After Tupac & D Foster (2 page)

“Me too,” I said, pushing the slice back at her. She dropped it into the empty pizza box, then took a napkin and wiped the oil off her arm.

“You should just rub that in,” Neeka said.“Your arm’s all ashy.”

“You hush!” D said. But she was smiling.

“You still ain’t tell me what else you got in common with Tupac,” Neeka said.

“Was your mama in jail like his mama?” I asked.

D shook her head. She curled her fingers into her palm and stared down at them.

“My mama is somewhere being somebody’s hot mess.”

She got quiet for a minute. “He sings about things that I’m living, you know. When he be singing the ‘Dear Mama’ song, that makes me think about my own mama. It’s like his mama was a mess sometimes and he still loved her—people’s moms be all complicated, and it’s not like you got a bad mama or you got a good mama the way people be trying to judge and say.”

D smiled.

“It’s like he sees stuff, you know? And he
knows
stuff. And he be thinking stuff that only somebody who knows that kinda living deep and true could know and think.”

“Yeah,” Neeka said. “And he gets paid big dollars for those thoughts. That’s way, way,
way
different from us.”

The Tupac video went off and Public Enemy came on. I couldn’t stand PE with their stupid big clocks around their necks and all that military stuff. It didn’t make any sense to me.

Neeka and D didn’t like them either. I turned the sound down.

“Y’all spending the night?” I asked.

Neeka nodded but D shook her head.

“Flo said she’d beat my behind if I didn’t come home.” She got up off the floor. Her foster mom’s name wasn’t Flo, we just called her that. Short for Foster Lady Orderly. It was real late for D to be taking the bus back to Flo’s house. She started putting on her sandals and getting her stuff together. We’d been friends for almost a year but we’d never seen where she lived.

“We gonna walk you to the bus stop,” I said, getting up off the couch. “C’mon, Neeka.”

“You sure lucky,” D said to Neeka.

“For what?” Neeka stretched real high and yawned, her skinny brown belly showing out from under her T-shirt.

“Just ’cause you get to spend the night.” D took a brush out of her pocketbook and brushed her hair. It was straightened, but Flo wouldn’t let her wear any styles except two cornrows or a whole lot of box braids. Whenever D got around our way, she took the cornrows out and just let her hair be free. But she always remembered to put it back like it was before she got on the bus.

“You should just tell the crazy lady you almost grown,” Neeka said. “And then come around here and let me hook you up with some fly hair and some good fashion.”

D stopped brushing. I clicked the TV off and turned on the light. We all squinted against the brightness.

“Dag, girl,” Neeka said. “Give a sister a warning before you turn on a light.”

“Why you always gotta say that, Neeka?” D was pointing the brush at her.

“Say what?”

“Tell me to go tell Flo about herself.”

“ ’Cause you
should
.”

“And then what?” D looked mad now. Her eyes were dark green—pretty in a strange way, like they should have been on somebody different but at the same time looking like they almost belonged to her. Her skin wasn’t brown like mine or light brown like Neeka’s—it was kinda
tan
brown in that way that made people always ask her what she was mixed with. When she said, “I’m half black and half your mama!” me and Neeka would laugh and the person would either get mad or laugh too. D hated people asking what she was. Maybe because she didn’t know who her daddy was.

Neeka rolled her eyes. “If you told Flo to kiss your butt, she’d see you was half grown and stop treating you like somebody’s baby.”

“Last I heard, twelve wasn’t half grown—”

“In six years, you’ll be eighteen,” Neeka said. “You eighteen, you legal.”

“If I
make it
to eighteen. If I don’t act right, I’m out of the system and on my own. And probably
homeless.
I been in the system long enough to see how jacked up it is. Kids living in the streets because they couldn’t get along with their foster mamas. Kids all caught out there and whatnot. I am
so
not trying to go down like that.” D put the brush in her bag and started braiding, her hands flying through her hair like she’d been braiding it for a hundred years.

“Why you getting so tight about it, D? Dag. I was just
saying
.”

D finished the first braid and started on the other one. “You my girl, Neeka, but you got your folks looking out for you.”

Neeka started to say something, but D put her hand up.

