 Hi, my name is Kwame and tonight I'm going to read you a short story from the book How to Love a Jamaican. How to Love a Jamaican is by Alexia Arthas and it houses a series of short stories, interesting short stories, and I picked one titled Bad Behavior and I hope you enjoy it. So yes, stick around and let's get to it. Pam and Curtis brought Stacey to Jamaica because they didn't know what else to do with her. They believed that her old-time granny was straightening her out. In Brooklyn, Stacey cut her glasses often and she was caught giving the boy a blowjob in an empty classroom. They looked at the sweet little face on the body of a woman and they were terrified of her and for her. It seemed that her breasts and her arse were getting bigger every day. Often Pam will pull down Stacey's shirt to give her arse better coverage and Stacey would groan and laugh, tucking her shirts back into her jeans. Pam wanted her loud to Curtis whether Stacey's curvy body was because of all the chicken wings she enjoyed eating from the Chinese restaurant. In America, Pam argued, chickens were injected with hormones, which could explain all the little black girls with breasts and arses before their time. Stacey refused to eat breakfast because she was never hungry in the mornings and because the school lunch was nasty, she was ravenous by the end of school day. She would come home with a take-out box, pork fried rice and fried chicken wings. She ate while she did her homework. Somehow in the midst of teenage angst and manhunger, she remained a diligent student and would later refuse to eat dinner with her parents and little brother because she was still four. Recently, Curtis was driving on Rockaway Parkway when he saw Stacey walk out of the train station just come from school. A man, not a boy, but a man in baguette jeans, just any old street thug, had called to his daughter and she had actually turned around and walked back to him. They were still talking when Curtis showed up to escort Stacey home. Pam and Curtis were afraid of their 14-year-old daughter. Often, they would tell each other that this was what America did to children. This blasted country that turned parents into children and children into parents. One need not look any further than the white people on the television who asked their children what they wanted to eat for dinner. In Jamaica, children knew to respect adults while it wasn't unusual to hear an American child call an adult by her first name. It wasn't that Jamaican children were perfect. It was that when they made mistakes, they knew to be ashamed. All children were selfish, but American ones had an easier time living for themselves. They took their daughter to Jamaica on the pretense of a vacation. Before they left Brooklyn, when Pam checked Stacey's suitcase, she found that her daughter had packed two nameplate necklaces that read Bad Bitch and Flawless and some thongs that Pam didn't know she owned. Pam left the Flawless necklace in the suitcase and hid the Bad Bitch necklaces and thongs. Stacey didn't seem to notice the missing items. On the beach, she wore sunglasses and a two-piece bathing suit she had bought with her own money, revealing the belly button piercing her appearance that even though she had. When a dreadlocked man saw her sitting on the beach by herself, he invited her to follow him to his house. She had looked the man in the face and kissed her teeth without fear as though he and she were size. Every day, Stacey climbed the mango tree behind her grandmother's house and then ate several mangoes in one sitting. In the afternoon, she walked down to the shop to buy banana chips, even though she had five on open packages sitting on the dresser, because she liked that the boy at the counter flirted with her and looked openly at her breasts. On the fifth day, while Stacey slept, her parents and little brother left. A few hours later, her grandmother, Trudy, nushed her out of the bed asking, You going to sleep the whole day? She was eating the saltfish and dumplings her grandmother made for breakfast when she thought to ask about her parents and brother. It wasn't the first morning she had awakened late to hear that they had started the day without her. At first, Trudy ignored her, so Stacey asked again. You not behave yourself. Her grandmother told her, speaking quietly, so they left you with me until you behave yourself. Stacey behaved very badly, cussing up some bad words and throwing her breakfast on the floor, which surprised the old lady so much that all she could say was Jesus Christ. She hadn't believed the girl was as bad as they said and since she was lonely living the house by herself, she gladly welcomed her. Stacey ran to the front of the house and looked down the road to see if they had only recently left. She knew this couldn't be the case, but she looked anyway. Then, she went to the back of the house behind the old pit toilet so that she could cry without anyone seeing her. She bawled for a long time. She punched her fist into the walls of the long retired pit toilet, but the pain only made her cry harder. She felt someone watching and when she looked down, Fatty, her grandmother's mongrel dog, was looking up at her. She bent to wrap Fatty's belly, which was heavy with puppies, and the dog reached up to lick her tears from her face. Over the first two weeks after her parents left, Stacey's spirit softened. She was quieter, more inward. When she spoke to her parents on the phone, she promised that she would behave herself, but Curtis and Pam weren't ready to let Stacey back into their home. Though at times they had missed her, she was, after all, a sweet girl when she wanted to be, and she was the first born, which meant they loved her in a different way, not necessarily a better way than they loved their son Curtis Jr., a chubby 10-year-old who was an easy child. They told her that after a year, if she improved, she could come home. You such a pretty girl if you do some ugly things. Why you won't behave yourself? Stacey had smiled and looked embarrassed because she was shy for her grandmother to know certain things about her, and yet it was a compliment to hear that she was pretty. She'd been afraid when she put her mouth on the