by Miasha
“You sure? I can give y’all a ride somewhere,” the man insisted.
“No, that’s okay,” the woman said.
“Well, can I call somebody for you?” He wouldn’t give up.
“Noooo!” I finally yelled. Then my body went into convulsions. I started screaming, “I CAN’t TAKE THIS SHIT NO MORE!”
I had a nervous breakdown. It was on the ho strip under the bridge in uptown Manhattan. Long ways from home.
Love the One you’re With
The smell of bacon and eggs woke me from a deep sleep. When I opened my eyes I didn’t know where the hell I was. I crawled from under the Dora the Explorer sheets and comforter and sat up in the twin-size bed. I scanned the room to gain familiarity, and the pink and purple walls and Dora everything did not ring any bells. I almost had a heart attack when I looked over at the doorway and saw three small children smiling at me.
“Oh, my God. Y’all scared me,” I said holding my chest. “I didn’t know y’ all were there.”
I was talking to these kids like I knew who they were.
“Mommy, she’s woke!” the biggest one yelled. She couldn’t be no older than six or seven. Her two front teeth were missing, but she was adorable. She was light-skinned, almost yellow, with green eyes and dark blond hair that was platted down her back. Her fat cheeks made me want to pinch them so bad.
The other two kids were little boys. One looked like he was four or five and the other about three, Kindle’s age. They were chubby, too, with the same complexion, eye color, and hair color as the girl.
As I was getting out of the bed, another unfamiliar face appeared.
“Do you want some breakfast?” the short, stocky woman asked.
I knew that voice from somewhere, I thought. I smiled and said, “No, thank you,” even though I was starved and wanted to run down the steps and stuff my face with every bit of whatever she had cooked. The thing was I wasn’t sure who she was and where I knew her from. But I knew that Rosie Perez voice.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” she asked, assuming correctly.
“Not really,” I said, smiling, hoping not to offend her.
“I met you last night. You were having some problems with the girl, Butter,” she refreshed my memory.
“Ohhhh,” I said. Her asking me for a light popped in my head. “I remember.”
“Come on downstairs and get you something to eat. You need to put something in your stomach. You had a rough night.”
“Okay,” I said as I started to make up the bed I had slept in.
“Leave those covers the way they are, and come eat this food before it gets cold,” the woman instructed.
“You sure?” I asked, minding my manners.
“Yeah. Come on and eat.”
“Okay, I’ll be right down,” I said. “I gotta use the bathroom.”
“It’s right there to your right,” she told me and headed back down the steps.
I went into the small bathroom, and if I wasn’t wide awake by then the bright yellow color scheme would have surely done the job. Everything from the shower curtain, bath towels, and window shades to the rugs, trash can, and soap dish was sunshine yellow.
After I went to the bathroom I flushed the toilet and washed my hands. I looked in the mirror and my lip was swollen. “How the hell did that happen,” I thought aloud. I touched my lip gently and tried to remember how it got like that. I figured it had to have something to do with Butter, because I didn’t wake up at her house and plus the lady told me I was having problems with her.
I went downstairs, and it was clearer to me that the lady loved bright colors. I had to walk through a bright orange living and dining room to make it to the bright green kitchen.
“Good morning,” I said, as I sat down at the kitchen table.
“Good afternoon,” the lady replied, as she put scoops of food onto a plate and placed it in the microwave.
“What time is it?” I was curious.
“Twelve thirty. You slept pretty late,” she said, turning to face me.
I wanted to ask her some questions, but I didn’t know her name. I had been in that lady’s house, slept in her child’s bed, and was about to eat her food, and didn’t know what to call her. I felt bad. “I’m sorry,” I said. “What’s your name again? I can’t remember last night too good.”
“That’s okay. I didn’t even tell you my name last night. But anyway, I’m Elaine. And these are my children, Brianna, Bryan, and Brandon.”
“Oh, I’m Angel,” I said.
“Say hi to Ms. Angel,” Elaine told her kids as she took the plate of food out of the microwave and placed it on the table in front of me.
“Hi, Ms. Angel.” Brianna did what she was told. Bryan and Brandon mumbled hi under their breath.
I smiled at them and spoke back. Then I thanked Elaine for the eggs, bacon, and home fries and dug in.
I was so hungry I ate like a pig. I didn’t even care that Brianna was staring at me, smiling as if I was a life-size toy she was dying to play with.
After I filled my stomach up some and got a little comfortable, I decided I would grill Elaine.
“What happened last night?” I asked.
Elaine made Brianna move out of the chair across from me. “Go in the living room with your brothers or something,” she told her daughter.
“Baby girl, you were out of it. I thought you were going to faint. I just put you in a taxi and brought you here. I didn’t wanna leave you out there ’cause Butter was talkin’ about cuttin’ ya throat and that guy you had went with was threatenin’ to call the cops. I felt sorry for you ‘cause I knew you were in over ya head. You ain’t but what, sixteen?”
“I’ll be sixteen next year.”
“So you’re only fifteen? Girl, when I was fifteen I was in school thinking about what I was going to wear to the dance. What are you doin’ out there on the strip?” Elaine seemed concerned.
