Don't Be Disrespecting Me

The girls liked Erin, but not his name. So they called him E. He liked it, especially when Ona called him that.

E's boys teased him about Ona. She lived in the suburbs and couldn't even get phone calls from boys. But she liked E, even though he came from the part of town that everybody called Death Row.

"Ona think she better than us," E's boy Noodles said. They were at E's house, lying on his bed--a pile of thin woolly blankets on the floor.

E thought about Ona's pretty smile and her apple-butter brown skin. "She's all right," he said.

"Invite her to your crib then."

"One day," E said , rubbing his gloved hands together .

Noodles stood up and look through the thick, clear plastic covering E's bedroom window. "Man, when your momma gonna get the heat cut back on?"

Even with the platic, E could see frost on the windows and his breath sometimes when he breathed out. "You got heat?"

"Well, we ... "

"Then shut up."

For a long time, they talked about girls. Then E Said they should go to the mall. "It's warm there."

"They got girls there, too," Noodles said. "And girls always got some dough."