American Street

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American Street Page 13

by Ibi Zoboi


  I don’t argue with Donna. I let her win. Because tonight, I will be the Ezili-Danto that she is too afraid to be.

  We hear the heavy bass from Dray’s car outside, and Donna changes her outfit for the twentieth time. It’s Dray’s birthday, she tells me again. She has to look perfect.

  Before we leave, Chantal grabs my arm and says, “Don’t change, Fabiola. Be yourself. You don’t have to do none of this.”

  I smile, nod, and follow Donna to Dray’s car. Kasim is there waiting, too.

  He doesn’t smile when he sees me. He looks confused. He doesn’t hug me or kiss me; he just stares at my very long fake hair, my long eyelashes, my too-red lipstick, and my perfect eyebrows.

  I kiss him, take his hand, and ease into the dark space of the car.

  The building where Dray’s having his party is like a giant Petwo drum that pulses with a heavy rhythm. I feel like I have entered the underworld.

  “What’s up with that new weave?” Kasim asks as he takes my hand.

  “Do you like it?” I ask, gently tossing the hair over my shoulder like I’ve seen Donna do many times.

  “No” is all he says. “But I like you.”

  I feel so bad that Kasim is confused by the new me, but I’m not here for him. Not tonight.

  “Don’t let Detroit change you,” Kasim says into my ear. His warm breath against my face makes my whole body tingle. “I know you’re not used to this. If you wanna leave, just say the word.”

  I shake my head and gently push him away.

  A large group of people greet Dray in all different ways—girls kiss him on the cheek, guys slap his hand and hug him with one arm.

  This party is different from the one at Q’s club. The beat changes and everyone raises their hand and starts swaying to the music. Kasim starts to recite the words and I wish I knew the words, too.

  Dray looks my way and our eyes meet. Kasim puts his arm around me and pulls me in close while we walk toward Dray and Donna.

  “You look good, cuzz. Finally. I’m glad you came to your senses,” Donna says to me as I reach her side.

  I lean in toward her. “Kasim doesn’t like it, but all the other boys do,” I say as I keep my eyes on Dray. He looks at me again. This time, he smiles and winks because Donna is turned away from him.

  “Kasim is nice and all, but honestly, he’s a cornball,” Donna says.

  Dray doesn’t take his eyes off me.

  “I like him. He’s nice” is all I say. Then Kasim goes over to stand next to Dray, and he looks at me, too.

  I quickly turn away, afraid to see any hurt in Kasim’s eyes. I almost don’t want to be with him here; I’m in battle. There’s no room for love in this war.

  Then I recognize the fat guy from the doorway at Q’s. He approaches Dray and says something in his ear. My heart skips because Dray changes. He looks around, shifts his weight from foot to foot, pounds a fist into his palm. I nudge Donna, who keeps her eyes on what’s going on, too.

  Dray comes toward us. He digs into his pocket and pulls out his keys and phone and hands them to Donna. He kisses her on the cheek. Kasim steps over to me, smiling.

  “You gonna be all right?” he asks.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’ll be right back. Just gotta take care of these dudes trying to start shit in the front.” He gives my hand a squeeze before he walks away.

  Donna puts Dray’s keys in her purse and fidgets with his phone as she leads me to the bathroom.

  The music is muted in here. I can finally breathe a little. In the mirror, I look more like Donna’s twin than Pri. Unique gave us the same hairstyle, and our faces are similar with our deep-set eyes and high cheekbones. Donna leans against the wall, still playing with Dray’s phone.

  “Why did he give you his phone, anyway?” I ask.

  She puts the phone and her purse down near the sink. “If Kasim ever gives you his phone to hold for him, then you’ll know it’s legit.”

  When she goes into the stall, I grab the phone and slide the home screen open before it locks. I glance into the mirror to watch Donna’s feet underneath the door. Someone comes in, but I ignore her. I check Dray’s messages and scroll up really fast. I see the word Ka and know that it’s Kasim. I scan the messages that say: Come thru. Where you at? What’s good? Got it. The spot. And once, Fab. She cool.

