by N'Tyse
When I came home from school that afternoon, she was angry and pissed off at what she saw. She had so much disgust in her eyes that she could hardly tolerate looking at me.
“What is this, Sand?” she kept asking me over and over again. “What the fuck is this? Who told you to do this to your goddamned hair?”
It was very clear what I had done. The two pigtails that hung on each side of my head had been purposely sliced off. I had taken the sharpest scissors off my teacher’s desk and had cut the dreadful twigs off my head without thinking twice about it. I had then taken a comb from my backpack, combed my hair all back, then slicked it down with lotion and water. The pretty little red ribbons that had been tied around my pigtails were gone, and the ugly barrettes that had hung from my plaits were in the trash. My mom eyed me up and down, looking at my hair and down at my red- and pink-flowered dress, which I had gotten all dirty from digging up earthworms with the boys.
“Do you know what you look like now?” she asked me. “Do you know what you fucking look like now?” She then hollered at the top of her lungs, making my ears ring. She pulled me by the little hair I had left and dragged my little ass into the bathroom. “Look at yourself, Cassandra Janene Ross. Look at what you did to your goddamned hair.” She cursed over and over. “You look like a damn boy now, you hear me? A damn boy!”
She didn’t even bother whupping my ass; she left that for my father to do. When he got home, he was so pissed off that he swore up and down he would have killed me if he touched me. I was told to stay in my room and never come back out. When those pictures finally arrived, I can recall my mom ripping the eight-by-ten straight down the middle and trashing the others along with it.
In the days that followed, I walked around the house like a stranger. I was so young and yet so confused about life and the thoughts that teased my young soul. I used to just brush them off and assume they were all natural, until I reached high school. The ninth grade would be when all those entrapped emotions exposed themselves. That was when my glances at women became stares and when being in the presence of one sent a tingling sensation between my legs.
Snap!
The bright flash from the camera temporarily blinded me. I stood up from the chair that I was posted up in.
“It’ll be thirty minutes,” the Asian man told us.
“You wanna grab something to eat, baby?” I asked Rene, who was touching up her foundation and lipstick.
“Yeah, baby. I’m starving.” She continued putting on her makeup as we walked back out front, toward the car.
I was rolling her Chrysler Sebring for the time being, until my ride was finished at the shop. The metallic silvery color shone bright against the rims that I had added on there. My baby’s ride was hooked up to the tee. I opened her passenger-side door, and she hopped in, putting on her brown-tinted shades, which matched the outfit she sported. I started the engine, and we drove a block down the street to Williams Chicken.
“What you want, baby?” she asked, trying to retrieve money from her wallet.
“Put that up. How many times am I gon’ have to tell you not to pay for anything yourself as long as I’m with you?”
She looked at me with a smile. “All right, hon. Whatever you say. You the boss, baby.”
I removed my wallet from my pocket and flipped through the large bills, trying to find something smaller than a hundred. I handed her the smallest thing I could find.
“Fifty dollars? Is this all you got, Sand? You know they may not have change.”
“I just want a medium corn fritter,” I told her.
She grabbed her purse and stepped out of the car. While Rene was inside, ordering our food, I waited in the car, listening to a mixed CD with nothing but Dirty South music. I had to turn the volume on level one because I had those speakers I had put in thumpin’ like a muthafucka.
As Rene was walking back outside with a bag in one hand and a drink in the other, I noticed some guys who were inside suddenly run out.
“Damn, baby got back,” I heard the young, immature boys say in unison.
She waved them off like she better had, and hurried to the car. I guessed they couldn’t hear the engine running or see me through the mirror tint, so I prepared to get out of the car. Just as I got ready to step out, they headed back inside. I reached over to open the door for Rene, then took the bag out of her hand so she could get in.
