by Aya De León
* * *
That night, Tyesha dreamed she was back at a basketball game at her high school, holding hands with Thug Woofer. At least, at the beginning of the dream, it was Woof. Later, she looked up from the game and found herself holding hands with Kyle, the first boy she’d ever kissed.
Tyesha woke up disoriented, feeling a slight trace of the excitement and anxiety that marked her last year of middle school.
At age fourteen, Tyesha had never had a boy’s tongue in her mouth before. It was like eating caramel, but you didn’t chew or swallow, and it was a different kind of sweet. Kyle. She couldn’t remember his last name—or if she’d ever known it—but she recalled his hands, his tongue. Warm. All of him was warm, and a hard spot pressed against her panties through his jeans and his underwear and her jeans and her underwear. She could feel the outline of him, and it made her a little nervous but also curious and excited.
Her aunt Lucille worked at her middle school, so she had a chaperone who drove her to and from school, and the boys didn’t want to get on the wrong side of Ms. Couvillier. Also, Tyesha knew there were dangers. She had seen her friend Shanique get in big trouble earlier that year, but that was with an older guy. Kyle was different. He was a high school sophomore, so he was only two grades older. He lived in her building, and flirted with her in the hallway. He passed notes to her with cheesy lines.
That day, her mama was still at work, and Aunt Lu had been called to handle a crisis at school. The moment her aunt walked out of the building, there was a knock on the apartment door. Kyle.
“Tyesha,” he said. “Jewel of South Shore. Has God smiled on me to give me a moment alone with you?” Fifteen minutes of sweet talk and handholding. Another quarter hour of kissing. He began to run his hands over her breasts, sliding down the fabric of her T-shirt. Then under the shirt, then unhooking her bra, then sliding off her jeans, but promising to keep her panties on. Then an insistent stroking of the soft cotton against her crotch. He had just begun to slide them down. Tyesha had her eyes closed, rolled back in her head with the ecstasy of it, when the apartment door opened.
She opened her eyes to see his underwear and jeans down around his ankles, his erect penis standing at attention for a moment, before her aunt strode in, and he pulled one of her mother’s embroidered couch pillows over himself. Tyesha blinked, wide-eyed, first at the size of his penis, then at the unexpected “Jesus Is Lord” message that quickly supplanted it.
“Don’t be shy now, Kyle,” Lucille Couvillier said plainly. “You ain’t got nothing I ain’t seen before. Tyesha, pull yourself together. We have an errand to run.”
As the blood began to rush to her face, Kyle pulled his pants up and left without a good-bye. Tyesha was too dark for her aunt to really see her blush, but she wasn’t looking at her niece. She was halfway to the door, hitching her purse up onto her shoulder and pulling out her car keys.
Shamefaced, Tyesha followed her aunt down the three flights of stairs. When they walked out of the building, she saw Jenisse. Her sister was sitting on a broken bench with her best friend from high school. Amaru was still in Jenisse’s belly. Aunt Lucille walked over and scooped a four-year-old Deza up into a hug, and the girl wriggled out of her arms and went back to playing tag with the best friend’s son. The two kids chased each other back and forth on the treeless concrete around the bench.
“So was it true, Aunt Lu?” Jenisse asked. “Did Tyesha have some company over to the apartment?” She sucked her teeth. “Folks wanna act like I’m the only Couvillier who’s fast.”
“Jenisse,” Aunt Lucille said. “I’m glad you called me. But it leaves a bad taste in my mouth that you seem more interested in getting your sister in trouble with me than keeping her out of trouble with that boy.”
Jenisse didn’t have a retort for that. Tyesha kept her head down and let Aunt Lu take her by the arm and lead her to the car. Several young people greeted them on the way down the block.
Lucille Couvillier drove a Pontiac. It was from the 1980s, and was so dirty that someone had written “niggas betta wash me” in the film of dirt. With a swipe of her hand, Aunt Lucille had wiped off the “niggas betta” and left the rest. Once inside, she leaned over and unlocked Tyesha’s door.
