HOT AND FAST

I’d walked or ridden past the local high school every single day of my life since I was three, and it hadn’t changed much. Just two blocks from our house, it sprawled on its lot with four wings fanning out from a large central quad and flanks of portable classrooms at its outer edges. There was a big weedy yard, fenced in for construction (or to minimize trespassing?) out past C and D wings, and I fantasized for a long time about scattering it with wildflower seeds, even talked to some teachers about it, though ultimately the weeds prevailed. Mom would rouse me for school using an intercom that connected my bedroom to the kitchen. “Tracy, time to wake up!” she’d call up, then ask what I’d like for breakfast. I found that getting up in the mornings was easier when the promise of food was involved and would send down my order—two eggs over easy or French toast, please!—as if she were the waitress in a truck-stop diner. Then I’d shower, dress (usually changing clothes two or three times before settling on an outfit for the day), line my eyes with the royal-blue kohl pencil I’d bought for ninety-nine cents in the makeup aisle of the grocery store, and put on a frosty lip gloss that had come for free with another department store cosmetics purchase.

Mom didn’t sit down with me for breakfast, but we’d talk through the window between the kitchen and the counter with the three barstools, where I usually ate. Small talk about the day ahead. If there was a test or some other challenge involved, we’d pray about it together, briefly, as a way of setting my mind at ease. I’d eat my meal, ignoring the newspaper set up beside me on the counter. She’d move back and forth on the other side, tidying the kitchen or lining up the ingredients for whatever marvelous thing might be waiting to be eaten later that afternoon. It strikes me now as strange how little I recall of what we said on all those mornings. Did we talk? Perhaps I ate quickly, knowing there was not much time before the first bell would sound. Perhaps she was preparing my lunch, which I still brought with me at that stage of the game: a sandwich, a piece of fruit, and a slab of pound cake.

The first few months of my freshman year, I’d walk around the corner to the Johnsons’ to pick up Qiana, who was a year ahead of me. It was a detour that made my walk a bit longer, but it was nice arriving on campus with a friend, especially an older friend, whose presence bolstered my own sense of belonging and who allowed me to focus upon things other than my clothes or my hair or the omnipresent self-conscious doubt that ran rampant among kids our age like a contagion.

The Johnsons were a black family that had moved into the neighborhood just before I’d stopped counting black families. At first, there had been only the Meekses and us. Then, later, the Beasleys had come, then the Johnsons, and before long, there were enough black families that I found myself no longer noticing when a house had suddenly begun belonging to blacks or whether they were people I was interested to meet.

It was through Qiana that I learned bits of the gossip about the older kids at school, especially the black kids. She had a huge crush on a beautiful boy named Jeffrey Steptoe, with a golden-brown complexion, honey-colored hair, and glittering green eyes. He ran track and he usually had a girlfriend, but he was nevertheless the target of a great deal of hopeful feeling on Qiana’s part. A lot of girls felt that way, but I didn’t. Jeffrey was too pretty for my taste. I found my heart speeding up when I saw boys like James Holloway, a senior, tall and brown, with a sharp, clean profile that reminded me somewhat of my dad. Or Nigel, a black British boy who had somehow landed in Fairfield. He seemed older, manly in a way that was equal parts alluring and alarming. He carried himself like a person who knew things—not facts, or even ideas, but things rooted in experience—and that knowledge intrigued me in a way that caught me off guard. I thought long and hard about what it would be like to kiss him, until finally I gave up on thinking about it and directed my imaginary energy toward a handsome Vietnamese boy named Ton, who rewarded my interest with scant attention. When I felt particularly defeated by one or another boy’s blatant lack of regard, Qiana was good for a story about somebody else’s rollicking romantic life, which took my mind off my own troubles and even made me feel lucky for having nothing too hefty to regret.

Much of what I learned from Qiana’s stories was disturbing. Boys pressuring girls to have sex and then turning against them once they’d gotten what they wanted. Or girls whose histories were so checkered, even at age fifteen or sixteen, that they sounded barely believable, except for the fact that Qiana knew them or knew of them from a close friend, or the rumor was so widespread it had to have at least some kernel of truth to it.

My mom had no idea what kind of information Qiana was feeding me. She’d let me ride to football games or movies with Qiana and her friends because it made her happy to see my circle of friends growing—or, more to the point, darkening—to include more black girls. I liked it, too, though I often felt I was playing catch-up with Qiana, trying to become older, more in the know, less of a kid in comparison.

