“I feel like sometimes they don’t care,” said Charisma. “This guy was twenty-four with kids . . . So then, I was looking at him like, ‘Sir, how old are you?’ He was like twenty-four. I asked him, ‘How old do I look?’ He was like, ‘Nineteen or twenty.’ . . . But in the back of my head, I was like, ‘I do not look that age.’ . . . So then I was like, ‘I’m seventeen.’ He was like, ‘We still can’t talk?’ . . . No!” Whether in the community or at school, age compression (discussed in Chapter 1) is a phenomenon that is often thrust upon Black girls. However, these girls are girls, not fully developed
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