Team Seven

by Marcus Burke

  Or one of them BRC boys might run up and try to beat you to sleep. It would probably be Big Maal, but their whole crew’s a handful of spark plugs. At school now, I’m just an athlete. We know our roles and play our positions. Like, we know better than to go after a girl like Monika Allen. She go out with Tito. He’s the most money-gettin’est nigga out the BRC. A nose candy peddler, he don’t even sell weed no more. Everyone in our high school had a position and most played ’em, but Tunnetta “Chocolate Chip” Johnson plain didn’t give a fuck.

  She moved here around the way from some dirt-road town in Alabama. It showed in her whole swag with them fuzzy cheese-puff plaits she kept twisted up in her head. She wore these clunky headphones like them boys that ride the short bus. She didn’t really talk to anyone. Well, at least anyone that ran in my world. On paper, Tunnetta don’t make too much sense, one of them girls with a few cute features and one or two sexy parts but it all don’t sum up to equal sexy.

  If you stared at Tunnetta long enough, you’d probably get a headache and be confused. Juicy, plump lips and a flat stomach. Wide hips with a pancake-flat booty. She had that tall mushy frame. Her hips pendulumed slow and seductive like a grandfather clock. She stepped strong like pistons pumping an engine and she was knock-kneed so it looked like she was smuggling newborns that were trying to jump out of her hips. Not quite an hourglass, she was like two sweet potatoes stacked on top of each other sideways. Her appeal was different, more something you’d want to get inside of.

  Reggie and them Team Seven boys on my block saw it too. They’d all howl every time she’d piston down our block with them headphones on, zoning out how she do. We go to the same church. Her and her father sit all the way across the congregation at service. She has a little cottage cheese bubble-wrapping the back of her legs and a few skin-tone stretch marks snaking up her inner thighs, but she could wear the hell out of a Sunday dress. She never dressed nice around the way, and that made me curious about her. Reggie and them Team Seven boys always told me I was crazy not to pipe her. Before she bloomed, got gassed up, and started thinking that she was somebody and deserved shit, is what they’d tell me.

  Two things couldn’t nobody take away from her were those honey-brown hazelish eyes and the big ol’ ripe mangos she had slang-a-dangin’ from her chest. We never spoke until early in August when I caught the shock in her eyes as I focused in on her with a request at her father’s bodega. Me and Beezy had just come from chilling at Kelly Park. He was hungry and I needed some Zig-Zags. Beezy grabbed the door handle and froze.

  “Fuck!” His arms tantrumed out to his sides as he limboed back toward me, bouncing at the knees.

  “Go, nigga!” I nudged him in the back.

  “Look inside.” He elbowed me in the chest. “All we need on a Sunday.”

  I got a nauseous tingle in my stomach. Sade Fulton was in there with her pops. He’s my Regional All-Star team coach. Forever rocking them black undertaker sunshades and cussing somebody out on his cell phone. The type of cat that turned a phone call about practice into a forty-five-minute hot-seat roast session. Wanting to know my dreams. Where I saw myself in the next ten years. My plan to combat the white man’s glass-ceiling system. He drove a sexy chromed-out black-on-black 745 Beemer. A nice sound system but he didn’t play music in his car when I rode with him to our games. He told me what he had to say was more important than anything the crackerjacked radio box could tell us knuckleheaded kids. He drove by us every day after school, never stopping to politick. He’d just thump on by, slow-freezing every nigga in their pose. Rumor is he used to be a dopeboy, but I don’t know. Shit, my plan was to stoner-glide the Sunday breeze. All I did know was he’d spoiled Sade into a rotten bitch.

  He was standing at the counter filling out a money order slip, the mean-mug on Sade’s face stanker than a bowl of chitlins. Mr. Fulton had on a black Adidas jogging suit with a Sunday Boston Globe tucked under his arm. Sade was behind him holding a lip gloss. Mr. Fulton answered his cell phone and we seized the moment and broke. Sade acted like she ain’t seen us hiding in the back near the watercooler and fresh fruit. She stood there stone-faced, sucking on the lip gloss that she hadn’t purchased yet, slow and steady like it was a popsicle or cigarette or something else. Gawking and thinking about her lips, she glanced over. We met eyes.

