Snow White: A Survival Story

by Anna J.

  It was cold in the store. I wanted a blue freeze pop, so I put my hand across my chest to cover my erect nipples from the cold when I dipped in the freezer to get my frozen treat. I had on my figure eight earrings and Khalid’s gold chain around my neck, and it felt like all eyes were on me as I made my way back across the street to go in. Vince told me to never wear my jewelry outside when I was by myself because Bartram Village bred a lot of stick-up kids, but it was broad daylight, and although I was conscious of my surroundings, I didn’t think anyone would do anything.

  “Damn, girl. I know you taste as sweet as you look,” one of the guys said to me on the corner when I got on my side of the street. I chanced a glance at him, and he wasn’t bad-looking at all. The fact that he was holding his dick like it would fall off totally turned me off though, and instead of responding, I made a mad dash for the crib, being sure to lock the door behind me before I went upstairs.

  I already had my outfit laid out, and I was nervous because although Khalid genuinely liked what I wore all the time, I wanted to look extra cute for our date. I had a cute pastel sundress from my favorite clothing store, Theory, that was swirled with pink, yellow, light blue, and white to match the pastel pink and yellow sandals and bag I got from Kate Spade. My breasts sat up perky, so I would only have on the dress and the shoes, not even a thong underneath.

  Running all hot water in the tub, I let the tub fill while I made me a grilled cheese sandwich and cleaned up my mess. I watched an episode of Martin while I cooked up what was left of the product Vince had laid out for me, giving my bath water time to cool down to a nice temperature before I got in. It was almost eight o’clock, and I wanted to be dressed and ready for my nine o’clock date with my boo. I didn’t want him to have to wait for me.

  It didn’t take me long to cap up and bag what I cooked, and I made sure to lock everything in the floor safe that Vince had built into the living room closet to keep everything hidden. Racing toward the bathroom, I didn’t take as much time as I would have liked to soak, but I did rid myself of any pubic and underarm hair that was present on my body before I scrubbed my body from head to toe, until I sparkled like a new penny. I was often teased about my dark complexion, but nowadays, men seemed to love my brown skin.

  I got out of the tub and dripped a trail of water toward my bedroom, where I took my time drying off and caressing parts of my body, pretending Khalid was there exploring me. I loved my own scent, and could smell my wetness as my fingers got lost between my folds. Through half-closed eyelids, I envisioned how I would look in my dress, although I’d tried it on a million times since I got it.

  I felt like someone was watching me, and when I got up the nerve to look, my uncle Vince was standing in my doorway. The clock showed that I only had forty-five minutes before Khalid got there, so I hoped my uncle would just leave so that I could get dressed and be outside waiting for him. When I went to sit up, my uncle took three giant steps across the room, demanding me to lie back down. I wanted to cry, but tears were for weak bitches, and I was strong—or so I kept telling myself.

  “Don’t rush to get up because I’m here. I just want to taste your temperature,” my uncle said to me in a lust-filled voice. I hoped like hell that he wouldn’t try to have sex with me tonight. I didn’t want his hands on me, and I didn’t want his tongue anywhere near me, but if I tried to stop him, he would probably make me cancel my date with Khalid, and I was not trying to hear that.

  Vince stood and looked at me like he was struggling with demons on the inside. I could see it in his eyes that he wanted to take it, and I hoped he could see in my eyes that I really didn’t want him to. We locked eyes for what felt like forever before he decided to walk away and let me be.

  It wasn’t until I heard the door lock that I got up and ran in the bathroom to wash Vince’s scent and saliva off me. I willed myself not to cry as I moisturized my body with pink grapefruit lotion from Carol’s Daughter, afterward spritzing my body with Light Blue by Dolce and Gabbana because I loved the way the two citrus scents meshed together. Stepping into my dress, I decided to at least go with a thong as a precaution to soak up any juices later on. I knew how wet I could get, and Khalid could have me like a running faucet in the snap of a finger.

