WE DIDN’T GO to school and we didn’t go to the movies, but we did watch the bootleg Juice tape the next afternoon after Rasul made me some fried sausage and real French fries, butchered from fat Idaho potatoes. I took a twenty-minute shower and didn’t worry about him walking in on me. I could already tell he wasn’t that type. I washed out my sweatshirt, socks, and even panties in his bathtub and hung them over the shower rail to dry. I used whatever lotion and deodorant I could find under the bathroom sink, and started to think about stealing a pair of his aunt’s panties before I thought that he might think wearing another woman’s panties was more nasty than not wearing any at all. I dried myself well down there. Just thinking about what might happen if he started touching me without my panties made the bells go off in that tiny spot, and I was moist. I was embarrassed at myself for even thinking about that, considering that’s why I was in the place I was in now. I slipped on the baggy Chicago Bulls sweats and triple x Nike T-shirt he gave me. I didn’t have a curling iron so I just slicked Ultra Sheen through my hair, and brushed it all back. To my surprise, I looked kind of cute that way—my eyes popped out more. He took a shower right after me, changed into an Adidas wind suit, and came out of the bathroom smelling like Speed Stick deodorant and cocoa butter.

I was confused about like, not to mention love, until that night with him. We talked for hours—about our mothers and fathers, the scar on my mother’s face, the white spots all over his body, the best friends we were both claiming to have. I told him I had never been to the carnival and he said we could go one day. I told him my daddy had let me have a kitten once, but I found it weeks later dead and stiff on our kitchen floor with no explanation. I had concluded it got a hold of some of our rat poison, though Ma just said he was sick. He told me that when he was little in Missouri he had seen a dog having babies in the middle of a dusty road, and no one thought to try to move her or the puppies. A truck came along and killed the puppies just as the mother was having the last one, and when the dust settled he had seen their tiny pink bodies smashed flat into the road. His mother wouldn’t let him keep the last one. So he told me we could find a kitten and a puppy to adopt. I couldn’t help but start loving him after that.