Lost in the City

THE NIGHT RHONDA FERGUSON WAS KILLED

Cassandra G. Lewis, the girl the boys called Tank and Mack Truck behind her back, sat on that low brick wall outside Cardozo High School, eating two-year-old Christmas candy when she wasn’t smoking Chesterfields. She’d been there since after her lunch period, and now it was nearing the end of the seventh period and the girl was getting bored because the teacher hadn’t come out to get popped. At Cassandra’s feet on the sidewalk was a small pile of cigarette butts and match stems, and behind her, on the grass on the other side of the wall, was a pile of candy wrappers a wind coming up 13th Street was now blowing here and there.

She had been waiting for her homeroom teacher to look out the window on the second floor and see her wasting her life away on the wall. She’d been hoping the teacher would come out and, as the woman had done that morning in the second-period English class Cassandra had with her, bark more shit in her face. Potential, Cassandra had thought all the time she had been eating and smoking on the wall, I’ll show her all the goddamn potential in the world! She had walked out before the end of the second period and come straight down to the wall, itching for the chance to knock the teacher on her bony ass. But now all the candy and cigarettes were beginning to turn her stomach and she wanted only to be somewhere else.

Parked across Clifton Street in front of her was a green 1957 Hollywood Hudson, a piece of shit that belonged to her brother-in-law, who, in his drunken moments, often called the car “my old mule.” She had spent last night — and the six nights before that — in her sister and brother-in-law’s apartment on Kenyon Street, the first time in a month or so she had slept a week straight in the same place. But that morning her brother-in-law had gotten up on the wrong side of the bed and picked a fight with her because she had eaten five eggs and four biscuits. After he’d gone to work and after her sister had taken the kids to the baby-sitter’s before going to work herself, Cassandra had stolen the old mule to get even. She would have popped her brother-in-law before he left, as she had done a year ago, but she thought it would hurt her sister and nieces too much to see Daddy laid out cold again on the kitchen floor.

She stood up now and brushed ashes from her blouse and pants. The school bell rang, announcing the end of the seventh period. She gave one final look to the corner window on the second floor. She knew the bitch had seen her out there on the wall, but just didn’t have the heart to come out. She’d made the death mistake of thinking she and Miss Bartlett were getting along fine, the way the teacher had always seemed to get along with the other girls. Miss Bartlett had even begun to include her in that small group of girls she invited to her apartment some evenings for meals and girl talk. It was there, over several weeks beginning in September, among twelve or so girls Cassandra wouldn’t have given a shit about before, that she had begun to share, sitting on that brown carpet that was thicker than some beds she’d known. Among all those books and pictures of the teacher’s smiling relatives, she’d said things only her sister and Rhonda Ferguson knew about.

But lately, for no reason at all, the teacher seemed to be in her face all the time, and that morning the teacher had made the death mistake of bringing up Cassandra’s father and mother. Had said that her parents must be turning over in their graves to know the way their child was living, going from pillar to post with no real home. Had said all that and more in front of the dick people who couldn’t stand Cassandra and were just waiting to hear some real personal shit about her life so they could talk behind her back. Then, like putting her personal business in the street wasn’t enough, the teacher had gone into all that other stuff about potential and blah-blah-blah and then, after that, some more blah-blah-blah.

She had made up her mind to get in the car and take off for God knew where when someone honked and she saw Rhonda Ferguson and Rhonda’s father, waiting at the light at 13th and Clifton. The car turned when the light changed and pulled up in front of her. Rhonda, in the passenger seat, waved her over. Students were coming out of school and they passed behind Cassandra leaning in the car window.

“I hope your bein out here so soon don’t mean you played hooky,” Rhonda said. “Hi you doin?”

“Fine. Goin to a party all dressed up like that?” Cassandra said.

Rhonda smiled and grabbed Cassandra’s arm eagerly. “You haven’t been around, or you’d know: I think I’m going to sign the contract today. We got a meetin downtown with the people from the record company. I think this is it,” she said, crossing her fingers. “I haven’t been able to think straight. I stayed home playin with Alice all day.”

Rhonda’s father leaned across the seat. “Hi you doin, baby girl? We looked for you last night. Been lookin for you every night this week.” He had a large stomach and his stomach was touching the bottom of the steering wheel.

“I been stayin with my sister, Daddy Ferguson,” she said. Cassandra winked at Rhonda and then said, once again, “When you get out there makin all them millions, you won’t forget me, willya?”

