On Girlhood by Glory Edim

Author:Glory Edim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

TWO MONTHS SINCE being the new girl myself, Melvin was the only one who called me by my name; otherwise the other kids usually named me after my hairstyle. Like Minnie Mouse or Cocoa Puffs if I wore my hair in Afro puffs. Or Afro Sheen if my mother had greased my hair and pressed it into submission the night before. Or Electric Socket if I was wearing a plain old Afro. Avery. To hear that coming out of someone else’s mouth at school was like hearing “Hey, Superstar.”

They were warming up to me, though. Lisa White, who always smelled like pee, had invited me to her Disneyland party. Why, I don’t know, but I was going, grateful to be going, For no reason, one day, she said, “Hey, you,” when she saw me standing by the monkey bars watching her and a bunch of friends jumping rope. “Come to my party if you want to.” What I heard was something like, “Hey you, you just won a trillion, bizillion, cabillion dollars.”

But everything had become even more tricky than usual. Lisa didn’t like Melvin. Nobody did.

One day when the smog wasn’t so bad in the San Gabriel Valley (the air was only orange, not brown, and you could sort of see the mountains if you squeezed your eyes some), Melvin and I stopped at the same place we did every day after school: by the ivy in front of Loretta Morales’s house on the corner, fat Loretta with feathered hair and green eyes, in high school now, even though we used to play Barbies together, who got down with boys now, who had a mother in a wheelchair for no reason I could figure out. She could walk, Mrs. Morales.

Melvin stuck his hand in the ivy, pulling at this and that, not finding what he was looking for. “Hmm,” he said. “Av’ry girl, I b’lieve you done took my cigarettes for yourself, ain’t you?”

“Nuh uh!” I grinned at him and hugged my folders and books to my chest. “You just ain’t looking good.”

“Well, then, help me out some.” He brushed his hands through the ivy like he was running them through bathwater to test it.

“There’s rats in there.” I wasn’t going to put my hands in the ivy because it was dark and I couldn’t see. If I couldn’t see, there was no need to just stick my hands into all that dark space like a crazy person, I didn’t think.

Melvin took off his jean jacket and handed it to me. It had MEL spelled out on the back with silver studs you pressed into the fabric. He was getting serious about looking for those Winstons. I put my face in his jacket and smelled it, since he wasn’t watching me. It smelled like smoke and sweat and general boy. From then on forever, I decided, I would love the smell of boy.

“Here we go,” he said in a minute. He stood up, tapped the package on his palm, pulled

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