I shrugged my shoulders.
“What do you mean you don’t know? You don’t have no business out there like that. You know how dangerous it is out there. And then you dealing with Butter? She is throwed off, you know that, right? Everybody know it. She belong in a mental hospital. She be snappin’ on girls left and right, gettin’ them hooked on drugs and shit so she can have more control over them. She put one of her girls in the hospital before. The girl was fucked up. She ain’t good people at all, mommy. You don’t need to be nowhere near her. How did you get down with her in the first place?”
I shook my head and said, “It’s a long story. I met her at a club.”
“Shake’s?” Elaine was on point.
“Yeah.”
Elaine shook her head. “Urn, um, um,” she said. “Shake and Butter still takin’ advantage of girls. See, I got out there around the same time as Butter. Shake was her pimp back then, and he pretty much schooled her on how to control and make money off of young naive girls like you,” Elaine explained. “She was trying to get me on her team at one point. But, I was like no. ’Cause first of all, I was older and I didn’t plan on being out there long. I planned to get in and get out. ’Cause see, I wasn’t never like a stripper or a drug addict or nothing like that, like most of the girls on the strip. My situation was different. My husband was the breadwinner. He was a Wall Street broker and he took good care of us. But he had got murdered. They had robbed him at gunpoint and murdered him,” Elaine recollected.
“I’m so sorry to hear that,” I told her.
“Oh, it’s okay. It’s been like four years now. I done dealt with it, you know. But, at the time, it was crazy because I was pregnant with my youngest, Brandon. And I didn’t have no job or no skills and all I had was a diploma—and with the high bills we had, I needed more than minimum wage. So a friend of mine who I used to hang out with before I got married had told me about how I could make fast, easy money. At first I was like hell no, you know. But then when those bills started piling up and I was looking at my babies like I can’t have
my kids in no shelter, I was like hell, I gotta do it. But like I said, I was planning on getting in and out. I thought I could do it just to make enough money to carry me until I could get some college credits and get a good job. But that plan went south. School was hard. Especially with three kids.”
I listened to Elaine tell me her story and I felt for her. She seemed like a nice, well-to-do lady and I could imagine how it was to have a good life with her husband and kids and then have it all taken away in a tragedy like that. That was just how it happened with me in terms of my brother. Before he was killed we had a good life. My mom wasn’t strung out and we were straight. So, I knew where Elaine was coming from.
“So, what’s your story?” Elaine asked. “Where’s your mother? And what you running the streets for?”
“Blaaah. Blaaah.”
“Oh, my goodness, Angel, are you okay?” Elaine jumped up and got paper towels from the roll.
“I am so sorry,” I managed to say, wiping my mouth. I had spit up all on Elaine’s kitchen floor. I didn’t know why. I didn’t even feel it coming. It just crept up on me.
“It’s okay. It’s just food,” Elaine said, as she laid paper towels over my vomit.
I stood up to get more, and I felt so dizzy I had to sit back down. I rested my head in my hands.
Elaine stopped what she was doing and looked at me. “Angel, are you all right?”
“I feel nauseous,” I told her.
“What were you high off last night?”
I didn’t want to admit to Elaine that I had been high off anything, but the way I was feeling, I thought it was best to tell the truth, just in case I needed to go to the hospital or something.
“Ecstasy.”
“Was that your first time taking it?”
“No.”
“Well, have you ever felt like this before afterward?”
“No.”
“Hmm,” Elaine pondered. “Are you pregnant?”
“No.”
“You a virgin?”
“No.”
“Well, how do you know you’re not pregnant? When was your last period?”
I thought back to my last period and calculated the days in my head. It went off around the end of October. So it had to come on like a week before that.
“Around October twenty-something.”
“So, you should have gotten it again around November twenty-something. Did you?”
I shook my head.
“Well, you need to get a pregnancy test. That’s the only thing I can think of.”
I felt so bad I wasn’t really listening to what Elaine was saying. I heard her, but I wasn’t listening to her. She walked over and got a bottle of Pine-Sol from the cabinet under the sink. Then she picked up a small mop bucket and placed it in the sink. She opened the Pine-Sol and poured it in the bucket while she ran water in with it. The smell quickly filled the air. I got up from the chair and tried to make it over to the trash can in time, but I was too late. I spit up again.
“Oh, yeah, you’re pregnant,” Elaine said confidently.
I was asleep in bed when Elaine got back from the store with a pregnancy test. She woke me up and explained to me what I had to do. I went in the bathroom and followed the instructions. I prayed that no line would appear. While I waited the couple minutes, I thought about the last time Jamal and me did it. I was trying to remember if we used a condom. I wasn’t sure. We used them sometimes. But other times we just did it and he pulled out. I couldn’t remember if the last time was one of those pull-out times or not. I prayed it was a condom time, though.
Knock, knock. “You all right in there?”
I cracked open the bathroom door, and Elaine was standing outside it with her three children. They all were huddled up together, looking nervous, like I was performing an exorcism on the other side of the door instead of taking a pregnancy test. Elaine was even biting her nails.
“I’m okay. I’m just waiting for the result.”
“Did you pee on the right spot?” Elaine asked.
