THERE ARE TEN girls my age at the church that I attend, and only one boy. His name is Jeremiah. He carries a Bible everywhere he goes, so we all decided long ago that he was not the one for us.
Our church is small. Only a hundred members on the books. That means maybe forty folks show up each Sunday. So we girls are like sisters. We sleep over at each other’s houses, paint one another’s nails, and lie for one another when we have to.
We figured God wasn’t being fair putting us in a church with just one boy and giving us parents so strict that boys at school are too afraid even to speak to us, let alone ask us to the school’s annual Mardi Gras festival. So we got our heads together and decided to change things.
We were in the church basement. Our parents thought we were planning Teen Sunday, which was a few weeks away. But we were really trying to come up with ideas on how to get boys to take us to Mardi Gras. Our parents already said we couldn’t go. “Card games, wild dancing, crazy costumes, no way,” Pastor said. But we have to go. Everybody goes! And only the losers go without dates.
My friends and I are fourteen years old, in the ninth grade, and this is our first time in public school with regular kids. We went to the church school from K through eighth grade, then the state shut the school down. They said the building didn’t meet state code, and our teachers weren’t certified, even though we’re all three grades ahead of most kids in our new school in math and reading. Anyhow, now we go to school with the neighborhood kids, but we’re still not allowed to do like they do or go where they go.
Satina has it worst of all because Pastor’s her father. They don’t own a TV set or listen to the radio. But Satina still knows how to dance. And she knows all the words to the latest rap songs. Satina made it clear. “I’m going to that festival. And I’m going with a boy!”
China is the one that came up with the best idea for meeting boys. None of us would have figured it, though. She’s shy and hardly opens her mouth unless it’s to stick gum in it. “The hoop courts. Boys always hang out there.”
Satina hugged her. “But we can’t go to the ones around here. Everybody knows what my father will do to them if he catches them around us.”
I thought about it a while. “Let’s just get on a bus and ride till we find one.”
Jamaica was scared at first. “Pastor says we can’t date until we graduate. And we can’t dance. Period.”
“‘The devil’s in that music,’” Satina said, mocking her dad. She cleared her throat three times in a row, same as he does every Sunday morning. “‘And the devil ain’t gonna have his way with nary a one of you,’” she said, pointing to each girl.
Jamaica told Satina to stop disrespecting Pastor. “We are not supposed to be like everybody else out there, shaking our butts and showing our . . .” She wouldn’t say the word. But we all knew what she meant, so we stared at our chests while she talked. “Pastor says it’s all there to distract us.”
I tried to be smart. “What’s there to distract us?”
“You know,” Jamaica said, sitting in a chair and squeezing her knees tight like the church sisters taught us.
I knew. Gold jewelry. Tattoos, toe rings, tongue and belly piercings. Tight tops, short skirts, boys with eyes that looked right through you. Dancing . . . sweaty, close dancing in rooms with hardly any light and no adult supervision. I knew, so did Jamaica, China, Satina, N’kia, Karen, Anna Belle, K’ya, Daylea, and Lisa. Pastor tells us all the time. And he’s right, I think. Only sometimes, like now, we get tired of missing out.
Satina ignored Jamaica and headed for the stairs. “I’m sick of being cooped up in church all the time. I wanna have some fun,” she said so loud I had to cover her mouth with my hand. “Y’all coming?” she asked the rest of us.
One by one we headed for the steps.
“Jamaica. You gotta come,” I said.
Jamaica was the only one still sitting down. “God ain’t gonna like it. Neither is Pastor.”
My eyes went straight up to the cross high up on the wall with Jesus hanging on it. “We don’t mean no harm,” I said. “But we wanna go to the festival with boys. Just once, anyhow.”
China ran over to Jamaica and pulled her hand. “If we do something dumb and you’re not there to stop us, God’s gonna blame you for it.”
Jamaica believed her. She is the oldest, and Pastor and the church sisters always hold her accountable for what the rest of us do. So she came along, too. And that’s how all ten girls from the Calvary Church of God’s Blessed Example went hunting for boys—and found something a whole lot worse.
