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army and never repaired. “You’d think that spoiled brat could find something better to put his mind to than staying high.”
    “I know, Nat. He’s just not your favorite pothead.”
    “He’s spoiled, I tell you. Lazy. Directionless. Talking that shit about offing the pigs . . . being militant. Huh. I’d like to see him handle it in the goddamn military, the way they drafting all these penniless, half-ignorant black boys and sticking them on the front lines over there.”
    “In case you don’t remember, Nat, we’re supposed to be
against
the military. Wilt doesn’t want to see anybody drafted and stuck on the front lines.”
    He was in his anti-Wilton groove now, unstoppable. “And if there’s anybody in the world got less business owning a gun, I’d like to know who.”
    I rolled my eyes. The gun thing was complicated. Even I thought it was a mistake for Wilt to have one. But he had bought it for protection, he said. There had recently been break-ins all over the neighborhood. As the rumor mill had it, gangs of white thugs had been raiding so-called hippie pads, ripping off whatever drugs were around, beating up on the guys, raping the girls.
    “I told you,” I said, “he got rid of that thing. Mia made him. She said she wouldn’t live with a gun in the house.”
    “Bad as things are for niggers in this city, there’s a hundred other things he could be doing,” Nat grumbled.
    “There’re things we could be doing, too,” I said, hoping it would shut him up. “Why don’t you put down that bag of brown rice. I didn’t come over to talk about Wilt. I came to see you, didn’t I?”
    Yes, I realized, that’s why I had left the lunch table. I’d suddenly felt in need of erotic comforting. Maybe it was Barry’s teasing that had set me off. I didn’t know. I just knew I wanted to be with someone who didn’t take my sexuality as a joke.
    Nat had that same faintly acrid odor about him as my very first lover. There was salt in it, and unsweetened cocoa. He was careful with me, too, the way Melvin had been. I liked being caressed in that delicate way and I liked all those kisses. But I wasn’t a virgin anymore; I was hungrier, bolder, and I wanted more. I wanted something I couldn’t name yet, or even imagine. And I could never quite help wondering how different it would be with a guy like Wilton, whose body was sleek and quick and who had been with so many other lovers. Wouldn’t I be utterly spent and out of my head with pleasure now if that were Wilton smiling down at me, rolling onto the other pillow?
     
    Wilt had a rude nickname for my lover—he called him
De Lawd
—taken from some creepy old musical about Negroes in heaven. I felt really guilty for laughing at Nat behind his back. But, laugh I did.
    Men. And their little jealousies. And their little hypocrisies. I wanted to understand them, not just sexually, but in all their confounding complexity. I didn’t, yet. Some women just get them right off the bat, instinctively. But women like that are always slinky. Which I certainly wasn’t. However, right after the holidays, I was going to lose fifteen pounds. I want to be an established slinky by the time I’m twenty-one.

CHAPTER TWO
    TUESDAY
    1
    Nat woke me at 6 fucking a.m., and then made me eat oatmeal, the pebbly kind, from Ireland. After that, we walked to the corner together.
    “I don’t have any classes today,” I assured him. “I mean, even if I wanted to go, I don’t have classes on Tuesday. Honest.”
    He gave me a good-bye kiss on the forehead. Then he headed off for the el station, and I started walking back to Armitage.
    The weather was a little milder that morning. We’d had no overnight snowfall, for a change. It was my turn to buy paper goods for the house. I did the shopping at the Jewel, and before I headed home I indulged in a couple of doughnuts at the Dairy Queen on Clark Street.
    Barely 10 A.M. , but the apartment was raucous when I arrived with my packages. Beth