“Why do you always keep talkin that way, girl? You comin with me. Everybody’s comin with me.” She squeezed Cassandra’s hand. “I’d sooner forget Alice or Jeffrey than you. And you know I never lie to you.”

Cassandra nodded, but there was nothing behind the nod. She carried in her pocket, each wrapped in tinfoil, articles about Rhonda published in the Afro and the Evening Star. CARDOZO H.S. SINGER ON THE RISE, the Star headline said. FAMILY IS THE SECRET TO SINGER’S SUCCESS, the Afro headline said. And in the photograph accompanying that story, Cassandra was sitting on the couch beside Rhonda’s youngest brother, who sat next to Rhonda. Rhonda was in the middle, holding her daughter Alice on her lap. The child was the only person in the picture who did not look directly into the camera. On the other side of Rhonda was her mother, and behind Rhonda were two older brothers and her father, who peered out through thick glasses. Beside Mr. Ferguson and directly behind Rhonda was Jeffrey Stanford, the father of Rhonda’s child. His hand was resting on Rhonda’s shoulder.

“But if you’re gonna take care of my business for me,” Rhonda said, “you’re gonna to have to get a education. How will I know if they cheatin me if you don’t know more than they know?”

“Thas right, baby girl,” her father said to Cassandra. He was holding the steering wheel in the enthusiastic way a small child would, as if he were playing at driving the car. “We best get on now, so we won’t be late. But you go on by the house. Mabel cookin up a mess of fish and waitin for you. I wanna see you at the house when I get back.”

Rhonda pulled Cassandra’s face down and kissed her cheek. The sidewalk was now full of kids. Rhonda and her father drove down Clifton Street, and all along the way to 11th Street, students, noticing Rhonda, would greet her. Some of them sang bits of the songs she was known for. Some of them danced.

Cassandra decided right then to make nice and return her brother-in-law’s car. But after she started it up, the car would only cough and shake and didn’t seem to want to move. After trying several times to get it going, she thought she’d give it time to make up its mind about going. She passed the time listening to radio music that came out mostly static because she had deliberately damaged the radio five months ago after an argument with her brother-in-law. Toward three thirty, as she was counting her cigarettes, Melanie Cartwright, on her way home, tapped on the roof. Melanie was a friendly sort who seemed to have a new boyfriend, a new “truest love,” every other month. She was good for cigarettes, but she only smoked Viceroys.

“Missed you in school today,” Melanie said. She had her notebook and two books in her arms and her pocketbook was hanging from her shoulder from a long strap. She was a second cousin of Cassandra’s brother-in-law, and at the wedding of Cassandra’s sister, Melanie and another girl had caught the bouquet together and nearly killed each other over who it belonged to.

“Wasn’t up for school today,” Cassandra said. She lit up a Chesterfield.

Melanie was with Anita Hughes, a quiet girl Cassandra had met at Miss Barlett’s apartment. Cassandra knew next to nothing about Anita, but she would forever remember the look on Anita’s face when Anita told the story one evening of how she had trembled and sung for her grandfather one final time at his funeral.

“I see you got Willie’s car again,” Melanie said, laughing. “I bet he don’t know you got it.” Melanie and Anita stood in the street at the driver’s window, and whenever a car passed behind them, they leaned close to the car.

Cassandra blew out smoke and sucked her teeth. “Willie always know when I got his car.”

“Listen,” Melanie said, “you wanna make some money? You know Gladys Harper? She lookin for someone to take her to her father’s in Anacostia.”

Cassandra thought a moment. “I don’t know,” she said. “She gonna pay some chump change or real money?”

“I think she said her mother’ll pay twenty dollars. She gotta take some things over there and they figure it’s cheaper than sendin Gladys alone by cab.”

Anita said that Gladys was still standing in front of Cardozo, and Melanie stepped into the middle of the street and whistled her over. Gladys explained that her mother wanted a few small boxes of stuff taken to Gladys’s father in Anacostia. Cassandra didn’t know Gladys at all, except to see her now and again passing in the school’s halls. Taking boxes from the mother to the father all the way in Anacostia seemed strange to Cassandra, but being an orphan set adrift in the world she had learned that unless it could involve a death mistake, it was best to ask as few questions as possible. And besides, twenty bucks was twenty bucks. Anita and Melanie said they wouldn’t mind coming along: Melanie’s boyfriend had football practice, and Friday evenings Anita’s parents allowed her a bit more leeway than they did on school nights.

“Will this thing hold up down there and back?” Gladys said of the Hudson, looking at it from front to back and up and down. “I don’t want to get stuck out there with my gotdamn father and his bitch whore.”