“Damn, those young-ass boys,” she said as she flopped down into the seat, sipping her soda through a straw. I handed the bag back to her and buckled up her seat belt, then drove off. By the time we got back to Sophisticated Images, the line had gotten longer and more people were waiting to have their picture taken. Rene stood next to me in line, holding me by the arm, anxious to see how they had turned out. I was anxious too but did not let it show.
“Rene and Sand, package C-thirty-four ready,” said the cashier, a young black lady, eyeing me in a peculiar way. I was used to stares, but this one was different, sort of an “I wanna get to know you” stare. She watched closely as Rene sorted through the package, looking for any imperfect prints, and I did as well.
“I love these,” Rene kept saying while examining each picture thoroughly. I was watching her and the chick from the corners of my eyes. “We’ll take them,” Rene said.
“All of them?” the cashier said.
“Yes.”
We paid ten dollars for the extra proofs that Rene decided to keep and then stepped out of line.
“You left something, sir,” I heard the cashier say behind me.
I turned around, knowing she was addressing me. She handed me my receipt and smiled a sly smile while doing it. I returned the gesture and headed for the door.
We headed home, and Rene was eager as ever to get those pictures into the frames she had bought days earlier. I decided to jump in the shower and allow the water to cool me off since it was such a hot and humid day.
It wasn’t until I was stripped naked and looking into the full-length mirror in the bathroom that I really saw myself. I wasn’t a boy. Never had been. Just had feelings and thoughts like those of a boy. My small breasts and the slit between my legs reminded me of that. That was why I hated being naked in front of other people. The way that I looked on the outside didn’t match how I felt on the inside.
I placed everything on the counter that I had in my pockets and almost flipped out when I saw the name Jasmine written in red ink, along with a phone number, on the back of my receipt. My heart was telling me to rip the damn thing up before Rene saw it; then I thought about how fine Jasmine was and talked myself out of that earlier thought. Besides, there wasn’t anything wrong with being friends.
Sand
Graduation was tight, but the after party my homeboy James threw for me was off the chain. There were so many women and men in one place that you were guaranteed to leave with somebody.
James was an older cat, probably in his late forties. He was the one who had introduced me to the fast money lifestyle. Once I was hired on his payroll, I had to prove that I could get out there and grind just like all the other niggas. Dude was cool, though. We would even hang out, and I definitely didn’t offend or intimidate him. There were times when we would kick it like guys and times when I had to show him that just because I had a split didn’t mean he was going to treat me like a chick. When we weren’t getting money, we would hit the basketball court, the club, and them bones. We were so cold as a team in dominoes that hardly any of the guys would play us for money. That was actually how some of my chump change would roll in. We played for real money. You had to shoot a hundred spot just to sit down at our table.
James wanted to make sure everybody got their drank on. He had trash cans full of beers, and the bar was full of liquor. He had strippers for me and the whole nine.
Rene had been pissed when I told her that James wanted to throw me a graduation party and get me some strippers. The conversation had gone way past heated when she heard that shit.
&nb
sp; “Why the hell you gotta have strippers at a graduation party, Sand? Since when do people hire booty dancers to get ass naked for a graduation celebration?”
“Babe, he just want everybody to have a little fun tonight. You trust me, don’t you?”
She’d been mad as hell, and I could hear it in her voice, as well as see it in her eyes. She didn’t approve of it but was cool after I tossed her a couple of hundreds to go shopping. Money always makes women hush their mouths.
“Well, just this one time,” she’d scolded as I followed her around the house, begging for her permission to attend my own damn party.
She finally approved, under the condition that I called her every hour on the hour. “Babe, if you don’t trust me, how about you just come with me?” I asked her.
“You already know that’s not my type of crowd. I trust you. It’s them skanks that I don’t trust.” Her mind was made up, so I took the agreement and bounced to the cleaners. I gave her no time to change her mind.
I dropped off all my clothes and some of Rene’s at Smith’s Cleaners. I told the woman working the drive-through that I would need them ready by 6:00 p.m. She agreed that they would be ready and handed me a flyer with coupons attached. I paid her in cash.