“God don’t like ugly.” That’s what my mother always says. So I guess that’s why the bus never came to take us to the hoop court. We waited for an hour and a half. By then, Pastor had shown up, wanting to know where we were off to.
“Nowhere,” K’ya said, tying her black sneakers at the curb. The rest of us stared at the ground, bit our nails, or scratched places that didn’t really itch.
Pastors can read minds, you know. So right then ours gave us a mini sermon on boys. He pointed to a really cute guy on the steps across the street. “I see him looking over here every time you girls step foot in church.” He took Satina’s hand. “I don’t blame him. We got a whole church full of pretty gals.”
“Thanks, Pastor,” we said, blushing.
“But don’t be fooled. That’s trouble sitting on that step.” He pointed to Jamaica, then to me, K’ya, and finally Satina. “You looking for trouble?”
“No.”
“No, sir.”
“Pastor, I ain’t looking for nothing,” K’ya said.
Pastor smiled. “Good. Life has enough trouble without you all chasing it down like a two-for-one shoe sale at the mall.”
I wanted to look him in the eyes and say, “Amen,” like I do in church sometimes. But I couldn’t, ’cause I figured he would see what I was really up to. So I followed him back into the church, like everyone else, and folded paper towels for tomorrow’s supper with the congregation from Bethel Hill Church across town.
“Maybe. Maybe we should forget about the festival,” Karen said, laying plastic forks and knives on towels. “I mean, if Pastor finds out what we’re up to . . .”
Satina looked at her baggy beige skirt. It was below her knees, just like ours. “What’s wrong with playing cards or dancing?” she said, pulling her skirt up to the middle of her thighs and turning in circles. “What’s wrong with meeting boys and having fun and being normal like other kids?” she asked. She threw some forks on the floor and crushed ’em with her shoe.
“Y’all working down there, or playing?” Pastor asked from the top of the stairs. We shut up and got back to work. But Satina’s words stayed in my head. Why can’t we be like other girls? Why can’t we dance and wear makeup and be with boys—kiss ’em, even? That’s what girls our age do. That’s all they wanna do, really.
The adult women’s choir only has three members, so they make me, China, Satina, Jamaica, and K’ya sing along with them every third Sunday. We sing, but mostly we sit behind Pastor and write notes to each other.
“It’s a sign,” Jamaica wrote on the back of the church bulletin. “What Pastor said yesterday about boys is a sign from God that He knows what we’re up to and He don’t like it none.”
She was right. All night long I had been thinking the same thing.
“I’m scared God’s gonna punish us for going after boys,” China wrote.
I tried to tell her God wasn’t gonna punish us for just talking to boys. But I didn’t tell her that last night in my dream I was kissing one on the lips.
“Jesus sees everything. He knows everything, too,” China wrote.
“So He knows you’re up to no good,” K’ya said in my ear. Then she laughed. I didn’t think that was funny.
Satina leaned forward and played with the collar of her starched white shirt. “I don’t know if I wanna go now.”
Satina’s dad prays with her at home every morning. Today, when he was done, he said he knew it wasn’t easy being a minister’s daughter and he was proud of how she handles herself. Before they left home, he kissed her on the forehead. “You’re a good girl,” he told her. “No one’s ever been able to say different.”
K’ya pulled out the bulletin for today and wrote up and down the sides in red ink. “It was your idea, Satina, for us to go meet boys. So don’t chicken out now.”
Sister Berta grabbed the paper from Satina. “You here to chitchat, or serve the Lord?”
Satina didn’t answer.
Sister Berta is seventy-six years old, with brown wrinkled hands that look like beef-stick skins. “Pastor’s gonna see how you spend your time up here,” she said, eyeing us five. Then she lay the paper in her lap like a handkerchief, and rocked.
Satina looked scared. “Get it back,” she said— like K’ya could do something about it. When it was time to sing, Sister Berta stood up and the paper fell to the floor. I grabbed it and handed it to K’ya, who gave it to Satina, who stuck it in her purse right when Sister Berta’s mouth opened wide and she started singing off-key:
Yes, Jesus, yes.
All that you ask, I will do.
Show me the way. Make it clear every day.
