She's Got Next

by Melissa King

  The players were friendly but direct at the Y, and if someone got mad at someone else or thought she fouled, or if she just didn’t like the way someone was playing, she would say it right then and there and get it over with. It wasn’t pissy like the Park District gym, but it was chaotic and nearly impossible to get a game organized, and that could be a pain when you wanted everyone to just shut up and play.

  Sometimes I would swear a little bit if I did something really bad on the court. I’d try not to, because there was a big-ass sign on the wall that said NO HATS, NO DUNKING, NO CURSING, and because, since I was playing with kids, I thought I should set a good example and everything.

  But sometimes it just came out. I said shit one time when I missed a lay-up, and a short, chubby teenager who was guarding me giggled for about ten minutes. Later, when we were down on the other end of the court, I really guarded her hard just to be silly, and we both laughed at me.

  This other girl, Tina, was the chubby girl’s best friend. Tina always wanted to play me one-on-one. She’d come running over as soon as she saw me, and if I missed a night, she’d want to know where I’d been.

  Thoughts of Tina had a way of staying with me. I’d been meaning to “get involved” for some time, entertaining some pretty feelgood daydreams about mentoring, imagining myself taking my charge to the library or throwing a Frisbee with her in the park. After years of my good influence, my mentoree would go to college, where she would major in English literature or journalism and send me witty and incisive letters from her dormitory.

  But when I thought about really getting involved, I couldn’t see myself getting past the point of being introduced to my mentoree. I always imagined sitting across the table from a kid more jaded than precocious and being instructed to, okay now, mentor, and the at-risk youth would just look at me like she knew I was about to say something lame. I was too worried that I wouldn’t think of something not lame to say, and my volunteer efforts never made it past the picking-up-pamphlets phase.

  Tina was a little tomboy hotdog, fourteen years old or so, tall for her age and skinny with her hair always styled into two afro puffs. She had a habit of shooting the ball from about three feet in from half-court, missing the entire basket as often as not, with all her teammates yelling at her and groaning every time she took one of her hopeless shots. But she didn’t care what anybody said. She just laughed this crazy hooting laugh she had and went on with what she was doing.

  She was a good player, though, when she wasn’t acting like a lunatic.

  Tina lived in the projects with her mom, her mom’s boyfriend, and three half-brothers and -sisters. “We all got different daddies,” she told me once.

  She knew the stereotypes, and knew she was one. She had a pretty good idea what people expected of her, and she generally met those expectations.

  Tina often worried aloud about her brothers and sisters, especially one sister who was overweight. “I don’t know whether she belongs on Jenny Jones or Jenny Craig!” Tina would shout, then fall out laughing with her hoots and howls.

  Tina would follow me out to my car after our games, talking fast so the conversation couldn’t end, and eventually, not wanting to blow her off, I’d sometimes give her a ride home, even though she lived so close she could have just as easily walked.

  Before or after our main game, Tina and I would take on two boys her age. Sometimes she’d play serious, and sometimes when she was in one of her three-point moods, I’d try to steal the ball from her when she was on my own team, just as a joke.

  One day, walking out of the building at the end of the night, she asked me if I’d show her how to drive. She told me she had her permit and it was legal for her to drive with an adult. Later, when I told someone about teaching Tina to drive, he told me she was probably lying about the permit. Maybe she was; I didn’t really think about it at the time. I’m not very smart about knowing when not to believe people sometimes.

  I drove us up North Avenue to the Bed Bath & Beyond parking lot, and I let her get behind the wheel of my Honda, which had a stick shift. She killed it three times trying to get it started, but then she got going, driving slowly around and around, with me regretting choosing a parking lot with actual parked cars in it. I was terrified, screaming, “Stop, stop, stop, Tina, stop!” and using my imaginary passenger’s side brake.

  Then I calmed down and told her she was doing great, that I definitely wasn’t yelling at her; I was just nervous, that’s all.

