I Ain't Me No More Read online

  When I got older, I did the math and realized that at the time my mom was pregnant and had me, she and my dad were married. So one would have only assumed that the child my mother was giving birth to was my father’s. Evidently, that wasn’t the case. It didn’t take a Chinese math scholar who had graduated first in his class to figure out I was a product of adultery. So who was my real father? Where was he? Would I ever meet him?

  I imagined the sit-down between my biological father and me being like an episode of Little House on the Prairie or something. All would be forgiven and forgotten, and then we’d move on to the next episode and live happily ever after. That never happened.

  At least I had figured out why my skin was darker than everyone else’s in my family. So every time I looked in the mirror, I was reminded of who I wasn’t, instead of who I was.

  Stone Number Three

  One thing my mom didn’t have to worry about with her youngest daughter when it came to entering high school was having boy trouble. Boys never gave me a second look, especially when I stood next to Lynn. Although her hair was as thick and as rough as a lamb’s wool, it was long and gorgeous and always professionally done. She had these big, beautiful brown eyes and could dress her petite butt off.

  I was tomboyish. I figured, why bother worrying about nice clothes, getting my hair done, and trying to be cute? At the end of the day I was still going to be invisible. So in addition to not caring about my appearance, I didn’t care much about my body, so obesity plagued me all the way up until high school, at least until after my ninth grade year. It was then when I realized that appearance mattered more than anything to high school kids. So by the time I went back to school for my sophomore year, I was barely recognizable.

  “Helen, is that you?” people were asking me to my face.

  “Is that Helen?” people were asking each other behind my back as I strolled down the school hallway like my father had been this great philanthropist and the school had been renamed in my family’s honor.

  “Yep, it’s me,” I was proud to say, running my hands down my new figure.

  “I see you, Miss Helen,” this guy named Roman said as he walked by me and a few of my friends.

  I watched him walk away and dang near melted. I’d gone to school with Roman since elementary school, and he’d never spoken to me. This was confirmation that all the hard work and dedication over the past summer had paid off.

  Feeling like I couldn’t fit in anywhere, I had refused to go back to high school overweight. I had stopped running to the store every five minutes to get those twenty-five-cent Little Debbie snacks or cream sodas. I exercised every single day. Back then the music video stations actually played music videos, so I would turn to one of those channels and dance my butt off. So by the time I went back to school, yes, I had danced my butt off literally. I was thirty pounds lighter, going from a size 16/18 to a 10/12.

  I started hanging around this girl named Rochelle who had been in a few of my classes in ninth grade. She was always nice enough and spoke to me, but we had never hung out or anything. She had her own little clique of people she already hung around: two girls named Liza and Chelsie and a guy named Chance. But on the first day of school coming into tenth grade, she spotted me getting out of the lunch line and flagged me down.

  “Hey, Helen, come sit with us,” Rochelle called out.

  I didn’t hesitate to join her and her crew. For the first time since I started high school, someone had invited me to hang out, and I wasn’t going to pass it up. Who knew whether I might get any other offers, and I wasn’t willing to take that chance. I wanted to be wanted, and, well, I was wanted.

  From that moment on, I basically became part of the crew, as well. Rochelle and I became the tightest of the group. Not only did we hang out in school, but we’d also hang out at each other’s house. We didn’t have any classes together, only homeroom, so our lockers were side by side.

  “Dub likes you. He told me so,” Rochelle said convincingly one day, as we stood at our lockers.

  “Girl, please.” I dismissed her with a smack of my lips and a swoosh of my hand. No way did Dub like me. Back in middle school, he was one of the four cutest boys. Although he was a year older than me, we were in the same grade because he’d been held back a grade. Even though we never had classes together, we still shared lunch periods or passed each other in the halls. He never even once looked my way . . . not even by accident. So it was hard for me to believe that all of a sudden he would be interested in me.

  “I swear to God he does,” Rochelle insisted with such conviction that my initial icy doubt began to thaw.

