“Well then tell the girl,” says Fran.
“What?”
“Tell her you tired of her and let her get on past you.”
DeAndre shakes his head.
“Can’t do without the sex,” says DeAndre, boastful.
Fran looks hard at him.
“What?” asks DeAndre, giggling.
“That’s cold as shit,” says Fran. “That girl thinks you for her and you just thinking about sex.”
DeAndre shrugs it off, complaining that he isn’t the only one cheating, that he’d heard that Tyreeka had gone off with Tae and other boys when he was locked up.
“Everyone think Reeka so innocent,” he mutters.
There’s a part of him that believes this argument and another part of him that doesn’t. Tae was a creeper to be sure, and he had thrown everything he had at Tyreeka after DeAndre had so casually granted him permission. The girl swears up and down that she and Tae were just friends, that they just liked to hang together; for his part, Tae isn’t saying. DeAndre has no proof, but he doesn’t like the way they look and act together. His suspicion is circular: Not trusting himself, he won’t trust Tyreeka either, which makes him inclined to further justify his own meandering affections. But the truth is that DeAndre’s infidelities have little to do with Tyreeka or anyone else; it is simply a matter of hormones, a kid-in-the-candy-store mentality that is in every way about adolescence.
DeAndre will be sixteen come summer and if he has his way, no single girl will be allowed to lay claim to that. He aims to spend the hot months with Tyreeka on one arm and as many other girls as he can find on the other, figuring that Tyreeka, in her devotion, won’t notice or, at worst, will notice but somehow let it slide.
But Tyreeka isn’t making it quite so easy. By April, with DeAndre free of his home-monitor and the court-imposed exile on Etting Street, she has already heard the rumblings about Tracey from her girlfriends. DeAndre soon realizes that the grapevine between Tyreeka, Dena, and Treecee, R.C.’ s girl—along with a half-dozen others between Fayette and McHenry streets—is sure enough keeping Bell Atlantic in business.
And Tyreeka isn’t one to sit at home and pout either; she’ll stroll down Baltimore Street unannounced, looking for the C.M.B. crew, talking about how she’s just out for this reason or that when in truth she’s trying to find and confront her man.
So the summer will be complicated; DeAndre could see that much already. He buries whatever guilt he feels about his wanderng attentions beneath an avalanche of small criticisms: Tyreeka wasn’t looking her best for him anymore. She didn’t do her hair, she didn’t dress right. Yesterday she was out on Fayette Street walking around with her heels pushing down the backs of her shoes, looking like some old housewife on laundry day. And she talks about stupid shit, young-ass stuff that DeAndre can’t have anything to do with. Most of all, by the end of April, DeAndre can see that Tyreeka is putting on weight, and not just a few pounds either. DeAndre finally has to ask the girl what’s up, but Tyreeka just shrugs it off.
“You pregnant?” DeAndre asks her.
“No,” she tells him.
“Cause if you is, I know it ain’t mine.”
He tells her that to see if she’ll argue, to try to get her to admit she’d been with Tae or Dewayne or one of the others. But Tyreeka just glares at him, then tells him flat out that she isn’t pregnant, but that if she was, there couldn’t be but one father.
One early May morning, they are lying in Fran’s room, DeAndre with one hand on her stomach, feeling the roundness.
“Reeka, you sure you ain’t pregnant?”
“I just need to diet is all.”
He doesn’t ask about her period, about how many months late she is or whether she feels any sickness or any other sign. For all his worldly experience, DeAndre’s sexual education is lacking when it comes to the female side of the equation. He knows of no connection between menstruation and pregnancy, nor is he particularly knowledgeable about the finer points of female sexual response. He knows what he likes and to some extent, he knows how to get what he likes; if God is in the details, then DeAndre’s view of the sexual world is decidedly agnostic. Tyreeka ends the brief discussion by simply saying that her aunt is going to get her a clinic appointment. DeAndre takes her at her word and feels free to pursue whatever new business he can find.