  Donna starts peeing. I scroll down until I find a set of numbers instead of a name. I click on the message: Come thru the spot on Anderdon on the east side tomorrow. Be ready with my shit.

  Donna is pulling up her pants. The phone buzzes and a new text comes in: You letting them niggas in son?

  Donna flushes the toilet and I quickly turn off the screen and put the phone back on the counter.

  “Did some bitch just text him?” she asks as she washes her hands.

  I shrug.

  She takes his phone and checks the text.

  “Do you think he’s cheating on you?” I ask.

  She dries her hands, sighs, and says, “No.”

  I go into one of the stalls, shut the door, pull out my phone, and text Detective Stevens: Something is happening tomorrow on Anderdon on the east side.

  It’s proof. This is what I need to get my manman home.

  Kasim is standing by the bathroom door when I come out. He kisses me on the cheek and leans in to say, “Come on. We got a VIP booth. I wanna toast Dray and then we could bounce. I can tell this ain’t your vibe. Dray said I could take his car.”

  The VIP booth is lined with red and blue lightbulbs. Donna sits down next to Dray on a long narrow couch. Other girls surround them, too, but Donna doesn’t seem to care. In front of them is a small table holding a big birthday cake. It’s Dray’s twenty-first birthday. He’s holding a bottle in one hand and a glass in the other. Dray stares at me for a long minute before he offers the glass to me.

  “Fabulous, come here,” he says.

  I walk over to him and take the glass.

  He picks up another glass and offers it to Kasim. Soon, we’re both standing around Dray, his cake, his girls, and his boys raising our glasses of champagne.

  “I wanna shout out my man Kasim,” Dray says over the music. “I think he found the one.”

  Kasim puts his arm around me and kisses me on the cheek. But out of the corner of my eye, I can tell that Dray keeps looking at me as he sips his champagne. I don’t drink any of it. Instead, I place the full glass on the table next to Dray’s cake. Donna is too busy talking and laughing with the other girls to notice when I leave the VIP booth with Kasim.

  We’re out of the club and in Dray’s car. Again, I’m in Donna’s seat, on the passenger side.

  “Where are you taking me?” I ask Kasim when I notice that he’s driving toward the tall buildings downtown. We’re on Livernois, and before long, after a few turns, we’re on Atwater Street pulling into a parking lot. I can see the dark stretch of water greeting me in the distance. I smile because rivers are Ezili’s home. Kasim comes around to open the door for me, and he places his coat over my shoulders.

  The air is cold and sharp. There are tall and wide buildings on one side of the street and trees, walkways, and the river on the other side. It’s as if they were building this city until it reached the very edge of the river here. I pull up the hood of the coat and pull down the sleeves over my bare hands. When we reach the brightly lit walkway near the river, Kasim’s phone rings and he answers it.

  “Yo, man, I just had to take Fab home right quick. I’ll be back soon—just save a bottle for me. . . . What?” He takes the phone away from his ear. “Fab, Dray wants to talk to you.”

  My stomach twists. I start to shake my head, but I change my mind. I take his phone. “Hello?”

  “Why you gotta bounce like that, Fab? Your cousin’s looking all over the place for you. I invited you to celebrate my birthday with me. I dropped some coins just so you look good for my boy. And you just gonna leave without saying shit?”

  “I didn’t feel we
ll.” I glance at Kasim, who is holding his head down with both hands in his pockets. “Tell Donna I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, tell Donna you’re sorry? Even though it was my party? Okay.”

  I don’t say anything and Kasim sees my face, so he takes the phone from me.

  “Yo, Dray, I’ll check you in a few, a’ight? Happy birthday, man.” Kasim inhales long and deep and puts the phone in his pocket. “Dray just looks out for me, that’s all. Don’t matter if it’s dudes or girls—he just has my back.”

  I turn to head back to the car. “Take me home.”

