You don’t let me get away with shit and I barely know you.” He reaches his arm around me, resting his hand against my tit as if it’s unintentional. “You walk around like you don’t care about anyone. Like you’re a dyke or something. Your friend Allison kind of looks like a dyke. What’s up? Are you a carpet muncher?”
I slap him in the chest. “No!”
“You sure?” He puts his hand back again.
“Is this why you prey on sixteen-year-olds? Because they buy this shit?” I pull away firmly this time.
“Hah!” He laughs. “Usually.”
I don’t know how it all happens, but Fortune drives me home and we end up messing around in his black BMW E 36 with tints and blackout grilles. He blasts 2Pac on his sweet boomin’ system. I feel the vibrations in the seat. He apologizes for the apparently indecent sound quality. “I got a blown sub and I’m gonna put in a Pioneer 500-watt ten-inch Fosgate,” he says. I have no idea what he’s talking about.
We pull into the parking lot out back of my building for a while. We don’t have sex because I have my period. His phone rings a thousand times, and he answers it no matter what we’re in the middle of doing. His conversations are the same: “Yeah. Right. Twenty. Fifty. Yeah.” And I know he’s dealing, which makes me like him even more, because it means he’s got a brain.
“See ya, babe,” he says when we’re done, giving me this most luscious kiss.
“Yeah. Later,” I say, shutting the door. Then he pulls away, without giving me his number.
I go up to my room, lie in bed, and think of him. I think of his lips. His hair. His smooth skin. His biceps. His thighs. His fingers.
I feel sort of guilty about Michael, but part of me wants to hurt him for leaving me. And when he comes back, I want him to think I moved on so he’ll be jealous and see how good a catch I really am. But for tonight, even if I am drunk, I feel happy, and it’s just so delicious to fall asleep with the thought of someone else for a change.
Twenty-Seven
Uncle Freestyle and I talk about the craziest things. Sometimes I really love him. He comes over every Monday night to watch football and we usually go out on the balcony at halftime and blaze. It’s like our own little counselling office.
I tell my mom that I don’t have to go see Eric, that Freestyle is just as good.
“That’s insane,” she says. “That man has no capacity for moral guidance. Look at his life.” She’s talking about his three kids with three different women. And his smoking pot. And his endless art projects that never get started. And his long string of home repair jobs.
“He says pretty smart stuff.”
She looks at me in disbelief. “That’s because you’re a kid. You think everyone sounds smart.”
“No I don’t.” I want to say I don’t think she sounds smart. Or her friend Crystal. Or my CYC at school. But the thing is, Freestyle is super smart. When he was little, he skipped two grades. He got kicked out of high school, but he can play Jeopardy and get every question right. He’s the one who taught me how to smoke poppers and to blow out the smoke through a toilet paper roll stuffed with Bounce sheets so my mom won’t smell it. And he’s this amazing painter. His stuff is so good, it could be in galleries.
I look carefully at my mother, thinking there must be more between them that I don’t know. “Why do you hate him so much?”
She rolls her eyes. “We’re related. That’s what brothers and sisters do—they hate each other.”
“Bradley and I didn’t hate each other.”
“No.” She smiles warmly. “You didn’t hate each other. You were too young. You probably would have later, though.”
When I tell Freestyle out on the balcony that he should be a counsellor to teenagers, he says he’s got enough problems of his own, that he wouldn’t want to sit around and listen to other people’s issues all day. To make conversation, I end up telling him about my weekend. I always tell him what’s up with my friends, and which guys I’ve been with. He doesn’t like hearing about the sex that much, but he doesn’t get all fatherlike about it. This time I tell him about Fortune.
“He’s black?”
“No, he’s orange. Yeah. So?”
He shrugs his shoulders.
“What, you from the