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  “Whatchu gotta do for the fair?” I quizzed, attempting to throw a little slang in there so I appeared cool.

  He picked up the bags and headed to the kitchen. I closed the front door and followed him. “The basketball team is sponsoring some of the activities this year, and since I’m the captain, I have to help out.”

  “Oh yeah? What type of activities?” He laid the bags on the counter, and I became enthralled with the tightness of his ass again. It looked ten times better up close than it did from the hole in the locker room.

  He didn’t notice me staring because he was busy putting some eggs, bacon, and milk in the fridge. “We got this kissing booth going on, for one thang. I’m not really trying to do it, but you know how it is?”

  “Kissing booth? Word?”

  “Yeah, you didn’t know?”

  “Nope.”

  Jason gave me a puzzled look. “Hmm, I’m surprised, because Chandler and some of the other cheerleaders are doing it along with us.”

  The mere mention of Chandler’s name made me cringe. Damn, why couldn’t that anorexic beanpole bitch move the hell on? I had even resorted to becoming a cheerleader to get next to Jason, but it just made him laugh. The other girls on the team were all buddy-buddy with Chandler and left me out of the loop except for the required activities. “No one said a thing to me. Then again, I’m not surprised, considering the fact Chandler hates my guts.”

  Jason put some tap water in an aluminum saucepan and then turned on a gas burner. “Chandler doesn’t hate you. You’re trippin’. What makes you think that?”

  He acted like it was some sort of revelation. Jason knew good and damn well Chandler couldn’t stand my ass. I don’t even know why he was trying to fake the funk. “Whatever, Jason,” I hissed. “So, are you and her still hanging out?”

  He cut open the pack of Oscar Mayer hot dogs, dropped them in the boiling water, and then sat down across from me at the white drop-leaf table with floral place mats adorning it. “Why you wanna know? In fact, what’s up with all these questions tonight? You writing a book or sumptin’?”

  I looked at him contritely. “No, I ain’t writing no damn book. I was just wondering because—”

  “Because what?” He waylaid the rest of my sentence and it was just as well. I was about to do something dumb and ask him to go with me like he did me years before. I could hear his smart-aleck reply in my head: Go with you where?

  “Never mind.” I decided to change the subject. “So how long are your parents gonna be out of town, and where did they go anyway?”

  “See, another freakin’ question.” That fool laughed at me in my face, and it finally pissed me off. My evil twin came out.

  “Geesh, if I can’t even ask a damn question, I might as well take my ass back on across the street!” I jumped up from the kitchen table and started stomping toward the front door in my platforms.

  Jason was right on my tail. “Hold up, Zoe. I’m sorry. My parents are in North Carolina visiting some relatives, aight? Just chill, Boo.”

  Dang, he called my ass “Boo.” A word of affection. Everyone knew “Boo” was more than just a word Casper the Friendly Ghost whispered to unsuspecting children. Maybe not before the eighties, but Boo was a certified synonym for “Baby,” “Sweetie,” and “Snookums” by the time the word left Jason’s sexy-ass lips. I was a Boo. Aww, dayum!

  “Yes, Jason?” I spun around and batted my eyelashes at him, trying to keep myself from blushing, but I realized it was a lost cause.

  “What about your hot dog? What you gonna eat for dinner?”

  I was appalled. How dare he build up my emotions and then start talking about some damn hot dogs, even if they weren’t cheap-ass chicken franks? I sucked my teeth. “I’ll just eat some Vienna sausages and some saltines instead.”

  I swung the door open and headed out, muttering expletives under my breath.

  “Wait—why did you ask about me and Chandler for real, though?”

  I didn’t even look back at him. “I gotta go. I need to go condition my hair and get ready for the fair.”

  “So you’re going then?”

  “Yeah, I’m going.” I didn’t want to tell him that Ms. Rankin, the principal, had asked Brina and me to be clowns. Chandler and her other hussy friends were going to kiss boys all day long, and I had to be a freakin’ clown.