  I still had a few minutes before Khalid got there, so I took the time to make sure my room was in tip top shape, just in case we came back here tonight. I practically lived by myself, with Vince only coming to check on me to pick up product and molest me on occasion. I never worried about how the bills were being paid because he pretty much took care of everything. So if me and Khalid did come back here, we would be alone.

  Looking at the clock again, I was a little disappointed that Khalid didn’t show up a little early, but I knew he would be here. He said he would call me when he was coming around the corner, and he’d never stood me up before, so I would just wait. I was a bundle of nervous energy, and I was ready to get this date started. I knew going out tonight I would still be a girl, but by morning, I planned to be a woman, and Khalid would make that happen for me before it was too late.

  Shanyce Davidson

  Rose-Colored Glasses

  It was a damn shame how Vince treated that girl. Although I didn’t have any concrete proof, I could almost bet my life that he was molesting her or some shit like that with his trifling-ass self. I swear I hated just looking at him, though I must admit that the dick-down was serious. A woman always knows, though, and I could tell by the way she carried herself that some shit was going on in there. She just seemed too damn timid for me, like she was scared or some shit. She was nothing like the other fast-ass little girls that lived around here, but she didn’t come off as a typical child her age, either.

  I knew Joey was about tired of my ass, too, because I fucked up his money in a major way the last time I took some out of the stash, and I didn’t know how long it was gonna take to bounce back. I was hoping I could put some of the shit back, or even blame it on Khalid, but the amount that was missing was too big, and my heart wouldn’t let me get my boy in trouble.

  I shouldn’t have taken so much, but I needed it. I told my young buck from down the bottom that I would look out for him, and he was on my heels about the cash I promised him, so I had no choice. On the real, Vince got me turned out on that shit—and the dick . . . I didn’t know which one I be wanting more. I wasn’t strung out like I was a crack head or some shit. I mean, I still looked good, my body was still on point, and I still went to work on a daily, but sometimes I’d be sitting at my desk and it was hard to concentrate on registering patients when all I could think about was my next hit of Snow White.

  It was a shame, though, such a pretty little girl being corrupted by the hood. She was supposed to have a loving family to turn to, since both of her parents were taken out by the same drug that I loved, but all she had was trifling-ass Vince, with his big-dick self. I got a twinge in my pussy every time I thought about him.

  Lately, we’d been getting more sloppy with our shit. I’d been letting Vince dip in my cookie jar for years, and Joey never knew, but when Khalid started running his mouth about him being around, we had to slow down.

  I owed Joey, though. Rumor had it that he was the one who murdered my brother back in ‘98, and a part of me believed the rumor was true. Joey was known for ditching bodies down Bartram’s Garden, but no one could ever pinpoint him on the shit, because he never left any tracks.

  It wasn’t until the snow had melted and spring emerged that a jogger discovered my brother’s body early in the morning, but by that time, he had decomposed quite a bit, and we could only identify him by his dental records. When we went to view his body, it looked like a bag of rotten lunchmeat sitting up on the table. It wasn’t even enough left to really cremate him. When I asked Joey about it, he denied it, but I knew better, because back in the day, me and Joey used to sit up and talk all night when his nightmares got to be too much and he wouldn’t dare close his eyes.

  He was just kind of q
uiet now, not really saying much, and he seemed kind of jumpy. The few times I mentioned not seeing my brother around before his body was discovered, he would just say shit like my brother was a junkie and he’d pop up soon enough. What I didn’t know was that he would pop up dead, but I believe Joey did know.

  At the funeral, I fell out like my life was over and acted a plum fool. It was partly from guilt, because I knew that I shouldn’t have left him in here knowing Joey kept his stash in the crib and my brother was a crack head. Did I feel he had to die for that shit, though? Hell no, and I was tired of these half-baked niggas walking around Southwest playing God and shit like they had the right. On the flip side of that, though, when you do dirt, you get that shit, and my brother had being doing dirt longer than dirt would be doing him. I just hoped my son took another road and didn’t follow behind this hustler mentality that Joey and me had. He was tough, but he wasn’t built for the street life.

