We're Going to Need More Wine

by Gabrielle Union

  I was a mess the whole game, unable to function as my hands shook in the layup line. Then I airballed so bad that my coach benched me. We lost, of course, and my teammates and I lingered inside as our coach went to bring the bus. Queeshaun paced back and forth, whispering to Angela. We knew that as soon as we left the gym, Queeshaun would follow us out and go in for the kill.

  The stalling tactic was becoming embarrassing when suddenly the gym doors burst open. In walked my sister Kelly, in full Foxy-Brown-bent-on-vengeance mode. My hero, she had sped over straight from work, still in her black Limited blazer with the huge shoulder pads. I’d always loved my brilliant, take-charge sister, but never more than in that moment.

  “Queeshaun?” she yelled. “You here?”

  “Yep,” Queeshaun said, stepping right up to Kelly.

  “You so much as touch my sister, I will kill you.”

  And that did it. Queeshaun lunged forward. A couple of girls pulled her back. My sister was ride or die. She came over to me and threw her arm around my shoulder. “If you touch my sister,” she said to all of Livermore, “I will kick every single one of your asses.”

  “That’s right,” I said, suddenly bold with my bodyguard beside me. “What she said.”

  She took me home. In the car, I did impressions of her Action Jackson performance. “I will spit on your grave, Queeshaun!”

  The next time I played against Angela was completely a different story. Jason was there. Even better, Queeshaun wasn’t. That let me talk trash straight to Angela, who was having her worst game of the season just as I had my best. I was so pleased with myself.

  Jason and I were not at our best point, however. Instead of getting his full name across my nails, I was getting a subtle J and K painted. It was the nineties version of “It’s complicated.”

  That spring I was at Kim’s Nails with friends one afternoon, and just as the nail tech started in on the K, in walked Queeshaun. Did this bitch have a homing device on my freaking car? Her eyes snapped open from the surprise of seeing me, then narrowed with fury as she saw the J-K.

  “Hold still,” said the tech, as my hand started to shake.

  “I told you the next time I saw you I was going to kick yo’ ass, bitch!” My K not even finished, my friends threw down money and hustled me out the back door. It felt like I’d been in a stickup.

  That seemed like the end. Cut to: the last day of junior year, and four of us were celebrating by sitting in Paige’s car and oh-so-glamorously drinking Purple Passion in the parking lot of a strip mall. Lucy was in the front with Paige and I sat in the backseat with another friend, Sook, our doors open as we listened to the radio.

  The song of the summer, Mariah’s “Vision of Love,” came on, and Paige turned it up loud, probably to drown us all out as we sang along. Just as I was pretending to hit that Mariah note, this meaty hand reached in and grabbed me by the arm, trying to drag me out of the car.

  It was goddamned Queeshaun.

  “I’m gonna kick your ass, bitch!” she screamed.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” I yelled, as Sook held tight to my legs.

  Paige pressed the gas, driving off with half of my body out the door. She did circles in the parking lot, swerving to try to shake Queeshaun as Mariah continued to belt. Sook managed to pull me in bit by bit, just like in the movies. It was kill or be killed. I tried to slam the car door on Queeshaun as Paige hit the gas to get the hell out of that parking lot.

  Queeshaun started to run, that’s how desperate she was to kick my ass! Finally, she tripped, let go, and hit the pavement. Hard.

  “OH MY GOD,” we said in one collective teen scream. Paige stopped the car.

  “Is she dead?” I said.

  Queeshaun instantly leapt up, and we all screamed. Again. First she moved toward us, then doubled back to get in her car. The bitch was giving chase. What was this zombie bitch?

  We stopped at a light and she caught up to us, bumper to bumper. Paige pressed the gas, running the red to get away. Queeshaun stayed right on us. We went into the Meadows development, hoping to lose her in the cul-de-sacs. Paige even killed her lights and gunned it, relying on her knowledge of the twists and turns of suburban subdivisions. We finally shook her, and we saw a house party. We decided it was safer to hide out there.