When I’d arrive at Qiana’s in the morning, she’d be upstairs getting dressed or working on her hair. I’d be told to go on up, where I’d stand half outside the bathroom while she primped in the mirror, just like I did on the nights Jean got herself ready to go out. Qiana’s dillydallying usually made us late, but that came second to how much I liked the feeling of watching a transformation occur before my eyes. Most of the time, with both Qiana and my sister, what I found most compelling was the internal shift that occurred once the hair and makeup were complete, the way something eager and alive seemed to click on all at once in the mind and light up the face. That didn’t happen when I stood before my own mirror lining my eyes and frosting my lips, and I wondered if it had to do with the fact that I never truly believed anything would change in my life: no boy would see me and fall in love or say “hi” in a way that gave me access to his heart, no matter how pretty I tried to make myself look. Perhaps some part of me was guarding against such a possibility, without my fully realizing it. But watching the shift happen in someone else told me that one day, when I was ready, it might also be possible for me.

There came a certain point when my first-period teacher began to balk at my tardiness. I began to excuse myself from the Johnsons’ bathroom threshold and make my way alone to school, and then I eventually started walking straight to school, skipping the Johnson house altogether. Our friendship got more fleeting, relegated to the odd evening after school or the random idle weekend. When I did see Qiana after a lapse of any length, I would admire her new hairstyle or her new sweater, while feeling a vague sensation of culpability, like when I hadn’t spoken to my relatives or gone to Sunday school in a while.

Sometime that winter, I got invited to something called High Life. I’d known about it since fourth grade, when Michael started attending some of its functions. “Is that where kids drive around in their cars and go to lots of parties?” a classmate had asked with hungry interest when I’d mentioned it way back when, bragging about all the things my big brother did with his time. “No,” I’d explained. And then I’d watched the interest drain from his eyes as I told him that High Life was a Christian youth group that hosted Bible studies and found ways of making God seem fun for high school kids.

Surprisingly, Mom had been skeptical when Michael first wanted to join the group. I thought she would’ve been happy for anything that proclaimed God as its focus, but she’d insisted on inviting the leader, a man in his thirties named Rich, to our home for dinner; she’d wanted to get a sense of who he was and what he was preaching. Sitting across from him in the dining room, I took in his Prince Valiant bangs, cut straight across his forehead, which gave him a youthful air but also made him seem vaguely strange, like an adult who was trying too hard not to seem like an adult. He struck me then in a way I couldn’t yet put words to. It’s the way so many men of apparent faith have struck me in the years since: as odd, a trifle cagey, people whose inner lives are or once were a wreck and who have managed to hobble together just enough wherewithal to throw their burden at God’s feet, where their relief could be seen to impart a feeling of redemption. I’m surprised Mom hadn’t come to a similar conclusion about Rich. I guess he’d said enough of the right words—Jesus, prayer, born again, saved—to convince her their views of Christianity overlapped. Or else she’d merely trusted that Michael’s head was screwed on straight enough that he’d know what to swallow whole and what to let roll past.

Rich still surrounded himself with popular boys from the two high schools in town, jocks mostly, who came faithfully to the gatherings he hosted. Sometimes, I’d see him around town with a small group of these boys, getting hamburgers or jogging through the neighborhood streets, and I found myself perplexed that a grown man (someone who had been grown since I was in grade school, if not longer) made a point of devoting all his time to a bunch of kids. Other times, it struck me that he was probably just lonely and doing the same thing most of us high school kids were doing: trying to find a way to fit in, to feel popular, to belong.

I was also motivated by the aura of popularity that seemed to cling to certain of the High Lifers. I thought it might rub off on me if I were to join their ranks, and so I started catching a ride once a week to a Bible study called Hot and Fast, held at Rich’s house every Tuesday at 7:17 a.m.

“I don’t like that name. ‘Hot and Fast.’ It’s lurid,” Mom said. “Why does everything have to be so provocative these days?”

I puzzled over the name somewhat, too, especially because one of the things High Life preached was that sex was to be avoided until marriage.

Hot and Fast was fast: it was over before 8 a.m. so everyone could make it to school in plenty of time for first period. But what was the hot part about? The word of God didn’t strike me that way. There was a breakfast served, but it consisted of doughnuts straight from the box. There wasn’t even a drop of hot coffee to be had (it would be another few years before anyone I knew ever drank the stuff). I found myself left with little choice but to conelude that the name was a salacious attention grabber, a stunt—and that it had worked on me.

