The next morning Vanessa got up and out of bed before her mother came into wake her up. She ran to the bathroom and looked at her face in the mirror, hoping that she would have healed overnight.
“Oh my God…” she whimpered. It was worse. Her lips were so swollen that it looked like a baboon’s butt. It was still bloody too. When she opened her mouth her chipped tooth was pretty obvious and there was no way that she could ever conceal that. Now she could clearly see the evidence of other injuries like scratches on her nose and chin. She looked at her hands, which were bruised and purple and then she pulled up the legs of a fresh pair of pajamas that she had put on after she had buried the ripped and bloody pair in the bottom of the garbage.
Blood had seeped from around the bandages on her knees and now they were stuck to her. Tears blurred her eyes but she had no choice but to face her mother and to take her punishment.
Leelah was just swinging her legs out of bed when Vanessa walked slowly into her bedroom.
“You’re up earl-” The words froze on her lips at the sight of her beaten child. “Oh my God, Vanessa, baby girl!” She said while leaping out of bed. “My God, baby, what happened?!” She grabbed her daughter’s arms roughly and searched her swollen face.
Vanessa had thought of all kinds of lies from being jumped to falling down the stairs but each story had holes and she would rather take the punishment and have it over with.
Vanessa met her mother’s worried eyes. “I went…I went outside yesterday.” The color literally drained from her mother’s face. Her lips parted but no words came out. Vanessa continued. “I was playing tag and I fell in the parking lot.”
Vanessa waited but nothing happened. Her mother just stared at her in shock that slowly transformed into something else. The look of worry finally retreated to be replaced with anger—no, not just anger but something much worse than that.
Leelah straightened and placed her hand on her hips, her head cocked in disbelief as she stared down at her child that had broken the supreme rule that existed in their household; Do. Not. Go. Outside.
“You are not telling me that you have been going outside when I’m not home, are you?” Before Vanessa could answer her mother continued. “I know you are not telling me that all of this time I thought your little ass was safe at home you’ve been running around with those little bad-ass kids while I’m working!”
Vanessa shook her head to deny it but her mother pointed to the closet. “Get the belt! And hurry up!” The tears began even before the words were completely out of her mother’s mouth. She got the belt out of her mama’s closet and she snatched it out of her hands and gestured to the bed. “Over the bed! Now!”
Sobbing Vanessa lay across her mother’s unmade bed. She squeezed her eyes closed and waited for the first painful strike of the belt. Waiting for the first hit was the worst and her legs began to shake as she cried. It took her a moment to realize that the belt hadn’t landed. A moment later she dared to look behind her and mama was just rubbing her forehead and it looked like tears were in her eyes.
“Get up Vanessa,” she said quietly. In disbelief Vanessa stood but stayed tensed as if her mother would swing the belt like a whip and strike her across the body.
When her mother didn’t move for a long time, Vanessa whispered. “I’m sorry mama.”
Leelah wouldn’t look at her. “Go get dressed and eat your breakfast.”
Vanessa hurried out of the room with an understanding that she might have gotten out of a whupping but something had changed just now—and it probably wasn’t going to be in her favor.
~***~
At school everybody thought she had gotten jumped because she was so messed up. Even when she said she fell and showed them the evidence of gravel in the heel of her palms they still didn’t believe her. And at recess Jalissa took one look at her and began bawling like a baby.
“Scotty got you!” She cried. “When?”
“J, I fell,” Vanessa tried to explain.
But Jalissa’s tears was evidence enough for everyone that, as far as the sixth grade class of Winton Hills School was concerned, Vanessa White had been jumped by Tino’s brother. And because she had survived it she was pretty bad-ass.
At lunch when it was time to go into the main building, Vanessa strained to catch sight of the older boy. She didn’t always see him but today she did. He was walking with a gang of boys and he stood out because he was the only white person in the group. But he looked really cool. He was wearing cut off jeans and hightop Converse. He was also wearing a sleeveless Los Angeles Lakers t-shirt with Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s name across the front.
His blonde hair flowed over his shoulders and his blue eyes twinkled with merriment as he laughed with his boys. Vanessa’s breath caught in her chest at the sight of him. It seemed that the world had slowed. Scotty Tremont. Her eyes stayed glued to him until someone pushed her from behind.
“Move!”
It was Donald and she quickly moved out of his way. Some of the girls crowded around her when they saw Scotty and she appreciated the show of protection but she really wished that they would just believe that he hadn’t jumped her, but she had just tripped and fallen.
Jalissa lowered her eyes and gulped as he passed them.
“Hi Scotty.” Vanessa said quietly.
He glanced at her and then took a double take. The smile fell from his face. “Did you get a whipping?”
“No.”
“Good deal.” He nodded and continued on with his friends.
The girls looked at her incredulously. “You talked to him!” Rochelle said in awe.
Vanessa grinned and then regretted it when her lip stung. “See! I told you.”
Jalissa looked so relieved that she looped her arm around her cousin’s neck and walked with her to lunch even though she would probably get into trouble for leaving her own classmates.