And I’ll say yes, Lord, yes, yes, ohhh yesss.
“No,” I told Karen. We were standing in front of the church, waiting for the bus. “It’s coming in a minute, and we can’t miss it.”
Two weeks after Sister Berta took Satina’s note, we stopped being scaredy-cats and headed for the hoop courts again.
When we got on the bus, all we did was talk about boys and the tight, short shorts Satina, K’ya, Lisa, and Daylea had on. They had bought them at the store a few days ago. The rest of us didn’t have the nerve.
We sat in the back, so it was easy for them to unzip their long granny skirts, pull them off, and stuff them in their backpacks. But when Satina pulled off her long-sleeved shirt and showed off a pretty orange tube top, Jamaica got loud. She said we weren’t allowed to show our legs or go out without proper tops.
Why? I thought, smearing raspberry-red lip gloss on. Our legs are as pretty as any other girl’s at school.
Daylea covered her thighs with her skirt. “If it’s not in the Bible, God doesn’t care if we do it or not, right?”
Jamaica rolled her eyes and turned up the music on her CD player. I asked what she was listening to, and she put her headphones on my ears.
Keep me pure, Lord. Keep me pure.
Help me do the things that you adore.
Make me perfect, make me strong.
Keep my eyes on you, where they belong.
I felt like dirt after hearing that song. So for the rest of the trip I didn’t talk much. I watched Jamaica, Karen, and Anna Belle read scripture cards and sing out loud every now and then. And I prayed a little. Asked God not to let me do nothing too wrong while I was out here. But when I wasn’t praying, I was thinking about boys. Wondering if they would think I was pretty.
“There’s a basketball court!” Anna Belle said, standing up and running to the front of the bus. We ran behind her, almost falling off the bus into the street.
The neighborhood we were in wasn’t like ours. Dirt and trash were everywhere. Houses had rusted gates surrounding them like Lego pieces snapped tight and painted white. We weren’t scared, though. Our neighborhood isn’t so great either. And when you spend all your time in church, you feel safe even when you have to walk past crack houses to get where you’re going.
Satina saw the boys first. Tall sweaty boys with muscles and big mouths, who pushed each other on the court, or yelled at one another from skinny wooden benches. Satina is prettier than the rest of us. She’s five-foot one, with black hair and giant black eyes that make her look like a baby doll. So naturally the boys yelled for her first.
“Hey! You! Come here.”
Daylea started pulling at her shorts, like she could make them longer. Satina stuck out her chest and smiled. “Okay,” she said, taking me by the arm and heading their way.
My feet didn’t move. Neither did K’ya’s, Karen’s, or anyone else’s.
“We should leave,” K’ya said.
My heart beat so fast I couldn’t think.
“Too late to back out now,” Satina said, swinging her hips and glossing her lips.
Jamaica is a tall, dark-skinned girl with long dark wavy hair that makes her look Indian sometimes. The boys could tell, I guess, ’cause one of them yelled for her, too.
“Yo, big girl!” he said. “Yeah, you,” he said when she looked his way. “Come here.”
Jamaica backed up. “Pastor’s gonna be mad.”
Daylea grabbed her hand. “Well, Pastor ain’t here. And Pastor ain’t fourteen, neither.” She dug in her purse and pulled out square silver earrings as big as Pop Tarts. “He’s old, and he’s had his fun.
Now he wants to stop us from having ours.” She pushed the earrings through the holes in her ears.
Satina looked mad when she said that. But what could she say? Daylea pulled Jamaica into the street. We all followed, breathing hard but not saying a word. Our eyes went from the boys to all them girls sitting in the stands watching them play.
“It’s gonna be easy,” Anna Belle said. “They already like us.”
I stuck my chest out. K’ya pulled the rubber band off her hair and shook. Her brown hair jumped. China waved her finger like Pastor does when Daylea, N’kia, and K’ya started opening the top buttons on their shirts.
“You do that,” Jamaica said, stopping right in the middle of the street, “and I’m gonna call Pastor right now.”
We all believed her, so the buttons closed again, and our feet keep moving across the hot black asphalt.