Nevertheless, I went. I ate the bear claws and laughed at the jokes and bowed my head in prayer. I even, in the very beginning, spent time thinking about the Scripture readings and filling in the Bible-study worksheets. I tried and tried to convince myself of an early lesson, based on John 3:30: He must increase, but I must decrease. I wanted to believe those words for myself, but it was difficult. How could I, at age fourteen, really and truly feel the need to let God inch me out of my own not-yet-salient life? Where would I go? I wasn’t living a wrong kind of life. I wasn’t doing any of the things God had explicitly forbidden. In retrospect, John 3:30 seems like the kind of prayer a much older person might seek to internalize, someone who felt the tug toward some kind of looming destruction or who, in light of his past mistakes, had given up trying to control things on his own. He must increase, but I must decrease might have been Rich’s prayer a dozen years earlier, back before God had begun to fill up the empty spaces in his life. My empty spaces, on the other hand, were empty because they were brand new; I couldn’t yet feel the kind of desperation-born drive to give them over straightaway to God. Still, I repeated the verse to myself for the whole first week, wondering what it might be capable of changing in me.

Did I ever even tell Rich about how I’d met him years before when I was a little girl? I probably knew it didn’t matter, that I wasn’t one of the kids he was interested in. I was quiet, lacking the dynamism of the older jocks or their tall, long-haired girlfriends. Those kids were the ones who showed up early and left late, who sat on one another’s laps or joked around in the kitchen or huddled on the floor while we prayed. Perhaps I thought that, a year or two down the line, I’d come to fit in with the kids Rich really seemed drawn to. Sometimes, my mind drifted off to imagine a future in which I was one of the chosen, called to stand before the group and tell a story or explain a game. I longed for the courage and the knowledge that could have proved I belonged there with those kids who hadn’t yet found reason to notice me.

There was one girl people noticed, Becca. She came to matter quite a lot to a man named Dennis, the other adult who worked with Rich in the High Life ministry. It was rumored that Dennis was successful at whatever he did—banking or law, something that brought in a lot of money—and he was soft-spoken and serious in a way that contrasted effectively against Rich’s Peter Pan demeanor. Becca was pretty in a mild, pleasant way—a tall messy-haired blonde, natural and unadorned. She seemed to return Dennis’s interest, though he was in his thirties and she was just starting her senior year in high school. Some mornings, if my ride and I arrived early enough, we’d see the two of them cuddled together, practically spooning on the couch. It was blissful, if the tortured longing of two people driven wild by their commitment to chastity can be seen as a kind of bliss. It stirred in me feelings of pity coupled with deep envy.

Were they dating? Dennis seemed like the kind of man who would have approached Becca’s parents with his intentions—intentions that would likely have been serious. I wonder what my parents would have said if I were in her place. Would they have been irate at him or me for letting our feelings for one another turn to love (Dennis and Becca were rumored to use the word love with one another), or would they agree that God had led us to one another? I wasn’t sure I could imagine letting myself be persuaded, the way Becca had been, that loving a man so much older than me, and marrying him, would be more important than going off on my own to discover what life in college tasted like. I wonder if Becca was afraid that loving someone brought to her by God would cut her off from the many things she might find on her own. Sometimes, I’d pass the entire thirty-eight minutes of Hot and Fast thinking such thoughts and wondering what it would feel like to let Dennis hold me in his arms like that in front of everyone, even God.

Did Becca and Dennis have secrets, stories like the ones Qiana liked telling, about what boys and girls did when they were pretending to be men and women? Did they and the other kids who called themselves Christians believe in God enough to obey Him, or was God a pretext for some other thing we were all of us seeking without our knowing it? Was Hot and Fast calling, all along, to our appetite for that which whispered enticingly, the things we’d been warned to look beyond, to stay away from, to talk ourselves out of wanting?

I wanted to be liked—to be wanted—the way Becca was. Who at that age wouldn’t covet that kind of belonging? And so it was not quite an accident that I came to be friends with Becca’s younger sister, a sulky, mannish sophomore named Diane, who stood a whole six feet tall. Diane made blunt, crude jokes that caught me off guard, and she didn’t care much about being pretty. She wore men’s rugby shirts and traipsed around campus like a big, irreverent Muppet. She wasn’t pretty or even popular, but she struck me as cool. It also felt like an accomplishment, or the next best thing to an accomplishment, to be friends with Becca’s sister. Perhaps that meant I was inching toward my goal of blending with the crowd that claimed Becca or at least being recognized by it.

My friendship with Diane wasn’t much. We sat together sometimes at Hot and Fast. Sometimes, Diane and I and another girl would eat in the quad together at lunch. Sometimes, we’d find ourselves crossing campus in the same direction at the same time, and we’d match our steps to one another’s and find some nonsense to laugh about before our paths diverged. Diane made deliberately gross faces or contorted her lanky body into impossible postures, like an animal put together upside down and backward, just for fun. She burped loudly and on purpose, like a boy. She made a celebration of being awkward, and despite my desire to be none of those things—to be, instead, pretty and poised and to attract the attention of Nigel or James or Ton or someone like them—I embraced the strange spectacle of her company.