“Let me finish. You got that nice house and cute clothes and stuff. All I got right now is Flo, and if Flo says go, then I gotta go. I ain’t ready to be trying to figure out how to fit in with some other family somewhere. I’m just trying to fit in with Flo.”

“She just trying to go with the Flo,” I said.

D looked at me and smiled.

“You corny,” Neeka said.

D finished her other braid and looked at her watch—she’d bought it for ten dollars in Times Square, and most of the time it worked. She always wore it and was always checking it.

We headed out. It was warm outside. Some grown-ups were sitting on their stairs across the street next door to Neeka’s house. We waved and they waved back. Neeka’s mama, Miss Irene, must have smelled us leaving, because she raised her window.

“Neeka, where you all think you going this late?” she yelled across at us.

Neeka rolled her eyes and cursed softly. “That woman’s got
radar
, yo!” she whispered. “We’re just walking D to the bus stop, Ma! Then I’m gonna sleep over at—”

“Oh, now you’re
telling
me what you’re going to do?” Miss Irene said. She must have been in the middle of doing her hair because half of it was straightened, hanging down to her shoulder, and the other half was curling above her ear.

“Just go with the Flo,” D whispered.

“Can I . . . ?”

“You call me when you get back inside and we’ll talk about it,” Miss Irene said. “You be safe going home, D.”

“I will, Miss Irene,” D said, and Miss Irene slid the window back down to meet the screen and disappeared into the house.

We knew she’d let Neeka stay. For some reason, moms felt like they had to put on acts and let you know who had all the power.

Neeka put her hands in her pockets and frowned all the way to the bus stop. But the minute we turned the corner, me and D started cracking up.

“She caught you out there, Neeka.” D laughed.

“Can’t creep around Miss Irene,” I said. I did the creep-step from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video.

“You lucky you don’t have some real mama all up in your stuff,” Neeka said to D.

We got to the bus stop and D took a deep breath. The avenue was quiet the way it usually was. Most times, the loudest sound was the bus pulling up. But for a while, there wasn’t even that.

“One day, my mama’s gonna show up again and things will all settle back to how they once was . . .”

Me and Neeka looked at each other. It wasn’t the first time D had mentioned her mama coming back. Me and Neeka had believed her in the beginning. But after a lot of time passed with no real mama coming, we stopped. We didn’t tell D that. She was our girl and she needed to keep on keeping on like that.

“That’s gonna be tight,” D said softly. “Real tight.”

“Yeah,” Neeka said. “Until she puts you on lockdown worse than Flo.”

“Or worse than
your
mama,” D said, and me and her started cracking up again.

Neeka tried not to, but she couldn’t help smiling.

“You remember how our mamas were when you first starting coming around?” Neeka said. “All suspicious and whatnot.”

“Like you were going to ruin their innocent girls,” I said. “Meanwhile, Neeka already looking at every boy that got half a leg and—”

“It wasn’t deep,” D said, cutting me off. A look came across her face, tired, old like a grown-up. “I would have been suspicious of me too—coming to this nice neighborhood out of nowhere. No mama or dad or even little sister to be coming over here with me.”

“They got cool about it, though. My moms was just glad I had another friend,” I said.

“And my moms was just glad you had some sense. And being how she seems to love kids so ding-dang much, she probably fell asleep dreaming me and you was a third set of twins in the family.”

Me and Neeka laughed. D smiled, but she looked faraway. Like she was already on that bus and gone.

“I used to be roaming all over the place,” D said. “And I’m glad because it got me here.”

“Why
did
you roam, though?” I asked. Whenever D talked about her roaming, I always asked why. I wanted to understand—deep—what it was like to step outside.

D looked at me and shook her head. “Why? Why? Why, Miss Why? You know
why
.”

“I know you be telling us why, but I still don’t get it. You say you want to see how other people be living, but that still don’t make a lot of sense to me.”

“You really not curious about how other people be living?”

“Yeah right,” Neeka said. “I guess you read all those biographies and all them other books just to feel the pages turning between your fingers.”

“Shut up, Neeka. I’m talking to D. Doesn’t have anything to do with the books I read.”

