“...Son, you understand what I’m saying? Son? Are you even listening to me?”
The teenager’s large eyes glistened as he descended from the passenger side of Mama’s Dodge Caravan. His mind was already on the whipped cream and icy texture of his favorite drink, the strawberry frappuccino from Starbucks. He envisioned the treacle goodness of the vaguely caffeinated drink, and his mouth foamed in anticipation.
“Boy, you really got nothin’ to say for yourself?” Mama asked, slamming her car door shut. She walked ahead of him, seeming to talk to herself and her son at the same time.
“I don’t know what I’m gonna do with you boy! You gettin’ to the point where you keep actin’ the way you actin,’ you gonna end up in real trouble, and ain’t nothin’ me or nobody else is gonna be able to do to help you.”
Terry wondered why frappuccinos didn’t come with cherries. Sometimes, his auntie made him Shirley Temples, and she’d put two or three marachinos in at the bottom. He shivered just imagining the sweet fruit exploding in his mouth as he bit down, the skin of the cherry surrendering to his questing molars.
Suddenly, Mama whipped around and pointed her finger up in Terry face. She bared her teeth in emotion.
“You AIN’T SLOW, Terry, you hear me? I don’t care WHAT nobody say. So, there ain’t NO EXCUSE for you how you been carryin’ on!”
In a flash, she’d turned back toward the mall plaza. She took several purposeful steps before realizing that her son was no longer following her.
Terry stood stock still in the middle of the parking lot. He hung his head, and his long arms swung listlessly at his side like two awkward pendulums.
“Terry, come on,” she hissed.
The large teenager just stared at the parking lot concrete, his arms swinging even faster.
With an exasperated sigh, the woman stormed back to the boy, her high heels clacking out her frustration. She pulled at his arm roughly, but he remained rooted in place in the center of the parking lot of Bronx Terminal Market. At 6 feet 1, and nearly 300 pounds, he was much bigger than she was.
A car came up from the ramp, and flashed it’s blinkers.
“Yo, Papi,” shouted the driver, “MOVE!”
“Terry, baby, let’s go into the Target, ok?”
She grabbed the boy’s hand, but he did not squeeze back.
“YO! Get out the way!” the driver shouted, punctuating his words with a honk of the horn.
“Hold ON!” Mama snapped, her dark eyes flashing.
“Terrance,” she pleaded, turning back to the frozen giant in the middle of the parking lot, “I’ll get you a strawberry frappuccino! Would you like that?”
Terry raised his head a little, and looked at Mama.
The man in the car slammed his fist into the car horn.
“Both y’all crazy ass niggas. I will run ya’ll over, I swear I will. I do not have time for thi-
Mama lost it.
“Hold-THE FUCK- ON you little piece of---” ”
“I wanna go in. I wanna go into Target,” Terry said, interrupting the creative invectives his mama was getting ready to hurl at the driver. His gentle pull of her hand nearly ripped her arm out of its socket.
Mama sighed, and composed herself.
“C’mon son,” she said casting a glare at the driver. The man in the car floored the gas, and screamed something vile at them.
As the two entered the store, Terry automatically let go of his Mama’s hand. He wrestled a red shopping car from the stack near the returned-items desk, and followed Mama to the nearby Starbucks counter in the front of the store.
“Mama,” Terry said moments later in between gulps of his frappuccino. “Mama, is you mad at me?”
Mama sat across from him with a grande dark roast. She knew better than to have them walk around the store with his drink. He’d spill it everywhere.
“I ain’t mad at you Terry,” she said after a little while.
“You sure? Cuz you-you you said some bad words. Outside. You said some bad words.”
Terry’s large dark eyes rounded in concern.
“I was talking to that man baby, not you. And anyway, I got upset. Sometimes we say bad words when we get upset.”
Terry slurped on the whip cream at the top of his drink.
“I...I...I…” Terry hung his head.
“What is it son?” Mama inquired wearily.
“I ain’t meant to get in trouble Mama. Honest.”
Mama looked at her son, hard. So, he had been listening.
“Look, baby, you gotta do more thinkin’ is all I was tryna say. You gettin’ to be a man now. Look like one anyway.”
Tears filled Terry’s eyes.
“But I don’t feel like one,” he cried.
“That don’t matter, baby. The world...I mean, what they see when they look at you is…”
Streaming tears poured from Terry’s eyes. Mucus cascaded from his nose in a slow verdant drip.
“Son, wipe up, ok? Ain’t no need to cry. You hear me. Drink your drink.”
Terry nodded. He grabbed the napkin his mother extended to him, and blew hard. Then, he took a long drag from his frappuccino.
Mama tried again, this time avoiding her son’s eyes.
“Terry, the stuff you be doin’ sometimes. I know you ain’t one to harm nobody, but others might think somethin’ else. And when you told that teacher, Ms. Bradley...When you told her you was gonna clock her-”
“Mama, I don’t like her. She never call on me!” Terry interrupted.
“That ain’t the point. When you said you was gonna clock her in the face, and then got up and started walkin’ toward her, well, you can see how she mighta—”
“I WASN’T GONNA DO NOTHIN’” Terry shouted, drawing stares from the Starbucks employees in the vestibule.
