Excerpt from Dominion by Addie E. Citchens, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

If he didn't have a big dick, somebody should have stoned him, but everybody knew all the Winfreys did. When he passed, the teachers got nervous; the girls sighed. When he picked you, you didn't giggle about him with your girlfriends, or they would get too jealous and try to slander your name. Me and my siblings were smelly poor when we were younger, and on top of that, my mama went and left, or died, which was shameful in itself. Kids like me usually went through school either being very violent or very quiet. I wasn't a fighter, so I had long ago chosen the latter. In our shared spaces, I was content to watch him, knowing I would never get the chance to love him.

Junior year, I started letting my hair hang wild every day because I heard he liked that. They started saying I must be mixed with something, but who knew? I certainly didn't. It must have worked because one day last September, he was behind me in chemistry and complained to the teacher that he could not see around my hair. It got the class to cracking up and my face burning red. After the bell had rung, as we were leaving, he overtook me.

"Diamond Bailey," he said, like he had just remembered me from somewhere.

My heart sang, but he went on his way down the hall without saying another word. The next day at lunchtime, he upped and asked me to give him what was on my tray, and I did. It was a thing the boys did sometimes if they liked you. The next day we had chili and rice, and he asked me again, and I gave it to him again. He took everything but the fruit cocktail, and I sat with my friend Bunny and side-eyed him, scooping the sap-thin fruit cocktail juice from its molded compartment as my stomach complained. The day after that was Friday, and we were having catfish. You could smell it all up and down the hall.

The catfish came hard-fried on a cloud of white bread, and even though that starchy bread would be stuck to the roof of my mouth for the rest of the day, I spent the morning periods daydreaming about drowning my fish in hot sauce and ketchup and making a sandwich. Well, he was waiting for me in the cafeteria, and I had to tell him no. He laughed, and the other athletes laughed with him. He let me off the hook, but he made sure I saw him taking Shanice's fish from her tray.

The same afternoon, he cornered me in the hall and asked me for my phone number.

That was ten months ago, and now he was my everything, and I was his. He gave me money, and he didn't bother me about no coochie, even though I wanted to give him some, and he would have been justified in asking because he was who he was. But I wasn't a pretend virgin. I was 100 percent a virgin, and it was amazing to him, and me, too, that a girl like me got to be seventeen without even being finger fucked—by a friend of the family or spare uncle at the very least. For that reason, we decided together to save ourselves for each other when the time was right.

Not everybody was in love with Wonderboy, though. A lot of people assumed he thought he was too much, and I could believe that he did. When we were thirteen in Vacation Bible School, Lissandra Betts asked if Jesus had a last name. Lissandra wore Coke bottle glasses and was in special education. Her and all the Bettses were so big and tall you could tell they had plow-hand or blacksmith in their lineage. Nobody made fun of her, though, because her brother, Beefsteak, was colossal and smart as a whip, but he would bang heads over Lissandra. If it had been anybody else, Mother Butler would have thought they were playing with the Lord, but everybody knew Lissandra was sincere. Somebody yelled out, "Of Nazareth." Another somebody said, "Christ," and almost said, "Duh," after that, but they checked themself before Beefsteak could.

"Jesus Winfrey," yelled Wonderboy. "You didn't know? His name was Jesus Winfrey. Jesus Winfrey, Emanuel Winfrey, can't yall see?"

Everybody laughed or booed. At other times, he had said his brothers had tried to throw him down a well, or that he had just come from crushing Philistines, or that he had merely one seal left to break, but this time, Mother Butler really got mad. She walked him straight to the pastor's study and stayed gone a long time. He came back smiling.

Excerpted from Dominion by Addie E. Citchens. Copyright © 2025 by Addie E. Citchens. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.