The Black Kids(59)

The first dress my mother saw that she liked was the pale pink of a ballet slipper. She held it up to my body, and we both tried to ignore the women in black following us like shadows. The next dress she picked up was the bright yellow of a canary, or sunlight, and against the dark of my body it popped brighter still. The navy dress was too adult, but the gold beading across the top was exquisite, heavy and weighty, which made the dress feel too important to put back down. The women in black didn’t say anything to us, even as they talked to the ladies around us: “What size?” or “What occasion are you looking for?” or “We just got that one in!” It was like that scene in Pretty Woman, except we weren’t hookers in thigh-highs and my mother didn’t need some john’s charge card to afford anything in there. Being a rich black woman in a fancy store is like being a trashy white hooker in a fancy store, which tells you something about everyone in that fancy store. The dress my mother settled on was red, like fire, and one of the more expensive items in that section, which is exactly why I think she plopped it down on the counter. I liked the dresses I’d picked out with Lucia better, but I didn’t dare say so.

My mother walked over to a cash register in the far corner, slightly removed from the section we’d been in before. The cashier was young, with delicate features like a model, or a statue. As we walked over to him, he said, “Hellloo, ladies!” like we were old friends who’d walked into a club.

“Did anybody help you gals today?” he said.

“No,” my mother said firmly, and we heard the shadows whisper behind us.

“Omigod, I fucking love this dress.” He ran his fingertips over it like it was gold. In his voice, I heard a bit of the South, from which I assume he’d fled.

In the car on the way home, my mother said, “Your sister got her dress from a thrift store.”

“I remember.”

“She didn’t even ask me if I wanted to come with her.”

“Maybe she didn’t think you’d want to go to a bunch of thrift stores.”

“I would’ve gone.”

I wasn’t sure if I should say anything, because sometimes my mother says things out loud as though she simply wants to hear the thought, and not because she needs a response.

When we got back home, my mother poured a glass of wine for herself and sat down on the couch.

“Try it on for me again,” she said.

I ran up to my room and pulled the dress over my shoulders.

Then I ran back down the spiral staircase to the living room. My mother and Lucia both sat on the couch. Lucia clapped when I came in.

“Que bonita,” Lucia murmured.

I twirled around the living room feeling the tulle in my hands. Tulle is a wonder, scratchy and dense, yet somehow managing to look like clouds.





CHAPTER 16


MY FRIENDS ARE glitter bombs. Their hair is straightened and curled and teased and doused in sparkle. Their dresses dangle in garment bags like satin spooks. There are still things to be done—makeup, nail polish, a careful evaluation of the evening’s expectations. They shriek as they stumble out of Courtney’s car and into my driveway. Then, we shriek together.

Courtney bares her fangs as soon as she reaches me. “Look!”

“What are you doing?” I say.

“I bleached my teeth!” She smiles like a carnival clown and twirls, as though somehow that’ll help showcase her mouth better.

“But your teeth weren’t yellow,” Heather says.

“I mean, they were a little, kinda,” Kimberly says.

“Who’s that?”

“My cousin.”

“Since when do you have a cousin who lives with you?”

“Since there’s a riot.”

My friends peer in at Morgan’s pain and recoil.

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Her father’s store got looted. They took everything.”

I don’t tell them that it’s our store too, kinda sorta.

“Dude, that sucks.”

“Yeah.”

“Should we say something to her?”

“Like what?”

“Like… Sorry about your store?” Courtney declares.

“Yeah, let’s do that.”

My friends enter the room together. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Kimberly look almost timid.

“Sorry about your store,” the three of them say in unison.

Morgan looks over at me and raises her eyebrow, and I shrug.

“Who are you?” Morgan says.

“I’m Courtney. This is Kimberly and Heather.”

Morgan looks at my friends intently. Then she starts to laugh. “Didn’t Ashley try to drown one of you guys when she was little?”

Kimberly widens her eyes and then narrows them. “That was, like, forever ago.”



* * *




We run up the stairs and through my house in a pack.

Upstairs, we paint nails and pull on dresses and talk extensively about Kimberly’s virginity. We paint one another’s pouts the same shade of period red. Miraculously, the color works on all of us.

We blast 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty as They Wanna Be. Our adults, Tipper Gore, and the courts hate it ’cause it’s obscene, so we love it. Even feminist Heather. When we’re just girls alone, we can gyrate on each other and yell filthy lyrics out of our pretty mouths without anybody thinking we’re asking for it, whatever it is.