  Jason was still saying something to me when I slammed the door closed, but I couldn’t have cared less. I was crushed, humiliated, fired up even. I kicked off my shoes, ran into the living room, and buried my head in a toss pillow to catch my tears.

  Momma shook me awake a couple of hours later. “What’s wrong, baby? Why are you lying on the sofa in the dark?”

  I looked up at my mother and wanted to spill it all, but she had enough problems, including but not limited to working two jobs to support me. “I’m okay, Momma. I was just dog-tired when I got home from school today.”

  “You sure, sweetie?” She rubbed my back, and I sought comfort in her touch.

  I got up, kissed her gently on the cheek, and took a whiff of the rose water she always dabbed behind her ears. She always smelled so feminine, even after a long day. “I’m going to bed now. Goodnight.”

  I was halfway up the steps when she drilled me. “What time is Mohammed picking you up for the fair tomorrow? I wanna make sure you get up on time.”

  I hesitated, thinking of a logical excuse why he wasn’t coming. Then I remembered him mentioning the rally. “Ummm, he’s not coming. He has to do a Muslim rally tomorrow, so I’m going with Brina.”

  My mother sounded slightly disappointed. “Oh, okay. Goodnight, Zoe.”

  I went in my room, left a message on Brina’s answering-machine telling her to come get me the next day, fell on my canopy bed, and started wailing all over again until I was fast asleep.

  I woke up the next morning about eight, still devastated and confused about my feelings toward Jason and his feelings toward me. When I got down to the kitchen, Momma was cooking some ham and cheese omelets. The aroma was kicking and I was either starved or ready to see if eating till I exploded would make me forget about my troubled, nonexistent love life.

  “You feel better this morning, sweetie?” Momma ran her fingers through my shoulder-length hair while I threw down on the omelet like Wilbur from Charlotte’s Web slopping up some grub.

  I wiped my mouth with a napkin and gulped down an ounce of orange juice along with some egg so food remnants didn’t come flying out my mouth when I answered her. “I’m fine, Momma. I was just tired last night because it was a long week at school.”

  She sat down beside me and blew lightly into her coffee-mug. The steam amusingly fogged up her glasses, and I remembered how it used to make me fall out laughing every time that happened in my younger years.

  “Yes, I know Ms. Rankin had you and Brina working hard on the fair.” She took a sip of her Maxwell House and grinned when her legal drug started to kick in. “Did you girls get all the posters made?”

  “Yes, they look great too.” I slapped my forehead, looking dumbfounded. “I meant to tell you last night. Guess what?”

  “What, sweetie?”

  “I got an A on my calculus exam! No, scratch that. Your baby girl got an A-plus!”

  I gleamed while she took it all in. She reached over and rubbed my shoulder. “That’s fantastic, Zoe! Having Jason tutor you has really paid off!”

  I frowned. It figured she would give him all the glory. I had asked Jason to tutor me in calculus one damn time, and my mother made it sound like he single-handedly resurrected my brain cells. It was all just a ploy to get him to pay attention to me in the first place. His math skills weren’t all that. “I did it all by myself. Jason didn’t take the test for me.”

  She caught my drift. “I know, baby. I didn’t mean for it to come out that way. I was just—”

  I jumped up and headed back upstairs. “I have to go get ready. Brina’s picking me up in a few.”

  I hear
d Momma calling after me. “I didn’t mean anything, Zoe! I really didn’t!”

  Brina picked me up in her hoopty twenty minutes later, and I was not even halfway dressed. I took a quick shower, and then lingered over every feature of my body in the foggy mirror on the back of the bathroom door. I had to admit that I was lacking a bit in the tit department, but my ass was good. All good!

  Most boys at school seemed to be into girls with nice asses, but Jason obviously wasn’t, because Momma could have fried those ham and cheese omelets on Chandler’s flat ass.

  I wasn’t one hundred percent sure they were still dating-because his slick behind had avoided my question the night before. I was hell-bent on finding out that day, though, one way or another. By the time the sun went down that night, I was either going to be as happy as a fag in Dickland or as depressed as a whore in church.