“It’ll do what I tell it,” Cassandra said, thinking she might get to see a fight. She and Gladys waited while Anita and Melanie took their books home, a short distance away. When they returned, Cassandra started up the car without any trouble and the four drove down Clifton Street to Gladys’s house on 12th Street. The house and the yard were uncommonly immaculate. Such houses made Cassandra nervous, because she associated them with owners who, without warning, smacked the hands of visiting children reaching out with curiosity to touch something.

Mildred Harper set the four girls at her kitchen table and fed them a dinner of reheated fried chicken, string beans, potato salad, and rolls. “My husband and I,” she said to Cassandra as she set out the food, “are separated. My son would take him the things, but he’s out of town right now, and I can’t get any of the other children to take him the stuff. He’s not well enough to come get them.” They sounded like words she had already said a thousand times, had learned to say to get it all out and over with. Anita and Melanie must have heard it before, because they didn’t seem surprised at what the mother was saying. After she had set out the food and told them to help themselves, Mildred Harper gave Cassandra a twenty-dollar bill and three dollars for gas and disappeared into another part of the house.

It was a pleasant Friday evening in early November. The girls set off with an hour or so of the day’s light remaining, and that light came through the last of the autumn leaves still clinging to the trees. The birds, somewhere among those leaves and among the nooks and crannies of buildings, were making a racket as they bedded down. Cassandra felt good, because her stomach was full and she had a little piece of change in her pocket and she had a bed waiting that night at Rhonda’s. At Elson’s at 11th and T she filled up the gas tank. They continued on down 11th Street. As usual when she drove, Cassandra leaned forward, her arms folded over the top of the steering wheel, the cigarette in her mouth bouncing up and down whenever she said anything. Gladys sat in the back, beside Anita, and in her lap was a small box of family photographs, the ones Mildred Harper could bear to part with. In the car’s trunk were two larger boxes, containing the last of her father’s stuff he had left at the house. Melanie, beside Cassandra, was trying to get a decent station on the radio.

“Why don’t you leave it alone,” Cassandra said to her. “You want some music, make your own damn music.”

“I bet not even a hearse radio sound this bad,” Melanie said, and she began to sing “My Guy.”

“Sing it on. Sing it on,” Cassandra said. “I remember the first time I heard Rhonda sing that.”

“At that talent show, right?” Anita said.

“Right,” Cassandra said. “People started standin up and shit and cheerin and everything. I felt sorry for the other people who had to come on after her, cause nobody wanted to hear em. This one girl came on and she was tryin to play the guitar and people started callin for Rhonda, and this girl just gave up and left.”

“I paid my money and didn’t get a good seat,” Melanie said. She had turned the radio volume down, but she continued trying to get a clear station. “Yall better get all the lookin you can at Rhonda now, cause when she gets famous, you won’t be able to get within a hundred feet of her. She won’t even remember your name.”

“You don’t know what you talkin about, girl,” Cassandra said. “Rhonda’s gonna stay the same. I know her. You don’t even know her all that well.”

“They all change, and Rhonda’s gonna change the most. Move out to Georgetown or Chevy Chase, if she still livin round here, and be with all them white people.”

“Oh, fuck you, Melanie!” Cassandra said.

“Fuck you back, Cassandra. I gotta right to say what I think.”

“Not in my car, and not when you don’t know what you talkin about. And if you don’t like it, you can get out and walk your sorry ass back home.”

Melanie became quiet.

“Sing another song, Melanie,” Anita said. “Sing ‘My Guy’ again.”

“No, thas all right,” Melanie pouted, turning off the radio and folding her arms.

“She sound like a gotdamn cat anyway,” Cassandra said.

The birds in their trees continued to make a racket as they turned off 11th onto P Street. Just before 9th, they passed a group moving boxes and furniture into an apartment building across from Shiloh Baptist.

At the light at 9th, Gladys, looking back, asked if Cassandra could back up. “I think thas Joyce and Pearl,” she said. Cassandra backed up until she was in front of the pickup with a used couch in it. “Hey! Hey!” Gladys shouted to a man with a load of boxes. “That Joyce Moses in there?” The man nodded, and Cassandra parked the Hudson behind the truck.

Upstairs, in the front apartment on the second floor, they found Joyce Moses and her friend Pearl Guthrie, heads in kerchiefs, standing in the middle of a nearly empty living room lit by one naked light bulb. Practically everyone at Cardozo knew them — two pregnant girls who had dropped out of school to pool their church mice resources in an effort to make the best head start for themselves and their babies.

