In My Shoes Page 5

  Shortly thereafter, Carlease came out of his room. Her hair was a mess and all of her make-up had vanished. She walked directly over by me, conversing as if nothing had happened. I wanted to inquire about what had transpired, but I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of telling me the details. After all, it was pretty obvious.

  We didn’t leave Winston’s house until 1:00 a.m., and he never said one word to me. Not only was I crushed, but in addition to that, Jesse and I knew we were in deep trouble with Mama. If I had known my night would turn out as it did, I never would have lied to Mama. I would have stayed my ass at home! It was funny that I saw it that way now, and as far as I was concerned, my feelings for Winston were a wrap.

  On the drive home, Carlease bragged about what she and Winston had done. A virgin she was not, but as far as I was concerned, he’d made fools out of both of us because we were the ones who considered ourselves friends. What a true lesson I’d learned, but this one was just the beginning of many more to come.

  No sooner had we got home, we were made aware that Mama was still awake. Our house was lit up like a Christmas tree. We rang the doorbell and Mama yelled through the door, “Jesse and Brenda, is that y’all?”

  “Yeah, Mama, it’s us,” I yelled back.

  “Good! Stay y’all trifling asses out there!” she yelled louder. She turned off the lights and we stood on the dark porch looking like idiots.

  Jesse and I slept on the ground in the garage that night, and in the morning, Mama let us back into the house. We continued to lie about Shantell’s mother, and even though Mama believed our story, we paid dearly for it. Our backs were killing us from sleeping on the concrete floor and I was left with a true broken heart. I wrote about my experience in my notebook: So-called friends ain’t shit, and neither are yucky boys who say whatever to get some pussy! My feelings are bruised…battered and the next time Winston looks at me and licks his lips, I’m gonna punch him right between the eyes. Hmmm…maybe not because he is still cute, but being cute won’t be enough for me to drop my panties again…

  ***

  The school year was finally over. My sophomore year was a true struggle; it was so bad I even failed gym. Since it was a requirement, I had to take it over next year, along with the freshmen. I’d become so particular about myself that I hated swimming and changing clothes in gym. Eventually, I’d have to deal with it or else fail, again, and face the possibility of not graduating because of gym.

  Summer break was well needed. Mama continued to work nights, and the moment she left, the partying was on. All of our friends hung out at our house—boys included. I’d hooked up with a new boy in the neighborhood, Chris, only to stop by his house one day to find my friend, Loretta, working him over. I hadn’t had sex with him, and he made it clear that since I wasn’t upping the goods, I was out and she was in. I was starting to learn a lot about friends, and as far as I could see, I really didn’t have any.

  Jesse and I made sure that everybody left our house by ten o’clock at night. We cleaned up any mess we’d made during the day, and when Mama didn’t get a ride home from her friend, I left to pick her up from work by eleven forty-five. Being very deceitful, I’d always have my pajamas on as if I hadn’t done much all day. I hated to lie to Mama and sneak behind her back, but I felt as if she just didn’t understand us. I knew it would be a matter of time that the lies would catch up with us, but that was a risk we were willing to take.

  Every day, it was the same routine. Mama would go to work and we would cut loose like wild animals being released from a cage. It had gotten to the point where the whole neighborhood knew our house was the hangout. I’d even caught up with Winston one day, and unable to decline his offer about us finishing up something we never got started, I was down with his suggestion. Unfortunately for me, it was that time of the month. He didn’t seem to care, but when we made it back to my house, he regretted his suggestion. From that moment on, I knew that sex during my monthly cycle wasn’t going to work. I was embarrassed by my blood flow, and the smell was horrible. I should have left well enough alone, and I was sure…positive that he’d felt the same.