  I never got around to conditioning my hair the night before, and it was frizzed up like I was going to audition for the role of Kizzy Kunte in the sequel to Roots . Luckily, once I got to school, I could put on the dreaded clown suit and cover my naps with a multicolor wig.

  Brina was laying on the horn thick, so I threw on some white walking shorts. Okay, they were more like Daisy Dukes. I flung all of my T-shirts out of my top dresser drawer until I came across the red one that had G.A.G. imprinted on the front and the phrase “Get A Grip” in small lettering at the bottom. I had a predilection for bragging on my tits even though I didn’t have much of anything. I slipped my dogs into some red patent leather slides and flip-flopped my way down the steps.

  “Gurl, hurry your slow ass up!” Brina was fussing as soon as I stepped out the door into the unrelenting sunlight. It was a beautiful day for a school fair. Ms. Rankin did everything except Indian tribal dancing and casting a voodoo spell to make sure it didn’t rain, and it paid off. There wasn’t a storm cloud in sight.

  “I’m coming, damn! You’re always rushing some damn body!”

  I got into the hoopty and gave Brina a brief once-over. No matter how hoochie I tried to be, she out-hoochied me every single time. She had on a skin-can’t-get-no-tighter-unless-you-embed-the-clothes-in-your-ass-tight black sundress and some black leather pumps. Plus, her hair looked good as all hell. I was immediately jealous. I knew I should have slapped some conditioner in my nappy head and thrown a plastic cap on before I went to bed. I looked like one of those ugly-ass troll dolls sitting next to Cinder-fuckin’-rella rolling with her.

  “What on earth do you have on, gurl? We’re going to a fair, not clubbing.”

  Brina rolled her eyes and flipped me the bird. I turned the radio up, even though there was more static in it than a woman’s nylon half slip straight out the clothes dryer, and started bopping my head to Cheryl Lynn schooling nuccas about how they “Got to Be Real.” “Dang, that’s my song,” I proclaimed.

  “ E-ve-ry cool song that comes on is your dang song.” Brina chuckled. She was right too, ’cause on any given day, I had at least twenty favorite songs but rarely knew the words to them. Ironically, the only songs I could ever manage to memorize were the ones I hated. Ain’t that a bitch?

  Brina started bopping her head in unison with my naps while she did one last lipstick check in her rearview mirror before pulling off. We rode all the way to school with the bass controller on the system turned as far to the right as humanly possible without one of us breaking a nail. It made the car shake from side to side at every stoplight while we gyrated our hips to the beat.

  I spotted Jason’s Camaro the second we pulled up in the parking lot. I wondered if he was somewhere arm-in-arm with Chandler, and if he’d picked her up that morning. His car was already gone when I got up. I checked.

  Brina threw something on my face, blocking my vision. I yanked it off and realized it was a navy blue bathing suit. I held it up, looking at her quizzically. “What’s this for?”

  “Oops, I meant to tell you. Ms. Rankin caught me on the way out of class yesterday and asked if you and I could sit in the dunking booth today, so I brought an extra suit for you from home.”

  I threw my hands on my hips and clucked my tongue. “Dunking booth! What the hell happened to being clowns?”

  Brina cut off the ignition and opened up her door. I followed her out of the car. “She still wants us to be clowns too, but we can take turns doing both. She was going to do the dunking booth herself, but she has a cold.”

  I raised my hands to my hair. “I can’t do the dunking booth. My hair is messed-da-hell-up, and I was counting on wearing that stupid clown wig to hide my naps.”

  We started walking toward the football field where the fair was being held. “Zoe, your hair’s not looking bad at all. In fact, it looks real cute.”

  I crossed my arms and paused briefly, tapping my right foot on the gravel parking lot, to inhale her bullshit. “Yeah, right! You know my hair is toooooooo through.”

  “You just think that, but it’s straight. You know how it is?” She stopped and turned around to face me. “Whenever your hair is filthy dirty, thicker than a ton of bricks, and pinned up, that’s when peeps come out of the woodwork with compliments.”

  I had to give it to her, ’cause she did have a point. That always seemed to happen.

