Deliver Me From Evil by Mary Monroe Page A

happy I’d won the fight, but I assumed we’d make up and still be friends. I had fought with other girls before and still stayed friends with them but Denise never came around me again after our fight.
    Denise had scratched my face and I still had some of the scars by the time New Year’s Day rolled around. I coated my face with a lot of makeup to hide the fact that I’d been fighting. But I got drunk at a New Year’s Eve party at Maria’s house and told everybody about the fight anyway. I had a good time dancing with Maria’s brothers and some of their friends, but the only boy I really wanted to be with was Wade.
    I was in love for the first time. Ever since I’d fucked Wade in his mama’s house, I’d been on cloud nine, and I assumed that he was, too. I had gotten over that little stunt he’d pulled on me at Giovanni’s. Somehow I managed to convince myself that that white boy I’d seen him with had something on him. Something that kept him from admitting that he was my man. I refused to believe that a boy who had fucked the daylights out of me had lost interest in me that fast.
    I began to think otherwise because I hadn’t seen or heard from Wade since I’d cornered him at Giovanni’s. “I ought to go to his house and smash his windows!” I told Maria. “I ought to steal that mangy dog of his and drop him off in East Oakland somehere.”
    â€œThen you won’t hear from him again for sure and you might get arrested,” she replied.
    â€œHe could at least call me up and tell me he don’t like me no more.” I pouted. “What am I supposed to think or do? I don’t like this shit! He can’t fuck with me like this and just forget about me!”
    â€œI think he already did,” Maria said with a nod. “Give the boy another chance. There might even be a good reason why he hasn’t called you up.”
    I gave Maria a thoughtful look and then I rushed home.
    We didn’t have an answering machine, so I didn’t know if he’d tried to call me during the day, when nobody was home at my house. But he didn’t call in the evening or at night when I was home, either. And the evenings and nights that I was out lollygagging, there were never any messages left for me with my parents when I got home. But I always asked, anyway.
    â€œDid a boy call for me?” I asked Mama. I had just come home from a party at a skating rink a few blocks from my house. I had had a few beers and a little tequila, and had taken a few hits off a joint, so I was a little tipsy. I didn’t know if my parents knew about me drinking and getting high, because I never did it in front of them. I never looked or acted drunk or high, so they never knew when I was. I was the kind of girl who could get drunk as a skunk and as high as a flying monkey and still not stagger or slur my words. I had that much control over myself. That was one of the reasons I had such a hard time believing that I’d been played by Wade.
    Even though I missed him, and would have jumped at the chance to marry him and have his babies, his absence was beginning to get on my nerves. But I still wanted to see him again. If he didn’t like me anymore and wanted nothing more to do with me, I wanted him to tell me so, to my face. “This boy that I’m expecting a call from, he’s a good friend,” I said, more to myself than to Mama. I wasn’t convinced that that was true.
    â€œA lot of boys call you,” Mama told me, not even looking up from the television. Daddy was stretched out on the sofa, snoozing like a cat. He was on his back, with his arms folded across his chest. He was already a dull and lackluster man. When he slept, he looked like a dead man. The only reason I knew he was still alive was because he snored like a freight train.
    â€œDid any of them leave any messages?” I had to talk loud so that Mama could hear me