“Yo, girlie,” one boy said. He didn’t have a shirt on. You could see sweat and dirt on his chest, and a ring in his nipple. K’ya pulled her shirt from out her skirt and tied it so her flat yellow belly showed.
Jamaica looked disgusted and started singing under her breath.
The devil knows what you like to do.
The devil knows the good and bad that’s in you.
But the devil can’t make you do what you do.
You better act like you know the right way.
Satina can’t sing as good as Jamaica, but she’s louder. So when she started rapping, and Daylea, K’ya, and even Anna Belle started clapping, they drowned Jamaica out.
So you say life is fun?
Well, well, well,
You can’t prove it to this one.
Well, well, well,
All I do is what they say,
Kneel down and pray,
Go to church every day.
Well, well, well,
Lord, I love you, I swear I do,
But can’t my life have some fun in it too?
We laughed when Jamaica covered Satina’s mouth and the words pushed through her fingers anyhow. “I wanna dance with boys . . . yeah, you made them too, Lord. . . .”
“Ouch,” Jamaica said, looking at the bite mark on her hand. But Satina didn’t care about the song no more. She was looking at the boy with the Z tattooed on his arm. “I want him.”
I looked at her with her tight shorts, gold earrings with her name spelled on them, and sandals that showed off toenail polish we aren’t allowed to wear.
Satina’s doing everything wrong, I thought, and she’s the one all the boys want.
Z looked Puerto Rican or Cuban. He was as brown as the edges on Sister Berta’s walnut sugar cookies. He was tall too, maybe sixteen years old, with light brown hair that hung in his eyes and stuck to his sweaty brown neck.
“You like this, don’t you?” he said to Satina, smacking his chest, then jumping high in the air and sending the ball into the hoop. “Yeah, you like it,” he said, wiggling his long tongue at her.
Satina stared at him.
Anna Belle told her that wasn’t no compliment he just gave her. “That was just nasty.”
She was right. Me and Satina knew that.
But we kept our eyes on him anyway. “Sit down before you get knocked down,” a girl said.
Being a pastor’s kid, Satina doesn’t always think the rules apply to her, ’cause everybody from the Church Mother to the janitor lets her have her way when she wants. So she just ignored the girl telling us to move and hollered at the boy with the Z tattoo.
“Hey. You. Come here,” she said, like she fit right in. A few minutes later, Z was twisting one of her curls, and eyeing her all over.
China, Daylea, and me just watched and wished for somebody cute to come talk to us, too. But before they could, another girl yelled at us. “If you don’t move your big head . . .”
I knew she was talking to me because I have the kind of head that you have to special-order hats for. So I moved out of her way and stared at the boy in the red tank top. “God’s got somebody for everybody, right?” I asked Jamaica.
She rolled her eyes, then pointed to the court. “We ain’t like them,” she said. Then she pointed to the girls behind us. “Or them.”
We headed for the bleachers and sat down. I looked at all them half-dressed girls sitting around us. Jamaica was right, I thought, we are not like those girls.
“What you looking at?” a girl in a gold halter top and no bra said.
I fixed my eyes on the game. “Nothing.”
She stood up then. “Oh, so I’m nothing, huh?”
I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.
“Get out the way!” another girl shouted to Satina and them. She, Daylea, and N’kia were still by the fence watching the game.
“GET! OUT! THE! WAY!”
Daylea and N’kia tripped over each other trying to make that girl happy. They came and sat down with us.
The gold halter top looked at me. “Why y’all here?”
We all looked to Jamaica. But Jamaica kept her mouth shut. So we did the same.
“You . . . You down there,” a blond-haired girl said to Satina. “Get out his face.”
Z smiled. Then told the girl to mind her business, ’cause he was sure minding his.
Satina was standing real close to him. He was whispering in her ear. Every once in a while she would giggle, but when she cut her eyes over to us, she looked kind of scared.
Anna Belle stood up. “We need to leave,” she said, looking Jamaica’s way. “’Cause God’s not gonna bless no mess.” She was repeating one of Sister Berta’s lines.