“Where the damn party?” Gladys asked.

“Wherever it is, you ain’t invited,” Pearl said, and the two embraced. Cassandra embraced Joyce, took Joyce’s blouse in two fingers, shook it and wanted to know why she wasn’t showing at two months “like all the other cows.” Melanie, after her hellos, went snooping in all the rooms of the apartment. Anita knew only Pearl and held back, standing in the doorway.

The movers were Joyce’s father and Pearl’s father and their relatives and friends. They were finishing up with the couch. Pearl, still with one arm around Gladys, pointed to the place where she and Joyce wanted the couch, and the men set it in place. The room still looked empty. “We gonna make the rounds of Goodwill and Salvation Army tomorrow,” Pearl said, seeing that Gladys noticed how empty the room was.

“If everything where yall want it,” Joyce’s father said, “I’d best be gettin back.” He took his daughter in his arms and he kissed her forehead.

“Tell Mama I’ll try to call her tomorrow,” Joyce said. “Tell her I hope she feelin better soon.”

“She’ll be feelin better tomorrow just before you call. You got my word on that,” her father said.

Pearl’s father gave her some money and embraced her. Then, as if embarrassed with others about, he withdrew and simply held her elbow. Though the room was full of people, there were no sounds except the movement of feet and the noise from outside. The other men had already gone downstairs, and Joyce’s father and Pearl’s father soon followed them. Joyce and Pearl went to the curtainless window to watch them go away. For three or four minutes, as if they had completely forgotten that they had visitors, they stood watching at the window. Then Pearl began to cry and Joyce, once more, told her that it would be all right. “Hush,” she said. “Hush now.”

“Where the hell was them sorry men a theirs?” Cassandra wanted to know when the four were back in the car. “Where the hell was Rufus?”

“I know he was at football practice the other day, cause Dwayne told me he was,” Melanie said. “And nobody in the world know where Kelvin at.”

“I feel like shootin both a them,” Gladys said.

“I’m all for that,” Cassandra said, honking at the slow driver in front of her, “cept for that damn it-take-two-to-tango rule.”

The sun had set by the time they reached 8th and H streets Northeast, and after they had crossed East Capitol Street, Cassandra pulled over to ask directions to Anacostia of a young man.

“Oh, he was sooo cute,” Melanie said, when they were on their way again. “But he not as cute as Dwayne.”

“Thas all you ever think about is some dick,” Cassandra said. Anita and Gladys laughed.

“I’ll have you know me and Dwayne are engaged,” Melanie said.

“Anita knows how to sing. She got a good voice,” Gladys said, wanting something to take the image of her friends standing at the window out of her mind.

“I don’t sing all that well,” Anita said. “I just sing in the choir.”

“Oh, oh. Better cut out all that cussin, ladies,” Cassandra said. “We got one of them choir girls in the car. Where your Bible, honey?”

“I just sing in the choir,” Anita said again. “Nobody sings like Rhonda.”

“You got that right, sugar,” Cassandra said. “And for your information, Melanie, Rhonda went down to sign some contracts today and she already offered me a job with her. Any kind of job I want. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

“She gonna quit school?” Anita said.

“You kiddin? Her father wouldn’t let her do that in a million years, singin contract or no contract.”

Despite the heavy traffic of people going home from work, they found Gladys’s father without much trouble. He lived in a small house on Maple View Place, down the road from St. Elizabeths and not far from Curtis Brothers furniture store. Melanie wanted to stop at the store to see the giant chair they had in the parking lot, but Cassandra told her to get a good look as they drove by because that was as close as Melanie was going to get.

Gladys was out of the car as soon as they stopped and refused anyone’s help with the boxes. She put the small box of pictures under her arm as she carried the larger boxes to the front porch. The woman her father lived with opened the door and helped her take in the boxes, then the woman closed the door. The other girls got out of the car. Melanie, seeing three young men harmonizing up the street, sauntered up to them, and Cassandra and Anita sat on the hood of the car, with Cassandra smoking a Chesterfield and Anita thinking that this was the first time in her life she was seeing Anacostia.

“My grandfather used to say people in Anacostia still lived with chickens and cows,” Anita said after a while.