Once she had pulled away from the curb, Aunt Lucille said without preamble. “I’m taking you to Planned Parenthood.”
“I’m sorry, Aunt Lu,” Tyesha began.
“Nothing to be sorry for,” came her aunt’s unexpected reply. “Boys have sweet talk. Warm hands. Tasty kisses. You think I haven’t seen Kyle passing you little notes?”
Tyesha was mortified. She thought she had been so discreet.
“What kind of birth control were you planning on using?” her aunt asked.
Tyesha shook her head. “I didn’t—I wasn’t expecting—”
“Are you already sexually active, or was this going to be the first time?” Aunt Lucille asked.
With that, Tyesha burst out crying. Maybe it was going to be, or would have been. In the moment, it had felt so good, exciting, a delicious secret. But was he gonna stick it in her? He seemed so ready, and he hadn’t said a word about it. She sobbed, filled with a jumble of feelings: disappointment in Kyle, shame, and the queasy, half-terrified, half-grateful feeling that she’d avoided something awful.
By the time they parked near Planned Parenthood, the tears had subsided, and her aunt handed her a tissue.
“I know you think me and your mama are the same,” Aunt Lucille said. “Both of us watching you like a hawk, making sure these knucklehead boys don’t get you alone. But the difference between us is that your mama wants you to save it for marriage, and I want you to take charge of this part of your life.”
“By getting birth control?” Tyesha asked, glancing up at the clinic building.
“By doing all kinds of things,” Aunt Lucille said. “Birth control. Condoms. Masturbation.”
“Aunt Lu!” Tyesha was scandalized.
“I told you, I’m not your mama,” she said. “Even though I’m the one who took her to get birth control, back in the eighties.”
“My mama?” Tyesha asked. She had only ever known the devout Christian version of her mother. All traces of the fast teen and young woman she’d been had washed away with the blood of Jesus.
Aunt Lucille put a gentle hand on Tyesha’s face. “It’s not a moral issue, baby. It’s about you having a good life. I don’t want you going along with these boys for the ride. I want you to know where you’re going. What do you want from these boys? What do you want to give them? What do you want to keep for yourself?”
“I don’t know,” Tyesha said.
“Well, until you’re sure, I think you should get the birth control shot,” Aunt Lucille said. “I know your mama wouldn’t approve, but I think the one thing we can agree on is that we don’t want you to end up like your sister, Jenisse.”
Tyesha did get the shot that day. But it was over a year later before she had sex for the first time. She was in tenth grade. And she never so much as spoke to Kyle again.
Chapter 8
The next day, Tyesha and Lily were sitting with Eva in Tyesha’s office.
“This is great,” Tyesha was saying to Lily. “You got almost all the girls to sign the union cards.”
“Definitely,” Eva said. “You only need over fifty percent, but you have more like eighty percent of our original list.”
“But the club pulled a fast one,” Lily said. “They hired twenty new part-time girls who only work once a month. They told them verbally that they would only be hired if they agreed not to join the union.”
“That’s totally illegal,” Eva said.
“Tell me about it,” Tyesha said. “That’s why the girls representing the clubs in the boroughs are on the way over here now. They’re bringing one of the new girls who’s willing to talk on the record.”
“Everything’s set up for a legal deposition to get her testimony today,” Eva said.
As Serena,
the clinic office manager, walked in with a video camera, Lily got a text.
“Bad news,” Lily said. “The girls are on their way from the subway, but they said some guys in a car started following them.”
“Oh, hell, no,” Tyesha said, and pulled out her own phone to call clinic security.
“Meet me at the front door,” she said into the phone.
“They just turned onto Avenue D,” Lily called out.
Tyesha and Lily met two security guards in the lobby, one female, one male.
“We’ll go meet them and escort them in,” Tyesha said.
The four of them stepped out of the clinic and headed south. The summer storms had finally cleared, and it was a bright, muggy day.
When they turned the corner onto Avenue D, the street was crowded. But once a pair of women with a toddler got into a cab, they could see a trio of fashionable young women headed their way. Tyesha recognized Giselle, the brown-skinned Latina, and then Tara, the white girl with the tattoos, as the two other union organizers who worked with Lily. Between them was a younger, shorter girl, arms crossed anxiously across her chest as she walked.
