How to Escape From a Leper Colony by Tiphanie Yanique Read Free Book Online Page A

quiet-quiet where they could get some weed. Yolanda does laugh so hard that she have to sit down on the pavement and lift her legs scissor-like into the air. She tell me that in college they asked her where she buy her sneakers because they didn’t think Nikes could sell anywhere but the U.S. But when she talk about that kind of stuff, it’s not funny. It’s all serious. And I think that it’s a real good thing that she have a sense of humor and some maturity to boot. When we talk serious it does make her want to kiss right there on the sidewalk. I let she. I let she all the time. At the beach in the water. On the couch in my living room. I never let a girl do that before.
    One night we sitting in my car, parked in the middle of her street. Since the last hurricane St. Croix don’t have no streetlights in this neighborhood. If you get too close to either side of the road the house lights shining right into the car. So we was parked in the middle where it dark. We ain having sex yet but since I a lot older than her, ten years older, I cool that she keeping cautious. I ain no young boy. I cooling. Yolanda’s on my lap snaking away—getting her nut. I kissing on her neck and thinking how this young girl have me acting like a schoolboy. She wearing tight white pants and because it’s so dark that’s all I could see clearly, and her teeth when she laugh and the white in her eyes. At this point we only been seeing each other for those two weeks and I already know she like to laugh and kiss and even do both when we fooling around. I like foreplay. I good at it. I mean I good at the whole shebang, but a older guy know foreplay is sweet. Just doing it is for dogs. I too old for that.
    Now a car is coming down the street and I have to drive around the block with Yolanda in my lap and me having to look under her arm to make the corners. She love that stuff. Laugh so loud I had to give her a hard stare. “Hush, no, girl. Your laugh will wake the dead.”
    When we reach back in front her house she go to me “I have to tell you something.” I know what she going to tell me just by how her eye them all small and her mouth all slack, and I don’t want to hear it yet. So I say “Get off my lap.” When she sitting there in the passenger seat, I try to relax my heart and my dick cause the blood in both is slamming away. “Don’t tell me,” I say. “It’s too soon.” But we been dancing all night and now she been on my lap for almost a half hour. “I have to say it cause it’s true,” she say. So I let her. “I love you, Slick.” Damn. Leave it to a young girl. A college girl. To fall in love and have to tell you the minute it friggin happen. I pissed but I don’t have no choice but to admit it back. “Okay, Yolanda. I love you, too. Now I gotta say something.” And I tell her about what I do on the side. How I deal sometimes. How I have a gun under my seat. I take it out and show her. She get all quiet like she gonna cry and right then I don’t know if I want hold her and tell her I going be done with that shit if she will just be my shortie for truth and I’ll move with her to Tallahassee where she in college. Or if I just want kick her out the car for being such a damn softy, tell her I need a ride or die chick and not some goody-goody college girl that don’t know nothing about the street. I ain gonna change for no man, woman, or child. But she don’t cry. She just rest her head on my shoulder. “Shit, Slick,” is what she say. And her voice is so sweet and she seem so for real that I decide then that I going wait this girl out cause she could be the mother of my youths. And so I tell her, “If you gonna be my woman you can’t be calling me Slick. It’s Anton. But don’t be screaming it in the street.”
    For the months Yolanda’s away at college I screw out on her, but not really. I thinking about her when I doing it and I wearing a Magnum so I don’t give her nothing when she come back. On the phone