Then everything goes black.

When I open my eyes, I can’t move. Ron has my wrists in one hand over my head. A breeze passes over my legs and I realize my shorts and panties are gone. I’m trapped beneath his hips and thighs, and something hard pokes at me.

“No!” I scream, turning my head back and forth so hard, one of my ponytails comes loose. I can’t see through the thick, dark curtain of pressed hair. “No! Please.”

“This’ll be just between us,” Ron hisses in my ear. “You’ll like it. Promise.”

“Please,” I sob, the smell of my hair and his cheap cologne and rotting sugarcane clogging my nostrils. “Ron, don’t.”

But he does.

And the pain is everywhere. In my head from the fall. In my wrists from the iron fingers clamped below my hands. Between my legs where it feels like a pipe is on fire and forcing its way inside. He grunts over me like a rooting pig happy in mud, his mouth hanging open, and his eyes rolling back in his head. Spots swim in front of me, and I squeeze my eyes shut. Tears scald my cheeks and trickle into my hair.

There’s a scream in my head that no one hears but me. I keep screaming, but my mouth is frozen shut, the sound trapped inside. It’s a secret cry, so loud in my mind it’s all I hear, but it won’t come out. Oh, God, the sound won’t come out.

Look up.

It’s the faintest whisper barely heard through the screeching in my head.

Look up!

That whisper comes again, urging, more urgent, and through the pain and the noise, I look to the sky. Two clouds bunched together slowly pull apart. They look like jaws and as they stretch open wide to reveal the sun hiding behind them, my mouth opens, too, stretching with the clouds. And finally, my voice floods the rotting field.

“Hopscoooooooootch!”

“May, now you know how fast these girls are.” Ron stands shifty-eyed and shadowed in the setting sun, belt hanging loose and his zipper undone. “Lo may be young, but she already got a taste somewhere, the way she was coming on to me.”

“You lying!” Iris yells, squeezing me protectively.

I huddle deeper into her, shaking so hard it hurts, my teeth chattering in the summer heat. My hair is half down, half up, and wild. That private place between my legs is so tender, even the cotton panties burn against my torn flesh.

Mama glares at Ron then at me, as if she’s not sure who she hates most right now.

“Lotus, I told you about being fast,” Mama says, but doubt trembles in her voice. She knows. She has to know he’s lying—that I wouldn’t.

I can’t even defend myself. I haven’t said a word since I yelled hopscotch and brought Iris running. Mama and Aunt Pris weren’t far behind. The five of us stand in the middle of this field, and Ron’s lies are as rotten as the sugarcane.

“May,” Aunt Pris starts, her lips pressed tight together. “I don’t know if—”

“That’s right, we don’t know,” Mama says, her eyes narrowed on her sister. “I just need a minute to think, Pris. Gimme a . . .”

Her voice breaks like a dish crashing on the floor, and she starts crying, both hands covering her face. Ron reaches for her, and she slaps at his shoulders, at his face and head.

“You no good . . .” she screams, her light skin going red. “How could you, Ron?”

“Baby, come on now,” he says, capturing her flailing limbs, trapping the talons of her fingers in one hand and pulling her against his chest with one thick arm.

“I ain’t coming on,” she screeches at him. “Not this time.”

“Baby, you know me,” he coos into her hair, making circles on her narrow back with his hand. “I love you. You know how it is with us.”

Sobs shake her against him, and she tosses her head back and forth, denying, but she stops scratching and clawing and starts clinging, burrowing into his neck.

“How could you?” she whispers over and over again, sounding more hurt than angry. Broken, not outraged on my behalf.

“We gotta tell the police,” Iris says, as if she’s the adult.

“No!” me and Mama say in unison.

“No,” I say again. Iris’s face blurs through my tears. “I don’t want anybody to know.”

I turn pleading eyes to my mother. “Mama, please, no cops.” I glare at Ron. “Just make him go away.”

She stiffens at my words, looking helplessly between me and the man who hurt me, like there’s a hard choice to be made.

“Make him go, Mama,” I beg again. “Please, we don’t have to talk to the cops. Just make him go away.”

“But, Lotus, we . . .” She licks her lips. “We all probably need some space to figure out what happened.”

“I know what happened, Mama,” I protest. “He ra—”

“Lotus!” Mama cuts in like a blade. “Don’t say that.”

“But he did,” I weep into Iris’s hair. “He did.”

