Teenage Love Affair

Prologue

June 2004

Newark, Jersey

Zsa-Zsa

Understand this: I'm grown—no two or three ways about it. I've been grown since last year, once I realized that the daily bruises on my mother's face and her busted lip were not from her walking into the front door but were instead courtesy of my daddy's. left hook. Then I came into womanhood.

Don't sleep. I knew how to cook, clean, and pretend that my mother liked to wear sunglasses indoors, and that daddy wasn't drunk, he just smelled bad. I knew not to open my mouth and question my mother when she called the cops. My daddy beat her one day and the next day my mother would drop the charges and bail him out of jail.

I knew it all, which is exactly why I was not impressed by the note that had mysteriously landed on my desk with the words "You wanna be my girl? Circle yes or no" written in block letters.

I knew it was from my classmate Malachi, although he didn't sign his name. We lived in the same building and would sometimes walk home together. He'd told my 2 best friends, Courtney and Asha, that he was checkin' for me. That turned me off. Although I loved him, I didn't need anybody else knowing that. So I stopped talking to him.....but that only seemed to light his fire even more. This explained why he was giving me the up-down with his eyes while I was sitting on the cement bench in the playground with my friends.

I turned to Courtney who, although he was a boy, only played with girls, had a high-pitched voice, and a swish. " I need to go handle this," I told him.

"Well." Courtney smacked his gums. "Me personally, I wouldn't even go through the changes. I would just get with homeboy."

"Ill." Asha frowned, her ebony microbraids swinging as she spoke. "Don't listen to him. He thinks Jay-Z is cute. Look at Malachi." We all turned our heads. "He's chubby, has a zipper running across his teeth, and let's not even discuss that pimple sitting in the middle of his nose. Can you say yuck?"

"Hatin' is so unattractive." Courtney flung his wrist and twisted his mouth to the side.

I didn't say a word. There was no way I could admit that despite the extra weight and the braces on his teeth, Malachi's cinnamon-colored skin and almond-shaped eyes were the prettiest things I'd ever seen.

I circled my answer quickly on the note, pushed my shoulder-length hair behind my ears, and walked over to where Malachi was standing by the monkey bars kickin' it with a few of his friends. I could hear Courtney and Asha running behind me.

"Malachi." I place my hands on my hips. "Don't be dropping notes on my desk." Before he could respond, I continued on. "I don't appreciate you being all in my face with your childishness. What kind of man writes notes? Now lose yourself." I tossed the note at him and as I turned to walk away, a bunch of oules and ahhs created a choir behind me.

"Zsa," Courtney said, as we returned to the bench. "You love him,don't you?"

I couldn't hold it in any longer, so I giggled and fell onto the grass. "I sure do." I smiled. "I sure do."

"Y'all just nasty." Asha frowned while standing over me and Courtney, who had just fallen beside me. "Real, real nasty."

After lunch I finished my classwork with the quickness and found myself daydreaming about me and Malachi getting married. I wrote Mrs. Malachi Askew with hearts all around it on small scraps of paper. I found myself naming our unborn children: a girl named Zsa-Zsa, after me of course, and a son named Malachi, after his father.

Once I floated back from my daydream, I looked up and saw Malachi staring at me. I don't know what got into me but I gave him the biggest smile in the world. I was cheesin' from ear to ear, and for a moment I thought I could see hearts floating around Malachi's head. He blew me a kiss and I blew him one back. As I started giggling to myself, the bell rang. "Okay,class," my teacher said. "Have a good weekend and see you on Monday."