“Shows you how much you know: They don’t allow em to do that anymore,” Cassandra said. She flicked the cigarette butt into Gladys’s father’s yard. “Even if they did, it wouldn’t tell you much — Anacostia people the best people I ever met in the whole world, chickens or no chickens.” She counted how many cigarettes she had in the pack and decided to hold off on the next smoke. “My mama and daddy came from Anacostia, then they had to go cross the fuckin river to live and get killed in some car crash.” She changed her mind and lit up another Chesterfield, blew out the match, and flicked it into the yard.

Gladys came out of the house, followed by her father. Anita was the only one of the other girls who had ever seen him, and as he walked down to the gate she could see that he was weaker and weighed less than she remembered. At the gate he took his daughter in his arms and kissed her cheek twice, then twice more. The woman he lived with stood in the doorway, her arms crossed and a sweater around her shoulders.

Glady’s father was saying something to her that the two girls could not hear, then, after a few moments, his daughter told him they had to go.

“You call me now, you hear?” her father said. Gladys nodded, but Anita could see that the nod had no truth in it.

Cassandra had to go get Melanie, who was talking under a street lamp with a boy who was standing extremely close to her.

“We goin in the next gotdamn second,” Cassandra said, “with or without you, Miss Engaged.”

“Whew,” Melanie said after everyone was in the car, “I’m glad you got me outta there. The singin was nice and he was cute, but he had the worse breath I ever smelled.”

Gladys was looking back at her father, who stood holding the gate with one hand and waving with the other.

“Must be all them cows and chickens they live with, huh, Choir Girl?” Cassandra said to Anita.

“I don’t know, Cassandra,” Anita said. “But I do know that my name ain’t Choir Girl.”

“Ohhh. Ohh,” Cassandra said. “Excuse me very very much.”

“I felt like slappin that little bitch into next week,” Gladys said. Though they were many blocks from her father, she continued looking back. “The whole time I was standin there I kept askin myself: What does this little bitch have that my mother doesn’t have? And she was treatin my father like he didn’t have a brain in his body. ‘Honey, you chilly? Honey, you wanna put on your sweater? Honey, give her some money fore she go. Honey, make sure you give her our phone number….’” She spewed out the words, as if it were a matter of talking or exploding.

“What we need is a party,” Melanie said. “Help pick us up.”

“Thas what you always seem to need,” Cassandra said.

Melanie ignored her and turned around in the seat to speak to Anita and Gladys. “This guy told me about a party on F Street in Northeast.” She looked out her window to see where they were. “Twelve oh nine F Street.”

“Nine one two,” Cassandra said.

“What?” Melanie said.

“You sure he didn’t say nine one two F Street? Or nine oh one two? One two nine F Street? Or maybe E Street, or C Street?” Cassandra said. “You flicted bitch, you tryin to get us lost, looking for some damn party.”

Melanie deflated and sat back in her seat.

“Why not?” Gladys said. “Why don’t we see if it was twelve oh nine, Cassandra. We ain’t got nothin else better to do. Besides, we still drivin on gas my mother paid for.”

“Sure, why not?” Anita said.

Melanie perked up and Cassandra shrugged her shoulders, saying, “If we get lost, it ain’t my damn fault.” She patted the dashboard for good luck and turned off 8th Southeast onto C Street. But they had no sooner crossed East Capitol when Cassandra began to feel the car hesitate, and just beyond D Street it stopped after Cassandra managed to pull it to the curb. She got out, rocked the trunk a few seconds, and cursed it in a voice passersby could not hear. She was in a different country, and she thought the laws might not be the same for her here.

It was a fairly quiet street, with a few older people sitting on their porches and children playing on either side of the street. Most of the noise was coming from a house across the street where there seemed to be a party going on. A hi-fi was bouncing noise off houses. In front of the house with the hi-fi, a fellow was under the hood of a car and a small boy was beside him shining two flashlights into the maw. The fellow came out of the car, wiped his hands on a rag he pulled from his back pocket. He looked at Cassandra and her car as if deciding what to do, and then came toward her, looking back once or twice to the little boy. He was an awesomely muscled young man no more than eighteen. The muscles looked even more dramatic as the street lamp behind first silhouetted him, then gave way to the brightness of a street lamp on Cassandra’s side of the street.

“Look like you got trouble,” he said to Cassandra, who had opened the hood with Anita’s help. He smelled like the world of dirt and oily metal and rubber Cassandra found under the hoods of all cars. The small boy had followed the guy, but he seemed interested only in shining the flashlights up and down the street, first on this house, then another.

The hi-fi music had pulled Melanie out of the car toward the house, and Gladys followed her.

“I’m Wesley,” the guy said to Cassandra. “You want me to see what I can do with it?” He was country, stone Bama.

