Free No Place Safe by Kim Reid Page B

house, I applied lipstick stolen from my mother’s cache and opened another button on the shirt she made me wear over my glittered tube top. ( No child of mine is going out the house looking like a Stewart Avenue ho.) Within an hour, the shirt was gone completely, and the tube top left little mystery. Kevin told me I was a fox, and I ate it up.
    He was a thoughtful host, leaving me every now and then to check on his guests or run upstairs for more soda and chips. It seemed to me he checked on the girls more often than the boys, but I didn’t mind because he’d be coming back to dance with me. Kevin would stop his mother on the steps when she tried to come and check on things, not by pleading like most kids would, but with smooth talk. She never made it past the third step, which allowed the kids to continue whatever it was they were doing—kissing in a dark corner, dancing a little too close. It works on her, too, I thought. She’s probably where he learned the skill. I wondered if Kevin was ever a boy, whether he came out a man and was just waiting for his body to catch up. It occurred to me then that the killer didn’t know him the way I did, that the killer would only see a boy.
    Kevin went around the room turning off some of the lamps, as if they’d been giving off much light in the first place. Things slowed down a bit when he put Rick James’s “Mary Jane” on the turntable, a nice bridge from fast music to the slow ballads that were sure to come as the evening progressed. When someone put on Peaches and Herb’s “Reunited,” our song after several brief breakups that year (mostly over my unwillingness to move beyond the feeling-up stage), I tried to push the killer out of my head.
    “You worry too much,” Kevin said into the air above my black-girl version of a Farrah Fawcett flip, not a flip at all but a stiff curl still holding the shape of the sponge rollers I’d slept in the night before.
    We were slow-dragging, my arms around his neck, his around my waist. One of my legs between his, one of his between mine. Hips dipping low and slow to match the beat.
    “I know. But I can’t help it. You’re too much like the other boys.”
    “I’m nothing like them.” I wondered if that was true. I wondered if the boy from the skating rink had a girlfriend, if they’d slow-dragged one night and felt certain they’d be slow-dragging forever. “Forget all that tonight. It’s my birthday party. We’re supposed to feel good.”
    I listened to Peaches and Herb croon about how good it was to be together while I swayed slow and low against Kevin, certain I understood what they meant, thinking I was grown. I breathed in his scent, some cologne he probably borrowed from his father mixed with a little sweat that comes from the warmth of a basement full of teenagers dancing slow. I was in heaven. I forgot.
    Later, when the last of the kids had gone home and I both anticipated and feared our inevitable moment on the sofa in his basement, we heard his father’s feet on the steps. I didn’t have to worry whether Ma’s warnings about getting pregnant would be enough to hold him at bay. I was both grateful and disappointed.
    “It’s time to walk Kim home,” his father said. His voice made it clear there would be no sofa time.
    “You mind driving us, Mr. Scott?” I hadn’t planned to ask, had looked forward to making the five-minute walk stretch into fifteen, but the words came out of my mouth before I could stop them. Kevin looked at me like I was crazy.
    “Not feeling okay?” his father asked me.
    “It’s just that it’s late, and I’d be worried about Kevin walking back alone.”
    His father went to get his shoes and keys, and Kevin flopped down onto the sofa looking defeated. It wasn’t until then that I realized my worry for him was the same as asking whether he was a man. I tried to make it better. “I was worried about both of us being out so late.” I made it worse.
    “I can look out for