I did understand. I’d never known of anybody being killed before. Other than Uncle Junie dying of Leukemia in 1980, I’d never seen a dead body. I didn’t know Uncle Junie was dead until at his funeral I yelled for him to get up and stop acting like he was asleep and Momma slapped me hard across the side of my face. Only then had I seen what death looked like, drenched in pain and sadness. As I stared at my uncle in that casket, I was glad I had never told what Pee Wee was doing.
“Laurie,” he said, “I want you to lay on this bed and be quiet. Don’t say nothing and don’t you cry. Just lay here and I’m going to lay on top of you. You hear me?” I nodded again.
I was actually relieved all I had to do was let Pee Wee “do-the-nasty” to me like Ryan had. With Ryan, I’d never gotten the satisfaction of sinking my teeth into the dirty flesh of the potato, but at least I’d have my family if I let Pee Wee do what he wanted. So, he grabbed me by my wrist and led me to the bed. I wasn’t even afraid, even though I didn’t have Champ to count down from ten for me.
“Lay down,” he said as I plopped my torso onto the bed and turned my head toward the open window.
“Open your legs.”
I moved my right leg sharply to the edge of the bed as if I were opening a pair of scissors.
“Move your hands off your chest.”
I quickly pulled them close to my sides and grabbed my shorts. Pee Wee then grabbed my shorts and underwear in one fist and pulled them down to my ankles. The heat contained in the fabric radiated across my skin. I was confused; “doing the nasty” had never required the removal of clothing, especially underwear. I didn’t know what Pee Wee was planning on doing, but I wanted so badly to tell him he was doing it wrong.
The house went silent and I could only hear the hum of the refrigerator cycling on and off in the kitchen. Pee Wee then laid his body on top of mine. The heat of his skin made me feel sticky. If I turned my left foot inward, I could feel the joint clinking in his right knee. He was still for a moment and then began deeply inhaling and exhaling as his stomach muscles pressed into my chest. He moved his hand down and began rubbing on something; I was almost certain it was his penis or “dookey” as Champ and I often called it. I smelled the lotion Momma always rubbed on us after we took a bath and wondered why he was rubbing it there. Momma had always told me and Champ never to put anything on our private areas because it could make my “biscuit” and Champ’s “dookey” sick. I began to wonder why she’d never told Pee Wee that.
Pee Wee then touched me and my body went into a spasm. No matter how many times I’d “done the nasty” with Ryan and Tyler, no one had ever touched that part of me. Pee Wee’s fingers felt like ice and I became happy my shorts and underwear were around my ankles because my feet were cold. Then, I felt something hot, even harder than his fingers pressing against me, my private spot, my space. His stomach muscles contracted. With a grunt from his chest he forced pressure into me. My legs attempted to snap shut, but met the resistance of his outer thighs.
His rhythm made my body flinch. With each down beat, each pull, I knew the stinging, burning, pressure that would follow. Unlike Ryan, Pee Wee seemed to have a purpose for his pulsing, his pushing and each thrust cut a piece of me out of me. I wanted to scream, to release the pressure and the heat from between my legs into a howl, but I couldn’t; my family’s life depended on me doing exactly what he told me to do. So, I bit hard the inside of my lip and tasted blood running through me.
I turned my head to the window, then back toward Pee Wee. All I could see was his neck and the dark lines that ran across it. Then I looked down at my belly, my once round belly I had relished on nights when Momma cooked biscuits from scratch and navy beans. I found it to be flat, empty.
My fingers stiffly clenched my sides, grabbing onto skin with each thrust and releasing with each retraction. Then, I lifted my head from the bed, wanting to see what was causing so much pain—hoping I could find a remedy if I could see what the problem was. Then I saw him, disappearing into me. I’d only seen a penis when Momma made Champ, Dathan, and me take baths together in order to conserve water, but I’d never seen anything as dark and ugly as what was going in and out of me. I worried it would turn the bottom half of me black and everybody would know how bad of a girl I was.
I was too afraid to cry tears, so I cried in my mind. I went back to a time when my cousin Tedren had taken me to a mall and decided to go up the escalators instead of the stairs. Somehow, I separated from her, but I saw myself as I stood, afraid of the moving stairs while she waited for me at the top. I, at the bottom, was too afraid to take that first step. I remember her looking down at me, clapping her hands, telling me it was safe. But all I could see were those silver, moving stairs swallowing me whole. So, I stood there and cried out with every ounce of fire I had until she came back down, picked me up, and took me safely up the stairs. Those tears stained my cheeks long after we left the mall, so I had no doubt there were enough to spare for the tears I could not cry while Pee Wee was on top of me.
Pee Wee’s rhythm began to quicken and his breathing turned from intermittent grunts to long huffs every few seconds. Soon after, I went numb, unable to feel my hands, my feet, and anything in between. Suddenly, he lay completely limp on me and the feeling slowly returned to my body. I felt his sweat, his heat, latent against the inside of my thigh. He rolled off of me like a leech swollen with blood and lay flat on his back. Pee Wee then turned his eyes to me and looked right into mine. “Don’t forget what I told you,” he said, “If you don’t want your Momma dead, then you better not tell anybody.”
He didn’t have to warn me again. I knew telling would only mean bad things for me. “Now go into the bathroom and pee,” he said.
I was so grateful to be out of Momma’s room, so afraid I would have to go back, that I forced urine out of me as quickly as my bladder would allow and wiped from front to back as Momma had always instructed me to. I felt a void, an absence of flesh in the middle of me, even though I saw red tears trickling onto the surface of the water. I wiped again, front to back, and then again, front to back, until the red trickles ceased.
By the time I left the bathroom, Pee Wee was on the loveseat, watching television. His legs were in their usual position, draped along the arm of the chair and he had one hand resting on his belly, while the other one was wedged behind his neck.
“Get me a cup of Kool-Aid, Laurie. Then you can go back outside. You can have a cup for yourself too.” I poured Pee Wee’s Kool-Aid in a glass that had a crack, which ran from the bottom of the cup to the brim. I stared at it curiously, wondering how it still had strength to hold itself together while so broken. Then I poured a cup for myself. I sat there and sipped the Kool-Aid, afraid if I gulped, I would choke. It was cold going down my throat, but it tasted saltier than it did sweet. I realized the sweet was mixing with the sweat on my upper lip, which made me think of Pee Wee’s sweat. After that, I couldn’t drink anymore. I tiptoed past Pee Wee, placed the cup on the coffee table, and found the once locked door, unlocked and slightly opened. I carefully went down the stairs and sat where the porch and the steps met. Champ and Dathan had finished their last match with Ryan and Tyler and were covered in dirt. They ran over to me on the porch, panting out words that were supposed to describe how they’d kicked Ryan’s and Tyler’s butts. Dathan spotted the red line atop my lip and asked, “Laurie, you got some Kool-Aid? I want some? How come you able to get some when it’s not lunch or dinnertime?”
“Yeah,” Champ echoed, “How come you were able to get some?”
I didn’t know what to say. I had no answer for what I had done, what acts had led to what I once thought was a gift. Champ then began making his way up the stairs, “I’m gonna ask Pee Wee can I have some, too,” he said, envy floating through his words.
“Champ, you don’t want to do that,” I said, afraid Pee Wee would think I had told and Champ possibly wanted the same thing I had gotten.
“Why not,” Champ asked, “If you got some, I can have some.”
“Yeah,”