“Oh, no. Not really. We just waitin for the midnight train to come by.”

“What?” Wesley said. He had a funny booklike jaw, square and unreal, and Cassandra had the urge to stroke it.

“She means we’d appreciate any help you can give us,” Anita said.

The little boy stepped confidently up to the car and shone the flashlights under the hood. Wesley bent down into the car. Anita followed Melanie and Gladys into the house. Several times Wesley went back across the street to get tools, and Cassandra tried not to let him or the boy or the people on their porches see how much pleasure it gave her to see him walk. He had a very tiny behind that she felt she could cup in both her hands. He seemed entirely comfortable with himself, but was far from being a showoff, and this made him even more endearing. Is this me? she asked herself as she watched him walk. She wanted to believe that the muscles were the result of a life of hard work, not a life in a gym with dozens of other men and tons of dumbbells. “I’ll hold them,” she said to the little boy after a time and took the flashlights. The boy resisted until Wesley told him it was all right. Cassandra leaned into the car beside Wesley and made certain their thighs were touching.

Before long, Wesley had the car running again, and Cassandra cursed it silently.

“It’ll take you home, lady,” Wesley said, “but I wouldn’t trust it after that. A beautiful thing if you take care of it.”

“What do I owe you, Mississippi?” Cassandra said, handing the flashlights back to the boy. “I hope it ain’t much, cause I’m just a poor widow woman.”

Wesley raised his eyebrows, then shook his head, no charge. “No one in this city talks straight, do they?” he said. “You live round here?” The little boy had stepped into the street and was again shining the lights about the houses.

“No. I live in Northwest. Across town. That straight enough for you?”

He nodded. “Bob, get out the street.” And to Cassandra, “Thas my cousin. I live with him and his family over there”—he pointed to the hosue with the music—“my uncle and everybody. Came up from South Carolina to learn some things.” The boy, after a few moments, got in the back seat of Cassandra’s car and at first pretended to fall asleep, then he climbed over the front seat and sat behind the wheel. “You go to movies, lady? Go to picture shows?”

“Every one I can,” Cassandra said.

He took a pencil and piece of paper from his back pocket. “Well, if you give me your phone number, I’ll call you sooner than you can say your name. If you don’t mind. If your people don’t mind.”

As she wrote her sister’s telephone number down, there was a scream from the house with the music. When Cassandra and Wesley reached the porch, Melanie, crying, was coming out of the house with her blouse torn, Anita and Gladys on either side of her.

“What happened!” Cassandra yelled. “What the fuck happened!”

“That guy got rough with me,” Melanie managed to say.

“Who?” Cassandra said. “Who was it?”

A young man followed them out of the house. “It was all a misunderstandin,” he said.

“Was it you, you sonofabitch!” Cassandra grabbed his throat and squeezed. “You try to rape my friend?” The guy was able only to shake his head before Wesley took her arm, held it. “Lady, please don’t do that. He my cousin,” Wesley said.

“I don’t give three fucks who he is!” Cassandra said. She began to struggle, but he held both her arms and the more he held her, the calmer she became. Whatever had been in his eyes before Melanie screamed was there no more and she would have given her arms to have it back.

“It wasn’t him. It was Roger,” a girl said from inside. “He been drinkin too much.”

“Yeah,” Melanie said, “it was that Roger. He got rough. Too rough.”

Wesley called for Roger to come explain himself, but someone said Roger had run out the back door. The three girls helped Melanie into the car. Wesley asked her if she needed anything and she shook her head. Then, all the while looking at Cassandra, he stood with his hands in his back pockets beside the little boy as Cassandra started up the car, which purred into life on the first try. They did not say good-bye.

“That was a close call. Another lesson learned,” Melanie said after they had gone a few blocks. Anita had given her her sweater and Melanie was buttoning it. “This blouse is ruined, though. He’d be a real nice guy if he wasn’t so rough. Should learn to treat a woman like a lady. But he was cute.”

“You know,” Cassandra said, “I’m fuckin tired of all your talk about somebody bein cute all the time. You gettin on my nerves with that shit! You sound like a damn cuckoo clock with just one tune!” For the next two blocks or so she pounded on the horn and rocked her head in exasperation. “You know how many girls pull down their panties and give up the booty just cause some boy is cute! Just cause some boy has some shitty good hair! Just cause somebody has the best rap in the whole damn world! And you, you the leader of them all, Melanie!” Melanie slumped back in her seat. “Thas why nothin ain’t right no more,” Cassandra continued, “cause some dumb bitch like you think this dick-head and that dick-head is so cute! Get some brains, girl! I get so sick and tired of you!”

