I Gave Him My Heart Read Free Page B

never touched me, but apparently he was touching his daughter.
    Sonya had a problem with Mario dating my mother. But over time, we pretty much grew on her. I don’t think I so much as heard more than ten words come out of that girl’s mouth, until the night Mario hired a teenaged babysitter to watch us one night he was working late. We came home from school to see Mario on the couch, kissing this girl. It didn’t surprise me; every nigga my mama dated seemed to have psychological problems. When Sonya saw that seventeen-year-old girl kissing and groping her forty-year-old father, she didn’t say shit; she just went about her business. So I thought anyway. I woke up that night to yelling and screaming coming from Mario’s bedroom. I assumed he was on the phone, cursing out his ex-wife as normal. But when I walked into the hallway, I saw Sonya standing in the doorway, aiming a gun at her father. She was yelling and screaming at him, telling him that it would be the last time that he’d ever touch between her legs again. That it would be the last time he’d make her stick his dick in her mouth. Before I could even get to her to grab the gun from her, she shot Mario in the head. As she aimed the gun at herself, I rushed over to her, pushing her to the ground, the gun falling from her hands, sliding across the carpet. She cried on that floor, and I cried with her. She called the police and told them what she did and what he did to make her shoot him. That man was fuckin’ his own daughter, and she was the one who ended up in jail. That man had her mind so fucked-up that she was actually jealous that he was having another relationship with another teenager. The girl was in love with her own father.
    I think I must have had to call at least fourteen niggas daddy by the time I was twelve. My mother had been married at least six times by then. I was told that my father was her first husband, Richard. I loved him, even though he was only in my life for about five years. My mother moved out of his house when I was four, but I still remembered where he lived. I think I purposely got on the wrong school bus for years just so I would get off at the bus stop that stopped in front of his house. I would sit at the park for hours, just staring at his house. Even once I started going to private school, I would still get a ride over to that park so I could sit and watch my daddy going in and out of his house. In time, he remarried and had two girls. I felt abandoned. I felt unloved. My daddy went from teaching me how to ride a bike, from playing house with me, from taking me to Chuck E Cheese every Saturday, from taking me to pre-school every morning to pretending that I never existed. He was my first example that if you wanted to move on, all you had to do was find someone to replace that person. That replacing a wife and a child was easy. That if you pretended a person didn’t exist, after a while, they wouldn’t. It wasn’t until I was thirty-one that I found out that my biological father was my mother’s stepfather.
    ***
    “Aye, cuz!” Nina hugged me in front of my locker, one Friday morning, right before my second period seventh grade math class.
    “Hey, boo.” I hugged my cousin back. She was dressed in her PE outfit. I, on the other hand, was dressed in my private school outfit - tight, white buttoned-down shirt and short, plaid, pleated skirt. Black socks stopped at my thighs. Black K-Swiss shoes covered my feet. I had a small frame, but I had a body on me. But nothing like Nina. For as long as I could remember, that girl has always had a body like a big-booty porn star. The boys jocked the shit out of that girl, but she never paid them any mind. Her nose stayed in a book or two.
    I smacked my cousin on the butt as I let go of her.
    She giggled. “Play too damn much. What’cha getting into today? You wanna go to the art exhibit with me tonight?” She always got excited about art exhibits. She was destined to be an