Dazzling Futures and Other Fairy Tales: from She Woke Up with the Words in Her Mouth (a novel)

Now that her friendship with Malaya had begun to drip away, there was really just one place where Shaniece Armistice Guzman knew power. She thought of that place as the World of Men. Hood men, the tired kind, who were too grown to be talking to her and knew it. With them, she didn’t have to feel that her manila skin and lightish hair were ruined by her wide, knobby nose and the acne that spattered her cheeks like brail. Hood men unpeeled her like an overripe tangerine, pulling past the spoiled surface of her skin to discover her weird talk, her quiet, creaky voice saying all the right things, a more or less pleasant surprise. She was light skinned, and went to a good school—she was special. Then, once the deal was sealed and she was in the car, the room, the bed, wherever, the men found the reward at her center: she really was just a girl like any other—hungry and in a profound state of need, though not the kind of need they expected.

So Shaniece put herself in training. The butterscotch pudge of her junior high body would not work with grown-man knowing. She needed the shape of an upright bass, sturdy curves and a strong back that announced its capacity for labor. It wasn’t thinness she was after—thinness was a lie. Men might have wanted a clothing rack body to parade down the street, but when the world’s eyes were closed and only their bodies were looking, men wanted sex like eating. They wanted to smack, to pull, to gobble and devour. They wanted bodies that would fight back, but not too much. Her first lesson in knowing, undertaken with a musician friend of her father’s two years ago, taught her that in this gobbling her age was her advantage—it told them her fight was benign, that her body was their discovery, and that they could have in her what all men, it seemed, wanted: the chance to make a girl into their version of a woman.

To work her knowing on a man, a real, grown man, required strategy. She called it her R.O.S. Plan: Reinvention of Self. She stopped with the bodega candies and took the job at the C-Town as soon as she was old enough to get her working papers—not only for the cash but for the discount. She bought all the lean meats and produce she could—jaundiced salmon filets with the skin scraped clean, scrunch-faced cabbage heads graying in their folds, limply fanning hands of kale. She poured over celebrity diet tips from the tabloids whenever the line at her register lulled, and got up for school an hour early each morning to work out to her decaying Suzanne Somers videotape before her father groaned his way into the day.

Now, two years into the R.O.S. Plan, she had lost thirty pounds and counting. Her skin cleared up a bit, too, so that at this point the only thing she had to contend with was her nose. But eventually she learned that even her nose had something to contribute. Between it and her hips, which sprawled in defiance of her morning squat routine, the men would always know that she would not be too much. She could be light and young and smart and pretty, but the nose and the hips told them she would always know her place.

This was one of the many things Malaya Clondon would never understand. Even if Malaya knew her place, her body made it impossible for her to stay in it. The two shared the distinction of being the only two black girls in their grade ever since the elementary days at Galton, where beauty once meant hair that flopped wildly behind you when you ran in gym class, and now meant hips narrow enough to fit into the newest jeans from Abercrombie & Fitch. But somehow, Malaya had managed to insinuate...