Read Online I Wish I Had a Red Dress by Pearl Cleage - Free Book Online Page A

a very bad move.
    Nik’s mother went to high school with me. Jasmine was a beautiful girl who grew up thinking that was all she needed to be. She moved to Detroit after we graduated and married a man who agreed with her, had Nikki and started eating. She gained a hundred pounds in one year, and her husband, taking that to mean their contract was null and void, divorced her, kissed his daughter good-bye and headed for the West Coast, leaving no forwarding address. Jasmine packed up, skipped out on her last month’s rent and moved back here.
    Nikki inherited her mother’s good looks, and by the time she hit puberty, she was a real beauty. When Junior Lattimore spotted her in his sister’s gym class, he demanded and got an introduction, swept her off her fourteen-year-old feet with his eighteen-and-a-half-year-old thuggish charm and the rest is history.
    I tried to get the conversation back on a positive note.
    “You found a job?” I knew she had been looking, but there aren’t many jobs around for nineteen-year-old women with limited literacy and only the most cursory understanding of basic job skills. “Where?”
    Nikki looked uncomfortable. She twisted the poetry book miserably in her hands, its diversionary potential useless in theface of Tomika’s relentless demand for the truth— the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
    “At that new place out by the interstate.”
    Tomika snorted rudely. The two of them had grown up together and they fought like friends but forgave like family.
    “Which one?” I tried to picture which of the fast-food emporiums had decided to unleash the undeniably high-strung Nikki on their unsuspecting customers.
    She didn’t answer right away, casting one last look at Tomika, who rejected the unspoken plea for a little slack.
    “Don’t be lookin’ at me all pitiful,” Tee said. “You took the job, so represent. ”
    “It’s a club,” Nik said carefully.
    “A nightclub?”
    “Sort of, but it’s open in the daytime, so I won’t always have to be workin’ late.”
    She offered this last with a hopeful look and I smiled encouragingly. “That’s good, right?”
    “Go on!” said Tomika.
    “Go on what? ” Nikki snapped at her. “I’m not talkin’ fast enough for you?”
    “You’re not talkin’ straight enough for me, how’s that?”
    “Maybe I should go out and come in again,” I said.
    “You ain’t gotta do all that,” Nikki said. “Tee just mad ’cause she don’t think I should be dancin’ and I don’t see nothin’ wrong with it, and besides, it ain’t her decision to make. ”
    “Dancing?”
    “ Strippin’, Miz J. She scared to say it, but that’s what she gettin’ ready to do for a livin’. Let these niggas watch her take her clothes off!”
    “At least I’m gettin’ paid for it!”
    Tomika just looked at her. “I wouldn’t be braggin’ about no shit like that if I were you.”
    “But you ain’t me, okay?”
    “Hold it,” I said, more sharply than I meant to. I turned to Nikki. “You’re working at a strip club?”
    “Yes, but it’s strictly legit! They even got dressin’ rooms and a bouncer.”
    A bouncer?
    “And ain’t nobody sellin’ no drugs up in there either.”
    I wanted to say, Girl, where is that community college application I gave you? Have you filled it out yet? But I made myself ask the only relevant question first. “Do you want my opinion?”
    She hesitated. “Will you be mad if I say no?”
    I shook my head.
    “Then no! ”
    “All right then,” I said. “Good luck and be careful.”
    Tee looked at me like I had lost my mind, but I try to be real clear with myself and with them about this whole advice thing. I only give it when they want to hear it. Sometimes, it’s hard for me to watch the things they do and not offer an opinion, but they’re not children. I figure everybody has the right to figure out how they’re going to pay their own rent.
    “That’s it?” Tomika sounded incredulous. “’Good