Choosing Sides

by Treasure Hernandez

  She hit him in the stomach and laughed.

  “You know I’m just playing with you,” he offered. Malek continued walking with Halleigh right by his side.

  “Okay, let’s make a bet,” she proposed. “If you score over 40 points in the championship, then I got you guaranteed, if not, you just gon’ have to wait a little bit longer.”

  Malek’s eyes lit up. He liked the game she was playing. “How much longer?”

  “Until graduation.”

  “That’s four months away!” he exclaimed.

  Just then, they stopped walking and stood in the doorway to Halleigh’s next class.

  “Then you better get off tonight if you don’t want to wait,” she said in a flirtatious and challenging tone. She smiled mischievously, hinting at their night of pleasure to come.

  As Malek leaned over and kissed her lightly on the lips, Halleigh’s teacher, Ms. Gulley, announced, “That’s enough, Mr. Johnson,” interrupting their intimate moment.

  Halleigh laughed and pushed Malek, feinding not having anything to do with the kiss.

  “Sorry, Ms. Gulley,” Malek said, throwing two fingers in the air and winking at Halleigh before he strolled up the hallway.

  “And pull up those pants!” Ms. Gulley bellowed. She smiled and shook her head. “Nobody wants to see your behind.”

  Speak for yourself. Halleigh smiled then turned and headed into the classroom.

  “Malek Johnson is having one of the best ball games of his life, ladies and gentlemen,” the ESPN sports commentator said as he watched the game in awe. “This is amazing. It is only the third quarter and he already has 32 points. Talent like this doesn’t come around too often. This is his last game before the NBA draft in a couple of months. I think he’s trying to show the pros what he’s working with.”

  Cameras were positioned everywhere. From local news stations to national coverage, every media outlet was there to witness Malek’s last game of his high school career. He was considered the nation’s top basketball recruit. The spectators jumped to their feet and roared with excitement every time he got the ball in his hands.

  Everyone thought that Malek was showing out because it was his last game, but Halleigh knew the real motivation behind his extreme performance that night. After every basket he scored, he pointed to her in the stands.

  “Girl, he’s pointing at you.” Nikki bumped Halleigh’s shoulder as she sat there in the stands right next to her.

  Halleigh cheered loudly throughout the game and admired her man as he brought the packed crowd to their feet time and time again. With every point he scored she thought, I’m really about to give it up now. He’s working hard for this. She almost felt honored that her high school would have her to thank if they won tonight’s game. A tremor of exhilaration mixed with fear frissoned up her back.

  By the last few seconds of the game, Malek had managed 47 points and 15 assists, and his team had a 10-point lead. During his final moments on the floor, he simply dribbled the ball, showing off his handling skills as the crowd began to chant his name in unison. Malek scanned the crowd until his eyes met Halleigh’s, and then he smiled at her as the final buzzer sounded off. The crowd went absolutely crazy as they rushed the floor.

  Halleigh eventually made her way down to the court, and Malek made a beeline over to her, bypassing all of the flocking reporters. Once he reached her, he picked her up and hugged her tightly, kissing her as he celebrated his team’s championship victory.

  “I love you,” she whispered in his ear.

  “I know,” he said. “And I can’t wait for you to show me just how much.” Then he quickly ran back onto the floor to hoop and holler with his team.

  Chapter Two

  After the game, Halleigh leaned on Malek’s beat-up Ford Tempo and waited patiently for him to exit the school.

  One dude yelled, “Hal, tell Malek I said good game!”

  “Yeah, he did his thang out there!” a girl added.

  Halleigh smiled. “Yeah, he gon’ be feeling thick tonight.” She had to admit that Malek did play a good game. She was proud of him for everything that he was accomplishing and felt blessed to know that he’d chosen her to share his future with.

  On the outside, Halleigh Walters looked like a regular, carefree teenager without a worry in the world, but on the inside, she had come up in a harsh environment. Growing up in a single-parent household, it had always been hard for her mother, Sharina, to take care and provide for her. Sharina had never had a real relationship with Halleigh’s father, who never played a role in his daughter’s life, so the sole support for Halleigh fell on her mother’s shoulders.

