The Histology text provided her the most joy, better than “Bathroom Humor, Part Four.” She loved the drawings as well as the words and concepts, though they were but vaguely understood. She now decided it was uncool to speak in profane argot; she forswore swearing. Instead, she would enunciate the implied body part or consonant physiological activity. This, along with her well-known ruthlessness and lack of fear, further set her apart from her peers. Her word was law, her commands demands from on High.

Thus she was truly urinated-off when her homework was marked “F” along with a little note, “Tameeka, please see me.” That mother-fornicator! That piece of bowel movement! Here she had handed in homework for the first time this year, and she knew it was right because it was copied word for word from one of her new books. She had recognized that it was a history question—this was a history class, Mr. Polanski was her history teacher—and had duly employed a History book. True, the question concerned the thirteen American colonies and she had answered with a passage about a Roman empress who had poisoned one of the emperor’s concubines, but she had shown effort, had participated in scholarly enterprise. Actually, she was delighted to learn of her historic antecedents, a no-moraled women who did nasty things. Surely this was more important than the lack of congruence between query and response. She would teach this penis swallower, this fecal deposit, a lesson.

Next day as Mr. Polanski walked to his car, her brother, Kwame, and two of his friends grabbed him and hustled the little man into a nearby alley where Tameeka was waiting. Kwame held his hand over the son of a female dog’s mouth, while his buddies commenced wailing upon the sides of his head with their fists as soon as they were safely out of view. Tameeka only watched at first, then entered the fray, acting with a purpose the boys understood, but addressing a hypothesis they didn’t know existed.

Tameeka had become fascinated by the concept of squamous metaplasia, wherein chronically damaged tissue changed into sturdier, albeit less functional, epithelia better able to withstand insult. She loved the idea that rather than destroying something, say, by breaking a nose or poking out an eye, she could effect change in the body’s very composition. She did have a few parts of this idea wrong, however. Said change was in response to persistent injury over time, say, in a cigarette smoker or as a result of continuous drip, drip, drip of stomach acid, and did not immediately follow blunt trauma. Also, she had reading problems, and pronounced the word ‘skwaymush’ instead of, phonetically, ‘skwamus.’ But so be it. Tameeka reveled in the concept, however mangled its perception or pronunciation.