boy's penis. Patrick was one of the most desired boys in school, and of all the other girls, he had pulled Stacey into an empty classroom, putting her hand down his pants. This happened a few times, them kissing in empty classrooms, and one day he pushed his fingers down her jeans, and eventually she climaxed. And it was surprising and gratified because she had never masturbated before and hadn't known that a boy's fingers could do that to her. She told one of her friends, and the friend had been surprised to hear that Stacey hadn't reciprocated, and this made Stacey feel as though she had done something wrong. She was sure Patrick would never pull her into a classroom again, and when he did, she wanted to make it so he wouldn't be disappointed. The first and only time she was caught. Her parents had been furious, and they had said all kinds of things, but they hadn't asked why. Every morning, Trudy woke her granddaughter so she could help with the breakfast, and she would help with the other meals as well. Stacey learned to fry dumplings that were almost as good as her grandmother's, to make a nice chicken foot soup, and to bake sweet potato pudding. In New York, Pam had done all the cooking. When Stacey started at an all-girls high school, she learned to wash her uniform by hand, even though Trudy had a washing machine, because her grandmother claimed that it was the only way to ensure that all white shirts were really clean. She was distracted from boys, because the relationship with her classmates were so intricate in consuming, all of them interested in befriending the foreign girl. The mother Trudy had been was another woman. When Pam was 16, Trudy, acting on the tip from a neighbor, had found a love letter in one of her daughter's schoolbooks and had punched her, even slapped her face. It wasn't until Pam had become a woman with her husband and children that she could almost forgive her mother. Not all mothers could afford to be kind. When Pam had first come to America, she cleaned for a white family, and one afternoon, standing at her employer's bedroom door, she overheard the woman and her teenage daughter debate the daughter's decision to lose her virginity to her boyfriend. Pam marveled that this was a thing that could happen. She had vowed to become a better mother than Trudy. But then, without realizing until it was too late, without knowing why or how, she had failed her daughter. She had had to send her daughter to her mother, and she hoped that the old woman would be tough. Maybe, she thought, maybe the formula so many Caribbean mothers used on their daughters wasn't the worst thing. Maybe, she thought, it was sacrilege for daughters to discuss their sex lives with their mothers, and what the daughter needed was not a confidant, but a woman who loved her enough to show her some of the harshness that the world was already unable to give her. For a long time after Pam came to America, it seemed that she was eternally in school. At first, for years, she studied on a part-time basis for a bachelor's degree. After all, she hadn't come to America to clean and cook for white people and take care of their children. When she and Curtis, she went to school to become a registered nurse. They had taken longer than necessary because she had to attend part-time. She needed an income, so she was still cleaning for white people and taking care of their children. When Stacy was growing up, Pam was always working overtime so they could buy a house. And when she and Curtis bought a house, she worked overtime so they could pay the mortgage, the water bill, the electric bill, and all the other bills that came with owning a house. She'd married a man who wasn't as ambitious as she was. For years, she'd married Curtis to go to school, and for years he said he would look about it soon, but soon never came. He was a simple man when she'd met him, and she believed that he would be good to her, so she married him for something that wasn't quite love and because she was tired of struggling in America without a green card. When she met him, he made his money by cleaning for the church he attended. And though it wasn't plenty of money, he seemed contented. Now, he was one of the janitors at an elementary school. If it had been up to Curtis, she and the children would have stayed in that tiny two-bedroom on Stirling Street and he wouldn't have minded. Curtis, unlike Pam, hadn't come to America for a better life. He'd left Jamaica because his mother filed for him and he figured it seemed like a reasonable opportunity. Pam worked hard because she had to. What choice did she have with her husband like Curtis? If she didn't put a pot on the stove, the thought would never have occurred to him. Before she had children, she had hoped that she would see her daughter as more than a daughter, as a person with desires and her own set of truths. And it turned out that all she saw was a child who needed from her. She determined that what her daughter needed was to be fed, clothed, baptized and protected from men. When her daughter put her mouth on the boy's penis, the question hadn't been why. But the answer had been no. The following year, Pam, Curtis and Curtis Junior returned to Jamaica. Pam leaves Curtis and Curtis Junior to bring the suitcases into the house, while she goes looking for her daughter. The house is empty, so she ventures to the back, where Stacey is squatting on their mongo tree, scaling a pan of fish. Pam watches her. Every time Stacey guts a fish, he throws the size to fatty. In New York, her daughter has certainly never cleaned fish. Of course, Pam thinks. Of course my mother said her right. On belongs to her, Trudy talks to her granddaughter in reasons with her. Once, they had walked down to the shop together, and because Trudy noticed that the shopkeeper's son was looking at her granddaughter as though she had plans for her, she said to him, take you eye of my grandpickney. I know you'll get Grace Bickney pregnant. Stacey had laughed in agreement. Now she looks up, and in her excitement to greet her mother, she knocks over the pan of fish. But fatty, who's pregnant again, is quicker than she is. Grabbing a fish in their mouth and ambling off before anyone can stop her.