Sure enough, a dark sedan moved slowly along behind them, holding up traffic. Several other motorists beeped at the sedan and went around.
“I don’t like this,” Tyesha said. “Call them and give me your phone, Lily.”
Lily handed Tyesha the phone.
“Giselle, it’s Tyesha. Do you see us walking toward you?”
“Yeah,” Giselle said. “You brought cops?”
“Just security guards,” Tyesha said. “They work for the clinic.”
A pair of young men jogged toward them. Tyesha overheard them talking as they sped past: “I know those girls looked good, but how you gonna block traffic just to ogle some ass?”
Tyesha kept her eye on the girls and the sedan. She spoke into the phone again: “When the light turns red, I want you all to start running toward us, okay? Tell your girls.”
In the distance, they could see her turn to the other women. Several motorists honked and drove around the slow-moving sedan.
“Tell us when,” Giselle said.
Tyesha looked up. The light turned yellow, and a dry-cleaning delivery car plus two cabs cut into the intersection as the light was turning red.
“Now!” Tyesha yelled.
The girls took off toward them. It was a glorious moment, the trio of them in bright summer clothes, with hair flying and brown skin glistening in the city sunshine.
Then, a moment later, a man leaned out of the passenger window of the sedan.
Tyesha’s first thought was that he was too late. Nothing he could say would turn those girls around. They wouldn’t even hear him.
But then he slid his arm out of the window, and Tyesha saw the handgun.
The first shot cracked loud through the air.
“Ohhhhhh, fuuuuuuuck!” Tyesha yelled and ducked down behind a garbage can.
Lily flattened herself against a building. The security guards ducked, too.
As the thug emptied his gun, Tyesha heard screams from the girls and some of the bystanders.
Before the light could change, the sedan did a three-point turn out into traffic in the opposite direction, nearly sideswiping a pizza delivery car.
A moment later, the three girls clattered up on high heels, cursing and terrified.
“Oh my fucking god!”
“Is everybody okay?” Tyesha asked.
“Do I call the police or no?” the woman security guard asked, her cell phone out.
The young Latina shook her head.
“No cops,” Tyesha said. “But I’m sure somebody else called. Come on. Let’s get back to the clinic before they show up.”
They ran the block and a half to the clinic, and Tyesha hustled them in through the back.
“Somebody trying to kill us now?” the young Latina asked.
Tyesha shook her head. “They just want to scare you. If he had really wanted to hit you at that range, I’m sure he could have.”
“If he wanted to scare us, he did,” Tara said.
“Not me,” said Giselle. “He just pissed me off.”
They trekked up the stairs to Tyesha’s office.
Eva opened the door for them.
“Is everything okay?”
“Some guy took a few shots to scare them,” Tyesha murmured to her. “Nobody’s hurt.”
“Thank god,” Eva said. “Well, I got the deposition set up. Who’s the new employee?”
The young Latina shook her head. “I don’t want to do it anymore. I wanna do the right thing, but not if it gets me shot.” She was short and thickset, a rhinestone piercing just below her lip.
“I understand,” Eva said, turning off her lawyer voice and putting on her shrink voice. “Something like this is terrifying. Do you want to tell me about it?”
“No,” the girl said. Her arms were still folded across her ample chest, but now her hands were clenching and unclenching as they gripped her upper arms. “I just want to get out of here.”
“Okay,” Eva said. “Why don’t you give yourself a couple days to recover. Then let’s see how you feel.”
The girl was adamant. “Nah. I’ma feel the same. I quit. I don’t want no part of it.”
“You can’t let them intimidate you,” Lily said.
“Espérate, nena,” Giselle began, but Tyesha put up a hand.
“You gotta do what’s right for you,” Tyesha said. “But can you do us one favor? Can you tell all the new girls what happened?”
“I’ll tell all the ones I know,” the girl said.
“Thank you,” Tyesha said. “And if you change your mind—about testifying or about wanting your job back—we’ll be here.”
