“One day, on the way home from school, this man tell me to ‘come here.’ He say, ‘What’s yo’ name?’ and he asking me and looking all over me. I tell him, and then he say, ‘Tonya, you got a boyfriend?’ I tell him no, and then he say he want to be my boyfriend. I say, ‘You grown!’ cause he should know better than to try to go with a kid. ‘No I’m not, I’m seventeen,’ and even seventeen too old for somebody who eleven, so I’m getting scared, and I start backing away from him, and that’s when he hollers at me to ‘come here!’ I walked back toward him, and he smiled at me.

“‘My name Gravy,’ he say. ‘I want to see you again. Tomorrow, when you get out of school come up to 1103.’ I said, ‘Okay,’ but I wasn’t going up to no grown man’s house. I tried to stay away from him. I knew that he sold drugs in front of my building, so I always went around the back after school. I was so scared of him, and how he was looking at me. A couple days later, he came and knocked on my door. I saw him through the peephole and jumped away from the door, holding my mouth. Mama was in her room, but she ran in the front when she heard knocking. ‘Who is it?’ she asked. I start talking fast, ‘Mama, it’s this man, he want me to go with him,’ I try to tell her the whole story, but before I can really get it out, she swing the door open and say, ‘Hey, Gravy,’ all happy. I almost pee on myself when I see how mad he is. He put something in Mama’s hand, and she run out of the kitchen, leaving me by myself.

“He say, ‘Come on,’ like he my daddy or something. I take a step back, and he scream it. Tears start falling down my face, and I holler for Mama, but she don’t say ‘Huh?’ or ‘What?’ or come running for me. She don’t come for me, Fe Fe.” As she says my name, it comes out all weird, cracking in her throat.

“It’s been like that since she started them drugs.”

“What happened when you went to his house?” I asked her, terrified because I knew the answer already. She just looked at me for a moment, then she started crying again.

“Sometimes they make me stay with them for days.”

I scooted closer to Tonya and hugged her, crying into her hair. I knew that her mama wasn’t kind and responsible like mine, but things were worse for her than I could’ve ever imagined.