The vibration of my cell phone startled me as the phone danced around in my lap. I muted the car system and answered it.
“Hello. May I speak to Cassandra?”
“This is her,” I said hesitantly, trying to figure out the male voice on the other end. No one I knew called me by my full name, only those who didn’t know me.
“This is Carl, Carl Williams. I’m a friend of your father’s. I was asked to inform you that your mother, Ruby Mae, passed away. Breast cancer took her the day before yesterday. The family is asking that you not attend the funeral, but your father just wanted you to know.”
My phone dropped from my hands, and my eyes began to flood with tears. I sat in the car, trying to allow my emotions to flow. My mama. The woman who had birthed me. The woman whose eyes I had inherited and whose smile I couldn’t hide. My mother was gone. Away from me, away from earth. She was dead. I wasn’t sure if the tears that were falling were from the news he had just given me or from him telling me that my family was banning me from her funeral. It took me a moment to get a grip as I laid my head back on the headrest and took out a cigarette to calm down. Deep in my thoughts and questioning whether I had the guts to show up at the funeral, anyway, I decided going through what my family would put me through wouldn’t be worth it, after all. Then all those tears quickly dried up when I started having flashbacks of the last time I saw my mama.
I remembered how Ruby Mae slapped the hell out of me and told me she never wanted to see me again. That was six weeks ago, when I showed up at the house with my graduation invitations. She threw her and my dad’s invites back in my face.
“Look what you’re doing. I don’t know you. I don’t have any children. My daughter died when she was sixteen!”
I stood there on the front porch, eye to eye with the door that had just been slammed in my face. I cried like a newborn baby that day.
Remembering all that snapped me out of my trance. If I died to her, then she wouldn’t miss me at the funeral. My resentment toward her and my father ran deep. I could never forgive them for the way they had treated me. How could a parent disown their child?
I wiped my face with the back of my hands and pretended like that call had never come through. I had my own method of dealing with my pain, and that method was what had got me this far.
By the time I reached James’s house, all my homies who had been invited had arrived. Their cars were parked across the front lawn. I went in the house and began enjoying myself. I was mingling with everyone in sight, the ladies primarily. I just wanted to see if I still had it, and I did. I was pulling women to me like a magnet, and some of the fellas started cock blocking and straight up hatin’ on a nigga ’cause they couldn’t get any play. They even started asking the ladies if they knew I was a woman. Some of the ladies would nod and be like, “Nigga, I know.” And some were like, “Nigga, quit lying. That’s not a chick. That’s a fine-ass dude. That’s what that is.” I heard one girl say, “I wouldn’t care one bit. He, she . . . whatever it is looks too damn good. All I wanna know is, is she taken? Well, then again, fuck that bitch. She walking around here, dancing with all these other hoes, so she gotta be some unclaimed property.”
I chilled before I could get myself into trouble. I got on them dominoes and cards. I walked over to the game room, where all the commotion was.
“Who next up?” I hollered.
“You, if you wanna put your money where your mouth is,” a youngster by the name of Ray answered.
I took a hundred-dollar bill from my pocket and laid it on the table. I’d seen the three guys at the table up in James’s crib before, buying weed from him or just over chilling. I guess they were all underestimating me, because they started cracking jokes about how I was about to lose my hundred dollars to their shit-talkin’ asses.
I kept quiet, laughing them off. “House rules still the same?” I asked.
“And you know it. Ten to get in, nickels don’t count, back hand man’s points, and everybody for they muthafuckin’ self,” the youngster replied.
“Cool.” I reached for my seven, then studied them in my hands. First the big six hit the table. Soon after that dominoes were flying. Everybody was concentrating, determined not to lose part of their bill money. The youngster had to be the one to shit talk and try to get everybody fired up.
“Come on, mamacita. What you got over there?”