“Maybe you should stay somewhere else for a while,” Mama says, avoiding my eyes. “Until we all feel more comfortable.”

“Me?” I bounce my shock between Mama, Aunt Pris, and Ron, whose bloodied lip pulls with a smug smirk. “But, Mama, I—”

“Just for a few weeks, Lo,” she says, some of the guilt on her face turning into impatience.

“No,” Iris screams, squeezing me tighter. “Don’t send her away.”

“Just for a few weeks,” Mama says again, her tone firmer.

“Then I’m going with her.” Iris pulls her lips into a flat, determined line.

“You ain’t going nowhere, girl,” Aunt Pris says. “What I tell you about getting in grown folks’ business?”

“But Mama,” Iris says, her voice thick and wobbling. “Where’s she gonna go?”

The stalks shift and part, snapping under someone’s feet, startling us all. It’s my great-grandmother MiMi. She takes her time looking at each of us, but finally fixes wrathful eyes on Ron. He gulps, shivers.

“I’ll take her,” MiMi says, looking at me with those ancient eyes. “She can come stay with me.”

31

Kenan

If there’s one place I never expected to be, it’s here.

New York Fashion Week. Front row of the JPL show. Yet here I sit, anxiously awaiting the first “look,” as Lotus calls it. She told me the show JP has been designing and planning for months will be over in less than twenty minutes.

My kind of event.

The waiting audience is seated on a terrace overlooking Lincoln Plaza. I can’t fully appreciate the city on the verge of sunset, or the excitement electrifying the air because I’m ready for it to be over. I’m happy for JP and his team, whom I’ve come to know and actually like over the summer. But the sooner the show and the after-party are over, the sooner I can have Lotus to myself. She warned me her schedule would be bruising in the last few weeks leading up to the show, but I wasn’t prepared for how little time she’d have for anything else.

How little time she’d have for me.

I’ve never been involved with someone whose schedule and commitment to their craft rivaled mine. In three weeks, I report for training camp, and the NBA will own almost all my time for the next nine months, at least. Ten if we make playoffs, which August and I are determined to do. Then Lotus will be on the receiving end of my career. It’s not easy to live with. I’m not easy to live with. I’m even more obsessive about my eating and workout regimen during the season. I watch film constantly. I talk even less because I’m in my head studying plays, scoping other teams’ offenses, mentally picking apart their defenses before games.

It’s all ball.

I may not have started out thinking I’d be an NBA player, but I’ve always been driven in every endeavor. I would have been this way about law, if I’d fulfilled my father’s dream and pursued it. If I’d been a farmer, I would have been this way about fruits and vegetables and soil. It’s the way I’m made, and nothing has ever disrupted this pattern in me. I know what Bridget did was wrong, but I also recognize that I’m no picnic, especially once the season starts.

And Bridget lived through a lot of seasons.

She’s the last thing I want to consider right now. I’ve moved on completely. It doesn’t matter that Lotus is in fashion, something I never gave a rat’s ass about, or that she doesn’t know Oscar Robertson from Oscar Meyer. That I’m eleven years older. Or that I live on the West Coast and she’s on the East. It doesn’t even matter that she may believe in voodoo. Maybe she’s a witch. I don’t know. I do know one thing for sure.

I’m falling for her.

And if I’m keeping it one hundred, at least with myself, I’m probably already in the past tense on that score. I’ve fallen for her.

You’d think with all the drama and trauma I experienced with Bridget, I wouldn’t be doing this again. But that’s just it. There is no “again” to what I’m feeling. This is uncharted territory. I’ve never felt this way about anyone. God, it shames me to think it, but Bridget and I met in college. I’ve known her sixteen years, been married to her for most of those, and I never felt for her what I feel for Lotus after mere months.

I’ve always jealously guarded my solitude, so wanting to be with someone all the time is not only foreign, but disconcerting. I read The Song of Solomon for notes to send her. That’s right. It’s in the Bible. This is some body-snatcher shit. I don’t know who has taken up residence in this mind and body I’ve always been so disciplined with. Who has taken up residence in this heart.

The circular path of my thoughts stalls when the lights drop and music fills the terrace. The song is like Enya screwed a DJ, and gave birth to some bastard New Age music possessed by a heavy baseline. A woman, tall, thin, strides with confidence and swagger down the runway. She poses, pops, turns. Before she’s out of sight, another has taken her place at the end of the runway.