I was shocked to see Jesse naked from the top down, her Strawberry Shortcake nightgown twisted up around her narrow chest. I knew she was just one of those hard sleepers who fought herself throughout the night, but I couldn’t help but panic for a minute. Once I threw those thoughts out of my head, I noticed the Vicks humidifier by Junior’s flimsy daybed was out of water. After refilling it in the rusted pedal sink of the tiny bathroom next door, I came back and pulled the lint-covered, flannel black blanket back up around the boy’s chest. Then I sat next to him alone, in the dark, on the edge of the mattress until I heard Mrs. Washington arrive home, calling my name above Mr. Washington’s inflated guffaws: “Shivana.”

It sounded like an echo in an empty house—surprising, crisp, soft as a breeze. And like cooped-up apartment dwellers fanning outside broken windows, I had been waiting for that breeze for far too long.

I was way too young to know I was disgusting: watching over a woman’s children while screwing her husband was an unforgivable contradiction. After that first time, when I struggled out of a dream to find Leroy staring down at me with his pants already unzipped, I couldn’t even look Renelle in the eyes when she paid me for that night. In my own bed later on, I held a hot face towel between my legs to stop the sensation of insides shredded by the sharp end of a rusty nail. I used the same towel to wipe the tears I had cried all night; I had cashed in my virginity long after most girls my age, but I still felt broke. As time passed I didn’t know how to end it and once he told me he loved me, I didn’t want to. I had been taught right from wrong, but not how to right a wrong. Unlike a mistress in the White man’s big house, I couldn’t claim self-preservation, custom, or the law to exonerate myself. I was a horny young Black girl unwanted and I thought unloved by anyone else, crushed ego temporarily bolstered by a scoundrel old enough to be my daddy—which maybe he should have been trying to be.