  After about twenty minutes, we stopped the lesson and got out to change seats.

  “Now that was some good drivin’ there,” she said.

  “Yep, it sure was. You’re a natural.”

  Another time, Tina asked me if I’d take her shopping for clothes at some stores north of the Y on Milwaukee. I knew that area, because it was near my apartment. The streets were crammed with wig shops, tiny rooms selling nothing but watches, and stores filled floor to ceiling with racks of pimp and fly girl clothes all wrapped in individual plastic bags.

  I had once bought a bright yellow fiberfill-stuffed jacket at one of three athletic apparel stores on Chicago Avenue, a block from my apartment. I bought the jacket because I’d been wearing my dress coat—a long black thing with faux fur collar and cuffs—to the gym, with my white high-top cross trainers sticking out the bottom. I knew I looked like an idiot, but the dress coat was the warmest thing I had.

  The store where I bought my jacket had an ironing board and seam ripper station, and as you checked out, someone asked if you wanted them to remove the knockoff logos that adorned 80 percent of your purchase’s surface area. I had them take mine off.

  I drove Tina up Milwaukee, but even though it was only a little after seven o’clock, every store up and down the street had its iron bars locked across the windows for the night. We tried to figure out where to go instead. There was nowhere to shop in the Y neighborhood, unless you liked expensive groceries or home improvement projects. The only clothing store over there that I knew about was a hiking place full of backpacks and eighty-dollar khaki shorts. And there was a Gap, too, but Tina wasn’t really a Gap girl. She suggested we go to the Kmart on Ashland, where, after browsing in the young men’s clothing section and finding nothing, she bought deodorant, a toy for one of her sisters, and a big poster with a poem on it titled “Follow Your Dreams.”

  I found myself talking to people about Tina sometimes. One friend told me I should be taking her to museums, not driving her around an empty parking lot. Another told me I better watch what I was doing, that I didn’t know this little city kid, who was more than likely a lot savvier than I was. And he said I better never give her anything, either. That’s what they told him in his mentoring program, never to give them anything.

  One night at the Y Tina picked up her dribble to tell us she was afraid she was pregnant. She blurted it out, and no one really knew how to react to her. We just kept playing, Tina too, but she would get really mad and throw the ball against the wall or just give up and stay on her team’s end of the court while everyone else got back on defense and yelled at her.

  Tina followed me out to the car that night and told me again about being afraid she was pregnant, and I said, “Tina, what in the world are you talking about?”

  That’s when she told me this story.

  “Well,” Tina said, “last week, my stepdaddy and I got into it. We got into it real bad, and he was whippin’ me like crazy, and I just couldn’t take it no more. So I left the house and started walkin’.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “I was just walkin’ around, and it was gettin’ later, and this older guy that I know from the neighborhood came up and started talkin’ to me, and I didn’t have nothin’ to do, so I was talkin’ to him in his car, and then he told me he’d give me a ride to this restaurant and we’d get somethin’ to eat.”

  Tina paused, squinting off into the distance.

  “Well, we didn’t go to no restaurant. He took me down an alley, and I wonder
ed what he was doing that for, but I didn’t say nothin’, and then . . . well, you know what he did was, he raped me, and that’s why I’m afraid I might be pregnant.”

  “Oh my God, Tina,” I guess I might have said. “Did you tell your mom? Did you tell your social worker?” (She’d mentioned the social worker several times, offhandedly, like the different daddies.)

  “Yeah, I told my mom, and she took me to the doctor. But you know what? That man, that man in the car, he’s got two kids, and he’s married. That’s what I couldn’t believe.”

  Tina’s mom had taken her to the emergency room after she’d made it home that night. She’d been tested for HIV and everything else, and the results were to come in the following week. I’m not sure why she didn’t have the pregnancy results immediately. Maybe she did. Maybe she didn’t believe or understand them. Maybe she could think of no better way to broach the subject than just shouting it out from midcourt.

