“Well, next time you come,” Neeka said, “bring it, all right?”
D nodded then and smiled, that same smile—but this time, her whole face relaxed and it was one of the prettiest smiles I’d ever seen in my life.
“I’m cool with that,” D said.
Me and Neeka watched D walk down the block and turn the corner.
“She seems cool,” Neeka said.
I shrugged, staring at the corner long after D had disappeared around it. A part of me was still with her—turning that corner and heading off the block—on my own. Free like that.
And a few days later, when D showed up, she was wearing new sneakers and carrying the rope in her knapsack. As we stood there, unraveling it, talking about who’d be first and what rhymes we knew, D got real quiet.
“Feels like forever since I had me some friends to jump double Dutch with.”
“Wherever Flo living is the wrong place to be,” Neeka said. “ ’Cause around here, if you got a rope, you’re gonnahave some peeps to jump with.”
“That’s what it feels like,” D said. “Feels real good coming back here.”
“Long as you bring the rope,” Neeka said.
“Oh, it’s like that?” D said, playing along with Neeka’s craziness.
“You know it is, girlfriend,” Neeka said. “You know you gotta come to the table with something if you wanna eat.”
“You can come even if you don’t have no rope,” I said. “Neeka’s just messing with you. Repeating something she probably heard her mama saying.”
“Don’t talk about my mama,” Neeka said.
“Ain’t talking about your mama. I’m talking about you. That’s why Jayjones be calling her a parrot.”
“Who’s Jayjones?” D wanted to know.
“Nobody,” Neeka said. “A big nobody.”
“A big fine nobody,” I said. “He’s Neeka’s big brother.”
A group of little girls came over and stood near us, watching us untangle the rope.
“Y’all doing double Dutch?” one of them asked.
“Yeah,” Neeka said. “You can watch, but don’t even be thinking about asking for a jump.”
The little girls all nodded and it made me remember being little like that, watching the big girls jump.
“I don’t mind going last,” D said. She took the open end of the rope.
“I don’t mind going first,” Neeka said.
I picked up the closed end and me and D started turning.
“Slow down, y’all. It ain’t a double Dutch race,” Neeka said, and we slowed the ropes a little bit. When Neeka jumped in, we started counting.
“Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty . . .”
And the three of us had a rhythm going.
CHAPTER THREE
Neeka’s big brother Jayjones was going to be a pro ball player when he grew up. But in the meantime, he played ball for Grady High School and worked at KFC. At night he smelled like chicken grease and sweat, but he was so fine, most girls ignored the smell.
His full name was Jackson Jones, but the first time he got on a basketball team, he was just a little kid playing for the Police Athletic League. There was another kid named Jones on the team, so they put J. JONES on one jersey and P. JONES on the other. After that, we all started calling him Jayjones.
When he was a freshman at Grady, he scored forty points in his play-off game and me and Neeka made T-shirts that said I KNOW J. JONES and wore them for a week straight. That felt like a long time ago. He was still a high scorer, but we weren’t trying to wear any T-shirts about it anymore.
“Y’all want some chicken?” Jayjones asked, coming over to my stairs and sitting down with me, Neeka and D. It was Saturday and D had turned twelve the Monday before. Leaves were falling off the trees all over the block and even though it was October and we still had some warm days, most days you could tell winter was starting to get its groove on. But it was Saturday and the temperature had gone up to eighty degrees. We were all sitting on my stairs, trying to catch the last few crazy hot days. Jayjones was wearing his basketball shorts and his hair was braided in zigzag cornrows. His legs were long and skinny with big calf muscles. He had a dimple right at the top of his cheek and when he smiled, it got deep—making you do a double take if you didn’t know him, because that was a strange place for a dimple to be. I saw D look at it. Then frown a little bit and look again. In the little while we’d known her, she’d met Jayjones a couple of times. I couldn’t tell if she thought he was fine or not because she didn’t say anything one way or the other about him. But I knew Jayjones thought D was cute. She’d only turned twelve, but she looked a lot older and guys were always trying to talk to her. Jayjones was see-through like all the others—you could look dead in their faces and see everything they were thinking about somebody.
Jayjones stretched his legs out down the stairs and crossed his ankles, his big basketball shoes looking a mile long. He held out the chicken box and Neeka took an extra crispy wing. D took a leg.
“Pretty girl like you should be eating a wing,” Jayjones said, smiling at D to show off that dimple. D didn’t say anything and Neeka told him to shut up.
“Like a wing’s that different from a leg, fool,” Neeka said.
Jayjones ignored her and held the box out to me. I waited for him to tell me to take a wing too, but he didn’t. I shook my head and pushed the box back at him. It was too hot to be eating fried food anyway.
We had been talking about our families. D hadn’t said much about hers, but Neeka was talking enough for both of them. She’d just finished giving D the four-one-one on her oldest brother, Tash, who was doing time for something stupid. Tash had gotten arrested right after D started coming around, so D hadn’t got to know him like we did. Before Tash went to jail, he mostly hung out at the Piers in Greenwich Village where all the gay people seemed to hang out. Tash had been a sissy from day one and most people just accepted it. Sometimes when the rappers started going on and on about how much they hated homos, me and Neeka would turn the TV off. We didn’t really talk about why—just both of us knew that crap was hard on the ear when the homos they were hating on was your own family.
