I Had A Female Pigeon As A Pet. I Looked In Her Box One Morning And She Was Dead.

They called my apartment complex White Harlem.  My neighbors set their trash outside their door once, an old jewelry cabinet with rings and necklaces still inside.  I stole it and wore the rings until the gold turned my skin green.

My friend Gina led me to play every day.  Her sister was named Lori and she had shorn blonde hair and walked barefoot around the town.  She was beautiful.  I told Gina and she told Lori.  Lori laughed and went into her bedroom that smelled like incense.  She had a waterbed with a half-naked boy in it.  Gina and I watched Crybaby in the living room with plastic covering the windows.

Mary was my other friend who lived in a nice house.  We pretended to be married and rolled around in her parents’ bed with our shirts off.  We both didn’t have breasts but Mary wore a bra like she did.  She told me she caught her mother walking the hallway in the middle of the night, naked.  The dark swatch where her legs met must’ve glowed against her white skin.

Irene and Stella lived in the apartment building next door.  They were Greek, and their father smelled of Old Spice.  He put his hand between my thighs when he drove us to the movies.  Sometimes they invited me for dinner but I stopped when they laughed at how I ate spaghetti for the first time.  My father bought two-for-one pizzas from a movie store called Pizza and Movies.  They always smelled good but never tasted like anything.

Louie was Stella and Irene’s brother who went to jail for raping someone.  I saw him on top of a girl on a picnic table behind my school’s playground.  His mother made him throw all his toys away when they found out.

We all played in the bushes, played tag at dusk.  Ran through them with dark brambles scratching our legs wet.  I never got caught.