Free The Deal, the Dance, and the Devil by Victoria Christopher Murray

get close, always adding a letter or two here and there. Like she’d say “fluck” or “shite.” But I guess she was so mad that Adam wasn’t that doctor’s son that she had to use the real word. “No!” I repeated and slammed my math book shut. “We’re not doing it.”
    “Uh-hmmmmm.”
    I could tell she didn’t believe me, but I didn’t know what I could do about it. Big Mama had talked to me about sex a little, but I’d never talked to my mother.
    “Well, that little boyfriend of yours and his mother don’t have nothin’. So, you better keep your legs closed.”
    I guess if Adam had been the son of that doctor, my mother would’ve been giving me sex lessons.
    I’d told my mother the truth—Adam and I weren’t doing a thing. Not because we were only fourteen—most of our friends were already doing the do. Our abstinence was part of our plan.
    “We’ve got to get out of here,” Adam said to me one day after we’d been hanging out at the movies with Cash and Brooklyn. Our friends hadn’t seen a single scene of The Godfather III though. Right there, in the movie theater, Brooklyn and Cash had had sex. Not that I was shocked—they did that all the time … they and everyone else, but not me and Adam.
    Now, Adam and I did go below the belt plenty of times. But it was just with our hands and a few, few times with our mouths. But that’s where we stopped, ’cause we were gonna do this right. We had a plan and a purpose.
    “Yeah, we’re gonna get out of here,” Adam said as we walked along Martin Luther King Boulevard. As he eyed some of Duke’s boys handling their drug business in front of the liquor store, he added, “We weren’t meant to be here. We’re not supposed to live like this, ’cause you and me, we have a higher calling.”
    Many times when Adam talked, his words and thoughts went right over my head, but like all the other times, I just nodded in agreement.
    “Education,” he continued talking, “is our ticket. Our way out.” He nodded. “Yup, that’s what Ma always says. Education.”
    From the moment I’d met Adam, he’d talked about three things: God, his mother, and education. He had big dreams of college in New York, and studying abroad in Paris, then getting a big-time job somewhere exotic like California or Canada.
    But the best part of his whole plan was that he was gonna take me with him.
    “We’re smart, Evia. We’re going to be one of the statistics,” he always told me. “We’re going to be the ones who got out. The ones who were able to rise up above their circumstances. People will be reading about us one day. Shoot, one day, I might even be president!”
    Oh, yeah, my boo dreamed big. I mean, the president part was a stretch. I guessed Adam forgot that he was black and there was never going to be a black president. But all I said was, “If you want to be president, baby, I’ll be right there with you as your first lady.”
    Adam’s dreams became my dreams, and that’s what kept us celibate. Getting pregnant would derail every plan, so our dreams became our birth control, dreams were why we abstained, dreams helped us to hold out for three years.
    Then, May of our sophomore year, the last days of school before summer. I couldn’t wait—Adam had gotten both of us jobs with the parks department. We were gonna be going around the city, cleaning D.C. parks—totally unglamorous, but Adam said it was good, honest work and that’s what mattered.
    With only one day left, I was pulled from my last class—the history of black America—into the principal’s office. There, Mr. Watson, a crinkly old man who always sounded like he had a sore throat, gave me the news that my grandmother had died. He could’ve just reached into my chest and yanked my heart out—it would’ve felt the same way.
    Never had I dealt with such loss, such grief. The sorrow wasn’t just in my head, it was all over me; my whole body ached. My tears just kept on coming; hour after