“Yeah it does,” D said quietly. She looked at me, her green eyes like tiny mouths asking me all these questions—
Don’t you ever want to know the answers?
they were saying.
The real answers . . . to everything?

“Uptown they got those fancy buildings. Out in Brooklyn they got those pretty brownstone houses. West Side got Central Park and people going all over the place in those bright yellow taxicabs.” D looked at us and I knew a part of her knew how much me and Neeka lived for the rare moments when she talked about her life, when she showed us where she’d been and, by doing so, we got to go to those places too.

And then it made sense to me—crazy-fast sense in a way it hadn’t before. D walked out of her own life each time she stepped into one of those other places. She got off the bus or walked up out of the subway and her life disappeared, got replaced by that new place, those new strangers—like big pink erasers. Before me and Neeka started asking D about her life, we were erasers too—she got to step into our world, with all the trees and mamas calling from windows and kids playing on the block, and forget.

“I can’t even imagine being as free as you,” Neeka said. “I’d be all over the place!”

“That’s why your mama got you on lockdown,” I said.

“Like yours doesn’t?” Neeka said back.

D laughed, but then she said, “Some days I be feeling like I’m
too
free.”

“You really think there’s such a thing as
too free
?”

“Heckio no!” Neeka said. “And I can tell you for a fact, D—you’d be kissing all that good-bye with a real mama.”

D leaned her head on Neeka’s shoulder and smiled. “I’m done, girl. That’s what I’m saying. I seen everything I want to see. Lockdown like
that
? I’m ready. As long as it comes with my mama.”

D started singing real soft “Dear Mama,” the Tupac song where he talked about having a beef with his moms but loving her anyway. D knew all the words and she moved real sweet when she did the rap parts. But when the chorus came on, she just stayed still and sung it—
I love you. I need you. I appreciateyou
—over and over until the song was done.

We got quiet. An ambulance raced by, and way down the avenue, somebody started honking their car horn like they didn’t have any sense. It was June now and school was out for the summer. Our neighborhood was usually quiet even in the summertime. It had always been like that, boring and quiet with some kids and some teenagers and a whole lot of parents up in all of our business. It was the kinda block where somebody was calling your mama if you even talked too loud. Crazy how grown people liked their quiet.

We loved D because she was our girl and because she’d been to places and seen things me and Neeka probably weren’t ever gonna see. Even though Flo had her on lockdown at night, D also had all this freedom in the daytime. I leaned against the bus stop sign and watched her and Neeka. Mostly I was the quiet one in our group, the Brain. Mostly I watched and listened. But I could watch until I was ninety-nine and I’d never be able to see what D saw.

“The way I figure it,” D said, “we all just out in the world trying to figure out our Big Purpose.”

“Oh, now you gonna go get all
relevant
,” Neeka said.
Relevant
was one of her favorite words. A lot of rappers used it and Neeka used it whenever she could too. “Well, drop your knowledge.”

“I’m serious, Neeka. My Big Purpose ain’t about telling Flo to let me do whatever I want to do. I could do that and then be out on the street tomorrow. And the street is
not
my Big Purpose.”

“What’s your purpose, then,” I asked. “I mean, what’s your
Big
Purpose?”

D smiled.

“You my girls,” D said. “You been my girls for a long time now and we tight like it’s all right. Everybody knows that. Everybody see us coming say, ‘Here come—’”

“Three the Hard Way,” we all said.

“I know I got this Big Purpose. And when I know what it is exactly, I’m coming right to y’all with the news.”

The bus came and D kissed me and Neeka good-bye and climbed on. We watched her pay her fare, walk to the back and climb into a window seat. There were only a few other people on the bus and D pressed her forehead against the window and gave us the power peace sign. Me and Neeka gave it right back to her and stood there until the bus pulled away. She kept waving at us until the bus was way down the avenue.

Then me and Neeka headed back to our block. We’d lived across from each other since we was babies. If Neeka wasn’t spending the night, she’d cross to her green house with the dark green shutters. Inside, Miss Irene would be fussing at the kids to be quieter and fussing at Neeka to help her get dinner ready before her daddy got home.