Casting Down Imaginations by LaShanda Michelle

child?”
    “What?”
he asked, his tone totally changing. “What? No. Hell no.”
    There
was uneasiness and then the two of us laughed.
    “Why’d
you ask me that?”
    “I don’t
know,” I answered. “I was just trying to figure out why it…”
    “Took me
so long to call you and ask?” he finished for me.
    “Yeah.”
    “Well,
you know when it all happened… We were both so young. I mean, we still are
really young, but we’re a little bit older now… Things change, people change… I
heard you’ve changed.”
    I felt
myself smile. “What are you talking about?”
    He
laughed. “You know what I’m talking about. I heard you a good girl now. Don’t
do no dating or anything.”
    “That’s
not exactly true. I just raised my standards, and so far haven’t met anyone
worthy of occupying my time.”
    “Baby,
what happened to us?” he asked, becoming serious again.
    He
hadn’t called me baby in a long time. I was scared to death because I liked the
familiar feeling that came to my stomach when I heard it.
    “The
baby is what happened to us,” I told him.
    “No,
before that,” he said. “Before that. We were having problems before the baby
came, remember?”
    I
thought back to the end of my sophomore year. He was right. Things began to get
sour between us around that April.
    “I
remember what it was,” I told him.
    “What?”
    “A
certain somebody, who shall remain nameless, got a basketball scholarship and
got a big head. All of a sudden I had to start making appointments to call my
boyfriend, who was managing to find time to walk all the skanky girls to their
classes, and wasn’t giving me the time of day.”
    “Oh
yeah,” he laughed.
    “Not
funny, Terrance.”
    He
cleared his throat and his voice became serious. “I have a confession to make.”
    “What?”
    “I
cheated.”
    “What!
With who? When?”
    “No, you
can’t get mad. We ain’t together no more and this happened a long time ago.”
    I kicked
my foot. He was right, I couldn’t get mad. Dang it.
    “With
who, Terrance? And I wanna know right now.”
    “Yes ma’am,”
he joked. “You remember that girl, Nicole?”
    I was
disgusted. “Nicole Greensboro! Ugh!”
    “You
said you wasn’t going to get mad!”
    “I ain’t
mad!”
    “Then
stop yelling at me then!”
    I
swallowed the other yell that lodged itself in my throat and exhaled through my
nose.
    “Boy,
you nasty.”
    “What?
Why I gotta be all that?”
    “I don’t
know why you had to act like that, but you did,” I said to him.
    “What
you call me nasty for?”
    “Nicole
Greensboro? You cheated on me with her? That girl was the biggest ho. Ugh. If
you were going to cheat, you could have at least cheated on me with somebody
decent. Not that dizzy chick. Ugh.”
    He
chuckled.
    “When?”
I wanted to know.
    “What do
you mean, when?”
    “When?”
I repeated.
    Terrance
remembered me well enough to know when I was mad. And right now I was.
    “After
the celebration party my brother threw for me when I got the scholarship. You
had to go home early because your dad wouldn’t let you stay past midnight,
remember? She ended up staying and we…”
    I was
still mad at Daddy for that one.
    “I could
kick you,” I said.
    “Too bad
you can’t, because we’re having this conversation over the phone.”
    “I
should go get tested,” I retorted, jokingly implying that he may have given me
a STD that he could have gotten from her. “But I guess I can’t be mad at you,”
I said. “What’s done is done.”
    “That’s
right. Now don’t you have something to confess to me?”
    “What?”
    “You
never cheated?”
    I was
insulted. “No!”
    “Karen.”
    “I’m for
real, no I haven’t. Just because you can’t keep your thing in your pants,
messing around with that ol’ nasty skank don’t mean I had to be nasty, too.”
    “You
never cheated on me with Darius?”
    Darius?
That was a name I hadn’t heard in a long time. He was a guy that was on the
same