“So what else you been doing with yourself?” Cal asked.

“Oh, nothing,” Aggie said. She and Cal were drinking coffee, and I was drinking the wine—it wasn’t sweet enough, but it was what we had. “I went up and saw Nina Simone at City College the other day.”

“You still go to those concerts.”

“I hadn’t been,” she said, “but this guy wanted to go.”

“Oh.” I could see that when she mentioned another guy, it took something out of Cal. He looked away for a minute, and a kind of sadness came over his face. So quickly, though, that I wasn’t sure that it wasn’t just a shadow.

“I’ve been trying to do some writing, too,” Aggie said. “My poetry isn’t all that’s it’s cracked up to be, but if I get the music put to it, it’ll be okay.”

“You know, I wrote some—” It came out before I even realized it was going to.

“You write poetry?” Aggie looked at me and waited for an answer.

“No,” I said, sorry I had opened my mouth about the story I had wrote. “It’s just this little jive story. You know.”

“What’s it about?” Aggie stood up and took some paper out of the closet.

“Nothing much,” I said.

“If you wrote it, then I would like to hear about it,” Aggie said.

“I didn’t know you wrote,” Cal said.

“I was telling a story to Paul’s little brother,” I said. They were both looking at me. “It sounded okay, so I wrote it down for some reason.”

“What’s it about?” Aggie asked. She was dead serious, too, like it was normal that I would go around writing stories.

“It’s about a giraffe named Gordon,” I said, looking right at Cal. “He’s tall, dig, and he eats the leaves from the tops of trees. And everybody digs him because he’s tall, but he gets tired of people saying how cool it is to be tall because he gets kind of … you know … ain’t nobody else as tall as he is.”

“I’d like to see it sometime,” Aggie said. She said it like she really meant it.

“What did you write?” I asked Aggie.

“I don’t have the tune finished yet,” she said, “but it goes something like this:

Honey, yes, I know it’s love

When I wake up in the mor-ning

And you’re the only thing

That’s on my miiind.

And baby, yes, I know it’s love

When I’m looking for a reason

And you’re the only one

That I can fiiind.

Oh, sugar, yes, I know it’s love

When the summer sun comes burning,

And it doesn’t touch the warmth

I feel for you.

Aggie could sing. Aggie could sing a bird right off a tree. The words she was singing were together, and so was the tune, but you didn’t even have to listen to the words or the tune because she was singing all in between the words and the meaning didn’t make as much sense as the feeling did. When she opened her mouth to sing, it was like she was a different person altogether. I felt like running outside and playing some ball for her, or doing something. I just wasn’t used to people being that heavy. When she finished, Cal turned to me, and I could see his eyes getting red and I thought he was going to let go, but he got himself together.