I didn’t answer her because it was obvious I did. The damn line appeared on the stick. I threw the test and the results away. I washed my hands and walked out the bathroom.
“You goin’ have a baby?” Brianna asked immediately.
I smiled at her and a tear slipped.
“Bri—you, Bryan, and Brandon go downstairs and finish watching TV,” Elaine instructed her kids.
They reluctantly did what she had told them to, and Elaine followed me into the back room.
“It was positive?” Elaine asked as she closed the door behind her.
I sat down on the edge of the bed. I nodded. Then the tears came pouring. Elaine sat down beside me.
“Don’t cry. It’s going to be all right,” she said as she rubbed my back. “It’s not the end of the world, Angel. People have babies all the time. I know it seems hard to picture and I know it’s scary right now, but you’ll get through it.”
Elaine wrapped her arms around me. She comforted me, and that made me cry more. I wished that she was my mom. I needed my mother desperately at that moment—and Elaine was nice and all, but I would have given anything to have been in my mother’s arms rather than hers right then. But the phrase, love the one you’re with came to my mind, and I opened my arms up and hugged Elaine back.
Elaine told me I could stay with her. She even told me not to worry about it when I promised her I would find a way to help her pay the bills. She said her only concerns were me getting back in school and making the right decisions about my pregnancy. At Elaine’s house things were much different. I was eating three full-course meals a day. I was able to go right down in her basement and wash what little bit of clothes I had. She kept her house clean. She hardly had company. Matter of fact, the only person that ever came to the house since I’d been there was her kid’s babysitter, Veronica, and she only came at night while Elaine worked the strip. The most important thing that had changed, though, was me. I hadn’t smoked weed or taken Ecstasy since I got there. I felt good about that. Especially for the sake of the baby that was growing inside me. I wasn’t sure how far along I was, but Elaine had made me an appointment at a clinic to find out. It would be my first doctor’s visit. It was scheduled for ten o’clock. I was on my way out the door at a quarter after nine. The kids had off from school due to the Christmas holiday so Elaine couldn’t go with me to the doctor’s because she had to stay home with them. I didn’t mind though, because I had gotten in touch with my sister and my mom and they agreed to meet me there. I was so excited to see them after so long. Plus, my mom had been clean since she was in the shelter so she was in a different mind state when I talked to her and it made me feel good.
I got off the train and walked toward the clinic. In the distance I could see two people standing outside the building. One was a skinny woman smoking a cigarette and the other was a thick girl with a long ponytail.
“Naja!” I shouted as I got a little closer.
My little sister turned around and it looked like she had gained weight. She wasn’t my little sister no more. Her breasts were bigger than mine and she had thighs and hips like a woman.
“Angel!” Naja called out as she jogged toward me.
We hugged each other tight for a while.
“I missed you, Angel! Where you been?” Naja whined.
“I missed you, too,” I told her, walking the few feet to my mom.
“Heyyy,” my mom said, taking one last puff from her cigarette and flicking it in the air.
I gave my mom a hug and looked her over. She put on a few pounds herself, but standing beside Naja, she looked thin.
“How you been?” she asked, smiling.
“All right,” I told her, smiling back.
“So you done got pregnant?” she asked.
I grinned bashfully and nodded my head as I led my mom and Naja into the clinic.
“By Jamal?” Naja asked.
I nodded again.
“He aske
d about you, too,” she said.
“For real? When? Where you see him at?”
“Mommy and me went around to the house to check the mail and see how much work the workers did to it, and he was walking out his house.”
“What he say?”
“What, you don’t talk to him no more?” my mom jumped back in.
“I ain’t talk to him in a while. He mad at me.”
“You done broke that boy heart?” my mom quizzed.
“He just was like, Where ya sister,” Naja spoke over my mom. “I told him I ain’t know.”
“Why you tell ‘im that?”
“That was before I got ya number from Aunt Jackie.”
“Oh.” Naja made my day, telling me that Jamal had asked about me. I figured I would go see him when we left the clinic.
We got in the waiting room and it was packed. Jerry Springer was playing on a small TV that was hanging from the ceiling in a corner. My mom sat down in one of only four empty chairs. Naja joined me at the sign-in window.
“You have an appointment?” the receptionist asked.
“Yes.”
She slid me a clipboard and a pen and said, “Sign in.”
I scribbled my name, date, and time of appointment on the line and sat down. A few minutes later the receptionist called me back up to the window and asked if this was my first time there. I told her yeah, and she handed me some papers to fill out. Meanwhile Naja bombarded me with questions.
“So, how you find out you was pregnant? You keepin’ it? Where was you staying at? You coming back home?”
She was probably just happy to see me. We chatted and put each other up on the latest. Then I was called to the back. The nurse said that one person was allowed to go back in the room with me. Naja thought it was going to be her, but my mom said she wanted to go back. I was surprised. My mom usually took the backseat when it came to me. She tended to be stand-offish. But that day she was playing her part. I was able to push any grudges I had held against her to the side.
Back in the room, a nurse took my blood pressure, weighed me, checked my heart rate, and recorded all this information in my file. Then she left my mom and me alone to wait for the doctor.
