All about Skin (10 page)

Renee Simms

I
t must be, DeAnn thought, that her sister was not a sexy thirteen. Not like DeAnn had been the year before. She gathered this by the way the boys in gold chains paused to look up and down at Crystal then turned hugely away. DeAnn had warned Crystal about her little girl hairdos. That day, her sister wore her hair in an Afro puff, which sat like a geranium on the crown of her head. “Not cute,” DeAnn had told her. Crystal said that DeAnn's straightened flip, which swept down over one of DeAnn's eyes, made her look, quote, extra cheap.

DeAnn was not insulted—was never insulted—by Crystal's assessment of her, especially when the boys in chains were turning to glance at DeAnn again. DeAnn was cute. Boys liked her because she was cute. Boys wanted to have sex with her. She liked sex. She'd had sex at least a dozen times, maybe two dozen times. These encounters happened in basements, swimming pools, in wooded fields, at the mall, or in cars if the boys could drive. She couldn't explain how incredible it felt to be with a boy in an unlikely place then return home to eat dinner with her mother and sister. It felt the way Christmas felt before you knew. It felt like someone out there thought you were special. Sometimes, before she did it, DeAnn thought she might explode into a cloud of atoms from anticipation. But afterward, as she'd pull on her jeans, she never felt special. She felt nothing. Mostly, she felt alone.

If she had to live here—in a city that offered her nothing and with parents who moved her toward new terrors—she would, at least, try for sexy.

The boys were still checking her out when DeAnn looked over at them. They stood near the school staircase, a huddle of backpacks, chains, sneakers. DeAnn and Crystal had not gone to public school in years, since Crystal was in second grade and DeAnn in third, so when they walked through the doors of Edward Bigley High School that morning, DeAnn was holding her breath trying to feel how her body was different from the jangle of sounds and rhythms she would join. It was her father's idea that the girls attend a regular high school.

“Where's your homeroom?” DeAnn asked.

Crystal unfolded her class schedule and examined it. “Mr. Glover. Third floor,” she said.

They looked up at the same time. Bigley High was enormous, so big it had elevators. Her mom said that when she'd gone there, the post– World War II boom had swelled the graduating classes to close to a thousand teenagers. In the late sixties, a separate L-shaped wing had been attached to the original building to accommodate the sudden surge in students. Now, there were half that many kids in the whole school and the emptiness made the smallest sound echo throughout the eight floors. From the outside the school looked like a big warehouse, like everything else in Detroit.

“I'll meet you at this staircase at the end of the day,” DeAnn told Crystal.

“We have the interview,” Crystal said.

“I know.”

She watched her younger sister navigate past a group of big-bodied girls. Crystal moved ungracefully: she did a duck-walk down the wide hall.

DeAnn started toward her first class. From her peripheral vision, she saw one of the boys break from the group and begin following her. She stopped to tie her shoe.

“What's up, you new?” the boy asked.

She stayed crouched on the floor and peered up at him with her one exposed eye.

There were no boys at her previous school, Our Lady of Mercy College Preparatory Academy. DeAnn chose her boyfriends back then from the sons of judges, doctors, and legislators with whom her parents socialized. These were preppy black boys who, like DeAnn, lived in neighborhoods of the city where grand homes overlooked tennis courts and a golf course. These boys bought her Coach purses in exchange for the blow jobs that she gave them.

“Who's your homeroom teacher?” the boy asked.

“The name sounds like icky?”

“Miss Nozicki.”

“That's it,” DeAnn said.

The boy had the whitest sneakers she'd ever seen, and a chipped tooth that was graying. Probably from a fight, De Ann thought.

“Miss Nozicki never takes attendance. You can ditch her class.”

DeAnn looked to her left and then right. “Where would I go if I ditched? There isn't much around here.”

“I drove. We could hang out at Belle Isle,” he said. He ran his fingers over the leather face of her purse. “Nice,” he said. “The new Coaches got dope design.”

“Thanks,” DeAnn said.

“So, you coming?”

“Maybe. Are you a senior?”

“Not exactly,” the boy said.