  I didn’t know whether to wholly believe Rochelle or not. At the time, swearing to God didn’t mean much to me. Truth be told, after about a couple of months of getting close with her, I had realized she was blood related to Liar. They were first cousins. She played with lying and watched it trigger drama among her peers. Drama was her second cousin. Both biological relatives allowed Rochelle to thrive off of the seeds of discord she’d sow in our clique. Eventually, the other members of our clique couldn’t deal with Rochelle anymore and all got together and decided that at lunch one day, when Rochelle came and sat down at the table, they would all get up and leave.

  As they all stood, they eyed me, as if to ask, “Helen, are you coming too?”

  I heard a voice in my head saying, Yes. But my head itself shook the word no. So I stayed at the table with Rochelle and remained her true and closest friend, all the while recognizing that blood was thicker than water.

  I had asked myself a thousand times why I wanted to be friends with someone so vindictive. Upon asking myself that question once, I realized that I didn’t want to be friends with her. I needed to be friends with her. Why did I need to then? The half-truth was I figured that since I knew all the dirt she was capable of dishing out, it was better that I was for her rather than against her. Part of the truth was that Rochelle was a shade darker than me even. She was the only person I felt a little bit more attractive than. I figured people would be too busy cracking on her to notice me or crack on me. The whole truth was that Rochelle was the first person to see me. That day in the cafeteria when she invited me to join her, I was no longer invisible. She wanted to be my friend. A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush. How I saw it as a fifteen-year-old high school kid was that being friends with Rochelle was better than having no friends at all.

  “Anyway,” Rochelle said as she retrieved her books for her next couple of classes from her locker, “I told Dub that you were coming over my house after school today. He’s going to shoot through with one of his boys, as if he’s just in the neighborhood. So be at my house by four o’clock and play along.”

  “I wish I might,” I spat before closing my locker so I could head to my next class. “How you gon’ hook me up without even asking me first? What if I don’t want to holler at him?”

  She looked me up and down and then twisted her nose, reminding me what I looked like, like her. It was as if I was standing before a mirror. Her eyes were telling me, “You might have lost a few pounds, but you still as black as a bowling ball. You better take what you can get while you can get it!”

  All day long I thought about the words Rochelle never spoke. She was right; no matter how many pounds I’d lost, I was still the underdog. So if any boy ever showed any interest in me, then I should jump on the first thing smoking, because who knew if there would be a second. That helped me make up my mind about whether or not to meet up with Dub at Rochelle’s house later that afternoon.

  “I knew you were going to come over!” Rochelle exclaimed when I arrived on her doorstep at 3:50 p.m., with ten minutes to spare. “Dub and his boy should be here in a few minutes,” Rochelle said. “I was just about to make some Kool-Aid. Come in the kitchen with me.” Rochelle was acting more excited than I was, and I was the one supposedly getting hooked up.

  I followed Rochelle into the kitchen, where she made her famous cherry Kool-Aid w
ith orange slices in it. Ten minutes later we heard a knock on the door.

  “That’s them!” Rochelle said, putting down the cup of Kool-Aid she had been sipping on. “Come on, girl. Let’s go.” She grabbed my hand and practically pulled me to the door. She looked through the peephole. “It’s them. Yes!” She pumped her fist. “He brought his boy Earl Lee. Come on.”

  Rochelle and I grabbed our jackets so that we could go sit on the porch and hang out with the boys. The weather wasn’t too bad for November. Even if it was bad, we couldn’t have invited them in. Rochelle’s mother would have killed her if she found out Rochelle had had boys in the house, especially while she was at work.

  My legs were shaking, and I could feel the butterflies floating around in my belly as I stepped out onto the porch.

  “Dub, this is Helen,” Rochelle said, introducing us. “Helen, this is Dub.”

  Dub held out his hand to shake mine, but my hand was already shaking. No way did I want this boy to know he had me trembling already, so I just gave him a nod and a bump with my fist.

