The locket was my saving grace and not only did it help to mend the broken part of my spirit, it did something else as well. Without a broken spirit, my mind was free to wander you see, and it ended up in the same place as the minds of the rest of the boys my age--in a seething pool of fornication. The locket set my brain to conjuring up ideas about sex between the races, and it all began with that slave girl and her white master. I wanted to know what their union would have been like, what the two of them actually looked like together.

Admittedly, I'd heard the narrative many times before regarding who'd stolen the necklace and why, but as a young boy, I'd never really given it much thought. After its discovery however, at the ripe age of sixteen, that heart-shaped pendent sparked the inception of a whole slew of daydreams in my already overactive imagination. The story came back to me and scenes of a white man having his way with a black woman suddenly overtook my consciousness.

It was strange though. At that stage in my life, I'd only ever seen two black people in an affectionate embrace, like when I'd witnessed my father and mother kiss, or when they'd stolen a more intimate moment, my father pressing up behind her while she did the dishes.

Sure, I'd occasionally spotted a white couple holding hands on the street, or observed them making out on one of the soap operas my mother was prone to watching, but I'd never actually witnessed firsthand two people of different races doing anything even remotely sexual, and never once had I contemplated a black person and a white person actually getting it on. It just wasn't something that was a part of my universe--until then, that is.

And so, together in my daydreams, my lovers engaged in all kinds of wild shenanigans, tricks that only a teenage boy could dream up. Sitting in class, I pictured those two people bound at the hip--their arms a pair of discharging wires, flailing and lunging, the contrasting hues of their bodies winding together like the stripes of a candy cane. I imagined them trading spit and twining tongues, his thin lips swallowed up by the fullness of hers, and I envisioned his throbbing, melanoid penis penetrating her dewy pink vagina.