“I didn’t mean anything by it, Cassandra.”

“That’s your trouble: You never mean anything by it.” She turned to look at Melanie. “And if you had any sense, you’d dump that dick-head Dwayne. He’s the dumbest thing in the world, but he playin you for eighty-nine kinds of fool. But you won’t see that cause he’s sooooo cute.”

“Stop the car,” Melanie said calmly. “Just stop the car right now. I wanna get out.” She began jerking on the door handle. “Stop the car, I said!”

“Don’t tell me what to do! Nobody tells me what to do!”

“I really wanna get out, Cassandra,” Melanie said, moving the handle up and down. “Why do you hate me so much? What have I ever done to you in my whole life to make you hate me so much?” She began to cry. “What harm did I ever do you, thas what I wanna know. Why you against me just because I’m in love with Dwayne? What bad thing I ever did to you in my whole life, Cassandra?”

Melanie got the door open and Cassandra braked. Melanie stumbled out into the street and made her way to the sidewalk. Anita and Gladys followed her. Melanie, first thinking it was Cassandra, pushed Gladys when she put her arm around her shoulders. Anita walked on her other side. Cassandra followed them slowly in the car as the three went down 8th Street. She could not hear what they were saying, but she could see Melanie shaking her head no no no.

At 8th and H streets, the girls stopped and Cassandra, after waiting for the light, turned the car around and parked at the corner, ignoring the NO PARKING sign. Anita, walking backward to face Melanie, held her by the shoulders, and she and Gladys said things that made Melanie look Anita directly in the eye. Little by little Melanie calmed down and stopped crying. She nodded her head once, but Cassandra could see that it was not the yes to get back in the car. She watched them go into the Mile Long at the corner and saw them order sodas and stand at the counter and drink them.

Cassandra wanted a cigarette, but she hadn’t the will to open the glove compartment and pull one from the pack. Across 8th Street a drunk was dancing with the wobbliness of a puppet. Just as he seemed about to fall, his legs collapsing, he would straighten himself and dance around the two little boys who were watching him, then his legs would give out again and the boys would reach out to catch him. The boys’ mother, waiting for a bus, ignored the drunk. Cassandra watched the girls drink the sodas as if they had all the rest of their lives to do it. Gradually, Melanie began to smile, but she continued to hold her soda with both hands. Melanie did not seem to be saying anything, only listening to what the other two said. Serve the bitches right if I take off and leave them here. But Cassandra did not leave, and when the bus came and took the mother and her boys away, she began to worry that the drunk would spot her and come over and dance and make her the center of attention.

Anita was the first to return to the car. “I thought you might have left us,” she said, handing Cassandra a soda.

“It never crossed my mind to do that,” Cassandra said. She set the soda between her legs and did not open it.

“Sure it did,” Anita said. “You were thinkin about what our faces would look like when we got out here and found we didn’t have a ride back to Northwest.” She sat facing Cassandra, her left arm over the back of the seat. “You sat here thinkin how good it would feel to ride off and leave us stranded. You know how I know? Cause I woulda been thinkin the same thing.” She opened the glove compartment and took a cigarette from the pack, stuck it in Cassandra’s mouth, and lit the cigarette. “Probably dyin for one a these, I bet.” Cassandra inhaled and blew smoke out of the side of her mouth. Cassandra looked directly ahead, and then, after she had inhaled again, she closed her eyes with relief. Anita unwrapped a straw and stuck it through the plastic top of the soda cup.

In a few minutes, Melanie got in the back with Gladys. No one said anything until they were well out of Northeast. Gladys asked Melanie to sing something, but Melanie said she wasn’t in the mood for no song.

“Well, what about you, Anita?” Gladys said. “What you feel like hearin, Melanie? ‘My Guy’?” Melanie said nothing. “What about you, Cassandra? What happened to the party we was supposed to have? Anita, how bout ‘Will You Still Love Me’?”

“It’s called ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow.’” Cassandra said.

“I hear the money going down in the jukebox,” Anita said. “Kerchink, ker-chink.” Anita sang:

Tonight you’re mine completely;

You give your love so sweetly.

“I’d pay a quarter for that,” Gladys said.

Anita sang:

Tonight the light of love is in your eyes,

But will you love me tomorrow?

“I’d pay a hundred bucks,” Cassandra said and honked the horn.

