Such a crowd had built up behind us without our knowing. Patrice Wallace led it, but Fred Ace Spade, Tasha Spruce, Jeanette Towns, and a copper boy named Tavares, whom I used to have the worst crush on, were her willing lackeys. Patrice was a big-boned, roguish, redbone girl with a face like a baby doll but a mouth like Richard Pryor back in the day. Her relation to a small-time rapper named Cognac had catapulted her to notoriety when his single “We Likes It Ruff” stayed at the top of the Coke Top Nine at 9 on 107.5 WGCI for all of the last summer. At the height of Cognac’s success, Patrice took on the alias Patty-Cake and cashed in on a collection of boosted designer shoes, purses, and shades; their authenticity, as opposed to the banality of the cheap knockoffs rocked by everybody else, instantly transported her into the realm of the exotic, amusing, and cool. Though Cognac hadn’t had a song much less a hit since, Patrice was determined to ride for as long as possible off her status as a mini-celebrity’s baby cousin, making sure no one, especially not all the boys who had never paid any attention to her before, forgot she had provided the feminine pants and moans that were the song’s claim to fame. She abused her position by taunting those like me who still hung desperately to the bottom rung of the popularity pole. She and her followers cornered us in our obvious hiding places: at the back corner tables of the cafeteria, on the way up-top rafters in the gym, in front of smudged girls’ bathroom mirrors as we attempted to up our status with greasy beauty supply lipstick, watered down perfume sprays, and messy hair gels letting us down on the “baby” hair promise. A couple years before Patty-Cake and I had eaten lunch with the same group for a whole semester after Constitution class. Now we shared the same biology class, though we had never had reason to speak. Until today.

“Ugh. Look at them hugged all up. They must be dykes.”

We heard the crack—fighting words, really—although we kept walking like we hadn’t heard her talking about (and to) us. To break apart would have been to acknowledge and corroborate her accusation, making matters worse. But cool nonchalance was never sufficient armor against determined heckling; our insistence on staying together proved a defiant remonstrance the bullies couldn’t appreciate or understand. The taunting from several voices continued while we walked several blocks, well outside the nearest police officer’s view. By the time we rounded the corner where the school could no longer be seen, we had heard them all:

Dyke. Butch. Femme. Lesbo. Pussy-chewer.

I protected myself by going deaf and dumb, an automatic self-numbing I had picked up and mastered with time. I walked hearing only my own footsteps.