At bottom, there is no great fear in either child’s heart of an unwanted pregnancy, for the basic reason that a baby is in no way unwanted. Fran had given her son condoms on several occasions and had routinely left extras on the bedroom dresser. But DeAndre doesn’t like sex in a raincoat, nor does he particularly believe in any of the consequences. Half the neighborhood had the Bug, yet DeAndre can’t help but associate the disease with the needle since virtually all of the people falling out and dying were long-time shooters. As for baby-making—that would be almost welcomed as the final proof of manhood. A fatalistic streak in DeAndre and the rest of his crew holds that they’ll soon enough be dead or in prison. Against that notion, the production of a child, a male child in particular, would guarantee some tangible evidence of a brief existence.
So DeAndre left the condoms on the dresser, and Tyreeka, too, does nothing to avoid parenthood. The idea of having her own baby, of caring for a being that would love and depend on her without equivocation, is appealing enough. That she is still thirteen, that she has nothing but a child’s love to provide any new life—these things are put aside by the self-meaning that procreation surely promises. Tyreeka, too, is looking for some kind of validation.
And DeAndre knows Tyreeka thinks this way. He can sense how needy she is, how she wants to believe that if she gets pregnant, he’ll stay with her—that the child will bring them closer together and keep his eyes off the other girls. If that’s what she believes, so be it; he’ll deal with those expectations down the road. But for now, he’s determined to have his fun with Tyreeka and other girls as well.
All through April, Tyreeka gets the bad news about DeAndre from her girlfriends, and all that month, she responds by seeking the boy out and time and again venting her anger and hostility, going out of her way to demonstrate just how betrayed she feels. But to DeAndre, this is only confirmation that the girl is taken with him, that she’ll be there whenever he gets done messing with the rest.
Tyreeka knows that holding on to DeAndre will be difficult. If she’s honest with herself, she’ll have to regard as unlikely the possibility of a long-term relationship with any man; her world experience doesn’t include more than one or two situations in which a child is being raised by two parents. But she loves DeAndre the way any girl loves a boy for the first time, and as it is with such things, her feelings could provoke the most absurd kind of optimism. A baby will straighten him out, she tells herself, maybe make him find a job and bring home some straight-world money. They could get an apartment and live together; DeAndre going to work and Reeka staying in school. Not right away maybe, but soon enough.
These are inner thoughts, of course. Outwardly, Tyreeka continues to deny the possibility of pregnancy to everyone who asks. As for the clinic appointment, Tyreeka changes the date regularly, advancing it from one week to the next, explaining that her aunt can’t take off from work, or that the clinic is closed, or that she needed to be in school on the day of the appointment.
“When Reeka goin’ to the clinic?” Fran asks at one point.
“Ma,” says DeAndre. “I don’t know what that girl has in her mind. She half-crazy and shit.”
Meanwhile, DeAndre is now haunting the lower strip along Pratt and McHenry Streets almost every night as the weather warms. He’s chasing after Treecee’s cousin, as well as another girl he met at a house party over on Pulaski Street. And then, when he finds the time, he’s back up on Fayette with Tyreeka.
She hears about some of it from Treecee and the other neighborhood girls, but DeAndre only gets mad and denies everything when confronted.
For a time, she tries to strike back by fl
irting with the other boys in DeAndre’s crew. It’s Tae, mostly, though she also lets Dewayne know he can holler at her. On one occasion, when Ella’s basketball team takes a trip across town to a tournament at the Flag House projects, Tyreeka engineers it so that she rides not with DeAndre in Ella’s Oldsmobile, but on Dewayne’s lap in the backseat of Marzell Myers’ car. By the time they reach the east side, she has her head nestled on his shoulder and her arms around his neck.
