KAT HOUSE
It was almost that time again… . I could smell the smoke and taste the alcohol already, and I was just sitting in sixth period. A bunch of blonde haired white girls sat cackling in the back of the room. I didn’t know if this was because the tracks from her nappy weave were probably showing or because Beatrice had just got up to walk to Mr. Wyatt’s desk. Beatrice was about the size of all of those skinny winches put together. In the hood, the boys on Elder Street would think her body was off the chain, but this wasn’t the hood, and the boys on Elder Street can’t hold a candle to these white folks. Beatrice walked past me again, slightly bumping my desk.
“Sorry,” Beatrice said in a low, raspy voice that reminded me of Marilyn Monroe.
Those girls would be surprised that I knew who Marilyn Monroe was, but I studied her for my music appreciation class last year. The smell of fresh menstrual blood passed me, too. Beatrice’s period was on. That was why she went up there to see Mr. Wyatt. Didn’t somebody teach her to count the days for when her cycle was gonna come on? My Auntie J taught me before she got killed…I wasn’t nothing but nine years old. That seemed like a lifetime ago now. Maybe Beatrice is like me. Maybe nobody don’t care about her neither. I heard the girls in the back snicker again. Yep, it wasn’t me they were laughing at this time.
The smell was getting high now. It reminded me of the Kat House; the smell of unwashed bodies when it was some of the girls’ time of month. I suggested that they stay home during that time, but Marcy was about her money. She didn’t care if they didn’t have no legs; as long as they could be laid, they were fair game for her.
“Ya gonna bleed anyways,” is what Marcy told me as a solution to the problem. Then she added, “Just cause you a high yella heifer, you thank you better den dem otha guls?”
Kimberly Michelle Scott, Author 