Something She Can Feel

“Come on.” He beckoned again and I reached for his hand.

“Now y’all know when Dame comes to town, there’s always gonna be something real special,” he said as one of the band members brought a chair up on stage and instructed me to sit in it. I sat down and looked at Dame, wondering what he was going to do and praying he wasn’t about to embarrass me in front of all of these faces I didn’t know. “This time, something real special came to me,” he went on and I saw the girls I was just standing beside turn from looking confused to jealous. “I won’t bore y’all with the details, so let’s just say, this is someone from my past. And I brought her up here tonight because I’m about to drop a rhyme that’s going on my next album. Y’all all right with that?”

Excluding the sour-faced women, the crowd cheered and Dame looked at me and smiled.

“And she needs to be up here because the song’s about her.”

“No,” I mouthed to him nervously. I couldn’t believe he was putting me on the spot. I looked at him hard, but he just kept smiling and turned back to the audience.

“You know how when MCs be about to spit a rhyme about some personal shit, they usually be like, ‘I don’t want people to get the wrong idea’? Well, I do want you to get the wrong idea about this one. It’s called ‘Teacher’s Pet.’ Yo, drop it.”

The band laid down a melodic, upbeat groove. The two singers, who’d stepped away to sip on water bottles placed on a table at the side of the stage, rushed back to their microphones.

“Teacher’s pet. Teacher’s pet. Everybody wanna be the teacher’s pet,” the two women sang slowly in unison as he bopped his head to the beat.

Sitting there, I didn’t know if I wanted to hear what he was about to say or if I was dying to hear everything he had to say. I looked out to see if I could find Billie’s face, but instead, there was just Naima, standing at the foot of the stage with a grimace on her face.

Dame looked back at me and then he started rhyming:

It’s like you and me,

And me and you,

I couldn’t pass your test

even if I wanted to.

It’s like me and you,

And you and me,

I couldn’t pass your test

because past you I couldn’t see.

His flow was quick enough to keep up with the tempo set by the band but still slow like a poet’s, so I could hear each line. A serious and almost longing look on his face, he turned from me to the crowd and stepped up to the edge of the stage.

“Yo, check it,” he went on:

I wanted so bad to leave childhood behind,

My childhood crush, I’d leave that at the same time.

Her hair, her scent, her smile just let it go,

But you can never leave your teacher, yo

u can never let

her go.

Between the verses, the singers sang the chorus, improvising in the background in call and response fashion when he started to rhyme.

I used to sit in the back with my boys and just chill,

But when she walked into the room, my universe just

went still.