  We didn’t mention Queeshaun to a single soul. On the one hand, we did kind of almost kill her and wanted deniability. On the other, she was like Beetlejuice—just saying her name could summon her.

  When we left the party an hour later, there she was, sitting in her car, waiting for us. She’d spotted Paige’s car. Of course she had. Now I had to choose between the social suicide of running back into the house and having Queeshaun follow me to beat me up in a Meadows party, or take my chances with the girls. It was that same fear of being associated with someone who looked like Queeshaun. I somehow got a pass, but I couldn’t bring an agitated scary black girl to a party, because then I would be the scary black girl, too. Also, fighting was just unheard of in polite upper-middle-class suburban planned communities. It was more about emotional warfare.

  “Get to the car,” I whispered to Paige.

  I stood by the door to the house party as the girls ran to the car.

  “Come on, bitch,” I said.

  Queeshaun got out of her car and slammed the door. For a second, we stood frozen facing each other. Just as she started her charge onto the lawn, I cut left, fast, racing to Paige’s car like I was doing the one-hundred-meter for the gold. By the time Queeshaun realized she’d been tricked and ran to get back in her car, we were tearing down the road.

  We drove around Pleasanton all night. Each of us refused to go to our houses, afraid that Queeshaun would be lying in wait. Paige eventually parked at Foothill High, and we watched the sun begin to rise to Roxette’s “It Must Have Been Love.”

  “Man,” Sook said, as if she had been thinking one single thought through the whole song. “That Queeshaun really hates you.”

  Paige reenacted Queeshaun’s rise up from the ground. “That is some Freddy Krueger–level crazy,” she said to a mad chorus of laughter.

  A few years later I met Freddy Washington, who is Angela’s little brother, at UCLA. I asked Freddy if Angela still blamed me for Jason Kidd breaking up with her.

  “No,” he said. “Angela doesn’t care.”

  “Oh, good,” I said, relieved.

  “But Queeshaun?” Freddy added with a sinister chuckle. “That crazy bitch still talks about you.”

  I flashed to her in a room with photos of me all over a wall. “Soon, Nickie Union,” she said. “Soon.”

  MY BEING MARY JANE CASTMATES AGREED I WON THE CONTEST.

  “Whatever happened to that girl?” my costar Lisa Vidal asked.

  “No idea.” Everyone grabbed his or her phone again, in a race to find Queeshaun. A particularly savvy Facebooker found a woman by her name. He held up his screen.

  There she was. My high school nightmare, still looking like she would kick my ass in a second. She was presenting an office look, and I imagined all the coworkers she terrorized. From my reaction, everyone could tell it was her.

  Lisa grabbed the phone to get a better look and screamed. “She’s living in Atlanta!”

  “Oh my God, she followed me here,” I said, only half kidding.

  The door to the conference room swung open and every single one of us seasoned professionals jumped. We all expected to see Queeshaun standing there, yelling her trusty catchphrase: “I told you the next time I see you I’mma kick yo’ ass!”

  “We’re all clear, guys,” said the production assistant, eyeing us with suspicion.

  We were safe. For now.

  seven

  CODE 261

  I worked there with all my friends that summer after freshman year of college. It was an easy job. You didn’t have to help anyone, that’s the beauty of Payless shoe stores. The customers help themselves and you just have to ring them up. So you can kind of fuck around
all day and get paid.

  It was near the end of July, the time of the big Garth Brooks concert. Everyone had tickets and they needed someone to cover. It was assumed that I didn’t like Garth. Black girls don’t want to see country music. But I would have loved to see Garth. No Fences was one of my favorite albums, and I knew every single word to “Friends in Low Places.” But of course, Nickie can work that night. The black girl and the Goth girl—they’ll cover.

  I was nineteen.

