Cricket in a Fist by Naomi K. Lewis Page A

into Ladies’ Apparel. The underwear section made Jasmine dizzy. Tam-Tam had worked in a ladies’ apparel department for years, and no wonder she exuded a superhuman femininity, even now — in the aisles of lacy bras, silky lingerie and black stockings, the air felt electric with womanliness. Trailing after Lara and Dad in the parking lot, Jasmine was ready for a hand to fall on her arm. His fingers would be long and white, his hair black, his cheekbones high. He’d have musky breath with an undercurrent of mint, because pimps always chewed gum. He’d grab her by the hand and pull her into a small, dark place. An alley, a car and finally an apartment and a bed with red sheets. And there she’d wake up, lean and wan, bright-eyed and addicted. She would wear lingerie and live with a lot of other sweet-smelling girls, and none of them would remember where they came from or wherethey’d been before they were whisked away. Occasionally she thought about the men. There would be men; she understood that. Naked men, maybe ugly. But that part of sex slavery hardly seemed real, hardly even entered her mind.
    The first time Jasmine ever skipped swimming after school, she stood outside the bus terminal for a long time before opening the door. Not in hesitation, but out of respect for the last moments of a way of life. It was the end of October, cool and sunny in a bright, brittle way. She watched the carwash next door, the one her father always used. When she was younger, she’d loved going through the carwash, how she couldn’t see or hear anything but the big brushes and soapy water battering the windows. The Volvo was a submarine under the ocean — a small pocket of airtight security. She loved the steady, engineless glide and her dad silent beside her; somehow, they both knew not to speak inside the carwash. They passed the massive blow-dryers that made little drops of water scatter, shrink and disappear, and then broke the surface into sunlight, and she was aware of everything at once — the sounds of cars driving by, people laughing and talking, bike bells and birds.
    Jasmine thought of never seeing that carwash again and remembered what it said in
The Willing Amnesiac
— that when you’re about to leave a place forever, things long taken for granted are suddenly precious. There’s always a moment, J. Virginia Morgan wrote, when the small details of the life you’re leaving behind seem to shimmer with unprecedented value.
    Jasmine stepped through the door and closed it behind her. She could still hear sounds from outside; she had half expected the door, like the one to her father’s lab at the university, to shut out all reminders of the outside world. She walked slowly from one end of the room to the other and nothing happened, except that a frizzyhaired middle-aged woman in a blue blazer smiled at her as she passed the Kingston sign.
    The seats by the Toronto door were all empty, and they facedthe coffee counter with its tiny, round tables — the infamous café Jasmine’s whole school had been warned against. At a recent assembly, the principal, Mr. Munro, had talked about the bus terminal lunch counter as though it were teeming with evil. As if its egg salad sandwiches could result only in certain death. Throughout the terminal’s condemnation, Jasmine had been sitting on the floor beside Benna, who laughed when Jasmine made a killer sandwich with her hands and made it bite Benna’s arm, whispering, “Attack of the baloney on rye.” Benna stretched out her legs in their ripped nylons and looked the gym teacher in the eye, giving him an obvious boner.
    A middle-aged woman in a blue blouse and a hairnet sat behind the terminal’s lunch counter, absorbed in a paperback, and the smell of egg salad made Jasmine think of her grandmother. Tam-Tam, her real grandmother, who had given birth to her biological mother. As far as Jasmine knew, egg