  “We were in that waitin’ room for six hours,” Tina said, “and then we went to see the doctor. And you know what she did? She took her hand . . . her human hand . . .”

  Tina didn’t finish her sentence. She just hooted, despite it all. We talked by my car for a long while.

  “Tell me about that woman takin’ your purse,” she said.

  “About when I was mugged? I told you about that three times already.”

  “I know, tell me again.”

  I paused, making it seem like Tina was having to drag it out of me.

  “Hmmm. Okay. Well, I was coming out of the Jewel one night.”

  “Which Jewel?”

  “The one on Chicago and Western. I was comin’ out of the Jewel, and—”

  “Ain’t that an Osco over there?”

  “Yeah, maybe. Anyway, I was coming out, and it was Saturday night, and I was carrying my wallet in my hand, and two bags.”

  “What’d you buy?”

  “Some sodas and chips I think. Anyway, I was comin’ out, and I sort of tossed my things and my wallet in the backseat of the car, and then this woman, who was about five feet two inches tall, came over and started asking me what time it was and did I have bus fare she could borrow and stuff like that.”

  “Was she black?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How big was she?”

  “About five-foot-two, smaller than you. Anyway, she walked up closer to me and started acting all sheepish and everything—”

  “Sheepish?”

  “Yeah, you know, all goofy and embarrassed. Not too sharp. She was acting all sheepish, and I wasn’t afraid of her or anything, but then she kept—”

  “Was you gonna give her some money for the bus?”

  “Yeah, I was gonna give her money for the bus. That’s what I was doing, was gettin’ some change out of my car, and then she kept getting closer and closer to me, like this.”

  I got right on top of Tina practically, just for effect.

  “So then what!” Tina was dying to know.

  “Well, I sort of tried to push her away, and then all of a sudden she wasn’t sheepish at all anymore, she was mean, and she said, ‘Get yo’ fuckin’ hands off me!’ and then I knew I was in trouble.”

  “She said that?”

  “Yeah, she told me I better get my hands off her. Then she sort of ducked into the backseat and grabbed my wallet, and I was like what the hell, she just took my wallet. And I was trying to give her some damn money anyway.”

  Tina shook her head back and forth as she looked off into that same distance.

  “So then what I did was, I backed her up against the car, like this, so she couldn’t run off.”

  I got right up on top of Tina again, like I was in her face, and sort of bumped her a little bit.

  “So then what!”

  “So then I said to this mugger crack whore freak, I said, ‘Give it back!’”

  “‘Give it back’?”

  “Yeah, I said, ‘Give it back!’ and then I said, ‘Don’t take it!’”

  “‘Don’t take it’? That’s what you said? ‘Give it back, don’t take it’?”

  Tina fell into a squat position at the thought, slapping the asphalt parking lot four times with both hands, then standing up and holding her stomach and stomping one foot, she was having such a howling laugh riot. I had to laugh about it, too. It was a pretty darned juvenile response. But it’s hard to think of what to say when you’re getting mugged, naturally. After it was over, I thought of all kinds of good stuff.

  “Give it back!?”

  “Don’t take it!?”

  Tina kept repeating my brilliant responses, standing upright and catching her breath, then falling down and slapping the asphalt some more.

  “Yep, that’s what I said. Don’t you bet she was scared of me? But I wouldn’t get out of the way, ’cause like I said, I wasn’t really too afraid of her little short ass. But then she said to me, she said, ‘I’ve got a gun, bitch!’”

  Tina stopped laughing.

  “A gun? So then what’d you do?”

  “What do you think I did? I got out of the way.”

  “Then what happened? Did she take off runnin’?”

  “Yeah, she was bookin’ it west up Chicago Avenue.”

  “Was she really a crackhead?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Or just plain crazy.”

  “How much money did she get?”

  “About eighteen dollars.”

  “Did you call the cops?”

  Finally, when it was getting dark and Tina couldn’t think of any more questions, she trotted on home.

