Deal With It Page 2

  “I will, Mommy.”

  Dance-team practice was the highlight of my life. Being on the dance team was the best thing going. Other girls wanted to be in my shoes, but not every girl was cut out to be on the team. Our dance coach, Miss Martin, had picked only the cream of the crop. She got you as a freshman, and most girls remained on the team throughout their entire high school careers, provided they kept their grades decent and stayed out of trouble. You weren’t allowed to get suspended from school under any circumstances. There was also an unspoken rule about managing your weight, so you had to be in shape, too.

  “You think I can get a tattoo right here, on my back?” I asked Mommy, pointing to the small of my back, just above my panty line.

  “Maybe when you’re seventeen.”

  “Daddy said I could get one when I turned sixteen,” I told her.

  “I don’t think he knew where you were trying to put it,” Mommy said.

  “It doesn’t really matter where I put it,” I said.

  “I don’t know, Tameka. Are you sure you want something permanent like that on your body at all?” she asked.

  “Are you serious? You have two tattoos, Mom! You have Daddy’s name plastered right across your arm.” I touched her arm and pointed it out to her, as if she didn’t remember.

  “That’s exactly why I’m asking if you’re sure about it. Tattoos are permanent. And if you’re thinking about putting someone’s name on your body, then you should think again.”

  “Mommy, you don’t need to worry. I’m not thinking about tattooing Vance’s name anywhere on my body,” I said. “I’m just talking about a simple little flower or something.”

  She exhaled. Probably relieved that I wasn’t planning on tattooing my boyfriend’s name on my back or on my thigh somewhere. Although Vance was the most serious boyfriend that I had ever had, I knew that relationships were not always permanent—tattoos were. And even though we’d already talked about spending our lives together and how many kids we were gonna have, I knew that anything could happen between now and then.

  When I was in the ninth grade, I thought that Jeff Donaldson was the only man on the face of the earth. But that soon changed when he started going out with someone else. It was Vance who came along and mended my broken heart. He was sweet and also smart. In fact, he was the only guy I’d ever dated whose grade-point average was higher than mine. He took all of the college-bound courses in school and consistently made the honor roll. He played basketball and was headed for a full scholarship to Duke, although Duke wasn’t really his college choice. It was his father’s. Dr. Armstrong had received a full ride to Duke when he was our age, and wanted the same for his son. He pretty much insisted that Vance attend there simply because it was his alma mater. Vance wanted to explore other schools, like Georgia State or Grambling, but his father wasn’t hearing any of that. And besides, scouts from Duke were already watching him. They were posted up at all the games and had even sent Vance a letter, asking if he was interested in their school. He wanted to go to college, but he wished he had the freedom to make his own choices.

  At least he had goals.

  I had them, too. I planned on attending Spelman, maybe not on a full scholarship like Vance, but I would at least try and compete for a few of the smaller ones. I would do my best on the SATs and see how far that got me, too. Spelman had been my college of choice since I was in Girl Scouts in the fifth grade. My Girl Scouts’ troop leader had graduated from Spelman, and it was all she talked about. She’d told us about all the wonderful things that she had experienced there. She had been one part of my inspiration—that and the fact that Rudy from The Cosby Show had graduated from there, too. The other part of my inspiration was Mommy.

  My mother never had the chance to attend college. In fact, she never finished high school. She was pregnant at sixteen and was married to my dad soon after that. Before she knew it, she had become a young wife and mother all at the same time, and any hopes and dreams that she had were immediately flushed down the toilet. Therefore, going to college was not an option for me; it was something that had to be done—for both Mommy and me.

  “Now here’s a hairdo that you could really rock, Tameka.” Mommy pointed to a photo of Fantasia, with her spiked haircut, and giggled.

  “Oh, you got jokes,” I said and stuffed a huge spoonful of the sundae into my mouth. “I’m not trying to cut my hair.”

  “I might cut mine,” Mommy announced, her shoulder-length locks bouncing onto her shoulders. She was never afraid to try new things. She would go bald just to see if she liked it, and her hair would grow back, as if nothing had ever changed. “I might get me one of those cute little sassy hairdos for the spring.”