  “Ummf!” She folded her arms and rolled her eyes, craning her body away from my direction.

  She’s too much. The baddest dark-skinned girl in school but a crazy birdbrain too. A bad bitch that knows she’s a bad bitch—the worst and most dangerous kind. She always had the freshest Jordans on, wrists dripping with gold bamboo bangles, ears swinging low with door-knockers. She’s been crumbs in my bed ever since we went out for three weeks last school year. We never broke up; we fizzled out. She been evil-glaring me ever since. She likes to start shit for the sake of starting shit.

  Mr. Fulton got off the phone and glanced around the store. I hunched into myself and acted like I was reading the back of a box of Theraflu. He paid and walked out the door. Sade moved up in line to pay. She looked through Tunnetta, gave her one of them blank stares almost the way people do to ATMs. She dropped her lip gloss on the counter like she was rolling a hand of dice. It rolled on the floor behind the counter. Tunnetta squatted quick and bobbed back up.

  We waited for Sade to leave the store, then got in line. When it was my turn Tunnetta hopped out of her seat and took three steps into the middle of the counter, just where her pops stands so he can see all the mirrors. She thought I was going to steal something, so I caught her in the eyes and leaned in toward her. Her face went sour and twitched. She stepped back and dropped her stare to the floor. I looked out the door and Sade was grilling me as she pulled away in the 745. I turned back to Tunnetta. She stood weird and meek, her body half turned away from me, hands clasped together at her waist.

  “Ay, sweetheart?” I squinted down at the name tag Velcroed to her cannons. “Tun-netta,” I drawled. She glanced up at me. I smiled.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Think I can get a pack of Zig-Zags, lil’ mama?” I licked my bottom lip and smiled harder.

  She was fidgety, like a child waiting in line to pee at the carnival. We caught eyes again but she didn’t look away this time. She arched into herself like her shoulders wanted to high-five. Them honey-browns got wide, pinballing side to side like I was stressing her out. She stood there blinking, looking dumb. I thought she was going to call the manager—her pops—but she didn’t.

  “On the low,” I shushed my index finger to my lips.

  A grin melted into her face and she spun around. I slid two Kit Kat bars in my back pocket. She turned back around with a bag of Swedish fish and my pack of Zig-Zags underneath.

  “Seventy-five cents, please.”

  I dropped the change on the counter. She sucked her teeth.

  “Just came in from church. Shouldn’t even be doing this for you.”

  “Bad girl.” I winked at her and she broke another smile.

  “Smoking weed on a Sunday, uh-uh.” She shook her head. “Ain’t you on the basketball team at school too?”

  I smiled back. “Don’t they say not to judge folk up in that church house?” I tossed her the deuces and walked out. That was the extent of our interaction that summer.

  “Andre Battel! If you want to talk to Jamal then you do it outside of my classroom. Otherwise you need to shut up.”

  The room rang out with an echo of “Ooooooos,” then fell pin-drop silent. Shut up? Mrs. Rosetti told me to shut up? We weren’t the only people in the room having a side conversation. She glared at me, then turned around to write more notes on the blackboard. All eyes were on me and my face was getting hot.

  “You gon’ take that, my nigga?” Big Maal leaned over and whispered in my ear.

  That’s when I picked up the ruler and threw it at her. I missed to the left of her and she pushed the intercom on the wall.

  “Main office? Yes! Andre Battel is being
sent to the office for being rude and obnoxious. He is becoming belligerent in my classroom.”

  “Well, that was a lot of name-calling, lady.” I got up and started walking out. “Bitch!” I said under my breath.

  She heard me and that sealed my three-day suspension. I also had to switch out of her class. I wound up in Mr. Stigs’s class.

  My first day back post-suspension, my name tag was sitting on a desk in the front of the room, of course next to the resident big brain. Teachers always loved to yin-yang the front of the classroom this way. I was late so I just sat down. A few minutes later a paper folded into a tight triangle slid under my desk. I looked at her and she looked at me and then the note. I acted like I had to tie my shoes and picked it up.