K’ya called for Satina. I thought maybe she was gonna tell her it was time to go home. But she wanted to know if Z had a friend. “’Cause I wanna meet somebody, too.”
Jamaica said they had ten minutes to do what they were gonna do because after that she was leaving this place.
“Go then,” K’ya said, “because we came here on a mission.”
Satina called for China, N’kia, K’ya, and Daylea to come over to the fence. When four big boys walked over to be with them, the girls behind us started whispering. No, not whispering, loud talking. Saying there was gonna be a beat-down ’round here if somebody didn’t get out somebody else’s face.
That’s when the girl in the halter top leaned over and asked where we were from. I said Hilton Heights. Jamaica said the Calvary Church of God’s Blessed Example. The girl pointed to Satina. “Her too?” She covered her mouth and laughed.
Before we could say anything, a girl ran past us talking about Satina. “I’m gonna kick her butt now!” she called to her friend.
Jamaica yelled for Satina. But before she could get her attention, two other girls were up in her face. They were cussing. Asking all five of ’em who they thought they were, coming in their neighborhood like they owned it.
The game never stopped. But more girls went over to the fence. And they got louder and meaner, and pushed harder. “Let’s go,” Jamaica said.
Karen, Anna Belle, and Lisa said they weren’t going down there to get beat up, too. Jamaica said they were right. Wasn’t no reason for all of us to get in a fight. But when we got to the pavement, Jamaica headed one way, and we headed the other. There was, like, sixteen girls gathered ’round Satina and them. And the boys were just egging them on.
“Yeah. Yeah, get that hair, so we can see if it’s real,” one said.
“Tear her top off and let’s see what’s under that shirt,” Z laughed.
I looked at Jamaica. “Don’t go, or they’ll beat you up, too.”
Her right hand trembled. “I asked God to stop the fight before I get over there. But I don’t think he’s gonna.”
“Me neither,” I said.
Jamaica headed for the fence all by herself. She was singing, so I started singing, too.
Lord, I am scared.
Please don’t hold it against me.
God, I am weak.
Please don’t hold it against me.
Please don’t hold it against me when I do what
shouldn’t.
When I act like you don’t,
When I do what you wouldn’t.
When they hit Jamaica in the face with a shoe, me, Anna Bell, Lisa, and Karen run away like she was a stranger. We didn’t even wait for each other once we got outside the hoop court. So I was by myself when I got to the candy store two blocks away and called Pastor. He was at home and we were in trouble. I knew that before he even said one word to me.
Our parents put us on punishment for six weeks. When you don’t have a TV, radio, or computer, like most of us, what can they take off you? Nothing. So they put us to work in the church. They had us scrubbing walls and floors, polishing pews that hadn’t been waxed in years, scouring pots, papering cabinets, stripping wax off floors, and erasing marks from leftover Bibles and ragged hymnals.
While that was happening, Satina’s father came up with rules on how girls at our church should act. It was Satina’s idea to write them down and post them in the church where everyone could see them all the time. So on the last Saturday of our six-week punishment, we wrote them in blue metallic ink and mounted them high on the basement wall where we hang out most of the time.
The Girls of the Calvary Church of God’s Blessed Example Do Not:
Jamaica thought it was silly. Me too, kind of. “Writing the rules down won’t make you obey them,” she said.
Satina disagreed. “I knew them before,” she said, painting silver stars on the poster, “but I think I’ll follow them now for sure.”
We looked at her. I’d keep to them too, I thought to myself, if I’d gotten hunks of my hair pulled out and my front tooth cracked, like she did.
“All right,” Satina said, closing the bottle of paint. “We have to plan for Teen Sunday and show the elders how responsible we are.”
“Yeah,” China said. “We’ll usher and read the announcements on Sunday, and go door-to-door all week long, raising money for something worthy— like old people.”
Satina looked at her when she said that.
“What?” China asked.
“Nothing,” Satina said, rubbing paint off her finger. But while China was telling us how much money we should raise and what cause to donate it to, Satina wrote me a note in shiny silver letters. “You think we’ll meet some boys while we’re out there?”
I stared at her. “Maybe,” I said, eyeing the rules, then looking at the cross over the door.