mean, princess?”
“Oh,” she said, understanding now. “Oh, uh-huh.” She raised her eyes to meet his.
“Well, so now you know.” Clarence shrugged his shoulders before wiping at his eyes again. “Now you know, and I suppose you’ll run and tell everybody you know.”
“No, I won’t,” she said a little too quickly, and felt like maybe she should cross her heart and swear to God, but she just shook her head for emphasis.
Clarence ran his hands over his hair and cleared his throat. “Well, good. It’s nobody’s business but mine and that piece of shit downstairs.”
He smiled at her, but the sadness and the hurt were still swimming in his eyes.
“Men ain’t shit. You’ll find that out soon enough, princess.” Clarence straightened his shoulders. “Don’t ever fall in love; it’ll kick you in your ass every time,” he said, and turned and walked down the stairs.
Campbell watched him move away, defeated.
She remained there in the hallway for some time, chewing on her already chewed-away fingernails, waiting for the second round of anger, but it never came.
Late that night, as Johnny Carson bade his audience good night on Fred and Millie’s nineteen-inch Zenith, Clarence’s breathless “I love you’s” stole through the vents, and Millie hugged herself, wishing Fred was lying beside her, uttering the same.
AGE THIRTEEN
Campbell’s hips protrude, and her behind does much of the same. She’s interested in lip gloss, perfume, fancy hair clips, and fashion magazines now.
Millie notices her daughter’s approaching womanhood like one detects something from the corner of one’s eye when the mind is concentrating on other things. A glint of gold that turns to brass. Campbell should be her main concern, but Fred is all that she can think about.
Campbell is a young lady now, Millie explains to her. She needs to remember to keep her legs closed and crossed at the ankle, not at the thigh.
She spews other decrees, regulations, and requirements that Campbell tries hard to remember and hang on to, but they’re swept away with the April breeze when Trevor Barzey walks up to her one day and says hello.
Trevor Barzey, a brown-skinned, thick-lipped, slanty-eyed brother from Jamaica, lives on the seventh floor of 256 Stanley Avenue.
Rumor has it that he has children from various girls Campbell went to preschool with, those and the twins he fathered on 86th Street with a woman old enough to be his mother. “I’ve seen them,” her friend Pat said. “They have his eyes.”
He’d been with most of the girls in the neighborhood.
The fast-talking ones who wore summer hot pants straight through October. The ones who lined their eyes and glossed their lips.
He’d had some parochial school girls, the nondenominational Sunday-go-to-meeting girls, and the ones that scored high in algebra and history.
He’d had all of them, so when he turned his attention to Campbell, she was flattered.
Trevor talked a lot about the white man, the revolution that wouldn’t be televised, and the fact that his father had been a Black Panther.
Luscious told her that she’d known Trevor’s father, and warned her niece that owning a black beret and dark shades did not a Black Panther make.
In the beginning, it’s just conversation; he confronts her when she returns to Stanley Avenue to visit her friends and Luscious. He asks about her parents first and then school. His eyes move over her high firm breasts that strain against the pink of her sweater and then drop to her hips and shapely thighs.
“You all grown up and stuff now.” Trevor speaks from the side of his mouth as his eyes continue to travel Campbell’s body.
They begin to meet like that every Sunday, and Campbell finds herself looking forward to seeing Trevor, him touching her wrist and sometimes fingering her hair.
By May, they’re spending time in the hallway, him stealing kisses from her before she steps onto the elevator that brings her up to Luscious’s apartment.
By June, they’re up on the top floor, in the stairwell that leads to the roof. Campbell’s pressed up against the wall, the cold cinder blocks against her back, wondering how she will smell after she leaves him because people piss against those walls.
Somewhere below the steady buzzing sound of the overhead fluorescents, she hears the heavy zipper of Trevor’s Lee jeans come undone.
Campbell slides her hands down to his waist and looks over his shoulder at the wall and then at the floor and the puddle of grape soda someone has spilled there, looking everywhere except at his crotch.
He grabs hold of her hand and guides it between them, places it . . . down there. She feels it, and it feels hard. Her breath catches in her throat, and she concentrates harder on the purple puddle of soda.
He presses against her and forces his penis to slide between the curled fingers of her damp palm, and then he slips his hand beneath her sweatshirt, the white one that has Angel spelled across it in bright pink letters.
Campbell holds on to his penis, not sure exactly what she should do, her mind wandering onto the Italian bread Fred sends her to buy at the grocery store. She holds his penis like the Italian bread, like she’s standing in line waiting to pay.
He begins moving faster and faster, and she can hear him moaning and whispering things in her ear that she does not understand. But her grip is tighter now, and she closes her eyes against the purple soda and pissy beige cinder-block walls.
“Ohhhh,” he moans, and it echoes through the halls, and Campbell’s eyes fly open again—and finally she looks down at his penis and understands immediately why they call it a dick.
It’s so swollen she thinks it’s going to explode, so she squeezes down hard on it, tries to crush away the wavy-looking veins that are pushing through the skin. She squeezes down hard, and he makes that sound again that echoes through the halls and gets her insides boiling.
His whole body is pushing and pulling, and his hands have forgotten about her titties and are now flat against the wall, trying to push the wall down. “I—I—I—”
He’s trying to say something, so she squeezes again because maybe his words are caught inside his dick.
“Shit!” he yells, and suddenly her hands are wet.
“Shit,” he whispers, breathless this time, and she realizes that her hands are wet and sticky.
He falls against her for a moment and then rolls off to the side and onto the wall.
“Damn,” he mutters as he wipes his dick off with the end of his T-shirt.
She looks down at it again. It’s not long, hard, or throbbing anymore. It’s drawn up, shriveled and glistening like the dwarf pickles that float in the jar on the counter at the corner store.
Campbell
