Dark by Kenji Jasper

Author:Kenji Jasper
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780767909297
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2001-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

“i don’t know

if I really want to do this,” I said to Robin after we were more than ten blocks away from the building.

“You said you wanted to get out the house,” she replied. “I’m gettin’ you out the house.”

This night “out of the house” meant more white people at a party for Delta employees. Two baggage handlers were hosting a BYOB night of beer and board games, and none of it sat well with me. I imagined everyone at the party looking and talking like Qualie Madison. The thought made me strongly consider going back to sleep, which was what I had been doing ever since I came in from my little stroll on Tryon. But stupid conversation and white-people music were my only way out of 3C. I would have rather watched reruns of Gilligan’s Island. But Robin had asked me to come. That made the trip worth it.

“You don’t like trying new things, do you?” she asked with one hand on the wheel and the other fumbling with the stereo. “Love TKO” from Teddy Pendergrass came out from somewhere.

She had on a snug white T-shirt with a bottle of Tanqueray on the front, a pair of baggy jean shorts, and a Polo cap with the brim pulled down over her eyes. Short tresses of her sandalwood hair poked out from the sides of her hat.

“Not unless I have to,” I said.

“You need to be more open to things. You might not be so lonely if you were.”

“I ain’t never say I was lonely.”

“You don’t have to,” she said.

She rocketed down 77 like a bullet in her hunter-green Eclipse. By the way she drove you’d have thought there was a bomb at the party only she could disarm.

“You don’t have to,” she repeated. “I can read it off that cute little face of yours.”

“Anything else you can read there?” I asked as I lit my first cigarette in six hours. She wanted a drag before it was barely between my lips. I gave her what she wanted. After all, she had me hooked.

“Yeah, I been thinkin’ about it. I think you only down here ’cuz you felt like you had to. I don’t know what you up to but I know you think you gotta be here, at least for now.” She took another drag and then passed it back to me.

“What you think I’m hidin’?”

“That’s your business,” she said. “Long as it ain’t got to do wit’ me I ain’t got no questions to ask. I learned how to keep my mouth shut a long time ago.”

I still didn’t know her. I’d slept with her twice and I didn’t know her last name. But she had said the right things at the right times and she knew how to shut up and let me deal with my own problems too. That was hard to come by in a girl where I was from. It made me a little sad to think that when I left I’d be leaving her.

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