  “It’s when you spend eight damn hours at a beauty shop under a hot-ass dryer listening to old-ass women complain to each other about men, kids, and other women that you have to almost beat a hair compliment out of some damn body.”

  I laughed because she was right on the money. “Aight, whatever, but I want to do the dunking booth first. I have something I need to do a little later.”

  Brina’s eyes bulged. “Something like what?”

  I looked down at the gravel, kicking a few pebbles around and blushing. “Just something.”

  “Does this something have a name that begins with a J?” I giggled. “By the way, what happened to Mohammed? I thought he was coming. I was surprised when I got your message about coming to get you this morning.”

  I grabbed her by the arm and started pulling her toward the field. I was suddenly in a hurry to get the whole sordid business over with, one way or another. I had no clue how I was going to approach the situation, but it had to be done. “Come on, Brina. I’ll explain it all to you later.”

  Ten seconds after I sat down on the two-by-four doubling as a bench in the dunking booth, I was regretting letting Brina talk me into the shit. First came the comment from this high-yella, snaggletoothed nucca with a lopsided high-top fade and freckles. “Damn, Youngen, look at her hair!” His little sidekicks, none of them out of the eighth grade, pointed and laughed at me. I just waved them off, hoping they would go try their luck at a cap toss game or something else at one of the other booths. No such luck.

  Five minutes later, I was the one laughing at their asses. They couldn’t hit the metal bull’s-eye on the dunking booth if their lives depended on it. They all took turns, wasting some of the ten bucks apiece their mommas probably gave them to get rid of them for the day.

  “Damn, Youngen, you didn’t even come close to her!” Snaggletooth was guffawing and hitting his boy on the back after the sorry excuse for a pygmy missed the target by a good two feet, and the baseball ended up in a trash can.

  “Shit, not like you did any better,” he retorted, trying to swallow his pride.

  I started getting in on it. “Personally, I think all of you need to go home and lift some weights because you all look like skinny midgets from up here where I’m sitting!”

  They didn’t know how to react when a girl came at them like that. They looked at each other dumbfounded, and finally decided to go waste some money on something else. “Come on, Youngen. This shit’s boring!”

  An hour later, I was kind of hoping to get dunked, but to no avail. At least fifty peeps had tried, and only three or four of them even hit the edges of the target, much less the bull’s-eye.

  It was hot as hell out there. Add in the sun beaming on me through the glass surrounding the top of the b
ooth, and it was ten times worse. I felt like I was sitting in a sauna. Thoughts of an old movie where a boy used a magnifying glass and sunlight to set a cricket on fire flitted through my head.

  Just when I was convinced my dry nappy hair was going to catch on fire any second like a pile of bushweed and leave me looking like the victim of a witch hunt in Salem, Jason, Chandler, and the rest of their clique walked up to the booth. She had her arms around his waist. How dare she?

  Chandler taunted me. “Look who it is! It figures they would put her in there instead of Ms. Rankin. Half the school would love to dunk her.”

  Jason looked from Chandler to me. I got sarcastic with him. “She doesn’t hate me, huh, Jason?”

  “Chandler, cut that out,” he demanded, systematically removing her arms from around his waist.

  She got dramatic. “What’s wrong with you? After what she did to you, you’re taking her side over mine? I don’t freakin’ believe this shit!”

  Jason looked guilt-stricken. After all, he probably did need to save some face at that point, with all his boys looking on and all. “No, not at all,” he proclaimed. “In fact, check me out while I dunk her ass real quick.”

  They all laughed, and Chandler smirked, looking at me like she had just hit the lottery. Jason paid for his three baseballs and threw the first one before I even had a chance to brace myself. It hit the bottom of the target, but I didn’t fall. Damn, I just knew that was my ass, as big and strong as he was, but he missed!

  “Ah-ha, Jason!” I taunted him. “I forgot you were blind in one eye and can’t see jack shit out the other one.”

  His boys started howling. “Damn, man, she told you!”

  Jason’s eyes narrowed with malice, a look I knew all too well, and he threw the second one. He missed by a mile.