Chapter 1
I still have the memory of the first time I laid eyes on her. It was during the English class. She had taken the position at the front of the room while I decided to take the seat directly behind her. Not long after, my friend Rebecca entered the class and seeing no vacant seat next to me, she looked puzzled.
It was not my decision to sit behind Leilani. My instinctive desire had driven me in that direction and it would have been a fire within me if I had made the choice to sit somewhere else. It could have been the contrast of her dark skin with the light of all the others that attracted me. Her lips were a bright coral color and she smelled like sweet stuff. I assumed she didn't know that perfume and makeup were not allowed. Her hair was a beautiful/healthy mass of black and it looked like it was lying on the back of her chair and teasing me. I really wanted to run my hand through it and that desire terrified me.
“Excuse me,” she said, turning around. “How much is the Shakespeare collection for this class?”
“I…I don’t know.” We had all gotten the syllabi for our classes in the summer by mail. I handed mine to my mother and she made the purchase of all the books. I bet my mother didn't even know how much she had paid for it. But Leilani made me wish that I had cared.
I saw Leilani look intently at the Shakespeare collection that was on the desk of the girl beside her. Her eyes were very different: they were almond-shaped and the color was the same. They had left me and I wanted them back. Desperate to say something to her, I just blurted out, “I think it was around $60.”
“Oh, thanks,” she said. Not even once did she look at me again. Rather she wrote something down in her notebook: “check library for Shakespeare collection” I read it from her shoulder.
With the passage of time, Leilani was the hot topic of discussion among the crowd at St. Mary’s. It was senior year and we were all more than willing to graduate and go to college where there would be boys in our classes. At this time, coming to St. Mary’s seemed like going the other way and although I’m sure she had a reason, I never found out what it was. They were straightforward questions: “Are you new in town?”, “Where did you live before?”, “What made you come here?” However, I was so deeply involved in the social politics of St. Mary’s that I didn’t ask what I really wanted to know.
We didn't talk to her; instead, we looked at her as she moved from one class to another alone, her uniform skirt like a tent over her broad hips. We talked about how terrible her life must be if she is wearing Reebok Classics. Not even pearls did she wear.
Throughout the instances, I could be sure that Leilani had overheard our talks about her big backside and the fact that she had a bus pass. On some occasions, she even stared right at me with the amusement sparkling in her almond-shaped eyes, and then she kept going to wherever she was heading.
#
I remember a day which was after the school hours when I saw Leilani at the old pay phone on the side of the St. Mary’s building. It was a warm spring day and she had her uniform button-down long sleeves rolled up. She was very attentive to her phone conversation and it seemed that she didn’t get any other people are near apart from her.
“…It is possible that they come out. This is my point. They could come out. I might be doing something on the floor and they come out and be like…”
She stopped, probably waiting for an answer from the person on the other end. I moved a little closer.
“But where is the bed, Vincent? Is the bed against the wall?”
Another pause came from her. I was really close with her now. She was lower than me, and so I had a direct view of her shirt. It was not that hard to think of unbuttoning the rest of it and feeling her curves with my hands. When I finally tore my eyes away from her chest, I saw her right forearm. A hibiscus flower was tattooed in pink on her arm. I remembered it from my trip last summer to Hawaii. Beneath the flower, in nice but flowing cursive, was the name Vincent which I read upside down.
“Oh, so your dad can't see the bed? Is the bed too high?”
She ran her hand over the black hair before turning it. She smiled at whatever “Vincent” had said by wrinkling her round nose. I hated this Vincent.
Her conversation was over with and she was looking at me long before I realized it. She did not seem surprised. Before she ran her tongue over her lips and then slowly over her teeth, she smiled. Throughout the time, she was doing all of this, and her sharp, almond eyes were fixed on mine, she bit her bottom lip and I thought “that’s it”. This is right, me and her, and she thinks so too and…
Then, she laughed at me. She shook her head, picked her bag up, and before I could get there, Leilani, walking away, was shaking her hips, black hair flowing behind her.