  Near the end of the summer, things started to get out of hand. Many of the kids in the neighborhood, known for bullying us, started doing stupid things like toilet papering our yard, throwing eggs at the windows, and even dumped horse manure in the driveway. We were able to hide those incidents from Mama, but when the word “bitches” was spray painted on the side of our house, that immediately got her attention. She confronted us about it and made us take her over the people’s houses that were responsible. One by one, Mama cursed them out, and to get back at us, they told her about the daily parties we’d had while she was at work. Mama had a way with words and told the boys, along with their parents, that she was no fool. “I’m well aware of what’s been going on in my house while I’m not there, but all of you muthafuckas better stay the hell away from my daughters and stay off my damn property! If not, I promise y’all a shotgun up the asses!”

  On that note, we left each house worried about what Mama would do to us. I wasn’t sure if she knew what was going on at her house or not, but once we got home, she put Jesse and me on punishment and told us that we were on lockdown until school started. Mama’s threats had shaken up everybody, and the rest of the summer remained cool, calm and collected. However, the upcoming school year wasn’t and it was the school year from hell!

  Chapter Four

  The first day of my junior year, trouble was in the air. Jesse and I had many more associates, but lots of enemies. I had gotten fed up with the constant insults from classmates and my actions showed it. I’d become a hard-ass chick…wasn’t taking much off anybody anymore. My close associates and I hung tight because, in addition to the rude boys who kept their bullshit up on the school bus, it seemed as if many of our classmates despised us for befriending some of the football players at Riverview Gardens High School.

  During school, damaging rumors started to circulate about us and many of the rumors were false. I hated to be talked about or lied upon, and it infuriated me that some classmates could be so cruel. I made my anger known, and if anybody even looked at me the wrong way, I felt a need to confront them. For protection, I kept a baseball bat and mace in my locker, ready to do some damage. Eventually, the bat came in handy one day, when Jesse and a football player named Derrick disputed over Hazelwood East’s loss to Riverview in a football game. Jesse was walking up the stairs, talking about the loss and the football player turned around.

  “The game is over with, bitch! Why you still talkin’ about it?” he charged.

  Jesse gave him a look as if hell had swarmed over her and pointed to her chest. “Are you talking to me?” she asked.

  All he had to do was say “yes” and he did! By that time, I was already at my locker, which was nearby. I pulled out my bat, swinging it through the crowd as Jesse, some of our other associates, and the football player went at it. They were kicking his ass, and when two more football players joined in to help, everybody was getting it in. I was cracking my bat against the backs of anybody in the way, and if they had on a jersey, nine times out of ten, they were hit. Many teachers rushed to break up the fight and Dana, Tina, Jesse and I were the only ones suspended. Shortly after returning to school, Jesse and I were suspended, again, for fighting two girls in the cafeteria. The fight was wild, and numerous crowds of people were standing around, trying to see where the flying chairs were coming from.

  “Fat bitch!” I yelled, throwing the chair at one chick who had just slapped Jesse so hard that her nose was bleeding. Jesse and I hands were tangled in the chick’s long hair, yanking the shit out of it. We pounded her face, head and back with our tightened fists. Several other girls were in on it too, trying to get a lick in where they could.

  More teachers rushed in, attempting to break up the fight. But when one teacher grabbed my arm, I turned around and shoved her backwards. She stumbled in her high-heeled shoes, trying to catch
her balance. My face was twisted from anger and my fists were still tightened.

  “Don’t put your hands on me, bitch!” I said with a heaving chest. “Are you crazy? I will fuck you up!”

  She took a few steps back, but a man teacher intervened and snatched my arm. He escorted me to the principal’s office, right along with Jesse. By now, we’d had a bad reputation for causing trouble and the principal at Hazelwood East wanted us out! He advised us that we couldn’t come back to school until he had a hearing with our parents.

  “We didn’t even start nothing,” I said, pouting while sitting in his office with my arms folded. “They started it!”

  “They’ll be suspended too,” he said. He stood behind his desk with his hands in his pockets. “As for you and your sister, the two of you can’t return to school, until we speak to your parents first.”

  I stood up, rolling my eyes. There was no need to involve Mama in this, and I knew darn well that Daddy wasn’t going to show his face. “Parents my ass,” I said to the principal. “I don’t need this school and you don’t have to suspend or expel me because I quit!”