  “You can’t cut your hair! What would Daddy think?” I shrieked.

  “He would think that I’m a grown woman who can do whatever she wants to do with her hair.” She grabbed the spoon from my hand, dipped it into the sundae and stuffed a huge spoonful of ice cream into her mouth.

  My mother was so confident. She didn’t care what people said or thought about her. She did what she wanted to do and always spoke her mind. With a body like a twenty-one-year-old, she rocked Apple Bottoms jeans, tight-fitting shirts and wedge-heeled shoes like nobody’s business. She knew all the latest dances, had all the latest music and was completely in love with Usher. She kept saying that if he was just a little bit older and she was a little younger, she would holler at him.

  Every day, like clockwork, we watched 106 & Park, and we never missed an episode of Baldwin Hills. Sometimes having a conversation with Mommy was like talking to one of my girlfriends at school. She was just that cool. I often wondered what attracted her to my daddy, because he was the complete opposite: he was quiet and never said what was really on his mind, not until it had time to fester. Then it would come out the wrong way. Mommy was always telling him that if he wasn’t careful, he was going to wind up with an ulcer. “You have to tell people off right then and there, not wait until you’re seeing red,” she would say. “By that time, it’s too late.”

  Daddy spent hours working at the studio. Life as a music producer required many hours of work with artists and a strong dedication to the music. Some nights he didn’t even come home. But he was strict about my grades and made sure that my clothes were appropriate before I left the house. He didn’t like the idea of my dating boys, but he lived with it. It wasn’t unusual for him to intercept my calls and give a boy the third degree before handing over the phone. Daddies were like that. They didn’t play when it came to their baby girls.

  My cell phone, which was on the coffee table, buzzed, and I reached for it.

  “Oh, no!” Mommy yelled. “You can’t answer that. We’re having our girl time, and we said we weren’t answering any phones today.”

  “You said we weren’t answering any phones today. I never said that,” I reminded her. “Besides, it’s just a text message, Mommy. It might be from Vance.”

  She grabbed the phone, and I wrestled her to get it from her, but she was strong. Before long we were on the floor, wrestling over my phone and giggling. When she finally got it away from me, she rushed into the kitchen and I followed. She flipped my cell phone open and began reading my text message, invading my privacy.

  I need U. She read aloud. “What does he mean, he needs you?”

  “Mom, it’s not cool to read other people’s text messages.”

  “No, what’s not cool is for a seventeen-year-old boy to be texting my daughter, talking about how he needs her!”

  Was she serious?

  “Mommy, you can need people in different ways. Maybe he just needs to talk or something,” I lied. I knew exactly what Vance needed, because we had just talked about it until two o’clock in the morning. He needed me in an intimate way. “Can I please have my phone?”

  He claimed that everybody who was anybody was having sex, and the fact that we weren’t having it bothered him. “No pressure,” he’d said just before hanging up, “but
I really need you, Tameka.”

  Those were the words that had been stuck in my head until I finally dozed off at four o’clock in the morning. The thought of sex had me shaking in my boots. Not because I was afraid to do it—because I had done it before—but because of the consequences of it. I had done it with Jeff, who had promised that we would be together forever. But the truth was, our forever had ended last semester. My virginity was gone, with nothing left to show for it—no fairy-tale wedding like we’d planned. No big house and three kids after we’d both graduated from college. Nothing. I’d sworn that the next time I gave it up to someone, it would be when I was grown and married. I was afraid to tell Vance that, afraid that the words “until we get married” would scare him away. So instead, I danced around the issue. Hoped that he would forget all about it, and we could just go on with our lives and not have to talk about it.

  “You know what we’ve always talked about, Tameka. You don’t let nobody into your pocketbook until you’re good and ready….” Mommy finally handed my phone over. She didn’t know that someone had already been in my pocketbook and had stolen everything in it.