  In Halleigh’s early years, Sharina had worked as a line worker at the General Motors plants. Many people say that shop jobs aren’t meant for women because of the strenuous labor that comes with it, but Sharina did what she had to do to make ends meet. Making pretty decent money, she took care of Halleigh, and although her long work hours left Halleigh alone most of the time, they never needed for anything.

  Unfortunately, Sharina had become another casualty of economics and was one of thousands to lose her job, when the hiring of cheap, overseas labor took its toll and General Motors decided to downsize their plants. General Motors was the livelihood of Flint, so the loss of these jobs hit everybody hard. If you worked in the shop, you lived a middle-class lifestyle. But for Halleigh, it seemed to have hit her mother the hardest.

  Out of work, and depressed because she wasn’t having any luck finding another job, Halleigh’s mother fell victim to her circumstance, and ended up turning to drugs as her daughter sat by helplessly and watched. A strong drug habit quickly formed, and Sharina became addicted to heroin, which affected Halleigh’s entire outlook on life.

  Once unemployment and government assistance would no longer do the trick, instead of turning tricks herself, Sharina started boosting clothes, not to feed her daughter, but to feed her habit instead. But it was that same skill of boosting that Sharina had mastered that kept people from being able to tell just how bad Halleigh’s upbringing really was.

  Halleigh stayed fly in the latest fashions, because her mother’s closet looked like the local Macy’s. Sharina always made sure she boosted some nice pieces for both herself and her daughter. And just like a Mary Kay consultant, she had to be a representative of her product. In fact, Sharina was a walking advertisement for her craft. And for Halleigh, dressing nice was her way of hiding her predicament from the world.

  Nobody knew how tough she had it. Nobody but Malek anyway. Halleigh tried to hide it from him at first, never allowing him to come to her house, making up the excuse that her mother would flip the script if she knew her baby girl had a boyfriend. But after a while, and after Halleigh ran out of excuses, he finally got her to keep it real and to tell him what was really going on at her house that was so bad that she didn’t want him to be witness to it. The last thing Halleigh wanted her new man to know, her new man that lived in a house with both of his parents and dressed nice because both of his parents were employed, was that her mother was a drug addict whose occupation was stuffing pieces of clothing down a girdle.

  But even when Halleigh confessed to Malek one night on the phone when he wanted to stop by and just see her, and her refusal led to a huge argument, his feelings for her didn’t change. As a matter of fact, he was relieved. For some reason, he thought that Halleigh might have been ashamed of him, although he couldn’t imagine why, or even worse, that she had another nigga that she didn’t want to get busted with.

  Malek loved her unconditionally and didn’t look down on her because of how she had come up. He knew that her circumstance wasn’t that uncommon. He truly admired and respected her. Even when his boys told him that he could do better than her, he begged to differ. Far from the prettiest girl in Flint, he thought she was the sweetest and most innocent girl he had ever been with and liked how she carried herself. He also liked a girl with some meat on her bones.

  Malek definitely wa
sn’t going to hold Halleigh’s being poor against her. Hell, Flint was a dead city. Most of the people who lived there were poor, and not because they wanted to be, but because it was the only way to be. Flint had literally become a war zone.

  With an 18% unemployment rate and the cost of living steadily rising, people from Flint developed a dog-eat-dog mentality. Everybody was out for self. It got so bad that people felt like if you were stupid enough to let somebody get you, then you deserved to get got. Crime swept over the city like a plague, and Flint became notorious as the murder capital.

  Even the hustlers weren’t getting it like they were supposed to, unless they had a good connect. Then it was a completely different story. A city where people were once proud to be called a “Flintstone,” had quickly been transformed into a city where dreams were lost. Everybody who came up in Flint knew the game. Because of its ruthless atmosphere, the city produced some of the grimiest dudes, the sheistiest females, the most strategic hustlers, the baddest bitches, and the most talented authors. Whatever a person’s game was, they were usually the best at it because survival depended on it.