  Someone was hitting Payless stores that summer, but we didn’t know a thing. He was a former employee, black. The management and police had positively identified him because he robbed the same store where he used to work. They had a description, even his driver’s license information. Then he hit a second store. Mind you, Payless would send you a storewide alert to change the price of a shoe or tell you how to display new sandals. They had the ability to warn us about this guy, tell us to be on the lookout for this former employee. They had pictures and a driver’s license. And since our store was in a predominantly white community, if a black guy walked in, we would pick up on him right away. And yet, we weren’t told a thing. Not a peep about the robberies.

  Our store had even been hit before, but by someone else. Goth Girl had been there then, but no one got hurt. Every other Payless store that had ever been robbed now had security measures, like cameras and panic buttons. Not ours. And we were right by the freeway, such an easy mark.

  So a black man walks into a Payless just before closing . . .

  When he first walked in, I was in the back of the store straightening up a display of fake Timberlands in the men’s department. When it was two to the store, one person worked the register, one worked the floor. He came up behind me and asked me about the boots. I don’t remember what he asked, because I took one look at him and I immediately wanted to run. I didn’t. I ignored my instincts. Part of that was the racial component of where I lived. I was very aware of how my coworkers and the people in the community viewed black people. So my instincts said, “Run. Run. This is a bad situation.” But my racial solidarity and my “good home training” as a “polite” woman said, “Stay put. Don’t feed a stereotype. Don’t be rude.”

  He went back to the front and I started vacuuming. This was at eight forty-five. We weren’t supposed to vacuum until the store actually closed at nine, but this was a trick staffers did to tell customers that it was closing time, get the fuck out.

  The vacuum was so loud, and I heard Goth Girl scream to me to come to the register. Something in her voice told me to run. Again, I didn’t. I overruled my instincts and walked to the front, where he was holding a gun on her. He motioned to me with the gun to get behind the register. As Goth Girl gave him the money, he was incredulous that there was only a couple of hundred. As a former employee, he knew there should be more.

  “I already did the drop,” she said, referring to walking the pouch of money to the nearby bank. It was another way we cut closing corners to clock out early. She sounded more annoyed than frightened. She had been there during the previous robbery and wasn’t hurt. And being an entitled young person, she had the luxury of being angry.

  “Go in the back,” he said when he had emptied the cash into his bag.

  Goth was in front of me, and the gun was in my back as he marched us to the storeroom. The gun was in my back, and she was still cursing him out, kicking boxes all the way in.

  “This is such bullshit,” she said as he closed the storeroom door behind us. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

  “Take off your clothes.”

  Goth was still pissed. “I’m not taking my clothes off.”

  Mind you, I was naked in a second. It never even occurred to me to say no.

  We’ll be naked and dead when they find us, I thought.

  And then he told us to both get in the bathroom.

  Okay, I thought, maybe he’ll just put us in the bathroom. Maybe he’s doing this to buy time so he can leave.

  So we crammed into the tiny little bathroom. And then, seconds later, he ordered me out.

  He threw me to the ground and was suddenly on me, spreading my legs as he kept the gun on my head.

  As he raped me, I began to hover over myself. I could see the whole room. I looked at that poor crying girl as she was being raped and thought, Things like this happen to bad people. Things like this don’t happen to people like me. My psyche, my body, my soul, simply could not take it. Though people say things like “I saw my whole life flash before my eyes,” I can tell you that this didn’t happen to me. I didn’t see my life. I was just very much present at the scene, watching this man rape me with a gun to my head.

  He turned me over to go for it doggy style. He put the gun down, placing it right next to me. I wasn’t looking at him, obviously, but staring at his gun.

  “Can you hand me the gun?”

  He said it just like that, as he ripped into me. He said it so very casually. “Can you hand me the gun?” It wasn’t even “Gimme the gun.” It wasn’t forceful or gruff. It was like he was asking for the salt.

  “Can you hand me the gun?”

  And in that moment, when he asked me to give him the gun, the me that was hovering above and the me getting raped became one. I was back in my body, and I grabbed that motherfucking gun.