  She had this thing about girls having sex with boys—she thought that teenagers should practice abstinence. Like that would ever happen in the real world. Just because she got pregnant with me when she was sixteen didn’t mean that every teenager in the world would wind up pregnant, too.

  “There are diseases, or worse, pregnancy. Can you afford to bring a child into this world, Tameka? You’re still a child yourself.”

  I’d heard this speech a million times, and a million times I’d had to convince her that I knew what I was doing. That I wouldn’t wind up with HIV/AIDS or some nasty venereal disease. And more than anything, I wouldn’t wind up pregnant. The times that Jeff and I did it, we always used protection. So why was she worrying?

  “Tameka, I want only what’s best for you. I can’t live your life for you, but I can teach you what’s right. I know my life hasn’t been the best example. Hey, I was pregnant at sixteen and then married shortly thereafter. I never finished high school, never got to go to college, missed a lot of parties and fun.” She was getting way too serious now. “I don’t regret having you, sweetie. I love you to death, and I’m glad you’re here. And I don’t even regret marrying your father. We have a great life together, and he’s a wonderful husband. But I regret not having a say in my life. The choices were already made for me.”

  I’d lost count of how many times I’d heard this speech. It had been branded into my memory since the age of twelve. I could repeat it verbatim, but she insisted on telling it to me over and over again.

  “Okay, so I didn’t mean to put a damper on our girls’ day, but I had to get that out,” she sighed. “You feel me, though?”

  “I feel you, and I’m not doing anything stupid.”

  Instead of replying to Vance’s text message, I just shut my phone.

  Dressed in matching flannel pajamas from Victoria’s Secret, Mommy and I spent the rest of the afternoon slumming—talking about hairstyles and stuffing our faces. I know she didn’t mean to put a damper on the day, but the damage was already done.

  three

  Vance

  Basketball practice was different today. As we scrimmaged with the junior varsity team, our nerves were on edge because somebody had said there was a scout in the bleachers, checking out our practice. He was the same dude that I’d spotted at our homecoming game, and then again, at our game against Forest Hill two Fridays before. He wore the Grambling team colors—a gold cap with a black G in the center of it and a black-and-gold polo underneath a blazer.

  He sat in the bleachers, his legs propped up, crossed and resting on the bleacher in front of him. Relaxed and leaning back on his elbows, he didn’t even flinch when I hit my famous three-pointer. And I tried not to even look his way as I jogged backward down the court to post up for defense. The next time I took the ball down court, I caught the guy pulling a pen and a small notepad out of the pocket of his blazer, writing some notes and then stuffing the pen and pad back into his pocket. I knew then that he was definitely a scout. And pretty soon he quietly eased out of the doors of the gym, like Clark Kent did when he was about to change into Superman. Smooth.

  I wasn’t sure if he was interested in me, but I was definitely interested in a free ride at Grambling State University. It wasn’t my father’s school choice for me, but it was definitely mine. He wanted me to be a Duke man like him. I wanted to explore my options, check out some of the historically black colleges, like FAMU, Howard University or Grambling State. Some of dad’s old college buddies were now professors at Duke. And his ex-roommate was one of the head basketball coaches. He’d been watching my game since I was in middle school, and had already promised me a free ride, with all the perks. But attending a school where all of Daddy’s buddies were my professors and basketball coaches meant twenty-four-hour surveillance, and I wasn’t having that. But I wasn’t sure how I was going to break the news to Dad that I had my eye on Grambling.

  When I mentioned it before, he’d said, “Now why in the world would you even consider that little country school in Louisiana? You gotta think bigger than that, son! Grambling’s too small for you.”

  “I haven’t settled on Duke yet, Dad,” I’d said to him at the beginning of basketball season. “I’m exploring my options.”

  He hadn’t been happy with that comment. He’d frowned, raised the Atlanta Journal-Constitution up to his nose and begun reading. He was done talking to me, and I felt dismissed. I never brought the conversation up again. Instead, I continued to give my game the best I could, and hoped for other offers.

