Imani All Mine Read Online Free Page B

ho. Like mama think I am. You would think she was probably stupid. You would think she was nothing.
    The doctor say too many of
our
girls throwing they lives away, giving up on they futures.
    Mama say that ain’t going to happen to me. That’s why she brung me for the pills. Tasha a smart girl. Get all A’s.
    Really? the doctor ask. That’s the first time she act like she was interested in me, like I was more than some fat-ass dumb ugly black girl.
    The doctor smiled at me, this real phony fake plastic smile, and Mama carried on. Tasha came out of her middle school class with the second highest average. She won the science certificate and the reading certificate and was on the honor roll every term. Tasha been on the honor roll every marking period but one in high school. She back on it now, Mama say. Mama was smiling this real smile.
    I swear Mama so pretty when she smile. Her skin so dark and smooth. She be looking young when she smile. Mama say she was protecting my future by putting me on the pills.
    I couldn’t keep my face flat no more. I was smiling back. Mama ain’t one to brag on me much, but when she do, I be liking it. Sometimes I hear her talking on the phone to Aunt Mavis, telling her about my report card. It’s like she really proud of me, and I’m that girl on the birthday card or one of them girls in
Seventeen
who got good self-esteem and one of them skinny bodies with neat little titties.
    I swear, for the first time that doctor talked to me like I had some sense. What you want to be when you grow up? she ask me. I told her a nurse, a nurse who work with children, because I love children. She ask, You ever thought about being a pediatrician? I ask, A doctor? Then I felt like a fool, like I ain’t know what a pediatrician is. I threw in right quick that I been thinking about being a
pediatric
nurse, because it take such a long time to be a doctor. Then she smiled a real smile at me and say time is one thing I got plenty of. But I got to take care of myself. Take care of my body. Not having no more babies was a way to start.
    She explained how them pills worked and not to miss one day. I felt like telling her I ain’t really need them because I wasn’t doing it, like I was going to tell Mama. It seem like the doctor might have listened. Maybe Mama, too. But I ain’t say nothing, and I’m glad I ain’t, because I’m doing it now.
    I met Peanut at school a few weeks later. This is the thing. I wasn’t stutting him when I first seen him. He was put in my homeroom because his was too crowded. Miss Williams, our homeroom teacher, had him standing up in the front of the room when we come in one morning. He short and skinny. She say his name Clyde Baker Junior. She ask him if he want to say something.
    He say, Yeah, don’t call me Clyde. Call me Peanut. Why they call you Peanut? Reuben ask. Why you think? Kente say. He got a head shape just like a big old peanut.
    We was all laughing. I felt bad about laughing when I seen Peanut looking like he was going to cry. Miss Williams say that was enough. She made Kente apologize to Peanut. She say she was calling him Clyde, and the rest of us could call him what we want. She give him a seat next to Reuben.
    I only got lunch and gym with Peanut, because I take the Regents courses and he don’t. Regents classes real hard. But they ain’t as crowded as regular classes like health. There thirty-three of us in health, stuffed in a room with no window. I think the room used to be a closet. The desks so close together, your knees be just about touching the kid’s butt in front of you. And it be so funky. A whole group of boys come in right after they gym period, and they underarms just about choke you to death. But in Latin, there’s twelve. Pre-Algebra, twenty. Honors English, seventeen. Physical Science, twenty-five.
    Even though the girls and boys have gym during the same period, we don’t