  “Ms. Jackson, please come to the registration desk.”

  I hated my damn job with a passion. I didn’t always, though. Back in the day when I first started working there, it was a nice middle class neighborhood with working women who came in to get their yearly check-ups and birth control refills. Occasionally you’d find a shy housewife who, come to find out, was not so shy. Those ones were usually trying to hide the fact that they were creeping with their neighbor’s husband and got burned, and they were trying to fix the issue before their husbands got back in town. But that was the most excitement we would get.

  When the office started accepting C.H.I.P., all this shit went downhill, and now the office was filled with a ton of young girls getting treated for the same recurring STD every two weeks because they weren’t smart enough to know that their dude of the moment had some shit. It was always the same story: since she “loved” him so much, he didn’t have to use protection.

  The girl that was sitting at my desk now smelled like trash truck juice on a hot July day, and it made me wonder what took her so long to come in for treatment.

  “Is all of your information the same, Ms. Jackson?” I asked her as I typed past the patient demographics screening, knowing that the projects would be her home for generations to come. Not too many people left the Ville. They would contribute generations to an already depressing situation. I kept my son as far away from Bartram Village as I could. He would be better if it killed me.

  “Yeah. My phone got cut off, but it’ll be back on next week, so you can leave that number in there,” she said as she brushed her bangs from her eyes with the longest fingernails I’d ever seen. I just shook my head in wonderment at how she could even function with them that long.

  It took everything in me to keep a straight face, because for the life of me, I couldn’t understand how her home phone wasn’t working when welfare paid for every damn thing, and her rent was probably no more than twelve dollars a month. As illiterate and as ghetto as she carried herself, though, she had the Gucci hobo bag and the shoes to match that I wanted. The bag alone had to run her at least seven-fifty from Sacks.

  Her hair was laid with that new terra weave that everyone was wearing now, and her nails and toes looked freshly done. My only question was, who gets dressed like that to come to the damn clinic? What was this, the new club family center?

  I was just tired, but I was more tired of having to wait for a hit. I had a small top in my bag that I could do in the bathroom real fast that would hold me over until I got down the way, so I rushed through her registration so that I could dip off real fast.

  “Have a seat in the waiting room, Ms. Jackson. We’ll be calling you back in a minute.”

  I had to hold my breath as her funky ass got up out of the chair and sashayed her ass back to the waiting area as if her pussy didn’t smell like death done twice. Turning my desk light off, I grabbed my bag real fast and dipped to the bathroom, letting my co-worker know that I would be right back.

  On the low, I kept my work with me. I just grabbed a new syringe this week from the supply closet, so I was cool on that, and once I got myself comfortable in the handicap stall and found a lighter in the bottom of my bag, I was good. I used the veins in the back of my knees so that no one would see any track marks, and I always kept a bottle cap and cotton balls so that I could cook up anywhere when necessary.

  So much had happened in the past five years that I needed something to keep myself sane. With Joey and Vince going at it with Bunz all the time, and Khalid being so concerned with Journey, I often wondered who was concerned about me. Joey didn’t even really show any interest in me like he used to. He would have sex with me sometimes just to shut me up so that he could try to get some sleep. The world I used to know was just crumbling around me, so I had started getting high more than usual.

  My hands began to shake from the anticipation, and I had to try to calm myself down so that I wouldn’t drop my shit. I wouldn’t do a whole syringe, just enough to get me nice until I left. I still had to function, and didn’t want to be on tilt at the desk.

  Tapping out a little of the drug, I cooked it up real quick and pulled it up into the syringe, a small smile spreading across my face. Quickly finding a vein behind my knee, I injected the drug into my system, setting everything on the windowsill afterward.