  In a city like that, how could Malek look down on Halleigh for being a part of the majority? Even his own parents struggled every now and then. Most folks were only a paycheck away from being homeless, so when an unexpected financial situation occurred, it hit everybody’s pockets hard.

  Malek’s parents weren’t rich by any means, but they had a roof over their heads, food on the table, and clothes on their backs. His father even ended up working two jobs to make sure that his family didn’t go without anything, and his mother’s paycheck as a nurse’s aide helped too. And they stood on the hope that their son would make it in life; having the number one draft pick for a son added extra motivation, of course. They knew that their hard work would eventually pay off. And when it came to Halleigh, it could eventually pay off for her too.

  Malek spotted Halleigh leaning up against his car. “You ready?”

  Nervous energy filled her stomach when she saw him come out the building with a gym bag hanging from his shoulder. A Colgate smile was the only way to describe the look that was on his face.

  “Y’all sho’ look good together,” an older man commented as he passed by. “Y’all make a nice-looking young couple.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Halleigh replied, feeling like this was a good omen. They already looked like a settled young married couple. She couldn’t wait until the day she said, “I do.” She turned to Malek. “Yes, I’m ready.”

  Malek reached over and opened the passenger door for her, and she slid into the car. Then he drove off, blowing his horn for their victory at a couple of his teammates and fans.

  Halleigh asked, “Babe, can you drop me off at home?”

  Malek turned to her with a puzzled look on his face.

  “I just want to freshen up a little bit. I’ve been sitting in there on those bleachers for the past couple of hours all sweated up and stuff.” Though she’d never had sex before, she’d heard rumors about fishy-smelling chicks. And even though her hygiene was always up to par, she still wanted to make sure she was just right for her man.

  Earlier, she wanted to pick up a throwaway douche for internal cleansing, but she decided against doing so. She didn’t want her mother to find the box. As much as Sharina had deteriorated over the last couple of years due to her drug habit, Halleigh still gave her mother her respect.

  Also, she didn’t want to break her hymen. She’d heard that could happen from taking douches or using tampons. She wanted Malek to be the one to break her in. She wanted everything to be perfect.

  Malek cruised the city streets until he finally made it to her house on the north end of town.

  Before getting out of the car, Halleigh asked, “Are you sure your parents aren’t coming home tonight?”

  “Yeah, Moms won’t be home until tomorrow morning. She’s working the graveyard shift at the hospital tonight. My pops is on a business trip that he couldn’t get out of, so we have the whole night to ourselves. I’ll have you back home by the time my moms gets in. How about your mom?”

  Halleigh shrugged. “You know her.” Her mother was known to stay out all night and disappear at any given moment. She changed the subject. “You get the condoms? I don’t want to get pregnant.”

  “Yeah, I got this. Don’t worry, baby. “

  Suddenly Betty Wright’s song, “Tonight is the Night,” came on the radio.

  Malek glanced at Halleigh. “Baby, they playing our song. Tonight I’m-a make you a woman. And I will be gentle with you.”

  Halleigh didn’t reply. The seriousness of her choice hit her. She’d no longer be a little girl. In fact, she was just moments away from being a woman.

  As she reached for the door, Malek stopped her. “You sure you down for this? I love you, Hal, and I want you more than anything in the world, but it’s still your choice.”

  Halleigh thought for a minute. “Even the NBA?”

  “Huh?”

  “Do you want me more than going to the NBA?”

  Malek leaned over and kissed her softly on the lips. “Even the NBA.”

  Halleigh hesitated, before nodding. “Yes, baby, I’m sure that I’m down for this.” She opened the car door.

  “You want me to wait for you or what?”

  Halleigh looked over to her man before stepping out of the car and going into her house. “No, baby, you’ve waited for me long enough. It’ll be over in an hour.”

  Chapter Three

  Halleigh sauntered into her house and headed straight to her bedroom. She looked around their two-bedroom bungalow but didn’t see her mother. “Dang!” she groaned.

