Jeff paused to give him a concerned look. “You okay? Need some water?”
Cameron considered telling the stranger to mind his own business, but he held up a hand to indicate he was fine. When Jeff moved on, Cameron went back to thinking about Imani even though he didn’t want to. She was like a scab that he couldn’t help picking at.
They had both been in their senior year of high school when he met her at a party. He usually avoided the kind of parties his friends threw, with liquor and loud music and making out in the stairwell and fistfights or worse in the alley behind the apartments. They weren’t even his friends-just guys he happened to know because they went to school together or lived in the neighborhood. But on this day he had just sent off the last of his college applications and was feeling celebratory. And perhaps a bit nostalgic. Soon all this would be behind him. He was certain of getting into a good college. His grades were excellent; his recommendations enthusiastic; he was on the track team, and for the last couple of years, he had taken care to stay out of trouble. Following the advice of his biology teacher, who had become a mentor, he volunteered regularly at the local hospital. His counselor had declared that all these credentials, added to Cameron’s unfortunate background-impoverished, orphaned, first-generation college applicant-would probably snag him a scholarship. At first Cameron had resented the counselor’s patronizing manner. Like some second-rate prestidigitator, the counselor tried to turn the painful truths of Cameron’s existence into advantages. Cameron had wanted to say something cutting, to walk out of the man’s office, slamming the door behind him. But he had held on to his temper. If doing so helped him get where he needed to go, Cameron could put up with a little patronizing.
Cameron wanted to be a doctor. He guarded this fragile dream jealously, not confiding it to anyone except his biology teacher. His friends would ridicule it, and even his well-meaning, churchgoing aunt, with whom he had lived since his parents had died, would shake her head in warning and say, “Boy, you aimin’ above your station.” Blindsided by infatuation in the months following the party at which they had met, he had ventured to share his goal with Imani, but that turned out to be an error.
At the party, he’d had a couple of beers. When he first saw Imani being pushed into the middle of the room by a couple of other girls, he didn’t recognize her because she went to a different school. She resisted her friends, but when someone turned off the music, she squared her shoulders, stood tall, and began to sing. She was good, definitely, but not so exceptional in this community; almost every family had a member in a church choir. So what was it about this girl that captured his attention and his breath? Her hair was too nappy, her skin too dark. She looked good in the red sweater she wore over a black skirt-but several girls there looked better. Was it the passion with which she sang, eyes closed, leaning into the song? Or the song itself, the haunting, dragged out notes of “My Man He Don’t Love Me”? Cameron had never heard that song before; it would go deep into him, lodging like a guinea worm, emerging whenever it wanted to. It pulled him across the room to introduce himself to Imani, to offer to get her a drink, to listen with fascination to her chatter, though later he couldn’t remember what she had said. By the end of the party, he had-most uncharacteristically-exchanged phone numbers and set up a movie date for the next evening. Maybe that’s why the relationship was doomed from the first: the person Imani fell for wasn’t the real Cameron.
Their romance sped through winter into the beginnings of spring. He rushed to get his homework done before he went to his job at the grocery, where he was a stocker, so he could pick her up after her shift at Burger King. Sometimes on Friday nights they went to the movies or to a club. Mostly they spent hours in his beat-up Chevy, parked on a quiet street where they wouldn’t be disturbed by gangs or cops, talking or listening to music or singing along with the radio-or groping. Evenings when she knew her mother wouldn’t be home, they went to her apartment. He fixed her grilled cheese sandwiches and listened to her sing; she initiated him into the mysteries of the female body. Tangled together in bed afterward, he felt an easefulness that was foreign to him. Usually, he had to be constantly doing something, pushing himself. But at these times he felt he could lie there forever.
Then, as the oleanders began to bloom and the orioles started flying back north and universities began sending acceptance letters, Cameron and Imani’s relationship grew strained. After graduation, Imani was going to increase her hours at Burger King (her mother said it was time she helped with the rent) while she took classes part-time at the local community college. She couldn’t understand why Cameron couldn’t do something similar. The manager at the grocery liked him. Her friend Latisha, who worked one of the cash registers there, had informed her that he’d offered Cameron a position as assistant manager-with benefits. “In a couple years,” Imani told Cameron, “we be saving up some. Get our own place. Get married.” She offered him a shy smile. When Cameron said that he would find that kind of life stifling, she flinched as though he’d slapped her in the face. On the increasingly rare occasions when she sang, the blues tunes he had loved earlier seemed loaded with reproach: “Crazy He Calls Me,” “Lonely Grief.”
They argued almost every time they met. Imani would cry and invoke sayings from her grandmother, a Jamaican obeah woman; Cameron would feel guilty and attempt to console her. If they were at her apartment, they would end up in bed. On the day he learned that a prestigious private college had offered him admission and a sports scholarship, she came into the grocery to say hello. Exhilarated into garrulity, he told her his news. She called him an Oreo, speaking loud enough for his coworkers to hear and snigger. It was the last straw for him-that she would want to ruin the moment of his greatest achievement. When he took her out to the parking lot to tell her this was the end, she informed him that she was pregnant. He could see she was scared, but beneath the fear was a kind of triumph: now he would have to stay with her and take responsibility for the baby.
Cameron was furious-and terrified. The ghetto seemed to be closing in on him. He told her that he refused to be manipulated. He was going to college. If she thought she could stand in his way, she was mistaken. He recommended an abortion. He would scrape together the money to pay for it. He couldn’t do any more than that.
At the mention of abortion, she stopped crying and grew very quiet. “You want to kill our baby?” she asked. “It so important for you to get away from your people?”
He started saying that the mess he saw every day around him was not his people, and he wasn’t alone in wanting to get away. All around him young men were enlisting in the army, being shipped to the jungles of Vietnam. But she was wringing her hands. No, she was making some kind of a complicated design in the air with her fingers. Was Imani putting some kind of voodoo on him? He shook off the ridiculous idea.