Penny for your thoughts, a nickel for your kiss

A dime if you tell me that you love me

Guantanamera…

Wyclef and Celia Cruz mixed it up and Dallas sang along with them. When she listened to the music while walking around the city, she felt like she was in her own music video. Everything welcomed her. Everyone glided along with her, the cars slid on freshly paved tar, children smiled and bounced about without a worry in the world. She was free to guantanamera anywhere she wanted. That was until she saw the police officer, a cute one with platinum hair and eyes like kiwis, sitting in his car, looking at her suspiciously.

Dallas pretended not to care that he was staring a hole into her head. If she showed fear, she was screwed. She was almost a junior, which meant that she could hook up her schedule and the cop couldn’t even start with her. Technically, because she was still fifteen, if he wanted to mess with her, he could. And it was the end of the month and the truancy cops had their eyes wide open. They had quotas to meet.

She went to Tower Records on the corner of Sixty-sixth and Broadway, a good place to spend some time. The cop looked bored and wouldn’t be going anywhere. She pulled off her sweater, tied it around her waist. Checked her book bag so she was more comfortable to browse.

—Excuse me, miss, can I help you with something? A security guard looked at Dallas as if he were about to interrogate her. —Are you all right?

—Yeah, just looking for something.

Dallas didn’t look at him so he wouldn’t remember her face. Arcades and record stores took bravery. Freshmen hid there. But Dallas was not a freshman. She was almost a junior, wearing makeup. She could’ve easily been in college. She was in City College. That’s right. Studying something. Undecided. That’s what all the college guys who stepped up to her would say. Which made Dallas assume they must not be too bright.

She walked through the isles of rock, classical, and movie sound tracks, looking for a good spot to squat. She dashed over to the leather chair when she saw a woman getting up from reading a magazine. The chair had a listening station beside it. —You need to have the eye for it, her father would say about parking a car. Dallas believed it was the same for places to sit. She programmed the first CD, raised the volume, wore the headphones and listened while she read through the magazines someone had left on the floor. She watched people come and go. The line formed at the information counter, the guy with bad skin was having trouble with the computer. People moved around the store, none of them worried about the cop sitting outside. None of them having to go to school. She didn’t want to think about her grades. It didn’t matter how hard she worked, all semester she floated somewhere between a D and an F, the Doomed and the Fucked. The teachers wrote on her report cards that she wasn’t working up to her full potential. All semester she leaned back on the F grade and then when she saw the semester closing in, she panicked at being left back. Dallas reached out to the D like a harp, reaching out to its beautiful round belly, believing that if she could just touch the other side of it, she would no longer be Fucked. Just Doomed. Which was better in the bigger scheme of things. Defiant, Devious, Dicked, Dwarfed, Deranged. Damaged, Desperate, Damned. She couldn’t think of any beautiful words that started with D. Her report card would be filled with them, and her mother would be pissed. She had to get her mother to Macy’s before Esperanza saw her grades. Dallas consoled herself by thinking that lots of successful folk didn’t do well in school and still made it big. School was not the only way. She could work her way up. She could try for a job at Tower Records. That would get her mother off her back.