  The house was so cluttered, it looked like a cyclone had hit it. Their current housekeeping standards were lower than when her mother used to work sixty hours a week in the plant. Then, her mother kept a cleaner, more organized house than she did now. Seems like she would have had all the time in the world to clean now that she didn’t hold down a job, but that would have been too much like right. Instead, the house looked like she had turned it upside down looking for a hit.

  Halleigh had to admit that she kept her room on point. It was the rest of the house that was an embarrassment. No matter how much Halleigh cleaned, Sharina and her junkie friends would come in behind her hard work, filling ashtrays and leaving beer bottles and drug paraphernalia lying around the house.

  At first, Halleigh would just continue to do the best she could to clean up again, but her mother would run through the house during the day while she was at school and tear everything back up, looking for any loose change to cop some more junk. After a while, Halleigh came to the conclusion that her efforts to keep the place looking even halfway decent were in vain, so she didn’t even like to invite Malek over anymore. Tonight, though, Halleigh decided to ignore the disarray and just get ready for her intimate evening with Malek.

  She opened up her panty drawer to see what she would wear that night. Even though, as Betty Wright would tell it, tonight Malek was going to make her a woman, as a high schooler, she didn’t have anything along the lines of lingerie. She figured that a cute bra-and-panty set would have to do the trick. Since black was sexy, she picked out a black one her mother had boosted from Victoria’s Secret. She also picked out a short denim Azzure skirt and a blue shirt that hung loosely off her shoulders.

  Relieved that her mother wasn’t home, she figured, once she was already gone, that her mother wouldn’t miss her presence, so she hurried into the bathroom to take a shower. The water felt good on her skin, as she thought about the way that she was about to give herself to Malek; her nipples hardening and tingling from the hot water pelting them. Though extremely nervous, she got excited just thinking about her man and how she was going to become a woman. Malek’s woman. Would it hurt? She’d heard from Nikki that the first time hurt, and that sometimes the girl would even bleed. Her vagina contracted, just thinking of it. Would she enjoy sex as much as she enjoyed just
spending time with Malek?

  The funny thing was that her body had been craving and wanting to have sex with Malek for the past few months, but her mind always gave her hands the order to push him away, once he tried to go beyond her bra or panties. She would allow him to kiss her, but never go too far. No grinding, no dry sex, no fingering, no titty-fucking. None of that stuff high school kids made famous. And he seemed to respect her all the more for setting this boundary.

  In the past, Malek had told her he’d been with a lot of “technical virgins,” who would let him finger them, or who would even do blowjobs on him, just so they could still claim they were virgins. But Halleigh . . . now that girl truly was a virgin. She’d never even masturbated.

  Oddly enough, Halleigh wasn’t raised to put a premium on being a virgin when she got married. In fact, before her mother got on the drugs, the only warning she used to give her daughter regarding sex was just to make sure her first time was special. That it should be with someone she loved. Sharina had also told Halleigh to come to her and inform her when she was ready to become sexually active so she could put her on birth control pills. Her mother used to be cool like that. In fact, before Sharina became addicted, she used to take relatively good care of Halleigh. Now, it seemed Halleigh had to take care of her.

  Nowadays, the truth be known, Sharina didn’t care what her daughter did. If Halleigh hadn’t disciplined herself, she could really have run the streets wild. That’s why it wouldn’t be any problem to spend most of the night over at Malek’s house tonight. Sometimes, she didn’t like to think about how different her once-caring mother had become, but tonight she would use it to her advantage.

  The good thing that came out of a bad situation was that after her mother got on drugs, Halleigh started wanting a better life for herself. She saw what happened when you gave up on life and didn’t practice self-control. At seventeen, unlike many of the youths she’d grown up with, she’d never smoked, drank, or tried any type of drugs. And she truly didn’t want to be another teen mother, like so many of the girls in her neighborhood, so she’d purposely abstained from having sex. It never swayed her that many of her friends had been having sex since they were twelve.