  “Oh, it’s like that,” Dub said and laughed. Earl Lee joined in.

  Rochelle shot me an evil eye, so I quickly cleaned up the situation.

  “Naw, I’m just playing.” I shook his hand so quickly, there was no way he could feel it trembling. Hopefully, the chill in the air had dried up the sweat on my palms, as well.

  “So y’all want to take a walk down to the park or something?” Rochelle asked, giving Earl Lee googly eyes the entire time.

  Dub and Earl Lee looked at each other and shrugged. Then we all headed three blocks up to the park.

  Rochelle and Earl Lee went off to a picnic bench somewhere, while Dub and I sat on the swings and talked. Before I knew it, the sun was warning that it was about to retire for the day. The time had gone by so fast as I sat talking and laughing with Dub. I was smitten with him, to say the least.

  “You cool people to hang out with,” Dub said as he and Earl Lee walked Rochelle and me back to her house.

  “You are too.” I smiled.

  “Then why don’t you give me your number so I can call you up and we can do it again?”

  “Okay.” I knew better than to hesitate as I gave him the number to the private phone line Lynn had in our room.

  Dub called me later that night to make sure I’d made it home from Rochelle’s okay and to set up a time to hook up again.

  For the next month and a half, the four of us met up at Rochelle’s house almost every day. Her house was the best meeting spot because her mother worked from three in the afternoon to midnight, so there were no adults hovering over us and questioning our every move. Besides, my mother would have never approved of me meeting up with boys.

  “No dating until you’re sixteen,” was what she’d repeated over the years. And even though my mother hadn’t been raised in the church and had never taken us to church a day in her life, except for an Easter Sunday here and there, not dating until I was sixteen was Bible! Chapter one, verse one, of the Book of Genie.

  Well, I was still fifteen, but sixteen was within walking distance. I figured if Dub and I got serious before then, I would just have to hide him for a few months. Little did I know just how serious things were about to get.

  Stone Number Four

  “It won’t hurt if you just let me do it real quick,” Dub whispered in my ear as he caressed his manhood.

  At this particular meet up at Rochelle’s, we had decided to be bold and allow the boys inside. Besides, it was wintertime and too cold to be out on the stoop or at the park. We had started off just listening to music while we sipped on Rochelle’s famous Kool-Aid. The next thing I knew, Rochelle and Earl Lee were in her mother’s bedroom and Dub and I were in Rochelle’s bedroom.

  “I’m scared. It might hurt,” I told him, but he promised it wouldn’t.

  I remember giggling the entire time. Dub wasn’t finding too much of anything funny. His mind was stuck on one thing, sticking his one thing into me.

  “Come on. Just lay down real quick,” he coaxed. “Everybody else is chillin’, doing their thang.”

  Of course, by everybody, he meant Rochelle and Earl Lee.

  “But I told you I’ve never done this before.” I was still giggling. In all actuality, I wanted to cry. I was so scared.

  I had never asked God for much before. Neither side of my family had been raised in the church, so I knew nothing about God’s commandments and convictions other than what I might have seen or heard on television. I did believe in Him, though. I did believe that only a higher power could have created the earth and the things of it. Therefore, I barely ever even spoke to Him, being taught from my toddler years not to talk to strangers.

  I knew of God. But I didn’t know God. Therefore, I figured He didn’t know me, either. Even though Nana hadn’t been raised in the church and hadn’t raised her children in the church, she did start attending right around my freshman year of high school. Sometimes I would join her here on a Sunday or there if I spent Saturday night at her house. But at that time, as I lay there on Rochelle’s bed with Dub on top of me, I wanted nothing more than for God to reach His hands down from heaven and scoop me up out of the situation I had gotten myself into. God didn’t, though. I guess He figured I had been big enough to get myself into this situation, so now I had to be big enough to get myself out of it. And since God didn’t pull me out of this situation, I made a mental note not to really call on Him for others.

