Free Rainey Royal by Dylan Landis Page B

an hour ago, or reckless Tina who strolls toward robbery or rape or whatever awaits chicks who wander past projects in Spanish Harlem. Maybe, having held a gun, Tina lost her fears. Rainey certainly feels more capable.
    “Let’s get this over with.” Rainey grabs Leah’s wrist, bone thin, and they walk up behind Tina at the light on Ninety-Eighth.
    “Tina,” says Rainey, and when Tina whirls around, “Don’t get mad. You owe me.”
    “I knew you were there,” says Tina, “and I owe you shit. You, you’re dead.”
    “I quit being dead,” says Leah, though she looks at Rainey when she says it.
    “You’re in my neighborhood, you might already be dead.” They are standing outside a hair salon with its door open and that Ricky Ricardo music playing. In the window are pictures of women with different hairstyles, fancy ones, updos, stuff none of the Urban Day moms would be caught dead with.
    “You’re Porto Rican,” says Rainey.
    “Puerto,” says Leah automatically.
    “
Tú, cállate
,” says Tina. “Puerto. I ride the bus. Is that a problem?”
    Rainey scrutinizes her. “You don’t ride the bus.”
    “Say it. I ride the bus,” says Tina.
    “But you don’t,” says Rainey. Tina has dark honey hair and light skin, though Rainey can almost now perceive the faintest cast to it, maybe, she thinks, like Sophia Loren.
    “That’s your big fat mistake. You look at me, but you don’t see.
I ride the bus
.”
    She wheels around and walks toward Ninety-Ninth. Rainey and Leah follow. They pass a storefront that fixes flat tires and another that seems to sell dolls covered with dust and has young men lounging outside, watching them intently. “Okay, if it matters that much, you ride the bus.”
    “It matters that much.”
    “You ride the bus, and you’re going to give me that fucking clarinet.”
    “I’m going to give you shit.”
    “Clarinet,” says Rainey, “or I never talk to you again.”
    Tina hesitates, then thrusts the clarinet hard into Rainey’s arms. Suddenly it’s the last thing Rainey wants to touch.
    “Your father is—fucked up.”
    “Did you kiss him?”
    Leah looks back and forth between them, riveted. A meat truck roars by, almost consuming Tina’s answer.
    “No,” says Tina, but she says
no
with two syllables, and Rainey hears
yes
and lifts her hand. Tina doesn’t flinch. “He touched my mouth.”
    “He touched your fucking
mouth
? With what?” Rainey’s hand is gripped at the wrist by Leah. She wonders if she would have slapped Tina.
    “He put two fingers on my lips. He said pretend it was the mouthpiece. He just said blow. It was part of the lesson.”
    “Did you kiss them?” Rainey lets Leah push her hand down.
    “His fingers?”
    “Yeah, were you kissing his goddamn fingers?”
    “It was like this, if you really have to know,” says Tina, and on the corner of Ninety-Ninth Street and Lexington Avenue, surrounded by passersby and storekeepers in doorways and a boy with a transistor radio to his ear and two young men in suits and a young mother with a baby carriage, she takesRainey’s first two fingers. Rainey lets her do it, lets Tina put her fingertips with their bitten nails on Tina’s soft lower lip. She feels the damp flesh and the hardness of teeth as Tina edges her fingertips fractionally deeper and thinks,
This is the softness inside Tina Dial
, and, a second later,
My father was here
.
    Tina closes her lips and blows.
    Rainey yanks her fingers back and wipes them on her top.
    “I didn’t know what to do. He’s Howard Royal. He was giving me a lesson. Is that a kiss?”
    “No,” says Rainey. “It’s disgusting. He’s my father and you were in his bedroom and that makes you—”
    “Go ahead,” says Tina.
    Rainey looks up the block, where a Dumpster is parked outside a fenced-in empty lot. “Wait here,” she says. Because of Howard her mother has split and her best friend has almost defected, and there have been other losses she cannot find words