They left campus through a remote door in the B-wing. DeAnn felt the usual thrill; it rattled in her shins as she walked. She had high expectations for their day. Her father believed in high expectations, not for skipping school, but in professional life. That's why he was not content to be a judge and wanted to run for Congress. That's why her dad had formed a political action committee, and why their family would sit for an interview this afternoon with Channel Four News. At one time, DeAnn thought, her family at least pretended to be about academics. It was the reason she and Crystal had attended Our Lady of Mercy. In his conversations with other adults, her father had often mentioned the value of a good education, and the “fight that King waged for little black girls and boys.” Now, DeAnn and Crystal were attending Bigley, which was a decent high school though nothing extraordinary. DeAnn's dad said they were going to Bigley to save money for college. DeAnn understood something different. Her father would have more in common with voters if his daughters attended a public school. But he couldn't say that, just like DeAnn couldn't say that she liked sex. True desires, DeAnn knew, were best kept folded inside your pocket.

She climbed into the boy's car, which was expensive and smelled of the vanilla air freshener they sell at the car wash. He lit a joint and they smoked. Outside the window, the struggling businesses on Jefferson Avenue rolled past like a scene from a detective show. Soon she saw the glittering top of the river as the car drove onto the bridge that led to the municipal island. She was not supposed to be on the island; it was dangerous. In the late nineties, a woman had been beaten on the Belle Isle bridge until she jumped to her death into the river. But that was years ago and DeAnn believed she could protect herself.

The boy parked in the middle of the island next to the water. DeAnn noticed, on the other side of the river, the sad, boxed-shaped buildings of Windsor, Canada, and she thought of her mother. That morning before leaving for school, she saw the keloidal scar where her mothers' breasts used to be. DeAnn pulled off her T-shirt. “Your tits are big,” the boy told her, “bigger than the rest of your body.” DeAnn ignored this. She slid her tongue beneath the rough edge of his chipped tooth. She climbed on top of him and unzipped his jeans. She rocked back and forth and watched his head fall back on the leather headrest as he came. She liked watching him let go.

When they were done he rolled down the windows and wiped his sweaty forehead with the edge of his shirt. “I'm thirsty,” he said. “You want to go to my place and get a bottle of water?”

“Will your parents be at home?” De Ann asked. Her mother did not work. Not before the surgery or after.

“I have my own place not far from here.”

She looked at his leather car seats and gold necklace. “Are you a drug dealer?” she asked.

He laughed. “Bitch, stop asking me questions before I have to kill you.”

DeAnn believed this was one of those jokes that could reveal if she were cool or a punk. She decided not to act unnerved.

He drove to Van Buren Avenue just on the outskirts of downtown. The buildings on Van Buren were more rundown than those on Jefferson had been. At least Jefferson Avenue had the mirrored General Motors building and a view of the river. Here, in the middle of the city where everything was concrete and gray, the storefronts had hand-painted signs and bars over the windows. There was no pretense of urban revitalization in this neighborhood.

They pulled up to a dark building that had a Mohawk Vodka ad painted onto its brick façade. Now it was DeAnn's turn to be sarcastic. “Oh nice,” she said. “You live in an abandoned building?”

“It ain't abandoned. It just looks that way,” he said.

He told her his name was Curtis and led her through a side door. DeAnn noticed that there wasn't a proper lobby and that the floor was concrete that had not been covered with carpeting or tiles. DeAnn saw a few doors but they lacked apartment numbers.

“We have to go up to the second floor,” he told her. He approached an elevator shaft where a freight car should have been. There was no door over the shaft. Instead there was just a huge canyon that looked like it could swallow you whole. DeAnn was no longer amused.

“How old are you?”

“I'm twenty. I graduated from Bigley two years ago.”

He pushed the button to call the elevator car. He turned to look at DeAnn. She'd stopped several feet away.

“The building's raw, I know,” he said. “A handful of artists live here. You have to hear about the place from someone who knows.” As he talked, the freight elevator appeared before them.

“We can take the stairs if you'd feel more comfortable.”

“You're an artist?” DeAnn asked.

“Art student,” he said. “I'm studying industrial design.”

Curtis unlocked the door to his loft, which was one long sweep of workman space. The unit was big enough to fit a table-saw, lathe, and other woodcutting equipment. A wooden wardrobe that he'd made sat in the middle of the room. There were no straight lines on the wardrobe, only wavy ones, its legs as curvy as a woman's. The furniture looked alive. It looked like something drawn by Dr. Seuss.

“That's different,” DeAnn said.

“One of my professors wants to enter it into an exhibition in New York,” Curtis said. He ran his hand along the left side of the wardrobe.