  “Remember me from the store, smoker boy?” the note read.

  She glanced me up and down and it turned me on. Tunnetta finally brought her Sunday church game to school. No more clunky glasses. She’d run a hot comb through her frizzy hair and ditched the plaits. She had a hazy look in her eyes. I could hear them Team Seven boys barking in my head, thirsty and beginning to bloom.

  “Sure do!” I wrote back and she giggled.

  She tucked the note in her pocket, then got up, earthquaking her hips as she walked over to the pencil sharpener. Her stance looked stronger, like she’d been hitting the gym or turning down meals. Her skin was even starting to clear up. Well, as clear as chocolate chip skin could clear.

  Tunnetta’s skin was tough. Her acne was for-real-for-real jacked up. Her cinnamon-brown skin made it look worse too. Her cheeks would look like there were fire ants clawing out constellations on top of sand mounds. One morning at breakfast, before school started, Big Maal stood up right as Tunnetta walked into the cafeteria, red-faced from the cold. He ripped open his chocolate chip muffin and held it in the air like he was Rafiki from the Lion King holding Simba toward the sun.

  “The side of Tunnetta’s face, ladies and gentlemen!” He spun himself around in a dramatic circle and curtseyed.

  I never called her that but the nickname stuck, and bad skin, big tits, and pretty eyes was all Tunnetta “Chocolate Chip” Johnson was known for around school. She wasn’t really a good look for me, but I was curious.

  “So tell me, what’s it like to be high, smoker boy?” the note the next day said.

  I told her I could show her better than I could say and she blushed. She was just as curious about me as I was about her. Later that week I got around to bringing up sex. She told me she was a virgin. I lied and told her I wasn’t. She believed me and I think it turned her on. She started asking me questions about what it was like. How long did it go for? Where did you do it? Does your mother know? Why weren’t you scared? Brand of condom? She said they made it sound like the most dangerous thing in the world at church, and I told her about how great it was. She asked me my favorite position and I told her all of ’em. I told her how tired I’d get in my lower back if I did it really good. I even told her that sometimes I’d lose my voice and be hoarse after. She ate it up.

  We switched notes every day in class and she’d laugh at me when I’d fail my tests. She told me all her good business up front and I told her what I wanted her to know. To be real, only the Bad Girls were fucking in the ninth grade, and even that was kept on the low-low. Either that or you had to have one of those committed-for-life relationships and the sex actually meant something. All them BRC cats got to smash down the Bad Girls. And us, we athlete boys, we were stuck with the mind-gaming, hard-stepping Hot Girls. Getting laid meant convincing a broad we wasn’t doing something wrong, or at least that we weren’t going to tell and make her a whore in the halls. Or scribble her number on the walls in the bathroom or the railing of the bridge under the words “Call for a good time.”

  Once we tickled the topic of sex, I wanted to scratch her. The next day I wrote my phone number on a piece of paper. It took me three whole weeks to strap on a pair of nuts and actually give it to her. She called me that night. Nina answered the phone and walked in my room wide-eyed like a day-ghost. She handed me the cordless, then backed away from me slowly like I had a gun pointed at her. “Let me find out,” she giggled under her breath and slammed my door.

  We talked until about two in the morning and it wasn’t about anything in particular. There’s only so much to say about the sex neither one of us was having. It didn’t matter, though; the conversation always flowed. Sometimes my mother would pick up the phone in her room right in the middle of our conversation and tell Tunnetta I had to go. She never made fun of me for it. We started talking on the phone every night but never in the halls. We stayed strictly math class friends. Math was her only normal class anyway. All the big-brain-smart-guy classes were in another part of the school, away from kids like us.

  On some weekend nights we’d stay up late and watch all the uncensored videos on BET: Uncut. A top-notch bullshitter, she’d always act like the big booties twerking in the videos repulsed her. But it’s not like she turned the channel. She’d get quiet then, randomly ask me shit like, So is this what guys like? Or, Is this how the other girls at school get down? Massaging her brain, I’d always tell her yes. I’d spoon-feed her anything to move her mind toward where mine was. Our notes started getting longer and realer. She started telling me about her deep thoughts.

