Who Am I Without Him? by Sharon Flake

Author:Sharon Flake
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction - Young Adult
Publisher: Disney Publishing Worldwide

I Know a Stupid Boy

When I See One

WILLIE GREENTEA’S GONNA hurt me bad one day. I told that to my daddy, Mable Lee, and that rich lawyer woman from way ’cross town. Ain’t nobody do nothing to stop him, though. But I ain’t surprised. They never cared about me nohow. It was my baby they all wanted. He’s fine now. But me, I’m here suffocating. Watching my life pass right in front of me just like in the movies. Dying ain’t so bad, I guess, but it is kind of lonely. And your mind don’t stay put neither. All I keep thinking ’bout is God, and what He thinks about me—a sixteen-year-old single mother who tried to sell her baby for hardly nothing.

Truth is, girls ’round my way get pregnant all the time. Heck, I’m old compared to most. But in my daddy’s house, a pregnant girl is like a roach crawling ’cross the kitchen table—something you best get rid of ’fore the neighbors spot it. So soon as Daddy found out about me, he tossed me out. I ain’t have no place to sleep for two weeks. Then Momma talked him into letting me back in the house. A month later, when my belly was still flat as notebook paper, my father sat me down and said something good was gonna come outta this here mess I stirred up. That’s when he stuck a little card in my hand. Said a white woman was handing ’em out at the check-cashing store on Eighth Avenue.

“Twelve thousand dollars for brand-new babies,” he said.

Momma and me tried to interrupt, but Daddy kept talking. “This lawyer uses the Internet, and gets people from all over the world to bid on babies.” He stared in his hands like the money was already there. “Seems fair enough,” he said. “A couple gets a baby, and we get paid.”

I didn’t want to give up my baby. But when I told my boyfriend, Oscar, about Daddy’s plan, he was all for it. “Too many babies ’round our way now,” he wrote me from jail. “Ain’t never enough dough.”

Anyhow, that’s how I got to Mable Lee’s, where gals like me end up selling their babies like lettuce from the back of a pickup truck.

The first day that lawyer woman brought me to Mable Lee’s place, Willie Greentea was standing on the front porch picking his nose. I know a stupid boy when I see one, and I could tell right off that Willie didn’t have much upstairs. You could see it in his eyes. They was as empty as the hallway at school soon after the last bell rings. But I was nice to him right off. I introduced myself. Stood so close he could smell the ginger spice perfume I had rubbed all over me and see the purple specks in my pretty green eyes. Shoot, even boys with all their marbles can’t resist looking at my eyes for longer than they should. Willie wasn’t no different. He stared at me so long that first day, it scared me.

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