  The principal’s face turned beet red. He couldn’t believe the tone I’d taken with him, but there was a whole lot of anger inside of me, waiting to come out.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Jesse said, walking next to me. “Fuck Hazelwood East!”

  We left the principal’s office and he, as well as the staff, stood in disbelief.

  “They’re nothing but troublemakers,” the assistant principal said as Tina and Dana joined in to leave with us. “Good riddance.”

  I could hear the principal calling security, but I turned at the door, giving the assistant principal a mean mug she’d never forget. “Insult me again,” I threatened. “And I will lay your White ass out on that floor.”

  She didn’t dare open her mouth again, and by the time security reached us, we had already gone to our lockers to clear them out. I left the front doors of Hazelwood East with a bat in my hand, and mace in my pocket, knowing that I would never, ever return.

  Weeks had passed by and Mama didn’t notice a thing. Doing the norm, Jesse and I got dressed every morning, leaving the house as if we were going to school. In reality, we went straight to Tina’s house and kicked it with her and Dana, who had left school that day too. We spent our down time doing nothing productive. Gossiping, listening to music and cooking. I had become obsessed with writing, and had filled many more spiral notebooks with my thoughts. Thoughts about my life, my parents, my friends, bullies…everything I thought of was basically spilled on paper. I even started coming up with rap lyrics for our group, The Hazelwood Gangsta Gang. Couldn’t believe I had all of this inside of me, and writing made me feel good.

  We had discussed returning to school, but not that often. Jesse was in her senior year and only had a few months to complete before graduation. As far as she’d come, dropping out of school didn’t seem like the sensible thing to do. I, on the other hand, had almost a year and a half to go. At this point, for me, school was a wrap.

  For the next month or so, we all could be classified as one thing—dropouts. We hadn’t made any decisions about telling our parents of our unfortunate situation at school, nor had we made plans to return. When Mama received a letter from the Board of Education, no doubt, we had some explaining to do. Finally, we told her everything that had happened and explained how miserable we had been at Hazelwood East. From the day we’d moved to Black Jack, we never did fit in.

  “I hate that school, Mama, and there is no way I’m going back,” I said, sitting on my bed and watching Mama as she frowned while listening.

  “Me either,” Jesse said. “We’ve always been looked down on and people around here treat us like outsiders.”

  Mama was so mad at us for lying to her, but she was sympathetic to what we had been through. She sighed, and then gave us an ultimatum. “Find a job to help me take care of these damn bills, or get y’all asses back in school! Any school! Preferably Sumner High School. It’s where I graduated from.”

  Jesse and I shouted at the same time. “Sumner High School!”

  “Ain’t that in the city?” I asked Mama.

  “Right around the corner from your grandparents’ house.”

  “But it’s in the city,” Jesse repeated. “I don’t want to go there.”

  Mama folded her arms. “You don’t have a choice. I call the shots around here, so get those sad looks off your faces and get up to do some chores around the house. It’s a mess.”

  Mama left our room, leaving Jesse and me worried as hell about attending a school dead smack in the city. But by the end of the following week, along with Dana, we were enrolled at the historic Charles Sumner High School, on Cottage Avenue. Tina’s mom made her enroll at Hazelwood Central because she was afraid of letting her go to a school in the city. It was funny how things worked out. Mama wasn’t upset with us anymore, and we were about to view school in an entirely different way.

  Chapter Five

  Sumner High School was a muthafucka! Appearance wise, it was nothing compared to the luxurious Hazelwood East and the student body was 99.9% African American. The wood floors were buckling; the lockers were loud hot pink, rusty, and banged up. The stairs looked as if they were about to collapse, and the classrooms were overloaded with students who had to share books. Paint was peeling from the walls, no air conditioners, and graffiti was scribbled everywhere. As for a football field—didn’t have one, and games were always played at other schools. I couldn’t believe what we’d gotten ourselves into and the school mascot was a Bulldog.

