Those Guesses
My legs were pins and needles. I walked into the girls’ clothing store, fingering the folded-up ten in my pocket. There was one clerk, and she was standing with Laura and Tracy by a shelf of designer jeans, smiling and sweeping her hands at Tracy’s legs, then at the pants.
Laura’s hair was coming out the sides of her ponytail. She didn’t look put-together like the clerk. That might have made Laura upset, but it set me at ease. We had plenty in common.
The clerk was a white girl, probably in college, with ringy hair and the tight, light-colored jeans that private school girls wear on weekends. She was also wearing a low-cut shirt, but I didn’t look. I kept telling myself I was buying something for my girlfriend, and guys with girlfriends don’t go around looking at other girls’ chests. If I was with Aisha, I’d never get to look down girls’ shirts. That would suck. Then again, I’d be able to look down Aisha’s shirt as much as I pleased.
A couple minutes before, me, Laura, and Tracy had been sitting on a bench near the store.
“What are we doing?” I asked.
Neither of them said anything. Wanted to get this mess over with so I stood up and said, “Let’s do this.”
Laura put a hand on my thigh and said, “We waitin’ on the manager.”
I sat back down. Tracy stared at the store and added, “That way, you can start asking the clerk questions like some dumb dude, and she’ll leave us to do our business with those Guesses.”
A grown woman with enough makeup for King Tut walked out, slapping a green and white cigarette box into her palm. Tracy said, “Aight.”
I stopped near the counter, at a table with a “20% Off” sign. The earring got so hot that I worried it was leaking pus. I’d never even kissed a girl, and here I was in another girl store near all of these soft, small things that would go on their bodies. And I was about to help Laura and Tracy steal something. I’d never stolen anything in my life, unless that five from Tyrell counted. And that five made Tyrell want to fight me and David punch me, so what was gonna happen here?
I peeked up. Laura and Tracy had their backs to me, and hangers were clacking as the clerk shuffled through a rack of jeans. It was like looking at Demetric the day after he’d fingered that girl. They were new people, part of a whole world I wanted into so bad. My eyes got wet, and I looked through the blur at a dark green shirt on the table. One day, a girl’s breasts would be filling up the smooth fabric in the front, right by my hands. The clerk walked up, smiling, and said, “Hi, how are you today?”
I was this close to yelling, “Horny! Scared! Not grounded anymore!” Instead, the words jumbled out, “I’mlookin’forsomethin’formygirlfrien’an’allIgotistendollars.”
The smile stayed on the clerk’s face and she went, “Hmm?”
I held up the ten. My fingers were sweaty, making it soft. “All I got is this. And I need to get a present. For my girlfriend.”
This time, I was too loud. I thought Laura was snickering across the store, but it might have just been the music. No matter what happened, we were supposed to pretend to not know each other, even if we look the same in the face.
The clerk came to life like I’d been winding a key in her back. “Well,” she said, spreading her arms, “this is the Sale table. I bet we could find something here that she’d like. What size does she wear?”
Crap. Size?
“D!”
She looked at me with one eye, then laughed a bit. “No, we do, like, Small, Medium, Large here. Is she about my size? Because I wear a Medium.”
She unfolded a black shirt in front of her and said, “Would this fit on your girlfriend?”
My girlfriend. Just the idea of it. Wow. I met the clerk’s eye and she smiled. In that second, I saw the powder over the bumps on her cheeks and how her right eyebrow ended narrower than the left one, and I liked her. Would those Guesses come out of her paycheck?
I leaned in on the shirt, pretending to be a rich guy inspecting a painting in a museum, and got lost in the black fabric until I couldn’t tell how far it was from my face. I breathed in the cottony smell of new clothes, baby powder, and greasy food court lunch smells coming off the clerk. The shirt rippled and she said, “Excuse me, ladies?”
Chris L. Terry just moved to L.A. from Chicago. In the past, he has toured the world in a punk band, taught creative writing to juvenile inmates, and been an extra in a Gwar video. Kirkus gave his novel Zero Fade (Curbside Splendor, 2013) a starred review, calling it, “Original, hilarious, thought-provoking and wicked smart: not to be missed.”
Zero Fade is available now.