Weird Black Girls by Elwin Cotman

Author:Elwin Cotman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2024-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

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Eleven hours later I’m at the dentist in Edgewood, to get five cavities filled. Afterward some white lady tries cutting in front of me when I’m trying to pay, demanding the receptionist answer why this or that can’t go on her insurance. The devil’s maiden wears a leather jacket and stretchy black cotton skirt to hide all manner of disaster on her lower body, a short woman with a broad forehead above close-set dark eyes pinching an aquiline nose, her hair a tawny rug over her left shoulder, all of which I insult her for over the course of a minute, unconcerned that the anesthesia has me reading her out of one side of my mouth. Then I plunk down a thousand dollars cash and read her again for needing insurance.

Outside, Leroy waits in the car. Academically suave in his beige sweater and new leather loafers with tassels, he looks upset. Me, I’m riding high.

“Drive fast!” I shout as he peels from the parking lot into midday traffic. “Oh my god, fam! I’m a bad bitch. You shoulda seen me roast that bit—”

“You’re such a Virgo,” he says in a tight voice.

“What? Yo,” I level with him. “You got something to say, say it.”

“Sometimes I wonder if you’re just using me for my car.”

“If you said I was using you for the metaphysical acting classes, it would at least sound like you respect me. But obviously you don’t, so maybe you should do some soul searching about these issues of yours.”

He drives back roads that bend like twigs on the way to Wilkinsburg. At one point the woods clear and there stretches the football field where I refused to play, where I once met a boy named Avon. Hard and unquestioning like a teakettle, his midriff gleamed in the moonlight, this boy raising his Wu-Tang shirt with one hand and unbuttoning his jeans with the other, and my breath stilled at the gorgeous dick he unsmuggled from his Calvins, this track star who liked me to watch, and proceeded to twist his manhood with the efficient delicacy of a concert trumpeter dismantling his instrument so he can place each part in the sateen-lined case. Presently that field, mine and Avon’s, is overgrown with wildflowers.

Leroy says, “Don’t do that.”

“Do what, babe?”

He stares hard at the road. “The passive-aggressive comeback under your breath to get the last word in. You sound like some bitchy middle-aged queen from the Castro.”

“Never heard that before. I know exactly what this is. Some femme nigga was bad to you and now you projecting it on me.”

“There you go again!”

Talking so much, drool flees my slack mouth like bats from a mine shaft. A bolus splashes my jeans near the crotch. “I ain’t taking the blame for the other nigga shit. I got dirt of my own.”

“You’re right.” He looks guilty, regretful, his eyes fixed on the past. Moment by moment, his grief draws closer, opening cracks in him from which his soul gusts like farts.

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