The girl shook her head again. “One shift a month to have motherfuckers shooting at me? I don’t think so.”
* * *
Later that night, Tyesha was getting ready for bed when she got a call from her eldest niece.
“Deza, I haven’t heard back from Thug Woofer on your—”
But she broke off when she realized Deza was crying. “Auntie Ty, you need to come get us.”
“Your mama and Zeus fighting again?” Tyesha asked.
“Come now,” Deza said. “Please.”
“I’m on my way.”
Tyesha stepped into her yoga pants and grabbed her keys on the way out the door.
Twenty minutes later, Tyesha was stepping out of the elevator on the seventh floor of the Brooklyn Gardens Hotel, and she texted Deza as much. The nondescript hallway was beige with forgettable muted watercolors on the wall, but halfway down the hall stood a tall black man in a long gray coat. Zeus’s bodyguard, Reagan.
The Chinese food she’d had for dinner lurched in her stomach.
“Tyesha,” he drawled from his post. “Is that you? Girl, I used to think you was hot when you was jailbait, but I do believe you just heated up over the years. I heard you been running a hospital or something. A shame you ain’t come in your work clothes. I’d love to see that fine ass in a skirt.”
“Reagan,” she said. “You know you really do live up to your name. Both crack and AIDS flourishing on your watch. A liar and a fake but somehow you keep duping the good people—or Zeus in this case—into re-electing you.”
He gave a grunt of disapproval and grabbed her arm. “One of these days you gonna realize it pays to be nice to me.”
She went to shake him off, but he tightened his grip. She was just wondering if she would have to punch him, when the door swung open.
Deza burst into the hallway with an overnight bag.
From inside the hotel room, Tyesha could hear a vaguely familiar nineties rap song and raised voices. She heard the deep bass of Zeus’s voice in an incomprehensible rant, into which Jenisse interjected sharply, “Well, I don’t give a fuck—”
“Amaru, come on!” Deza shouted into the suite, adding another layer of noise.
“I can’t find
my gym bag,” Amaru said. Through the door, Tyesha could see her youngest niece looking around wildly, brows knit, nearly in tears. “I’ll be in trouble if I miss my workout tomorrow.”
“We can get you new stuff,” Tyesha offered.
Deza walked in and stood in the middle of the room. Then she picked up a pair of basketball sneakers from beside an armchair and led her sister out into the hallway.
Tyesha pulled both girls into her arms. “Let’s just get out of here, okay?”
Zeus’s baritone voice sounded from inside the suite, “No, bitch, just shut your ass up, okay?” His words gained in clarity and volume as he came closer to the door.
Tyesha pulled both girls to the other side of the hall and out of the way.
“That’s right, nigga,” Jenisse’s voice came, shrill and contemptuous. “Run off like you always do. Can’t stand up to your own woman, no wonder some pussy white boy mobsters kicking yo faggot ass. You betta get back in here!”
Zeus tore out of the hotel room with his fists clenched. “Either I’m leaving or I’ma kill yo ass. Right in front of yo kids. You put one hand on me and you made your choice.”
Tyesha pulled the girls tighter and marched them toward the elevator. She clenched her body against the sound of a scream or a shot.
Instead, she felt the whoosh and smooth feel of fabric against her arm as Zeus strode past, towering and regal in a black cashmere trench coat. Reagan was right on his heels, like a pale shadow.
Tyesha stopped and let the two men take the elevator car down.
Just before the door closed, an empty liquor bottle flew out of the suite and hit the hallway’s opposite wall.
“That nigga ain’t shit!” Jenisse slurred from inside the room. “Ain’t even dog shit.”
Tyesha couldn’t tell if she was crying or drunk or both.
Deza started pulling Tyesha toward the elevators.
“Is she gonna be okay?” Tyesha asked.
“I think so,” Amaru said. “As long as he’s gone.”
“I don’t give a fuck about her one way or the other,” Deza said.
As they waited for the elevator, Jenisse began a loping walk toward them. She had an empty brandy glass in her hand.