  I tried to keep my focus on school and on my game, but it was hard to focus when girls were constantly jocking you. They showed up at practice, they lingered after the games, they called your house at ungodly hours of the night and they stalked you at school. There was nowhere to turn, even when you told them that you had a girlfriend. That only made them want you more, which made my current girlfriend, Tameka, want to fight the entire female population.

  Tameka had been my girl since the beginning of basketball season. We had chorus together during the first semester, and since she was on the dance team, we would see each other after school a lot. I never really paid much attention to her until she asked me for a piece of gum one day.

  “You got some gum?” she’d asked, a pair of leotards hugging her hips as we both sat in the bleachers.

  “I got Trident.” I smiled.

  “Trident?” She frowned. “You ain’t got no Bubblicious or Bubble Yum?”

  “No. I chew Trident. It’s sugar free. Better for your teeth,” I told her as I pulled the package out of my pocket. “You want one or not?”

  “Yeah, I’ll take one. It’s better than nothing.” She pulled a piece of Trident out of the package and popped it into her mouth. “Thanks.”

  “You’re a pretty good dancer. I saw you out there practicing earlier,” I told her. “You been dancing long?”

  “Forever,” she said. “What about you? Can you dance?”

  “I can get down a little bit.” I’d smiled. She had my attention immediately, and I wasn’t sure why. I guessed it was her straightforward attitude, or maybe it was the way she wore those leotards. “Why do you ask?”

  “There’s a party on Saturday night at this teen club on Jonesboro Road. You going?”

  I hadn’t been to a party in a long time. After all, I was a busy man—basketball, school and working part-time in my father’s dental practice left me little time for extracurricular activities.

  “I hadn’t really thought about it, but if you’re going…yeah, I’ll probably go.” I blushed as she pulled a piece of lint from my eyebrow and brushed her fingertips across my face. She was so natural with me. I felt comfortable with this girl.

  I wanted to ask her what the name and complete address of the club were, and what time the party would start. I wanted to ask what I should wear,
but I decided that questions like that would make me seem silly—like I was uncool or didn’t know my way around a high school party.

  “Cool.” She smiled. “Maybe I’ll see you there.” She threw her gym bag across her shoulder, left the bleachers and headed for the door. I knew then that she would be my girl.

  That was four months ago, and we’d been like Elmer’s glue and construction paper ever since. Stuck. That is, until the new girl at school, Darla Union, walked into my American history class. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She had cute little dimples and a set of crystal-white teeth, which my father would appreciate, and she wore her hair in long curls and reminded me of Alicia Keys. She wore jeans that were glued to her hips and a top that clung to her vanilla skin. She even looked like she worked out at the gym, because her arms were a little muscular, like Angela Bassett’s were in Tyler Perry’s movie Meet the Browns.

  She stared as she took a seat at the desk next to mine. I stared, too, because I was mesmerized by her beauty.

  “You got an extra pencil?” she whispered, opening her American history book to the page that Mr. Harris was teaching from.

  “Yeah.” I handed her the worn-down, chewed-up number-two pencil that I’d picked up at my father’s dental office.

  She looked at the pencil as if it had cooties, twirled it around and read the black letters on it: Armstrong Dental—Smile Brighter! “Thanks.” She smiled when she caught me watching.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Darla. What’s yours?” She smiled that smile again.

  “Vance.” I stuck my chest out. “Vance Armstrong.” I was sure that she’d heard my name before. After all, everybody in our student body knew me. I was a superstar—the LeBron James of Carver High School. Surely she’d heard all the hype.

  “Nice to meet you, Vance Armstrong.”

  That was it.

  At that point she took a nosedive into her American history book and never returned. She was one of the few people who actually took notes during Mr. Harris’s lecture. Maybe it was because she was brand-new, but she listened intently to his monotone voice, which normally put everyone else to sleep. Darla seemed carefree and so sure of herself. She was nothing like the other girls I knew; they were all so needy and shallow. Not Darla. She didn’t even care that I was sitting there, staring at her, as she ferociously recorded every syllable that Mr. Harris spoke.