  How did I even end up in this situation? I asked myself, figuring if my body wasn’t able to escape, at least my mind could.

  Everything with Dub and me had just seemed to happen so fast. Less than two months ago I was being introduced to Dub while I sat on the stoop outside of Rochelle’s house. The next minute I was in Rochelle’s twin bed, deciding whether or not that was where I wanted to lose my virginity. Although I was scared out of my mind, there was a little excitement brewing, as well. I mean, of all the boys to lose my virginity to, who ever imagined it would be Dublen Daniels? Light skin, good hair, white mom, and black dad Dublen Daniels. A pretty mixed boy and me. I thought something like that could happen only in my dreams, yet now my dreams were a reality.

  On top of that, I hadn’t even chosen Dub. He’d chosen me. He was the one who had told Rochelle he liked me. He was the one who had asked for my phone number. He was the one who called to set up our meetings. He was the one who just a week ago had said to me, “Will you be my girl?” Me . . . I was the one who accepted. I was ecstatic inside that even though I didn’t look like an Apolonia or a Vanity, I had still managed to pull me a fellow that looked like Prince—good hair and all!

  I’d gotten caught up in the light skin thing too. What other choice did I have? “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” was still my motto. For me, though, it went even a little deeper. It was almost like a challenge, me getting a boy who looked like Dub to like me, me, who was as black as they came. So when I hooked up with Dub, it was like a victory for all chocolate girls. And in this case, not only was Dub light skinned, but he was also mixed! That had to be worth more points, so it was up to me to take one for team dark-skinned and relinquish my virginity.

  “See? That wasn’t so bad at all,” Dub said as he pulled his pants up.

  Embarrassed, I got up and ran out of the room and into the hallway bathroom, still giggling. Still giggling to keep from crying. What I had just done hurt. It hurt between my legs. It hurt my heart. It hurt my mind with confusion. I had this eerie feeling that someone had been watching me play big girl in the other room. They were no longer watching me, though, because they had bowed their head with grief and couldn’t even stand to look at me. I couldn’t even stand to look at myself.

  I didn’t know then that the word I needed to describe my emotions was conviction. Neither did I know at the time that God had been there. He’d come in the form of the Holy Spirit, and He had, in fact, given me an exit route from the situation I was in. It was called free will,
yet I’d driven past the exit ramp like a stubborn husband refusing to take directions from his wife.

  Regret began to manifest itself as I stood in the bathroom. Fear began to manifest itself as I realized Dub and I hadn’t used a condom, no birth control, no nothing . . . heck, no self-control. We wouldn’t have even needed birth control if we’d had self-control.

  “This is not how this was supposed to feel,” I said to myself as I stood there, trembling. I thought I was going to feel grown up after having sex, sexy even. But there was nothing grown and sexy about a fifteen-year-old girl losing her virginity in her best friend’s house, in her best friend’s bed. There was no going back in time, no do over, and moving forward wouldn’t be a walk in the park, either.

  Stone Number Five

  “You’re pregnant, aren’t you?” Lynn asked me as I lay on the top bunk of our bunk bed set, which we’d had ever since I could remember. Lynn and I shared a room in the small two-bedroom duplex home we lived in with our mother and her boyfriend. She and our dad, Rakeem, had long since been divorced. She’d unfriended her drug habit, denounced stripping, and got a job in housekeeping. Rakeem was still chasing his high, so he wasn’t in the picture much. So not only had my biological father chosen another life over me, as far as I knew, but so had his proxy.

  “I’ve been using this same box of maxi pads for two of my cycles in a row,” Lynn continued, holding up our shared box of sanitary napkins. “Usually, I would have had to buy more by now if both of us were using them. But obviously both of us are not. This is the only box we have, so either you have been running around bleeding in your panties or you ain’t been bleeding at all . . . which means you’re pregnant. So which is it?”