Neeka was telling D how she came a few years after Jayjones.
“And then,” Neeka said, as if Jayjones hadn’t even come over and interrupted us. “After she and my dad had Albert and Emmett, they had to go and have anotherset of twins. Had the nerve to have girl twins at that. Crazy!How you gonna have all those twins up in one family?” She rolled her eyes and took a bite out of her chicken wing. “So now we got”—Neeka started counting off on the hand that wasn’t holding the chicken wing—“Tash, Jayjones, me . . .”
“Mama and Pops just like kids,” Jayjones said, grinning. “When I go pro, I’m gonna buy them—”
“If you go pro,” Neeka said.
“When I go pro,” Jayjones continued, speaking over her. “I’m buying them a huge house like all the ballplayers be buying their mamas.”
Neeka made a face. “Gonna have to be a big-assed house to get all of us up in it.”
“It’s gonna be a ONE-bedroom on a lake. The rest of y’all sorry behinds gonna stay right across the street. Hire a nanny for you.”
Me and D laughed, but Neeka just rolled her eyes and took another bite out of her chicken. She’d blown her hair out and curled it. But the heat had started melting the curls, making them fall into her eyes and down her back. I brushed it back with my hand and Neeka smiled, grateful. So I got behind her and started finger-combing her hair back. It was jet-black and soft as anything. I tamed it into a braid.
“I owe you one,” Neeka said.
“What kind of name is Albert anyway,” I said. “No black people be naming their kids that. No white people either, for that matter. Your mama just run out of names?”
Neeka continued working on her chicken. “She named him that because she said he was born looking smart, like Albert Einstein, fool. You know that.”
“Albert E wasn’t s
mart,” I said. “I read somewhere that he had some kind of brain disorder. Made him say all these crazy things that made sense to people a whole lot of years later. He had a psychosis.”
Neeka looked at me. “Did you have to drink something to get that dumb? Because the good news is, eventually you’ll pee it out.”
“It’s true,” I said. “You deconstruct some of—”
“Uh-oh,” Jayjones said. “Here she comes with the college words.”
“You take it apart,” I said. “Break the brother’s language down. He wasn’t saying nothing we didn’t already know. He just had a way of saying it that made people feel confused and when peeps get confused, they have to figure out what to do. So they made him a genius. If you’re a genius, it just means you confused some people somewhere.”
“Okay, genius,” Neeka said.
“Nah,” Jayjones said. “She’s smart.” He winked at me. “That’s cool. Colleges gonna be all over you.”
“That’s ’cause from the womb that girl been reading and stuff. Hiding behind those books,” Neeka said. “I was reading Cat in the Hatand she was busting out some of those books ain’t even have pictures in them.”
I smiled—embarrassed. We’d had this conversation forever. Teachers, people on the block, Mama, Neeka—everybody was always talking about me being smart, how I’d leave them and go away to some fancy college. And maybe I would and maybe I wouldn’t. I read all those books and watched those educational shows and peeped the newspapers and people’s biographies and autobiographies because I was trying to see some tiny bit of myself up in those books. And even though I didn’t ever find it, I kept on looking.
“See how she gets all quiet when we start calling her out,” Neeka said. She turned and hugged me. “You know we just messing with you, girl.”
“I know.” But a part of me really didn’t. Lately, I’d been feeling like I was standing outside watching everything and everybody. Wishing I could take the part of me that was over there and the part of me that was over here and push them together—make myself into one whole person like everybody else.
“Hey girl.” Neeka tapped my knee. “Earth calling you home.”
I swatted her hand away.
D looked at me and smiled. And I saw it then—the little part inside of her that was just like me, that was walking through this world trying to find the other half of her. She roamed the streets. I roamed the books. I smiled back. For some reason, in that split second, I knew no matter what happened, we’d always be connected.
Then Jayjones moved a little bit closer to her and D moved a little bit farther away. I tried to ignore that sickly feeling I got when he started acting all stupid around girls he liked.
“I shot four hundred free throws in the park last night,” he said.
“How many went in?” D wanted to know.
Jayjones smiled, his teeth all straight and white. “Three hundred ninety seven.”
“Well, what happened to the other three?” I said, wanting him to take his eyes off of D.
“Streetlight blew out.” Jayjones looked at me and winked again.
I winked back. Jayjones was like a brother to me—a brother who I loved and was maybe a little bit in love with. But I knew D was pretty and it stung me to sit there and watch him looking at her like she was something beautiful and looking at me like I was just some kid.
D got up, put her chicken bones in the garbage and brushed herself off.
“I need to be getting to my bus.”
Jayjones jumped up. “I’m gonna walk you.”
“Whatever,” D said, sounding bored.
Me and Neeka watched them walk down the block and turn the corner.
I watched Jayjones bump D’s shoulder. Watched her bump his shoulder back.
The sun was starting to set, and down the block, somebody’s mama was telling them it was time to come on upstairs. I hated that part of me that wanted D to turn that corner and disappear forever.