  I moved forward, turned, and landed on my back. And I shot at him.

  I can go right back to that moment now. The sound of the gunshot reverberating in my ears, every muscle in my hurting body tensed, the smell of gunpowder filling the air.

  And the realization that I missed. And that I was probably going to die very soon.

  He jumped on me, trying to yank the gun out of my fist. He bashed my face as he turned the gun toward me with his other hand.

  My finger was wedged between the trigger and the base of the gun. It felt like he was going to rip my finger off, but I wouldn’t let go. I flashed on scenes from movies, so I kept trying to pull the trigger seven times. I just thought that if I clicked it seven times, I would save myself. I was trying to turn the gun away from my face and holding on to it and trying to pull the trigger all at the same time.

  I kept screaming for Goth to come out and help me. She didn’t come out.

  Finally, he ripped the gun out of my hand. He pointed the barrel at my head as he stood over me.

  “Now I’m gonna have to kill you, bitch.”

  I looked down, begging, my face a mess of blood and tears. I clutched a gold-plated chain necklace my boyfriend Alex had given me.

  “You can have this,” I sputtered. “Take it. It’s worth more than the money you got. Take it.”

  He had already taken everything else from me. This necklace was all I had to offer for my life.

  He didn’t take the necklace. I didn’t dare look at him. And as quickly as it all happened, he was calm. And again, he said, very casually.

  “How do I get out of here?”

  I pointed to the back exit, whimpering, snorting tears and the thick blood back into my nose.

  He went out and I was left alone. I never saw him again.

  I called for Goth. I didn’t ask why she hadn’t come out. I knew why. In those moments, you do what you need to do to stay alive, I guess. Self-preservation is a motherfucker.

  I DON’T REMEMBER WHICH ONE OF US CALLED 911, BUT THE POLICE GOT there fast. I am grateful I was raped in an affluent neighborhood with an underworked police department. And an underutilized rape crisis center. And overly trained doctors and nurses and medical personnel. The fact that one can be grateful for such things is goddamn ridiculous.

  Two cops arrived initially, and then there were more. Many more. If they had been writing a manual for police officers and medical personnel on how to handle a rape case with care and compassion, I would have been the perfect test case on procedure. They were wonderful. And I know this now because I have spent time lobbying Congress and state legislatures about the treatment of rape victims. I’ve seen the worst-case
scenarios, and they are devastating. Now, I can appreciate the care with which I was handled. Now, I know it rarely happens that way. And it really rarely happens that way for black women. I am grateful I had the experience I did, wrapped up in the worst experience of my life. Now.

  Then, I was hysterical. I’m not a hysterical person. I’m not even a weepy person. And I was hysterical. I looked up, and suddenly my dad and my older sister, Kelly, were just there at the store. Later, I would find out they were running errands and saw the police cars lined up outside the Payless where I worked. But in that moment, it just seemed surreal to suddenly have them there.

  “Calm down,” my dad kept saying, over and over again, as he touched my shoulder. I couldn’t speak to tell him what happened and I couldn’t imagine telling him anyway.

  The cops were radioing dispatch and other officers using police codes, a jumble of numbers wrapping around my head. None of them meant anything.

  But Kelly was majoring in criminal justice. And I saw her face when she recognized the police code for rape: 261.

  She whispered in Dad’s ear. And the way he looked at me after, oh my God, is still a nightmare. I sued Payless for negligence, but I wanted to sue them for my dad looking at me like that. I HATED THAT. To this day, I HATE IT.

  The look was: Damaged. Victim. Guilt. Fear. Like, I was my dad’s prize. He didn’t acknowledge it in words, but I was his favorite because I was the most like him. As far as he was concerned, I followed the rules. I was the kid you bragged about. I got great grades. Was the perfect athlete. Blah blah blah. And in that moment I was damaged. It was as if someone had broken his favorite toy.