“I know Terry, cuz you ain’t a violent person. But honestly, where did you even get the idea to say somethin’ like that? huh? ”
Terry hung his head. After a long moment, he opened the top of his frappuccino, and chugged the remnants of coffee slush and whipped cream. A slow smile spread across his lips, and a satisfied belch escaped his esophagus.
“That was good!”
Mama sighed.
Some minutes later, Terry wandered into the kitchen appliances aisle. He fingered the neatly stacked bowls underneath colorful mixing blades. He sounded out the names of the brands in front of him, laughing at the way “KitchenAid” and “Hamilton Beach” seemed to tickle the inside of his mouth. He imagined raw dough, butter creamed with brown sugar and molasses, and his mouth watered expectantly.
“I want cookies. Naw naw...I want cake, “ he burped, regurgitating a portion of strawberry frappuccino up into his mouth. He swished the warm sticky liquid over his tongue, and happily swallowed the stale sweetness.
After a moment, he looked around and saw that his mother was well down the aisle studying vacuum cleaners.
“Don’t wander off now,” she’d said to him as they’d headed into the main storefront, past the Starbucks where they’d been sitting. “If you can’t see me, you’ve gone too far. You hear me?”
Terry balled up his fist and put it into his mouth. He turned his attention to the blenders, and imagined his Auntie blending frozen bananas and cantaloupe together into “ice-cream.”
“Oh, let him live Sarah,” Auntie had said the other week, when he’d excitedly explained to Mama that he’d been allowed to lick the inside of the large blender, his tongue flicking in and out of the large glass like the forked apparatus of a reptile.
“C’mon Baby, why you wanna always act like that, huh?”
In his reverie, Terry had stumbled into a kitchenwares aisle that was obscured from the main store floor. A tupperware display separated Terry from a dark chocolate skinned man with beautiful short braids. His smile seemed to form a perfect V of immaculate white teeth, and from where Terry was standing, he could see the young man’s eyes twinkling mischief. The man’s arms wrapped tightly around a young woman’s waist. The blue jeans she wore seemed to accentuate every curve of her supple backside, from her buttocks, to her calves, to her ankles. Though she was facing away from him, Terry knew that the girl was probably the most beautiful girl in the world. More beautiful than Tanisha Johnson in his homeroom class. More beautiful than Shalayne Williams and Andrea Nunez from his history class. Maybe even more beautiful than his math teacher Ms. Bradley, with her big tits and hazel eyes.
It infuriated him that she never called on him in class. She never smiled at him like she smiled at the other boys, never asked how his weekend was. The only time she had ever bothered to talk to him was to ask if he had an accommodation that allowed him extra time on exams. He’d been so shocked that she was speaking to him at all, that he could only hang his head and smile.
“C’mon baby,” the handsome young man with the braids tried again, “don’t you love me?”
“Damian, I’m at work,” the young woman said, her body pressed up close.
Terry was sure that this woman was a Goddess or a princess from a fairytale. He loved her with a soul-level wholeness that made his insides convulse.
“Aww, Ari, why you gotta be like that?” Damian laughed, “you can’t even gimme a kiss?”
“I don’t wanna be written up!” the girl complained, playfully. “What if my manager show up? You can’t just be showin’ up like this an’ actin’ all crazy!”
He laughed and kissed her. And she kissed him back, a slow, tongue filled affair with murmuring affection. Their passion was so electric, that Terry felt fire blaze in his own loins. He realized that he’d been crouching behind the tupperware display in an unconscious effort to avoid being seen. He slid down to the floor, closed his eyes, and stretched his left hand past the elastic of his school uniform sweatpants. In his mind’s eye, he saw the man with the braids, his hand reaching to caress the perfect ass of the woman in the jeans. In an abrupt scene change, he saw himself ripping off Ms. Bradley’s shirt, squeezing her tits, and telling her that he would need extra time to explore every part of her body.
That’s what she’d said to him earlier, in front of the whole class. “You can take the exam home if you want to, Terrance. I know you probably need extra time on it.” Someone had laughed, he was sure of it. He thought he’d seen Aileen Rodriguez, who used to be the hottest girl in school until she had gotten a weird neck tattoo with a snake on it, look at him with pity.
Terry’s eyes snapped open to the sound of piercing screams.
“YOOO, THERE’S a FUCKING PERVERT HERE! CALL SECURITY, CALL THE COPS!”
It was the young woman, the princess, shouting at the top of her lungs. She was as beautiful as he’d thought she would be, now that he could see her dimpled face, and her amber, almond shaped eyes. Her breasts pressed up tightly against her red Target shirt . The man with braids held her and, in between her screams, cursed at him.
Terry was surprised to find his pants down, and his left hand on his rapidly softening member. He wondered when his shirt had been peeled off. He heard heavy footsteps approaching him, and watched as the blue uniformed security guards approached him, commanding him to remain still. He thought of Auntie, and of cookie dough, and cherries and ice-cream. He hoped that later on, when this was over, his Mama would buy him another strawberry frappuccino.