Anita sang:

Tonight with words unspoken

you say that I’m the only one

But will my heart be broken

when the night meets the morning sun?

That was how they went the rest of the way home.

Anita sang:

I’d like to know that your love

Is love I can be sure of.

So, tell me now and I won’t ask again,

Will you still love me tomorrow?

Cassandra parked on 12th Street a few doors down from Gladys’s house. She decided to leave the car there for the night and return it to her brother-in-law in the morning. Gladys went home, and the three girls went on up Clifton toward 13th Street. They were about halfway up the block when a little boy ran past them coming from 13th. “Rhonda’s been shot!” he shouted to no one in particular. “Rhonda’s been killed!” The three all knew the boy as the biggest liar in the world. He was followed by his mother, who carried a switch as long as the boy. “You better stop!” the mother hollered. “You just gonna make it worse when I catch you!” The girls laughed.

The chaos on 13th Street began at the corner, with dozens of people standing from the corner up to Rhonda’s house in the middle of the block. The girls could see that 13th Street was blocked off from Clifton to Euclid. There were five or so police cars parked every which way about the street. One had come onto the sidewalk and was facing the low stone wall at Rhonda’s place. Cassandra had begun walking faster after she turned the corner and crossed 13th Street, pushing her way violently through the crowd. Anita held on to her back, and Melanie held Anita’s back. Anita’s mother was standing a few feet from the front of Rhonda’s house where two policemen, unsmiling, arms folded, stood as if they would never again do anything as important. One kept telling people, “Get back, get back.”

“Mama, what happened?” Anita said.

“Jeffrey shot Rhonda,” her mother said. “Jeffrey killed Rhonda.”

“You shouldn’t say that,” Cassandra said. She began calling Rhonda’s name. She called her friend’s entire name, even the two middle ones, which Rhonda hated. There were plainclothesmen in the yard and even more in the house. All the lights in the house seemed to be on, and Cassandra could see the strange men on the first floor and in the basement walking by the windows and talking among themselves. She called Rhonda’s name. Nothing seemed real, not the buzzing of the crowd, not that house lit up from top to bottom as if for a party.

“Honey, it’s true,” Anita’s mother said to Cassandra and took the girl by the arm. Cassandra continued to call. At any moment the hated middle names would bring Rhonda, pretending to be angry, to the window.

“This is Rhonda’s best friend, Mama,” Anita said.

A woman next to Anita’s mother said, “He just shot her for no reason at all. I was playin out there with my grandbaby and I could see her practicin in the basement.” Cassandra stepped toward the policemen with the folded arms and one told her, “Get back, get back.” “He shot her and then just came out here and sat down on the steps,” the woman said, “like he was waitin for a ride to come pick him up.”

Rhonda’s father was a very thrifty man, and had he been there, Cassandra knew, had his daughter been in the basement, alive and practicing, all those lights would not have been on. Melanie took Cassandra’s other arm and began to cry. They took Cassandra back through the crowd and across the street to Clifton Terrace, where Anita lived. Melanie, still crying, hugged the three women, then, as if she had forgotten what she had just done, she hugged Cassandra twice more and went home.

Anita’s father and brother were playing chess at the kitchen table when they came in. Anita and her mother took Cassandra into the girl’s room. Cassandra sat on the bed with her hands in her lap and looked out the window. Anita stood at the foot of the bed, one arm around the bedpost, looking down at Cassandra. An eyeless and very old teddy bear leaning back against her bed pillows had fallen over when Cassandra sat down. The ticking of the Big Ben clock Anita’s grandfather had given her was the loudest sound in the room. In the kitchen, her brother was proclaiming victory over their father for only the third or fourth time in the boy’s life. Beyond her window Anita could see the twinkling lights of Washington.

Anita’s mother came in and gave Cassandra a cup of cocoa sitting in a saucer.

“I got to be goin…I got to be goin to home,” Cassandra whispered, saying bome as if it were a foreign word. Anita told her to drink. Anita watched as her mother helped Cassandra off with her clothes and into one of her mother’s nightgowns.

She made a pallet for her daughter beside the bed and turned out the light when she left the room. Occasionally, Cassandra would drift into what Anita thought was sleep. All the while Cassandra gritted her teeth. Sometime way late in the night, Cassandra spoke out, and at first Anita thought she was talking in her sleep: She asked Anita to sing that song she had sung in the car on the way home. Anita sang; long after her parents had gone to bed, long after she stopped wondering if Cassandra was listening, Anita sang. She sang on into the night for herself alone, her voice pushing back everything she did not yet understand.