After school Vanessa paced along the sidewalk but it was evident that she was going to have to walk home. Mama was late again. She looked up the long hill towards Garden Hilltop and sighed and began the long trek alone.
It was October and some people had hung paper jack-o lanterns in their windows. Nobody wasted money on pumpkins—not in the ghetto, not unless you wanted to wake up the next day with it stomped to smithereens and smeared all over your door and window.
As she walked purposely up the hill she saw some of the kids from school already outside playing hopscotch on the sidewalk and stickball in the street. These were not the kids that she wanted to play with. These kids were the ones that would taunt her or pull her hair or truly jump her in earnest. Not because she had hair that ran down her back but because she lived at the top of the hill and thought she was better than they were.
So she averted her eyes and just walked towards home. Soon she left behind the playing children and came upon the ugly complexes that had not yet been torn down. One building in particular was set to be demolished but still it stood with boarded up windows and doors. A few of those boards had been torn down and now lay scattered across the tall grass. People went inside that building; mostly teens. She didn’t know why. Why would someone want to go into a building where a little girl had been found raped and murdered?
Chapter 4
That spring every kid in school had talked about nothing else but eleven-year-old Yolanda Washington. She had gone missing one night, not returning home after the streetlights had come on. Some people said she was fast and ran wild, but even they didn’t think that she would stay away for days. The police had been driving up and down the streets that spring, interviewing people, checking cars and had even taken the little girl’s father to jail but had released him when they found no evidence against him.
One night when Vanessa and her mother were driving up the hill after a dinner at McDonalds she saw Tino leaving the vacant building. He was lighting a cigarette but once it was lit he kept his head down and quickly slipped around the back as if he didn’t want to be seen. She remembered th
inking that was funny. It wasn’t as if the sight of his massive Afro and lighter than brown skin wouldn’t stand out.
She had turned in her seat to stare at him wondering briefly if she would later hear that the building had burned down. If it did she wouldn’t tell anyone what she had seen—just like she hadn’t told anyone about Tino throwing the match into that car. She hadn’t even told Jalissa because there were some things that you just didn’t want to risk anyone finding out.
Two days later as they rode down the hill to school Vanessa saw police tape criss-crossing the building.
‘Mama, what happened over there?’
‘Baby they found that little girl,’ her mother had sighed sadly. ‘Someone killed her and that’s where they found her body.’
Those words caused such a shock that if felt as if her world began to spin off balance. She tried to digest the idea of something much more grave than mere death--but murder. And as she considered the mortality of a girl that had been dead right where they had driven back and forth for days and days, goose pimples began to cover her skin and her breakfast threatened to come up.
But then her breath froze in her chest as she remembered Tino leaving that very same building 2 days before.
Later when Vanessa found out the extent of the atrocities that the girl had suffered—whispered to her under the stairs at school or by her cousin, fears multiplied and were forever transformed from those of her past where the clowns at the circus gave her nightmares, or she swore that her dolls moved at night when the only light available was that of the moon edging through her closed shades. Fear was no longer something mundane as the Mummy’s bandaged hand creeping from beneath her bed and reaching for her. Real fear wore the nightmare face of dead little girls that lay naked in abandoned buildings wearing frozen looks of horror across beaten faces.
She feared a new Boogeyman and he was just a teenager with an Afro and hate filled dark eyes. She never told, never hinted to knowing because if the police asked her and she didn’t lie well enough, then the next little girl to disappear might be her.
That had been over a year ago but the fear hadn’t died—it had grown. Sometimes as she approached the building she would think that the little girl’s body was still there. Sometimes she was convinced that a different little girl was there. But worse is when she saw herself lying dead in that building. The fear nearly paralyzed her and there were times when she could very easily pee her pants. She wouldn’t want to look at the building but you had to. By not looking it invited something to sneak up on you and to catch you by surprise. So when she was a few yards from the horrible place she would work up her nerves to run. It was an upward run so she had to get as close as she dared before she began her sprint, otherwise she would run out of breath. Running out of breath too close to that building would be unimaginable.
Vanessa’s mouth grew dry and her bladder felt heavy. She wished she had peed before leaving school. She couldn’t even cross the street because the other side of the street was just a steep incline in which the Hilltop had been cut from. There was no sidewalk on the other side.
She eyed the building and then her legs went into action without her remembering ever commanding them. She sprinted, her feet slapping the pavement rapidly, almost too loud; a sound that might awaken the dead and make them curious about why another little girl was so close but trying to get away.
Get her! She’s getting away!
Vanessa’s mouth opened to scream, as her imagination seemed to create reality. She ran so fast that she felt like…like Scotty when he flew down the hill back to the projects, feet rapidly peddling, his bike nearly soaring through the night. Scotty Tremont. Something sprouted in her chest; glee, joy, a hint of a smile. Scotty Tremont…She wanted to sing his name. Scotty…
And before she knew it, the building was far far away and so was the fear. Something, that moments before had nearly paralyzed her was now a forgotten memory as she stopped sprinting and resumed her walk. She started to sing softly to herself; a bit out of breath but feeling something brand new blooming inside of her.