  When I saw her a week later, she gave me the okay sign, letting me know she wasn’t pregnant or diseased. It was later on that night that I saw her rolling around on the side of the court with her chubby, giggly friend. From the talk among the spectators, I gathered that Tina had started the fight, but the other girl ended up on top, and Tina’s clothes were starting to come off in the ruckus. Everyone started laughing at her because she was wearing boys’ underwear.

  The next week, Tina announced she was a lesbian and a poet.

  “I’m gay,” Tina said, oozing an unstated whaddya think of that?

  “I think you should be whatever you want to be, Tina.”

  “Ohhhh, I like that one, she’s my type,” she said, with lust on her face, looking at a woman walking along the side of the gym. “I like those breasts.”

  Everyone just kept shooting around.

  Tina quit coming to the Y not long after that. Then somebody else quit coming, and another person, until the games started getting unreliable and the Y got to be just like anywhere else. I never saw Tina again.

  Looking back on it now, I’m pretty sure I underestimated Tina. Her capacity to lie was one thing, but since the New City Y days, I’ve learned to be a little less concerned with being taken advantage of, especially by a kid. I don’t particularly enjoy looking like an ass, and I’ll avoid it if I can, but it’s not going to kill you. What bugs me now is, I should’ve taken her to the museum. Probably, we’d have wandered the rooms of the Art Institute, awkward and uninspired in an alien setting, playing roles we weren’t accustomed to, relieved as hell when it was over, but that’s just probably. I should’ve taken her, on the outside chance it could’ve changed everything.

  I kept going to the Y on Tuesdays and Thursdays for a while, hoping everyone would come back. One night I was shooting baskets and looking around, and this guy walked over and asked me, “Where’d everybody go?” We shot around, and pretty soon we started playing together.

  His name was Randy, and he was a natural coach. He told me once to shoot free throws when I was tired, so I’d be able to make them in the clutch. He was right—the hoop can seem like it’s a million miles away when your chest is heaving—but I didn’t play in games where free throws were shot.

  Randy knew lots of people at the Y, and he started challenging guys to play two-on-two against him and me. We usually won, and he was cocky about it, telling everyone we’d
take on any two people in the gym and beat them. Somehow, we just played well together. He stood out by the key while I did most of the running, and that was okay, because I’m a worker bee type of player anyway, and it was a great workout. Nothing is more tiring than two-on-two when you really want to win, because you can never stop moving. I liked playing with Randy, and I found myself starting to look for him when I got to the gym.

  Randy wore a wedding ring, and I thought I was just this oddball older white woman he played two-on-two with until one night when something bad happened. We were resting on the sidelines after winning a few games, and he looked at me with this smarmy look on his face and said, “Why don’t you wear your hair down for me next time?”

  I blew him off with an awkward, entirely unsophisticated snort. I can get like that when I’m surprised and embarrassed. My sheer self-consciousness would be enough to turn King Kong off Fay Wray, but if a guy is looking to involve you in some bullshit, social ineptitude only fans the flames. I stood there stammering around like I was twelve, and then Randy just lost his damn mind and started asking me out more directly, wedding ring and all.

  Another asshole. At the time, I was having a rash of them trying to commit adultery with me. I was young enough to attract men, and old enough for them to assume I was experienced and possibly desperate.

  I recovered enough to blurt, “Aren’t you married?”

  He looked at me like that was the most irrelevant thing he’d ever heard. Then he said, “Yeah,” like it was a question, shrugging his shoulders.

  “How long?” I asked.

  “Three months,” he told me.

  I started asking him a bunch of questions along the lines of “What the hell is wrong with you?” and then I paused, catching my breath and wanting to hear what he had to say for himself. It was stupid of me to let him see I was hoping I’d made some kind of impression on him, because it just gave him another in.

  “Would you go out with me if I weren’t married?” He just had to know, as if he hadn’t heard a word I’d said.