  Her mother died last year, before they moved up here. A leaking gas pipe caused a flash fire in the middle of the night. Her mother didn’t make it out and it haunts her daily. Her daddy took to bourbon and bringing home prostitutes. She said he only paid attention to her when he got to brag on her big-brainedness at church during coffee hour. She told me the only thing he cared for was his bodega and the money that came in through its doors. I told her about my lame-ass father and how I do a little more with weed than smoke it. She didn’t hang out with anyone at school, but she’d hang with me. I thought there was something really cool about that. She was like my little secret. And I was hers.

  When school lets out, the drama of the hallways turns real. You’ll get your issue if you got one. This is how it worked. Basically you had to be some type of somebody. We latchkey kids all walked together in a huddle, but don’t get it twisted, we were not together. The pack was like a prison yard, everyone had their territory. People step out they zone and it turns into a jungle.

  Me and Beezy got to walk up front of the pack behind Big Maal and Tito, a few big-booty Bad Girls peppered between us and the Hot Girls. Sade Fulton made me a somebody when Keyona Lawson, the next in trust of the Hot Girls, approached me after basketball practice one day last year and delivered a note.

  You wanna be my man? Check Yes or No.

  —Sade “so-easy-to-love” Fulton

  She drew two hearts next to her name. Keyona handed me a black marker and sucked her teeth. I looked at the hearts.

  “Check something, nigga!”

  She started snapping her gum like I was the one who ran up on her. I checked the “Yes” box.

  “Sooky-Sooky Chile,” she yelled, then scrunched the note into her bra, winked at me, and ran off.

  I was officially POS—Property Of Sade. We were scandalous news in the hallways. The buzz from me dating a grade up set the thermostat for all the girls. Once Sade liked me, all the girls did. She was a mind-fuck, though. Whenever I was close enough to talk to her one-on-one she’d act like she ain’t see me, then seductive-glare and eye-fuck me from afar, putting on a show for the halls. If it wasn’t for her pops I woulda cussed her out. Sade still writes me these long-ass notes every now and again like we were in love and had been through some shit. She slips them in my locker. I ignore them. Most of the time I don’t know what the hell she’s even talking about. She writes these corny-ass R&B lyrics in the margins of the page. Her and Big Maal’s crazy ass were like a match made in heaven. All ’cause I played up on the varsity basketball team and she was the captain of the step squad she decided to like me. We didn’t even speak to each other, but I was still off-limits in the halls. But anyw
ay, anything could be the spark that set a forest fire on the walk home, however big or small.

  Tunnetta was usually a little late coming out of school. Something about being smart also meant staying hella late after school. I’d walk home with my peoples, then stop off by Kelly Park to hoop and hustle. That’s what I’d do until she’d walk by. She’d never stop and say anything. Wouldn’t sugar me with one of them caramel glares or nothing. And that’s why I liked her. She played her position right for me. She’d stroll by the court and I’d see her. She would keep it moving. I’d eventually breeze off from the court and catch up. Me being seen with her was a no-no.

  One day after the basketball season was over Tunnetta got into a fight with her pop. He was drunk and beat the piss out of her, with a belt too, all because she got a B on one of her English papers. All during math class she was stressing it. I just put it out there and asked, “Ever met Mary Jane? Bet she’d make you feel better about it.”

  She wrote back, “I haven’t but maybe I should.” I didn’t think she was serious, though. But sure enough, that day after school we met up inside my grandfather’s toolshed.

  Now, I really ought not smoke so much of the weed I’m supposed to be selling, but as long as I keep killin’ on the ball court, my main man Smoke will break me off. He breaks bread with me, an ounce or two here and there to hustle and smoke, nothing major. He never sweats me ’bout no re-up money. I get it to him when I can and leave my extra around the house, where I know Ma will find it. Sometimes I put it in the mailbox and I know she thinks it’s either Pop or Reggie putting it there. Sometimes she trips for days off that shit. Hollerin’ and stomping her feet. Talking ’bout the Lord and His sweet mercy miracles. Ma would lose it if she knew drug money was sponsoring her dinner and church plate tithes.