked around to see who saw them.
“Well, I’ll walk you home, so we can talk in your house like we used to.”
Tracy asked, “Have you spoken to your mother?”
“No, I haven’t, and don’t plan to, either.”
“Well, what if they see you?”
“It don’t matter. I have nothin’ to say to them,” Mercedes said out of spite.
But won’t you be ashamed of them seeing you like this? Tracy wished she had the courage to ask.
Mercedes sniffed and followed Tracy and her brother. She then took out a Newport.
Tracy sped up her pace to get inside quickly, nervous about Raheema spotting them.
Once they had made it inside, Mercedes sat on the couch. She began to shake and rub her hands together as if she were still cold and decided to keep her coat on.
Jason asked, “What’s wrong with her?”
“Nothin’, boy. Go on upstairs and watch TV in my room.”
Jason peeked at Mercedes disgustedly before he ran upstairs.
Mercedes looked at Tracy harshly. “Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, but it can happen to you, too. It can happen to any and everybody.”
Tracy felt Mercedes had a lot of explaining to do. It was a quarter to five. Patti was not expected home until five-thirty.
Mercedes shook her head. Her baggy eyes were bloodshot under the black hat’s brim. “Look at me now. A year ago I thought I was the toughest thing walkin’. And I thought I could get out of taking drugs, but I had more and more problems, so I needed more shit.”
She wiped her nose and continued. “Yup, Tracy, I had some good men that wanted to be with me, even marry me, but I turned them all down. I don’t know why, and shit. I guess I thought I was too much for these motherfuckin’ niggas out here.” She looked at Tracy and shrugged. “It might be over with for me, but I figured I could turn you around. It’s the least thing a sorry bitch like me can do now.”
Tracy interjected, “Naw, it ain’t gonna happen to me. And your life ain’t over with yet. You’re only twenty years old.”
Mercedes stood up to get her point across. “LOOK, GIRL . . . it ain’t that easy to say!”
Tracy backed down nervously, thinking that “junkies” were violent. She didn’t want to alarm her.
Mercedes calmed down and continued. “Every time you turn one nigga down, you gon’ go for another who’s more ruthless than the last. And they just gon’ dog you out and waste your damn time. It’s not the right way to go, but you put yourself in that boat when you’re young. And you’re never fuckin’ happy, because eventually you get bored with every one of them niggas. They don’t really like you and you don’t really like them. Y’all just buying time. He gives you some money and some clothes, while you’re giving him the pussy. And that shit ain’t changed in a hundred fucking years.”
“Have you talked to your sister?” Tracy asked, holding back her tears. Mercedes sounded as if she had given up on life.
“No. I haven’t seen her,” she answered. “How is she though?”
“She got acne all up and down her face. She needs some attention,” Tracy assumed.
Mercedes shook her head and sat back down. “See, all women got the same problem. I think we were better off in the caveman days when the men just took and fucked us . . . So what about that boyfriend of yours? The drug dealer?”
Tracy frowned. “Who, Cash? Oh, I’m gettin’ out of that, because I’m tired of that drug shit.”
Mercedes nodded. “That’s good, because once you get in it too deep, it’s hard to get back out. And all you’ll do is go run to the next one. But shit, at least I ain’t have no damn babies. That’s all I needed to drive me crazy.”
“But what about you? Are you gonna get help or something?” Tracy asked, concerned about her.
“Yeah, I’m going to this rehabilitation place tomorrow. And I guess I gotta be goin’ now.” She looked outside to see if her mother or Raheema might have been walking in. She then turned and faced Tracy. “Watch after my sister for me, all right? You’re stronger than she is.”
Tracy nodded. She shook in her stance as she closed the door. That could never happen to me, she told herself. I don’t even smoke. But Tracy would watch after Raheema. She felt that Raheema needed guidance, not her, and just like old times, she decided to call next door and make up.
• • •
Tracy answered her phone on the first ring, expecting it to be Cash. Patti still allowed her to have phone calls; she just could not leave the house.
“Where was you at today?” he demanded.
“I had a detention. And you don’t have to ask me like that.”
“A detention, for what?”
“You know what, Cash? I think you better call me back when you calm down.”
“Naw, fuck that! We gon’ talk right now!” Cash was paranoid again that Tracy was trying to play him. He suspected that she had evaded him on purpose.
Tracy smirked. “Cash, you gots to chill with all that hollering.”
Cash was annoyed. He figured he would try to scare her into submission. “Aw’ight young-girl. I’m gon’ break you up when I see you. Watch.”
Tracy retorted, “No you’re not.”
Cash slammed the phone on her ear.
Tracy sat on her bed, worried about tomorrow and unable to focus on her homework. She was too busy thinking about her situation. Cash was from a rough neighborhood, and most likely, she figured that he meant what he said.