I looked at him like he had lost his damn mind. “My nigga, my name Sand. Call me Sand, or don’t call me at all.”
“Ha-ha-ha. Damn, my bad . . . Sand. No need to get all feisty on a brotha. Please forgive me,” he teased, hoping for someone to join in with him.
I didn’t even bother looking up. I laid down my domino, calling fifteen to the point marker. It was the youngster’s go. He quickly threw down his, slamming it hard, like he was about to score something. He made all the damn dominoes shake for nothing. But that was the old jailhouse scare tactic that all niggas enforced when playing bones. The next man played, and then the next. It was back around to me.
“Come on. Study long, study wrong,” the youngster protested.
I knew what he was doing. But while he was trying to make me lose focus on my game, I had his bigheaded ass in a headlock. I was applying the pressure, and I knew he felt it. He hadn’t called shit but ten during the whole game, and I gave him that. I laid down another domino, and then it was his time.
“What that score look like, my man?” He was paranoid as fuck now. He had less than seventy-five on the scoreboard, and everybody else was in their third house.
“Don’t worry, little man. You’ll know who won when the game over.” Ray started laughing. That young buck knew he wasn’t winning, and everybody else was right on each other’s toes. That was another house rule. You had to keep up with your own points. Nobody knew what no one else had until the score taker called first fifty or first hundred. You just had to have a good-ass memory and a hell of a thing for quick addition. And that was me.
“Domino,” I yelled.
“Man, why the fuck you didn’t stop her?” the youngster screamed to his boy.
“I couldn’t, man. All I had was this. I had to play that shit.”
The guy to my right added his two dominoes.
“Twenty, and that’s game!” I hollered. I stood up from the table, picked up my cash, and was about to walk away when I heard another challenger sit down in the spot the youngster had been in.
“Double or nothing, if you think you bad,” the new challenger said.
I looked around the room. Everybody was watching from afar, and some had front-row seats. They enjoyed watching muthafuckas lose their money and then walk away, long faced, like they had lost their damn puppy. The music was thumping, cranking me up a
little more.
Shit. What the hell? I thought. I had to show ’em who was boss.
“Wash ’em,” I said, accepting his challenge. “Pass me a beer somebody.” I sat back down in the same chair, and it was on and poppin’ all over again.
I looked at my watch, and it was three hours and six hundred dollars later. I quickly called Rene and let her know that I did not forget about her and that I was in the game. She knew how I was about interruptions, so she was cool.
“How much you make, baby?” she asked, already knowing her man would score.
“Six hundred big ones, mama,” I replied.
When I hung up with her, James was announcing the names of the strippers in the order they were about to come out. Chocolate Ty, Honey, Fantasy, and Peaches. Now, Peaches had it going on. She did all kinds of crazy shit. She did some shit with her mouth that had all the guys freaking out, including me. She stood up from doing all those floor-dancing tricks and made her way toward me. She had on a navy blue blazer that fit hella tight. You could see that she had no bra on underneath. She had on a short matching miniskirt that was way up her thighs and some see-through glass-like stilettos. She had the schoolgirl role going on. She grabbed my graduation cap, which I had sat on the bar, put it on, and modeled it for me. Her body was outta this world, and her face was beautiful and innocent.
“Are you the one I came to see?” she asked, staring into my eyes, trying to hypnotize me more than I had already been.
“Yeah, that’s me, Ma,” I said, talking smooth, with finesse.
“Yeah, she the one,” my boy James hollered out back, egging her on to do what he had hired her for.
She sat me down in a chair, and before I knew it, hands were on the floor, feet were in the air, and she was upside down in front of me, pussy popping. Her ass was shaking like a violent earthquake, and her titties were flopping all over the place. She removed the blazer and threw it to her feet. She used it to prevent carpet burns as she seductively twirled her ass on the center floor. One of her nipples was pierced, and she had a tattoo of a long-ass tongue reaching out at her nipple ring.
