I could barely hear his question over the static in my head. It was so loud, and I was at a loss as to how to function now that this vision had walked into my life.
I wondered if this was how Molly Ringwald felt when she met Andrew McCarthy in Pretty in Pink.
The first thing I thought to say was “I used to sing Tina Turner at the kindergarten concerts I threw in my head.”
The second thing I thought to say was “Everybody calls me Monkey Night.”
And the third thing I thought to say was “Cora lied. I believe in Big Love now, because I am in love with you.”
In the end, though, I didn’t say anything. I pointed across the street, keeping my eyes just beyond his shoulder.
He turned around and chuckled. “Right behind me. Aw, man.”
He looked back to me with an embarrassed smile. But it wasn’t really embarrassment. Even then I could tell that he was one of those boys who only pretended to be ashamed of himself. I could tell that just from the way he ended our conversation with a “Thank you very much.”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t even smile.
I just watched him walk back into the sunshine. I wondered if that was where he had been born, where he came from. The sun.
No, our first conversation did not go as well as I would’ve hoped, but I could already feel it. The grabbing hold, the transformation that was now starting to take place just because I had met him. He was my Jake Ryan. And more importantly, he was my Molly Ringwald Ending.
. . .
Everybody at school was talking about him the next day. That’s how I found out that the boy I was dreaming of was named James C. Farrell.
“His great-grandmama started Farrell Fine Hair—I ain’t lying,” I heard one girl say to her boyfriend as I put my books away.
“He got two fine-ass sisters,” a basketball player said to his buddy, while not paying attention in math class.
The three Farrell siblings, according to hallway and classroom gossip, were the main heirs of the vast Farrell Fine Hair fortune. Their father, who was the president of one of the oldest black hair companies in the United States, had moved his family from Houston, Texas. And now he was working out of the Farrell Fine Hair offices in Columbus, Mississippi, and sending his kids to Robert C. Glass High School.
No one could quite figure out why he had decided to do this. Sure, the main factory was in Glass, but even the floor managers there didn’t make their kids go to the local public school. It was like planting silk trees in a cotton field.
“Coach talking about making him quarterback, even though he ain’t never been played with us before,” Corey Mays, a large football player, said to Dante Hubbard, another football player; they were both in the lunch line behind me.
“Man, that’s fucked up,” said Dante.
“Well, you know, he from Texas. They for real about playin’ that shit out there. And it not like we exactly threatening up state with Pointer.”
Perry Pointer was now the most popular guy in school: cute, athletic, dumb, and mean as shit, so of course he was king of Glass High. But from the sound of it, he was about to get his throne straight snatched from him.
And that only made me love James more.
. . .
That afternoon I saw the Farrell sisters for the first time.
I was walking down the cement steps when they came out the school’s main entrance. They strutted like Charlie’s Angels, in acid-washed jean skirts and baggy, off-the-shoulder, neon-colored sweatshirts that somehow managed to hug their bodies in all the right places. They even wore heels—and mind you, this was at a time when teenagers never wore heels outside of prom.
Every head turned as they glided past in a cloud of designer clothes and expensive perfume. Even mine. Because seriously, I had never seen anything like them outside of a magazine ad.