“Did your father call you yet?” her mother stopped in to ask.
Tracy shook her head. “No.”
“Mmm, hmm,” Patti grunted. “All right then. Go on back to your homework.”
Tracy took longer than usual to put her clothing on that next morning. Before and after school, she watched her back for her safety, looking out for Cash. And after her second detention, Cash was nowhere in sight, so Tracy rushed home with her key in hand.
A voice roared, “HAAH!”
“AAAHHH!” Tracy screamed, throwing her hands to her chest. She then noticed that it was only Raheema. “Girl, what’s wrong with you?” she snapped.
Raheema laughed. “You’re lucky, girl, because Cash was up here looking for you in his jeep.”
“He was?”
Raheema followed Tracy into her house. “You should have seen this rabbit-fur coat that he had on,” she commented. “It had like five different colors, and a hood.”
Tracy sucked her teeth disdainfully. “Yeah, he can buy anything that he wants with his drug money.”
Raheema watched Tracy take off the long black leather. “Didn’t he buy that coat you’re wearing?”
“He got me a lot of stuff, but ta’ hell with him though,” Tracy insisted. She walked into the kitchen.
Raheema followed her. “You’re a trip, Tracy. You just go from one guy to the next, and you don’t even care,” she said, wishing that she could do the same. In a way, Raheema was beginning to admire Tracy’s free spirit.
“You can’t care, ’cause then they try to get new on you, and start acting all differently, like they got you in check or something.”
Raheema sighed. “Why can’t boys just like you and be with you for who you are?”
Tracy washed the dishes, glad that her mother was picking up Jason after a field trip his kindergarten class was having. She would not have to worry about seeing Cash for at least another day.
“Here you go talking that trash. You probably got boys who like you, but you don’t like them,” Tracy assumed. It was the same with most girls. If you look even half decent, somebody is gonna like you, she told herself. And in her opinion, light-skinned, long-haired and virtuous Raheema still had a lot going for her.
“Yeah, that’s true,” Raheema responded with a smile. “But when do you get the guy that you really want?”
“I guess when you get married. But some girls don’t even get him then.”
Raheema said, “Yeah, like my mother.”
“Everybody ain’t meant to play the same role in life, Raheema.”
“You right, but my role is stupid.”
“No it ain’t, Ra-Ra. You might get that ‘Mr. Right’ before I do. And men love to marry virgins.”
Raheema was caught off guard. Neither of them knew how to react after it had been said.
Tracy decided to laugh it off. “Why do people get all upset when you call them a virgin? That ain’t nothin’ negative.”
“It’s because of the way that people say it, like it’s something to be ashamed of.”
“Well, it don’t make no difference, as long as the guy knows what he’s doing.”
“Why can’t he be a virgin?” Raheema asked with a smile.
“Because, girl, you don’t want no guy who don’t know what he’s doin’. And if he’s still a virgin by the time he gets married, then most girls must didn’t like him anyway.”
Raheema suggested, “Maybe he was saving himself.”
Tracy cracked up at that one. “Oh my God! You really don’t know anything about guys, do you? Because I guarantee you, any man who’s still a virgin by the time he’s like twenty-one has a serious social problem.”
Dave had finally gotten over his inhibitions about moving back in with Patti and his children, but he wasn’t prepared to take the dive overnight. He took his sweet time about it. And with his work schedule as it was, he still did not seem to be home much. He and Patti had to get used to sharing the same bed and bathroom again, and it was no cake walk for either of them. They had both gotten used to having extra space.
I hope that this shit wasn’t a mistake, Dave would routinely tell himself. It felt weird being away from home for so long and then suddenly coming back for good. For nine years, he could leave in and out whenever he wanted to, and that liberty was gone.
This shit seems more stressful than him not being here, Patti thought, apprehensive herself. She was not sure if she could cuddle or hold him at night without scaring him away. Dave coming back home was nothing like being newlyweds. They were more like a couple coming home after a marriage-counseling session, and every move between them was tentative.
Tracy was confused as well. I wonder how things are gonna change with my father moving back home for good? she pondered. She was not quite sure how to take it. What if Dave became restrictive about who she went out with, where she went, and how long she stayed. Yet Dave was not as pressed about it as she thought he would be. He knew that he had been absent, so he planned to walk his way through a new understanding with Tracy, and that understanding did not include stepping in and controlling her life. He simply wanted to guide her from a man’s perspective.
For Jason, having both mom and dad home more often was heaven. He even wanted to stay up longer just to see the two of them in bed together. His reaction to the move in eased all of their doubts, making the new transition they were going through a hell of a lot more hopeful.
Tracy had moved on from Cash and began to date “respectable” guys, to impress upon her parents that she too had matured.