The lyrics to Always and Forever by Heatwave rang out from the little girl. Her surprisingly strong yet melodic voice was almost unbearably beautiful. She became lost in the joy of singing, her mind’s eye pulling up images of Scotty. And when the break in the song happened, Vanessa White squeezed her hands into fists and threw her head back and wailed out emotionally as her voice grew deep and rose high and carried her heart into the sky.
When she finished singing there was barely a sound that could be heard, and that was mainly because people had stopped what they were doing in order to listen to the distant singing. Vanessa paused, but only long enough to get her second wind, and then she began to skip. She was tired. It was a long walk but singing and thinking about how cute Scotty was helped to take her mind off the forty-minute trek.
As Vanessa finally reached her parking lot and home she became anxious. Hopefully mama had left the key for her. She put it under the mat and most times when she was forced to walk home the key was there. But sometimes it wasn’t…
Out of breath and wanting nothing more than to make some chocolate milk and to watch the last of The Electric Company, Vanessa checked to make sure no one was looking and then she lifted the front mat with it’s warm message of WELCOME printed in fading black dye. Her heart dropped. The key wasn’t there.
“Oh mannn…” she frowned. “I gotta pee. Dang, mama why you gotta be late today?!” She muttered. She looked around and spotted some really little kids playing in front of their houses. Yeah, right! Everybody else was in their comfortable house watching The Electric Company and probably drinking Yoo-hoos! She sighed and walked slowly to the edge of the parking lot that overlooked the hill that she had just climbed. Not many cars ever drove up this way and she tried to scope out her mother’s white Caddy. She even tried to pretend that she could see all the way down to Winton Road and that her mama’s car was speeding down the street trying to get to her before she had to walk by herself. Her mama would be worried sick and apologetic and then they would go out and get dinner and everything would be okay.
She sighed and looked around again. She didn’t know her neighbors, her mother kept to herself and barely said more than good morning to anyone. Besides, she wouldn’t knock on someone’s door that she didn’t really know and ask to use the bathroom even if she did play with their kids every blue moon when she was allowed outside.
This brought up a turmoil of emotions in Vanessa. Which was worse; peeing on yourself or finding a place to squat? What if someone saw her with her pants down trying to take a pee? Donald Miller was always up on the hilltop because his buddy Anthony lived one level up. The idea of the boys seeing her without the safety of her ‘girls’ brought a memory of something that had happened a while back when she had been in this exact same situation. She hurried back to her door and sat down in the nook trying to make herself small and invisible. The last thing she needed is for Anthony or Donald to see her outside alone without there being any where for her to run…
~***~
Mama had been late then just as she was now and hadn’t left the key for her. Back then she hadn’t been scared all the time. That was before the dead little girl, and Tino and what Donald had done to the little girl that he had caught behind the school trailer. She had been sitting on her stoop doing her reading assignment while she waited for her mother to come home.
“Whatchu doing?” So absorbed in her homework that she hadn’t even seen Anthony Johnson approach until he was standing right in front of her, she jumped. He was in her class and had been since pre-school. She wasn’t friends with boys but Anthony was smart and he never picked with her or pulled her hair like his friend Donald. He was also the blackest kid she had ever seen. Sometimes people would cap on him and joke about him being black like midnight or mistaken for his shadow. She could tell that it bothered him but he took it good-naturedly. She had heard the term ‘gentle giant’ and had ins
tantly thought of Anthony because despite being big enough to beat up people he generally never fought.
“Sorry,” he grinned when he saw that he had spooked her.
“I’m doing that homework Miss Kerns gave us.” She went back to her reading but looked up a moment later when Anthony was still standing in front of her, moving nervously from one foot to the other as if he needed to pee. “Did you do your reading yet?”
“Nah.”
“Do you want to do homework together?”
He looked surprised by her offer but nodded and then sat down next to her on the stoop. She passed him the book and turned it to the beginning of the chapter.
“You can start reading. I already read that part. Let’s read out loud.”
He was looking at her but he nodded and accepted the book. His smooth clear voice read the words with no hesitation. She listened to the story intently even though she had already read it just moments before. She liked the sound of Anthony’s voice when he read. It was nearly like watching a movie or seeing the things happening.
He continued to read without stopping until he had read the entire assignment even past where she had stopped. He passed the workbook back to her and she turned the pages to the back where the questions would be listed.
Anthony cleared his throat. “Where’s your mother?”
Vanessa had tossed one of her braids back over her shoulder where it had flopped down onto the book. “At work.” She glanced at Anthony who was watching her hair as if something was in it. She reached up and scratched her scalp and he gave her a half smile.
She saw a Daddy Long Leg next to her leg and squealed and jumped up, dropping her book and ready to bolt. Anthony jumped up too. “What’s wrong?”
“Daddy Long Leg!” She raised her foot to kill it.
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