Big Henry is grabbing at Marquise’s feet, trying to pull him off the rope. Marquise kicks, and Big Henry tugs so hard on the rope, the limb it’s tied to cracks so loud that it sounds like a big bone popping.
“Oh, shit!” Marquise yells, and then he’s letting go of the rope, but it is too late, because it’s all falling on Big Henry’s head. I am laughing so hard my ribs hurt, but when Manny surfaces like a jumping fish next to me, popping up out of the water like the best kind of prize, I stop. The laugh turns to a scratch in my throat.
“What’s up, Esch?” Manny’s looking at Big Henry and Marquise struggling with the branch in the water, Randall swimming over to help. He talks to me out the side of his face. Skeet is still scrubbing his skin off, not watching us. Manny dives under the water and comes up on my right, still staying far enough away from me that I can’t reach out and touch him.
“Nothing.” I swallow the words.
“You was scared to take off your clothes in front of us?” Manny is grinning, but he’s not looking at me, and he’s swimming in slow circles so he’s orbiting me like the moon. Or the sun.
It’s a little noise that comes out of my throat then.
“Scared to let everybody see what you look like?”
I shake my head.
“It ain’t that bad,” he says.
“Not bad?” I breathe, and I am ashamed because I am repeating what he says.
“Something like that.” He jams a finger into his ear and then shakes his head so fast water comes flying off him like a dog. His bottom lip is pink and full, while his top is a shy line. I have dreamed about kissing him. Around three years ago, I saw him having sex with a girl. He and Randall had talked her into coming back to the Pit with them when Daddy was out, and I heard them all laughing when they passed underneath the window. I followed them into the woods. When they got to the pit, Manny grabbed her butt and rubbed her stomach the way a man pets a dog’s side, and then the girl laid down for him. He was on top of her, moving his hand up and down in between her legs, and then he kissed that girl. Twice, three times. He opened his mouth so wide for her, licked her like he was tasting her, like she was cane sugar sweet. He was eating her. I wonder when he stopped kissing girls like that, or if he just doesn’t want to kiss me. Now he circles, half looking at me, half looking at Big Henry and Marquise. He grabs my hand and pulls it toward him, wraps my fingers around his dick.
“Not too bad,” he says. I want to know what it feels like, so I reach out under the water to touch his chest, his nipples the size of red grapes. They are much softer than that. The skin in the seams of his muscles is the color of Sugar Daddy caramel candy. Manny pulls away. “What are you doing?” His dick slides out of my hand, hot in the cool water: then gone.
“I just wanted-”
“Esch.” Manny says it like he’s disappointed, like he doesn’t know who this girl who reached out to touch him is. His profile is sharp, and it shines like a polished penny in the fire. His bottom lip thins when he smiles. “You crazy?”
My hand is still tingling from where he grabbed it and pulled it toward him.
“No.” I meant to say his name; this is what comes out instead.
“Naw, Esch.” He kneads the water, pushing himself up and kicking away from me. “You know it ain’t like that,” he says, and the pain comes all at once, like a sudden deluge.
Manny swims to Randall, who is walking up to the shore, pulling on his clothes. Manny’s back is a shut door. His shoulders are beautiful. I imagine myself on his back now, him swimming me across the deep water, carrying me to solid ground. How the other Manny would turn to kiss me in the water, to eat my air. How he would hold my hand on land instead of wrapping it around his dick underwater. When I tell him about my secret, will he turn to me? I push out all my breath and sink, my head hot. Is this how a baby floats inside its mother? I cup my stomach, hear Daddy say something he only says in his sober moments: What’s done in the dark always comes to the light. I loved Manny ever since I saw him kissing that girl. I loved him before he started seeing Shaliyah, skinny, light-skinned, and crazy, who is always trying to beat up other girls that she thinks he’s messing with. Once she broke a bottle over Marquise’s cousin’s head down at the Oaks Club on teen night. Shaliyah. She has the kind of eyes that always move fast back and forth like a cat’s. He talks about other girls with Randall, but he always comes back to her: complaining about the way she checks his phone, the way she calls him all the time, the way she only cooks once a week, the way she leaves his clothes in piles around the trailer they share so that he has to do his own laundry so he’ll have something to wear to his job at the gas station. I saw her once at the park, and her crazy cat eyes looked right over me: neither prey nor threat. I loved him before that girl. I imagine that this is the way Medea felt about Jason when she fell in love, when she knew him; that she looked at him and felt a fire eating up through her rib cage, turning her blood to boil, evaporating hotly out of every inch of her skin. I feel it so strongly that I cannot imagine how Manny does not feel it, too.
My belly is solid as a squash, because there is this baby inside me, small as Manny’s eyelash in mid-sex on my cheek. And this baby will grow to a fingertip on my hip, a hand on the bowl of my back, an arm over my shoulder, if it survives. I think it is for Manny; he is the only person I have been having sex with for the past five months. Since he surprised me in the woods while I was looking for Junior and grabbed me, knew my girl heart, I have only let him in. Once we had sex for the first time, I didn’t want to have sex with anyone else. I either shrug and pretend like I don’t hear Marquise or Franco or Bone or any of the other boys when they hint. They ask, and I walk away because it feels like I’m walking toward Manny.
There is a sound above the water; someone is shouting. When I surface and breathe, my lungs pulling for air, Skeetah is the only one left, and he is silent. Bats whirl through the air above us, plucking insects from the sky while they endlessly flutter like black fall leaves. Skeetah watches me swim to him and the dirt, watches me dress in my soapy clothes, and says nothing before turning to lead the way through the dark, naked.
THE FOURTH DAY: WORTH STEALING
Fleas are everywhere. Walking toward Mother Lizbeth and Papa Joseph’s house, I wade through scummy puddles of them. They jump and stick to my legs like burrs, biting, until I stand on what’s left of the porch: a couple of two-by-fours leaning at a slanted angle against the house like an abandoned pier sinking below storm-rising water, the tide of the earth rolling in to cover them. The screen door has long disappeared, and the front door hangs by one hinge. I have to push the wood, which flakes away to dust in my hands, and squeeze sideways through cobwebs tangled with leaves to get into the house.
The house is a drying animal skeleton, everything inside that was evidence of living salvaged over the years. Papa Joseph helped Daddy build our house before he died, but once he and Mother Lizbeth were gone, we took couch by chair by picture by dish until there was nothing left. Mama tried to keep the house up, but needing a bed for me and Skeet to sleep in, or needing a pot when hers turned black, was more important than keeping the house a shrine, crocheted blankets across sofas as Mother Lizbeth left them. That’s what Daddy said. So now we pick at the house like mostly eaten leftovers, and Papa Joseph is no more than overalls and gray shirts and snuff and eyes turned blue with age. I remember more of Mother Lizbeth alive. I’d sit on her lap and play with her hair, gray and straight and strong as wire. I would help her take her medicines: two handfuls of pills she had to take every day, by handing them to her one by one. She would feed me sweet figs, still warm as the day, we picked from a tree behind the house. She’d laugh at me, said I ate figs careful as a bird; her smile was black and toothless. And sometimes she was sharp, didn’t want to be hugged, wanted to sit in her chair on the porch and not be bothered. When she died, Mama told me that she had gone away, and then I wondered where she went. Because everyone else was crying, I clung like a monkey to Mama, my legs and arms wrapped around her softness, and I cried, love running through me like a hard, blinding summer rain. And then Mama died, and there was no one left for me to hold on to.