Brina rolled her eyes and flipped me the bird. I turned the radio up, even though there was more static in it than a woman’s nylon half slip straight out the clothes dryer, and started bopping my head to Cheryl Lynn schooling nuccas about how they “Got to Be Real.” “Dang, that’s my song,” I proclaimed.
“ E-ve-ry cool song that comes on is your dang song.” Brina chuckled. She was right too, ’cause on any given day, I had at least twenty favorite songs but rarely knew the words to them. Ironically, the only songs I could ever manage to memorize were the ones I hated. Ain’t that a bitch?
Brina started bopping her head in unison with my naps while she did one last lipstick check in her rearview mirror before pulling off. We rode all the way to school with the bass controller on the system turned as far to the right as humanly possible without one of us breaking a nail. It made the car shake from side to side at every stoplight while we gyrated our hips to the beat.
I spotted Jason’s Camaro the second we pulled up in the parking lot. I wondered if he was somewhere arm-in-arm with Chandler, and if he’d picked her up that morning. His car was already gone when I got up. I checked.
Brina threw something on my face, blocking my vision. I yanked it off and realized it was a navy blue bathing suit. I held it up, looking at her quizzically. “What’s this for?”
“Oops, I meant to tell you. Ms. Rankin caught me on the way out of class yesterday and asked if you and I could sit in the dunking booth today, so I brought an extra suit for you from home.”
I threw my hands on my hips and clucked my tongue. “Dunking booth! What the hell happened to being clowns?”
Brina cut off the ignition and opened up her door. I followed her out of the car. “She still wants us to be clowns too, but we can take turns doing both. She was going to do the dunking booth herself, but she has a cold.”
I raised my hands to my hair. “I can’t do the dunking booth. My hair is messed-da-hell-up, and I was counting on wearing that stupid clown wig to hide my naps.”
We started walking toward the football field where the fair was being held. “Zoe, your hair’s not looking bad at all. In fact, it looks real cute.”
I crossed my arms and paused briefly, tapping my right foot on the gravel parking lot, to inhale her bullshit. “Yeah, right! You know my hair is toooooooo through.”
“You just think that, but it’s straight. You know how it is?” She stopped and turned around to face me. “Whenever your hair is filthy dirty, thicker than a ton of bricks, and pinned up, that’s when peeps come out of the woodwork with compliments.”
I had to give it to her, ’cause she did have a point. That always seemed to happen.
“It’s when you spend eight damn hours at a beauty shop under a hot-ass dryer listening to old-ass women complain to each other about men, kids, and other women that you have to almost beat a hair compliment out of some damn body.”
I laughed because she was right on the money. “Aight, whatever, but I want to do the dunking booth first. I have something I need to do a little later.”
Brina’s eyes bulged. “Something like what?”
I looked down at the gravel, kicking a few pebbles around and blushing. “Just something.”
“Does this something have a name that begins with a J?” I giggled. “By the way, what happened to Mohammed? I thought he was coming. I was surprised when I got your message about coming to get you this morning.”
I grabbed her by the arm and started pulling her toward the field. I was suddenly in a hurry to get the whole sordid business over with, one way or another. I had no clue how I was going to approach the situation, but it had to be done. “Come on, Brina. I’ll explain it all to you later.”
Ten seconds after I sat down on the two-by-four doubling as a bench in the dunking booth, I was regretting letting Brina talk me into the shit. First came the comment from this high-yella, snaggletoothed nucca with a lopsided high-top fade and freckles. “Damn, Youngen, look at her hair!” His little sidekicks, none of them out of the eighth grade, pointed and laughed at me. I just waved them off, hoping they would go try their luck at a cap toss game or something else at one of the other booths. No such luck.
Five minutes later, I was the one laughing at their asses. They couldn’t hit the metal bull’s-eye on the dunking booth if their lives depended on it. They all took turns, wasting some of the ten bucks apiece their mommas probably gave them to get rid of them for the day.
“Damn, Youngen, you didn’t even come close to her!” Snaggletooth was guffawing and hitting his boy on the back after the sorry excuse for a pygmy missed the target by a good two feet, and the baseball ended up in a trash can.
“Shit, not like you did any better,” he retorted, trying to swallow his pride.
I started getting in on it. “Personally, I think all of you need to go home and lift some weights because you all look like skinny midgets from up here where I’m sitting!”
They didn’t know how to react when a girl came at them like that. They looked at each other dumbfounded, and finally decided to go waste some money on something else. “Come on, Youngen. This shit’s boring!”
An hour later, I was kind of hoping to get dunked, but to no avail. At least fifty peeps had tried, and only three or four of them even hit the edges of the target, much less the bull’s-eye.
It was hot as hell out there. Add in the sun beaming on me through the glass surrounding the top of the b
ooth, and it was ten times worse. I felt like I was sitting in a sauna. Thoughts of an old movie where a boy used a magnifying glass and sunlight to set a cricket on fire flitted through my head.
Just when I was convinced my dry nappy hair was going to catch on fire any second like a pile of bushweed and leave me looking like the victim of a witch hunt in Salem, Jason, Chandler, and the rest of their clique walked up to the booth. She had her arms around his waist. How dare she?
Chandler taunted me. “Look who it is! It figures they would put her in there instead of Ms. Rankin. Half the school would love to dunk her.”