She likes both Dewayne and Tae, but more than that, she wants a little of her goings-on to get back to DeAndre, to let him think on the fact that you reap what you sow. But even this doesn’t work the way it should. Soon after her flirtation in the car with Dewayne, DeAndre tells the rest of the Crenshaw Mafia Brothers that regardless of how many other girls he chases, Tyreeka is once and forever his property, that she is proscribed to them under pain of a full-blooded beat-down. Tae shrugs indifferently and moves on to other neighborhood girls, mostly because he’d rather preserve the friendship with DeAndre. And Dewayne, though obviously interested, is frightened away, much to Tyreeka’s contempt.
“I don’t know what it is,” she tells Treecee glumly after her flirtations come to little. “Them boys is afraid of Andre. None of ’em got too much heart.”
But facts are facts. Only Dinky—DeAndre’s cousin and closest companion—hits as hard or fights as savagely as DeAndre. And though by summer, Dinky will go so far as to walk Tyreeka home a couple nights, he’ll eventually talk himself out of things, telling her it wouldn’t be right messing with his cousin’s girlfriend.
Last summer was the best of her life. Last summer all the boys wanted her, fought for her. All she wants now is to get back to those first weeks when DeAndre was all about her, when he would take her places and talk to her and say things to make her feel special. Now, even when they are together, he time and again proves himself incapable of full-grown love. All he offers her is his basic presence, his casual lust, and odd moments of random cruelty.
Once, before the juvenile master ended DeAndre’s home detention, Tyreeka found herself with DeAndre and R.C. riding in a hack up to Etting Street. DeAndre wanted her to spend the night, then go home the next morning before school. And Tyreeka was willing enough until the hack crossed the expressway on Gilmor Street and stopped at Mulberry, where R.C. spotted an older girl trussed tightly in a halter and shorts, grinding her well-contoured self down the sidewalk.
“AW, THERE IT IS,” shouted R.C., leaning out the front passenger window. “GOT-DAMN, GIRL!”
And DeAndre didn’t hesitate before taking up the braying.
“Yo, girl, where you goin’ at? Hey … where you headin’ with all dat. I know you know I need a number from you.”
“Gracious,” growled R.C. as the hack rolled on.
“She made me say, ‘Oooooouuccchhh,’” moaned DeAndre.
“Fuck you both,” said Tyreeka bitterly, her eyes tearing as she pulled herself to the far edge of the rear seat. “You all common as shit.”
DeAndre laughed.
“You make me sick,” she wailed, punching him hard in the shoulder.
“I can’t help it if the girl looked phat.”
“You don’t have to say something.”
“You don’t have to hear it.”
“Fuck you, Andre.”
When they got to Etting Street, DeAndre slid from the rear seat, waiting with the open door in hand for just half a moment.
“You comin’?” he mumbled.
“Fuck you, DeAndre,” rasped Tyreeka, arms crossed and eyes streaked.
“Suit yourself,” he said, shutting the car door.
She knows she can no longer press him for money or clothes or movies, the way she did when they first started going together. She knows that DeAndre is off the corner now; she wants him to see she won’t be greedy like the other girls, that she can stay loyal to him even after the money runs out. She makes no demands whatsoever, save for Andre’s attentions.
But DeAndre’s eye continues to wander.
“I asked Andre why he don’t just break up with you,” Dena tells her at one point, after DeAndre takes up with a McHenry Street girl named Shanelle. “He just say you young and he don’t want to hurt your feelings.”
“My feelings been hurt,” Tyreeka says. “DeAndre don’t care about no one’s feelings but his own.”
At least she doesn’t hear his boasting oratory, when he declares her nothing more than a handy sex object. Nor does she pick up news about the girls unknown to Dena and Treecee, or about the C.M.B. boys now and then pooling a few dollars for one of the crack-saturated whores down on Addison Street. Five dollar blow jobs or free for a vial, though any man with more than a passing knowledge of the viral universe wouldn’t dare venture to Addison Street equipped with the penis of his worst enemy.
“You can’t get AIDS from a blow job,” DeAndre assures his mates after one such sortie. “And even if you can, ain’t nobody likes sucking on rubber.”
“How would you know, bitch?”
“Fuck you, R.C.”