  Tears began to escape my eyes as I thought about what I just did and how it would affect my son if he ever found out. I told myself I could stop anytime I wanted to, but in reality, I didn’t think I could. If I got help, that would be admitting I had a problem. I tried to convince myself that it wasn’t that serious. I was a recreational user. I only wanted to get high sometimes, but I didn’t necessarily need it—or so I thought.

  It wasn’t until after the spinning stopped and I could kind of see straight that I tried getting myself together. I heard a couple of my co-workers come into the bathroom, so I made sure I had all my shit before I walked out of the stall. They looked at me like they hated me, and I knew it was because I stayed fly, so fuck all of them. Just because I worked there didn’t mean I couldn’t afford to have nice shit, and I wasn’t about to fuck up my high thinking about it.

  I heard them say some smart shit as the door was closing behind me as I left out, not realizing that I had been gone for almost twenty minutes. But I was cool. Jumping back into my work, I scheduled patient after patient until it was almost time for me to go.

  At the end of the day, I made sure all of my charts were up in medical records, and I bounced out five minutes early, eager to get me some shit before I went in. I didn’t want to dip in Joey’s stash again, so I’d have to take a trip up west to cop. It wasn’t Snow White, but it would do.

  Khalid Street

  Last Time

  “When you gonna leave that little girl alone and start messing with a real woman? You know I liked you since like the first grade.”

  I knew I was dead wrong being up in here with Gina, but on some real shit, I really thought she called me over here because she wanted help with her math. She had to go to summer school because she failed algebra, and although I wasn’t on nerd status, everyone knew math was my shit. I also knew that she had been trying to get at me since forever, but Journey had my heart, and I made sure everyone knew that.

  That definitely didn’t keep chicks from trying, though, and it was hard having to bat pussy off you all day when your own girl wasn’t giving it up. I told Journey I would wait for her, and we promised that we would be each other’s first, but I had Gina pressing her wetness against me through my sweat pants, and it was hard as hell to control an erection in a situation like this.

  “Gina, I came to help you with your math, and you know I’m not leaving Journey, so why do you keep asking?”

  “Because I know she not giving it up to you. I’m soft and wet with a tight grip, though. Don’t you want to know what all the hype is about?”

  I did want to know, but I didn’t need to feel it to find out. All my homeboys done tapped it and told me what it was hitting for already, and the
y said I’d be better off getting some head, because the pussy was already worn out. When you’re pretty like Gina, everyone wants you, and her low self-esteem–having ass gave it up willingly. I wasn’t cool on getting sloppy seconds, thirds, fifths, or however many were before me.

  Just the thought of it made my dick go back down, and I pushed her back off me gently as not to hurt her feelings. I had to get my shit together so that I could go see my girl.

  “Actually, I’ll pass on the hype, but when you’re ready to get those numbers right, let me know,” I said to her as I stood up and adjusted my dick in my boxers before smoothing my shirt out. I would have to go home and change before I saw Journey because I didn’t want her smelling Gina all over me, especially since I didn’t get none.

  “So, you mean to tell me that you gonna pass up all this?” she asked as she stepped out of her short skirt, revealing the fact that she had on no panties underneath. Next came her shirt, and her braless breasts did look delectable. She had smooth, light skin, with dark nipples and a hairless pussy. I did think twice about doing a smash and grab, but that would just be something for her to throw in Journey’s face, and I wasn’t about to put my girl through that kind of bullshit.

  “I’m good, ma. Trust.” She looked disappointed as I walked out the door, but I had no control over that. Bitches are scandalous, and I knew my girl was well worth the wait.

  Taking a peek at my watch, I put a little pep in my step because I was already running a little late, and I usually showed up early for our dates. Journey said she had a surprise for me, and I knew she was going to be looking real sexy. That alone put a smile on my face. When you got the baddest chick in the neighborhood on your arm and no one can get next to her, it feels good. Gina was only hot because she was giving it up to any and every body. Journey had class and sex appeal about her that made her stand out. I loved it.