Keith Branch was a popular basketball player at Cheltenham High School, outside of Philadelphia. He was the talk of the school, tall, brown-skinned, well-dressed and well-spoken. He was exactly the type of young man that Tracy could introduce to her parents. Yet he had a problem with correcting her speech and making her feel illiterate. She could stand that, but his pretentious attitude was unacceptable. She had been around too many sociably astute guys to settle for a phony who pretended to be better-than. So Tracy dropped him in a heartbeat.
Her next friend, Charles Webster, was from Chestnut Hill, west of Germantown. Tracy had met him downtown inside of The Gallery while out boy-shopping with Raheema. He was half-white, or “mixed,” and he had never met the white side of his family. His German-born mother had been shunned, so Charles only knew his black kin, from down south.
Charles had a yellowish-tan complexion and floppy light-brown curls. The only boy who could match him for sheer prettiness was Bob. In fact, Tracy only talked to Charles because of his looks. She never listened to anything he had to say. “Light-brown curls, with pretty, smooth skin” was all that she talked about. And she took him with her wherever she went, protecting him possessively, as if he was the girl.
After they talked on the phone for a couple of days, Charles began to meet Tracy at her house nearly every day after school, and they would sit around and innocently do homework. Soon though, his eager peers began to pressure him into asking her for their first sexual encounter. Tracy was only sporting him, and did not consider herself in the sexual market anymore. Those days are over for me, she told herself.
Less concerned about her own wardrobe, Tracy began buy and pick out things for Charles to wear. She felt that his gear was not flashy enough for her taste, and in no time at all Tracy had him wearing clothing that quickly boosted his young image. She even paid for his haircuts, getting his curls cut the way she wanted them to look.
Tracy had reversed the roles, but unfortunately Charles’ new status attracted girls who were still in the sexual market. A Chestnut Hill girl, three years older than Charles and four years older than Tracy, made a strong move for him. Charles went over to her house to help lift a new television set into her bedroom when no one was home to help her. According to Charles, she then closed her door and locked him inside with her, where she proceeded to take off all of her clothes and supposedly lick him from head to toe before forcing him to have sex with her.
Tracy was furious after he told her. She didn’t believe one word of it. She felt as if he could not control himself, and that he knew what the girl was up to when she had invited him over to her house. “And if he thinks that his story is gonna make me wanna give him some, he can forget about it,” she had huffed to Jantel after telling her Charles’ story. They had become good friends again, and Jantel was by then one of the most popular track stars in the city.
Tracy could not believe that Charles had played her after she had bought him clothing and taken him places with her money to make him who he was. Girls were only attracted to him sexually after Tracy had schooled him. He was nothing but a slow-wit suburban boy before she had met him, but after Tracy, Charles ran free like a teenaged stud, getting all of the girls.
• • •
“That’s it, Ra-Ra. I hate all guys!” Tracy snapped after school.
“Why you say that?” Raheema wanted to know.
It was April. Raheema was turning sixteen in another month. Tracy’s birthday was not until September.
“That pussy-ass Charles is actin’ like he’s all that now,” Tracy hissed. She took a seat on her steps, with the April sun shining through the breeze. She winced, looking up at it.
“Well, you shouldn’t have been pimping him, and buying him all that stuff,” Raheema told her.
Tracy smiled at her neighbor’s choice of words. “Pimping him?” she repeated. “Let me find out Raheema’s trying to sound hip.”
Raheema grinned. “Well, that’s what you were doing, dressing him up and showing him off and stuff.” Raheema secretly liked Charles herself, yet Tracy practically jumped down his throat to get his phone number when they had first met him at The Gallery.
“Yeah, well fuck him,” Tracy fumed. “And see if I spend my money on another boy in my life.”
Raheema chuckled. “I wish I could have went with him,” she revealed. “I would have never let him leave.”
Tracy looked at her neighbor’s pimpled face and felt sorry for her. Raheema was living off of her life. “So you would have had sex with him?” she asked, still wondering if the myth was true that sex could clear up acne.
Raheema thought about it. “I don’t know. But I mean, why not?” she piped.
Tracy shook her head at her, remembering her first experience with Victor and how she had turned into his plaything. “You don’t wanna do that. Just hold out until you get married.”
“You didn’t,” Raheema reminded her.
Tracy paused, thinking about what she had actually gotten out of having sex, and why she had been so quick to engage in it the first place. “I think I just got ahead of myself and got mixed up into boys for the wrong reason,” she admitted. “I mean, I had no business at all being with a guy like Victor. He wasn’t no good for me. And I can see that now. He was way out of my league. And after him, I just kept doing it.”
“What about now?” Raheema asked, curiously.
“What, me and Victor?”