The worst manages to elude Tyreeka. But by May, she knows enough. If she doesn’t know every detail and can’t prove every allegation, she knows that at thirteen years of age, she is as alone as she ever was. And, she knows, she is pregnant.
For two months now, she has been lying to DeAndre. In March, she missed her period. In April, again. And the clinic appointment—the one that she kept putting off in all her conversations with DeAndre—that had come and gone. The doctors had told her and her aunt everything that Tyreeka already knew.
But save for her aunt, she trusts no one with the truth. Certainly not DeAndre, who has proven so unworthy of trust. She worries that he’ll force her to go to University for an abortion, or that he might tell others who would force her to go. She worries, too, about what her father might say when he finds out. She even worries about Miss Fran, thinking that DeAndre’s mother might try to take the child away. And above all, Tyreeka wants this baby.
Once, in late May, she comes close to telling DeAndre.
“I might be pregnant,” she admits as they watch television in the back of the Dew Drop one night.
“Huh,” says Andre.
“I don’t think I am though.”
And DeAndre simply takes her word for it, telling his mother that Tyreeka is probably just talking about the possibility to keep him obligated. Then, for appearance’s sake, he declares that if it is true, he’ll buy into a package and go out on a corner and raise the money necessary for an abortion, that he has no intention of being tied down by Tyreeka or any other girl.
Fran can’t stand his attitude. True, she’d made no pretense of trying to keep DeAndre from doing the dirty, and in practice, there aren’t many mothers living amid the easy temptations of Fayette Street who have figured out how to prevent such a thing. But Fran did at least raise her son to show more caring than he is managing for Tyreeka Freamon. Hearing her son talking like a dog, she first tries to work on DeAndre’s conscience, urging him to either commit himself to Tyreeka or let her go. When that proves futile, she goes out of her way to befriend Tyreeka, to play a maternal role with this child who is alone and raising herself.
Tyreeka responds immediately, confiding her love and fealty to DeAndre, complaining that her loyalty is being repaid with growing distance and a spate of hurtful insults. Fran listens sympathetically, then tells the girl that chasing DeAndre will only make him more bold.
“You not gonna keep him with a baby,” Fran warns.
“I know,” says Tyreeka, tearful, but Fran can see that she doesn’t know, that she believes it’s in her power to bend a fifteen-year-old corner boy to the role of husband and father.
“I’m sayin’ Andre is gonna do what he gonna do.”
“I know.”
“Reeka,” Fran asks finally. “Is you pregnant?”
Tyreeka shakes her head, still trying to front, still worried that someone will get between her and her child. “Don’t
think so,” she says finally.
“When you last have your period?”
“Um, last month … no, February.”
Fran shakes her head sadly but holds her tongue, asking only whether the girl is going to go to the clinic.
“My aunt gonna take me,” Tyreeka lies. “I got a clinic appointment next Wednesday.”
“Well,” says Fran quietly. “You gonna know then.”
It isn’t about the welfare check. It never was.
It isn’t about sexual permissiveness, or personal morality, or failures in parenting, or lack of family planning. All of these are inherent in the disaster, but the purposefulness with which babies make babies in places like West Baltimore goes far beyond accident and chance, circumstance and misunderstanding. It’s about more than the sexual drives of adolescents, too, though that might be hard to believe in a country where sex alone is enough of an argument to make anyone do just about anything.
In Baltimore, a city with one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the nation, the epidemic is, at its root, about human expectation, or more precisely, the absence of expectation. On Fayette Street, the babies are born simply because they can be born, because life in this place cannot and will not be lived in the future tense. Given that fact, there is no reason to wait. The babies speak to these child-mothers and child-fathers, justify them, touch their hearts in a way that nothing else in their lives ever will. The government, the schools, the social workers, the public-service announcements wedged in between every black-family-in-the-burbs sitcom—all wail out the same righteous warning: Wait, don’t make the mistake, don ‘t squander every opportunity in life by having a child too young. But the children of Fayette Street look around them and wonder where an opportunity might actually be found. The platitude is precisely that, and no one is fooled.
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