Kitty

Noun. Synonyms: see below.

Setting: Hallway by Alma’s locker.

Me: “Where you been?” I look at her knotty hair, her bleary eyes. “Never thought I’d say this, but you look like shit.”

Alma: “I’ve been pulling all-nighters to get caught up in trig.”

Me: “You need a break, girl. Come hang out with me.”

Alma: “I can’t. I don’t have the time. I’m still behind in—”

I grab her backpack. “If you don’t come with me, I will throw your backpack into a incinerator. Then you will have tons more shit to make up.”

Alma skips all the way to the park. Like I didn’t just take the weight of her bag off her back but the whole world. She sings. I’m the only one who gets to hear her sing like this because I don’t ask her to sing. At home, anything she does well everybody wants her to do over and over and over. She once sang a lullaby and then her mom made her sing lullabies to all the kids every night and to the babies all night because that was the only way they would shut the hell up.

Right now Alma sings for herself.

We start talking about our favorite songs when we were little kids. “Remember Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?” Alma says.

We face each other, clap, and sing:

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Sitting on a fence

Try to make a dollar

out of fitty cents.

She missed! (We jump into a little split.) She missed! (We split wider.) She missed like this! Whoever splits the widest wins. Alma does, of course. Alma and I are having fun.

Then along comes some dude who thinks he is funny. You know the dude. You know what he’s wearing. He has on enough cologne to destroy the entire ozone layer. You tell him to fuck off, but in his defense he is absolutely deaf from blasting his iPod into his ears 24/7.

“Titty titty bang bang,” he sings, eyeballing Alma.

I kick him into a permanent split, confident that I have saved the world from his procreation of future generations.

“Ah!” he screams. “Bitch?!!!”

I pick up a rock.

He limps away as fast as his droopy pants can carry him.

Alma: “Macy! You wouldn’t have . . .”

Me: “Wouldn’t have shed a tear. Alma. Remember this one?

Left left left right left

My body aches

my pants too tight

my booty shakes from left to right!”

Alma laughs and marches with me.

Then we hear it from a car driving by real slow: “Here kitty, kitty, kitty.”

I hold up that rock and look over. The dudes see me and shut their window.

“Come on,” I say, pulling my hoodie over my baseball cap. I grab her hand and we run to the jungle gym where we can talk in private.

We walk up a twisty slide that’s still wet from yesterday’s rain. We laugh because we’re getting all wet and it’s hard to climb and we want to laugh. Need to. We sit at the top of a red and blue plastic tower. I feel the pile of rocks I’ve gathered in my pocket.

They are for intruders.

I lean back against a scratched-up faded plastic tic-tac-toe game and look at Alma. She is sitting criss-cross legged across from me. She is wearing pink shorts underneath her skirt.

“Unbelievable. That”—I point at her pink shorts—“is all that stands between you and them fools back there. Think about it.”

“I don’t want to.”

I say, “Don’t matter what you want when you got something everybody wants. Pussy is always in high demand.”

“You call it that?”

“What do you call it? Your pocketbook? No? Your snatch? Your pootie? Your private place.” The parts under your bathing suit, the counselor used to tell me. Those parts are private. Tell that to the boys. Tell that to the men.

She mimes a phone call. “I don’t call it. And,” she says, “it’s odd that you of all people call it a pussy.”

“The odd thing is a pussycat has got more to it than a pussy. Pussycat’s got teeth. Pussycat’s got claws. Pussycat can pounce. What’s our pussy got? Lips that don’t even speak.”

“Lips? Thank you for that, Macy. Now I’m going to picture my vajayjay talking. Cracking jokes.”

We crack up. Then we crack jokes.

“But seriously.” I stop laughing. “It’s slippery, not spiky. It just sits there. Can’t move. Can’t hide. And all that stands between us and a man who wants it is—what? A pair of underwear? It ought to spit fire. Shoot spears like Agüeybaná.” I show Alma some moves. The slide and the monkey bars are involved.

“Macy!” She puts her fist to her mouth and looks around to see if anyone is watching. She is scolding but still cracking up.

“It ought to have teeth,” I shout, out of breaf. “It ought to close, at least!” I sit back down. “I mean”—I lie back—“God gave animals venom. Armored plates. But the pussy he just gives hairs?”

“Shut up, Macy,” Alma says, looking up at the sky and signing the cross.

Alma is a big believer in God striking people like me with lightning. I haven’t been striked yet. But maybe, I think, looking up where Alma is looking, maybe my life is the lightning.