There was one thing I didn’t like about Diane. She never called me Tracy. In keeping with her penchant for blunt irreverence, she insisted upon calling me Black Girl. “Hey, Black Girl!” she’d call out from behind, and I’d cower on the inside before turning around to greet her. “What’s up, Black Girl?” she’d ask when I bumped into her in the quad, and I’d miss a beat trying to find something equally sharp-edged to throw back in her direction. I never found anything equally sharp-edged. I couldn’t even find anything adequately witty to say about her height, and through trying, I learned that it’s generally not productive to mock someone taller than you are; no matter what you say, they are always up there looking down at little you.

“Oh, come on,” I said more than once. “Stop calling me Black Girl, White Girl.” But Diane didn’t mind being called White Girl. I guess she took it as a given that there was nothing inherently wrong with calling a white girl White Girl. Like calling a tall person tall, it didn’t sting.

In May, when everyone was passing out school photos, two-by-three-inch pictures of themselves that would be printed in the yearbook come June, Diane surprised me by asking if I wanted to swap photos with her. It was a gesture loaded with meaning. The more pictures you exchanged, the more popular you were. I bent down to retrieve one of mine out of my backpack and thought about how I should fill up the space on the back. It seemed like an earnest moment, though I also knew that it, like everything in high school, was an opportunity to show how cool—or betray how clueless—you really were. Hey Diane, I wrote on the back, and tried to walk the line between kind and funny. This, after all, was something that would outlast our high school friendship, something meant to say that no matter how glib or word-shy we’d been on a daily basis, the feeling between us was one of warmth and friendship. Maybe even belief that the future for the recipient would be filled with success. I jotted down a message that seemed befitting of the occasion, signed my name, and handed Diane the photo, making a mental note of how many pictures I had left to distribute and to whom they should or shouldn’t be offered.

“Thanks,” Diane said. “Here’s mine.”

I didn’t read what she’d written right away. I held on to the photo, wanting to will it great meaning. My collection was already growing, and I liked the heft of the stack of photos in my hands, a stack I could shuffle, like a deck of cards. When I got to class, I flipped the picture over and read the back—but first, I held my breath and made a tiny wish: “Let this be nice.” I knew the odds of that were grim, but I thought a genuine inscription would prove that I mattered to Diane, which would mean that I might one day come to matter to the others, the ones on the inside of all the fun I watched each week from afar.

Thanks for being my friend, the inscription read, though the only thing I saw, the thing that spoke loudest or truest, was the salutation at the very top: Hi Black Girl! I carried the photo in my backpack with the others for the rest of the day, but when I sat showing the pictures I’d collected to Jean and Mom, I edited Diane’s out. Later that night, I dropped it in the trash compactor, a place I was certain no one would see it and from which it wouldn’t manage to escape.

Maybe Diane was a bully. Probably she was that catchall word that applied to most of us: insecure. She might also have sensed that, deep down, her friendship represented a social opportunity to me, that I hoped it might grant me permission to jump several social lanes to merge with Becca and her friends. Had Diane grown adept at sussing out that kind of opportunism? I told myself mine was hidden, but it turned somersaults in my stomach whenever Becca or someone like her acknowledged me. It’s funny. Where did I think all my discomfort—the social anxiety that left me, for the most part, without a single word in my mouth or head—would disappear to on the day Diane finally delivered me to the popular kids? At that point, would I just wave to her over my shoulder or look at her with such transparent intent that she’d understand that my use for her had vanished? Did she sense what I really wanted from her and choose to ignore it? Or did she know it was so impossible it didn’t matter, that I’d never get past her, I’d never make it to her sister’s world.

Black Girl. Every time Diane said those two simple and accurate words, I fed my own voice to the familiar silence that came around whenever it smelled pain. I fed the silence every time this strange tall girl called me out of my name, just as I fed the silence every time I failed to ask my mother and father what names Jim Crow had tossed their way when they were my age. Perhaps the shame that ensued and that I mulled over sometimes at night, wondering what Qiana or Nigel would say if they ever heard Diane refer to me that way, was enough of a distraction to keep me from acknowledging my actual dislike for that big, ugly, rude, brazen, cunning girl I so desperately wanted to claim as a friend, as an intermediary between myself and the kids whose easy, happy, carefree belonging I craved.