“How did you know you could do this?” she asked.

“Do what? Make furniture?”

“Yeah.”

“I didn't.”

Curtis walked over to a compact refrigerator and retrieved two bottles of water. “I better call the school,” DeAnn remembered. She dialed the school office on her cell phone. “Hi, this is Judge Porter's wife,” she began. “I'm calling to let you know that my daughter came home this morning. She wasn't feeling well. DeAnn Porter. Thank you.”

Curtis looked at DeAnn. DeAnn looked at the loft. Clearly, it had not been renovated for residential use. Wires sprouted from some of the electrical sockets. The floors were unfinished. The room lacked insulation and was cold.

DeAnn decided that she could never live in this building, but being there made her believe that she could live somewhere else. Somewhere unexpected.

Curtis walked over to her with the water. When she'd taken a sip and had placed the bottle on the floor, he took her hand and placed it on his cock. She gently squeezed his testicles. She wondered if she'd ever get used to how male genitals felt and looked. Testicles reminded her of jellied sea creatures.

“What's so funny?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said. To stifle her laughter, she practiced a sultry look. She narrowed her eyes and slowly parted her lips.

Curtis dropped her off at school before the end of seventh period. She entered the school through the same door through which she'd left. She passed the rows of empty classrooms in the B-Wing. Why were so many buildings empty in the city?

Soon the bell rang and DeAnn was in a section of the school where kids ran about the hallways talking smack. She made her way to the staircase. She saw Crystal's profile from among the crowd. From that angle, DeAnn saw how her sister's upswept hair complimented her long, slender neck. Two boys walked past Crystal and looked her over. “Erykah Badu,” one of them said. “Erykah Ba-doo-doo,” the other one cracked. DeAnn elbowed past them.

“Where have you been?” Crystal asked her.

“Come on,” DeAnn said, “I saw mom's car out front.”

Their mother sat in a Volvo at the curb. She looked relieved to see their faces. “How was your first day?” she asked as they climbed inside. “Bigley's not bad, huh?” DeAnn saw that it had not been a good day for her mother. Her mom had dark circles beneath her eyes. DeAnn hated pretending that her mom's life was not collapsing around her knees. “It was perfect,” DeAnn replied.

They arrived home as the Channel Four News truck drove up their tree-lined street and onto their circle driveway. DeAnn's mother pulled the car into the garage. Her father met them there in a pale blue shirt and red tie. He looked at his watch.

“That was a little close,” he said to DeAnn's mother.

When DeAnn got out of the car, she saw her father's eyes move over her body with the proprietary look that she hated. “Precious, go comb your hair out of your eyes,” he said.

DeAnn went to the bathroom off the foyer. She left the door open and watched as her sister and mother went to greet the news people, who were now coming through their front door with lights and cameras. DeAnn grabbed a comb from the drawer within the vanity. She pulled it through her thick roots. She knew that she stood inside her house although she felt anywhere but there. She was outside the bathroom window, above the Mohawk Vodka building. She was igniting far away: exploding, emerging, gone.

She decided her hair was fine and joined her family on the sofa. When the photographer began his urgent clicking, she stared down the camera's dark lens.

Ramola D

W
hen Dr. Sabina Kannan, the youngest gerontologist in America, was seventeen, she returned one morning from her daily run to find her parents' secluded Vienna home encircled by protesters. She paused a moment, then zigzagged through the crowd, fine misty rain of a Virginia spring cool on her sweaty skin, her jerky jog-jog
Excuse Me
s cutting a swath through young mothers pushing babies in strollers, little girls in light-up princess shoes, oily-haired teenagers with printed blue bandannas knotted at necks, older women and men in nondescript barn coats. The protesters held up handmade cardboard signs with grainy black-and-white photos pasted on top, of cats, dogs, monkeys, in restraining devices, with open wounds. Sabina wrenched her eyes away; she could not bear to look. She hurtled past the sodden magnolia, past the splitting-open of taut umber buds, past the dampened trunk. Stop Experimenting on Animals, the signs said silently. Let Animals Live Free. A thin blonde woman in narrow jeans was leading the group in a chant. Her intense blue eyes fixed on Sabina.
Stop hurting animals
, she shouted.
Shame Shame on you!
The crowd echoed, waved signs, and poured up the drive, stopped only by her father's black Cadillac and her mother's beige Camry from engulfing the lawn, the front steps.