CHAPTER FOUR
So tell me about this D,Mama had said when D first started coming around. Across the street, Miss Irene was asking Neeka the same thing.
She’s cool, Mama,me and Neeka answered in our separate houses.
Cool. What kind of cool? Get y’all in trouble cool? Drop out of school cool?
She gets A’s and everything. Girl ain’t even thinking about dropping out of school.
She the one got you saying “ain’t”?
All through that fall, while Tupac’s trial went on, while he sat in that courtroom and listened to that judge tell him why he was no good, while that girl changed and changed her story until all the judge had to go on was the fact that Tupac hit her on her butt and had THUG LIFE written on his belly, we watched it and our mamas tried to watch uswith D, tried to see what was coming . . .
How could they know what was coming? How could we?
While Mama asked questions about D, I stared down at my hands and tried to answer.
One night, we sat at our kitchen table with her across from me—the tiny lines between her eyes getting deep with the wanting to know. To understand.
“She came out of nowhere and now the three of y’all thick as thieves.”
“She lives around the way, Ma. That’s somewhere.”
“Well, who’s her mama?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who’s her daddy?”
“I don’t know. She doesn’t know either, I don’t think. Her foster mom’s probably home asking her the same question about me.”
I stared out the window. Outside, snow was beginning to come down. It was the first snow of the year and the tiny white flakes made me think about being a little girl—me and Neeka all excited and stupid over the idea of playing outside. Sitting at the kitchen table with Mama, that cold gray winter-light coming in from outside making everything, even the toaster, look like it was on the verge of tears, it was hard to even believe there was a time when I got so happy and silly over something like snow.
“You know who your daddy is,” Mama said.
I kept staring out at the snow.
“But I don’t know wherehe is.”
“Well, that makes two of us, baby. That sure makes two of us.”
Mama got up from the table and went over to the sink. She wasn’t heavy, but she wasn’t skinny either. She’d had me when she was twenty and always said that she’d been real skinny before I was born. Where I was brown, Mama was light-skinned. Where my hair was thick and kinky, Mama’s was thick and curly. Where I was tall, Mama was short—stopping just at my eyebrow. It seemed one day I was her baby, the next I’d gotten taller than her. Everything about me, Mama used to say, belonged to my daddy.
“I know you think about him,” Mama said. “And I know you stick your head in all those books to disappear some days. I wish I could tell you exactly where he was, give you a phone number, even dial the phone for you.”
I sat there, listening to Mama but staring out the window. She’d spent the whole morning asking me questions about D. I wanted to say, Mama, there’s always stuff we’re not ever gonna know.But I couldn’t.
Mama always said about her and Daddy that staying together wouldn’t have been good for anybody. But some days she sat by the window in the living room, just staring out over the block and looking sadder than anything. Those days I knew she was thinking of a better life, a different life. Something that maybe she’d planned for herself when she was my age. I thought back to me and Neeka and D jumping rope for the first time—how it felt like D had always been a part of me somehow. I thought about how we all three sat on the stairs on warm days, leaning up on each other and talking about all the stuff we were gonna do when we were grown and not broke anymore. I bit my lip. How could I explain even a little bit of this to Mama—how some days D smiled at me and felt like my missing half. She was not trying to judge me and Neeka for not being allowed to go off the block, not trying to get all up in my business about why I didn’t have a daddy, not trying to be
anything but D.
D was hometo me and Neeka. D was Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.She was sun and crazy loud laughterand warm rain.
After a few minutes, Mama said, “I just want you to be careful. This D might seem nice, but who knows what she’s gonna lead y’all into.”
Who’s her mama? Who’s her daddy? Where’s my daddy? Always stuff we ain’t gonna know.
Outside, the snow fell all quiet. Outside, the world just kept going on and on.
CHAPTER FIVE
Friday before Thanksgiving, we were on our block trying to teach some little girls how to jump. It was close to dinnertime and me, Neeka and D had gotten together right after school just to hang and jump some double Dutch. We’d been jumping for a while when the little girls came over and asked if they could play. We stopped jumping and let them use our rope. But after watching them try, we offered to help. They weren’t even getting the basics of jumping in on one foot, though. Me, Neeka and D took turns jumping into the rope to show them how, but after a lot of time passed with them messing up, we gave up and went to sit on my stairs. It was cold out and we put pieces of cardboard under our butts to keep them warm. I had brought a comb, brush and some grease down so Neeka could braid my hair. She parted it down the middle, then starting brushing it.
“I guess that’s why you just gotta learn yourself,” D said, watching the little girls. “Can’t nobody really teach you double Dutch.”
“Nobody ever tried to teach us,” Neeka said. “When I was little, the teenagers were like ‘No!’Remember?”
I nodded. “They were so not having us.”
“Keep your head still,” Neeka said, steadying my head with her hands. I felt the comb moving through it.
The girls had stopped trying to jump double Dutch and were doing single—two jumping while the other two turned the rope. They were doing “All in Together, Girls.”
All, all, all in together, girls, how you like the weather, girls? Fine. Fine. Super fine. January, February, March . . .
After Tupac & D Foster Page 3