  Coming from a school that had swimming pools, plush carpet, elevators, a library, and colorful freshly painted lockers—what in the hell was this all about? Not only that, but again, we had a difficult time fitting in. On the first day, we wore fancy dress pants and silk blouses, all by way of a five-finger discount. High-heeled shoes comforted our feet and our pressed hair hung on our shoulders. No doubt, we stuck out like a sore thumb, because many of the other students kept it simple. The norm was rugby’s, t-shirts, blue jeans and tennis shoes. No shorts were allowed and neither were mini-skirts! Huh? Sumner High made me feel as if I’d dropped down from another planet. And more than anything, some of the students scared the shit out of me. Many of the boys were rough around the edges, but many were also cute. The girls looked as if they didn’t play, and eyes were rolling as soon as we hit the door. When you’d ask people for directions, they looked at you like you had shit on your face. The teachers…well, most of them were more like friends. They joked around with students in the classrooms and the students didn’t seem to have many rules to follow. To me, this was an eye-opening experience. I couldn’t believe the differences I’d witnessed from being in a city school versus a school in the suburbs.

  During the first week of school, after scrambling the halls and looking for the girl’s bathroom, Jesse, Dana and I rushed in to use it. It was clouded with thick smoke; smelled like burnt dried leaves from a maple tree. A gang of females stood in front of the stalls smoking pot. We didn’t want to leave, but since none of the stalls were available, we stood looking like a White person who had just called someone a nigger and regretted it. The females passed a fat twisted joint around the bathroom, eyeballing us as if we had no business being there.

  My heart slammed against my chest. I definitely wasn’t about to ask any of them to move aside so I could use the bathroom. Since some of the doors were missing from the stalls, I had no intentions of pulling down my pants and allowing everyone to look at me.

  Trying to ease the tension, Jesse walked up to the cracked mirror, and started teasing her hair with a comb. Dana worked her jerry curl and I asked Jesse if I could use her comb to straighten my hair as well. The females stared without saying a word. Normally, being stared down sparked a few words from me, but not this time. I hadn’t said one word, and had learned my lesson from being such a bad-ass at Hazelwood East.

  “What’s
y’all names?” one of the girls asked while inhaling the joint.

  First, I pointed to Jesse. “That’s my sister Jesse, Dana, and my name is Brenda.”

  “What’s up,” she said, tossing her head back. “Welcome to Sumner.”

  “Thanks,” was all I could say and we walked out smiling.

  I wiped the sheen of sweat from my forehead, realizing that I wasn’t so tough after all. I was sure to get my ass beat by saying the wrong thing and the looks on many of the girls’ faces said so.

  After only a few weeks at Sumner High, things started to get better. We dropped the dress pants and blouses and kept it real in blue jeans like many of the other students did. Jesse kept her hair as is, but I swooped mine into a ponytail with feathered bangs. She had first hour with one of the most popular boys in school—Slim they called him, and he started to show us around. He showed us how to cut classes, how to take as many lunch breaks as we wanted, and how to hang out in whatever class we wanted to. A nearby food joint, Billy Burke’s, was the place to go for burgers, and some of the teachers often sent us there to get lunch. No doubt, this was my kind of school, and it wasn’t long before I classified myself as being a Bulldog for life! The football games were lively as ever and we attended every single one of them. I was always in Jesse’s classes or she was in mine. The only time I went to my own classes was if I had to take a test, and nine times out of ten, I cheated on that. After the test was finished, I’d ask the teacher if I could go to the restroom and never returned. The teacher was lucky to see me the next day, or sometimes, not until the next week! We ate lunch together, and at this school, if you had to get free lunch, so damn what! Nobody made fun of you and the struggle seemed understood. Every single morning, the principal got on the intercom and referred to us, the students and faculty, as “family.” A family it truly was, and for the most part, everyone seemed to get along. Oh, yes, it was quite a change from Hazelwood East, as many of the things we had done at Sumner would result in immediate detention or suspension from school.