“Yeah? Do you think he’s still out of your league?”
Good question, Tracy thought. “Umm, I don’t know.”
“Whatever happened to Keith?” Raheema asked, changing the subject. She had begun to enjoy talking to Tracy about boys since she was older and more interested in them. And Tracy had many stories to share.
“Fuck that boy. He thought he was better than somebody,” she snapped.
Raheema frowned. “You do too.”
Tracy grinned, feeling guilty. “Yeah, but I don’t do it the way he did. I mean, I don’t really think that I’m better than people. I just—”
“Yeah, whatever,” Raheema said, cutting her off.
Tracy chuckled to herself. “Have you seen your sister lately?” she suddenly asked.
“No,” Raheema answered quietly.
“She might just don’t want to see y’all.”
“Are you saying that my sister hates us that much?”
“No. Maybe she’s too ashamed.” Tracy was speaking more for herself than for Mercedes. She was ashamed. Mercedes had been her big-sister figure as well.
Raheema was speechless. She was utterly confused about what road to travel in her life. She definitely did not want to go through the things that Mercedes and Tracy had been through, but yet they still had lived fuller lives. Raheema continued to believe that she was being cheated.
Raheema asked out of the blue, “Tracy, when was the last time you had sex?”
Tracy was shocked. She laughed and asked, “Wow, where’d you get that question from?”
“I don’t know. I guess because I never had sex.”
“Well, Cash was, when he took me to Atlantic City, last September.”
“Dag, I didn’t ask you who. I asked you when.”
Tracy laughed. “You probably was gonna ask me that next, anyway.”
“But you only did it with him once, though?”
Tracy grinned. “Well, you can say that, if you’re talking about on different dates.”
“He didn’t try you again?”
“Not really, ’cause he was embarrassed. He got other girls though. I just wanted his money. His jeep was nice, too.”
Raheema quizzed, “What do you mean, ‘he was embarrassed’?”
Tracy smiled and said, “Because, he didn’t last too long.” Then she chuckled and said, “Look, I gotta go get my brother. I’ll be back.”
Tracy left. She shook her head on the way, thinking of how much Raheema appeared to be missing out on. It was no surprise to see Victor again when she turned the corner. He was close enough to speak to her.
Tracy could sense him watching her as she walked. She then turned and caught him smiling at her, still giving her tingles up the spine. She was immediately angry at herself. I don’t believe that I still get nervous around him, she told herself.
“Ay Tracy, can I walk with you?” he said to her.
Why not? she told herself. “I’on care.”
Victor walked up beside her and grinned. “So I hear you been keepin’ some big-time company.”
“What ’chew mean by that?”
Victor always seemed to have information on her.
He took out a roll of twenty-dollar bills and said, “Cash Money.”
Tracy sucked her teeth and responded, “Oh, he ain’t nobody.”
“You was even talking to my man, Bruce. And that young-boah’ ‘Charley’ schoolin’ all the girls after dealin’ with you.” Victor smiled and said, “I guess I must have trained you well, hunh Tracy?”
“No, I don’t think so,” she responded. I don’t believe he said that to me, she thought. He makes me sound like a whore.
“Anyway, I hate that boy Charles,” she told him. I’m starting to hate your ass, too, she mused.
Victor said, “You know, hate is confused love sometimes, for real. You probably said you hate me to somebody. I mean, we both know you still like me. Don’t we, Tracy?”
Tracy was speechless. “Oh my God,” she mumbled with a helpless grin. I was just thinking that. “Why were you asking about me and stuff?” she wanted to know. It was obvious to her since he knew what she had been up to.
Victor cracked a smile, displaying all of his charm. “I’m just keeping tabs on you, making sure you’re all right.”
“Why?”
Victor grimaced at her. “Would you rather I just forgot about you, like we never did nothin’, and we never knew each other? Just like that,” he said with a snap of his fingers.
Tracy thought about it, experiencing an unexpected moment of panic. What if Victor never even knew me?
Victor was smiling again, in love with his own wit. “You know what? You don’t even have to answer that. I’ll just see you around.” He then turned and stepped off in the springtime breeze.
Tracy stared at the white sweatshirt that covered his back, still in a daze. Then grinned at herself. “I guess I’m not in his league,” she told herself. Victor still had her hooked.
Another summer rolled around, and the years were passing by like days. Tracy’s “sweet sixteen” would be at the summer’s end, and she planned on moving up the social ladder. She had already been accepted into a new clique of older college girls that she had met at the Ayunde Cultural Festival downtown on South Street. Her popularity had escalated, but Tracy wanted to change her priorities as far as guys were concerned. She desired more intelligent relations. She was tired of dealing with guys who had nothing on their minds but sex and life out in the streets.