  “No. Not yet,” he says, and grabs both my hands and pulls me in. “Can we just chill for a minute?”

  I lean into him. He eases his arms around my waist and my whole body warms. I rest my head on his shoulder. But he steps back and takes my face and kisses my forehead, then kisses me long and deep.

  I am two sides of the same coin. Ezili has made all of me like honey—sweet, sticky, and oozing under Kasim’s hold. But Ezili-Danto has lit a fire inside of me—with rage in my heart and a dagger in my hand, I want nothing more than to slice away this sore named Dray so I can free Donna and get my mother back.

  NINETEEN

  “WHY YOU NOT answering my calls?” Dray yells from downstairs. His anger seems to make the whole house shake.

  Donna has locked herself in her bedroom. She called Dray this morning and cursed him out after someone told her that the police caught him hooking up with another girl. I was there that night when Donna got the text from a friend, and then a phone call, and then Pri and Chantal couldn’t stop talking about it, telling her to break it off with him for good.

  Matant Jo is trying to make him leave, but he keeps calling Donna’s name. “Ma, Ma,” Dray says. “I just want to talk, that’s all.”

  I don’t hear Matant Jo respond to him.

  “Yo, D. I swear, I’m about to come up there and get you,” Dray says.

  Then Pri bursts out of the room and yells down, “No, you better the fuck not come up here, or I got something for that ass, Dray!”

  Chantal is not home now to talk some sense into the situation. I text her, but she doesn’t answer.

  “Where’s Donna? Just tell her to give me a second. That’s all. Baby? I’m sorry. I love you.” Dray tries to make his voice sound sad.

  “Oh, hell no!” Pri says. “Donna, go deal with that nigga before I run down there and drop-kick him in his balls.”

  “Donna?” Matant Jo shouts from downstairs. “Come talk to him. All these years of him running after you, and you running after him, it’s now you want to hide? Come down here. Curse him out. Tell him how you feel. But I swear on your father’s grave, if he puts a hand on you, it will be his last time.”

  A chill runs down my spine when I hear my aunt say this. It’s as if she’s slowly coming back to life. I get a hint of the Jo who everyone respects around here. I get up from Chantal’s bed and open the door a little to see more of what’s going on.

  Donna bursts out of her room and only stands at the top of the stairs. “A white girl, Dray? You got busted while you were with a motherfuckin’ white girl?”

  “That’s why you don’t gotta worry about her!” Dray yells back.

  “Fuck you! Get the fuck outta my house!”

  “Final-fuckin’-ly,” Pri says. “It took a white girl for her to finally see him for the piece of shit that he is.”

  “Donna!” Dray calls out. And then footsteps up the stairs.

  I quickly hide behind Chantal’s door. I don’t want Dray to even know that I’m here.

  “Dray, I done told you not to come up here,” Pri says. Through the cracked door, I can see that her socked feet are really close to Dray’s boots. Donna has stepped back and is quiet.

  “Hey, hey, hey!” Matant Jo calls from downstairs. “Dray, you know better!”

  “Jo, I’m just trying to talk to Donna, that’s all. Baby? Come on. I swear, you ain’t got to worry about nothing.”

  “Tell me something, Dray.” Donna’s bare feet step closer to Dray’s boots. “Did Q have to bail out your white girl, too? Is she moving weight for you, or you just have her around to suck your dick every once in a while?”

  “How you even know about this shit? You a fuckin’ snitch, D?”

  I’m trying to figure everything out as the words swim in my head. Q. Bail out. Snitch. Something happened and didn’t happen at the same time. Dray got arrested and maybe it was because of the information I sent to the detective. But he’s here now. He’s out of jail. Something went wrong. My information was no good.

  Dray steps closer to Donna, but Pri blocks him, and Matant Jo is now in the frame. I can tell that one of her slippered feet holds up most of her weight, but I’ve never seen her have the energy to come up the stairs before. I close my eyes and hope that no one calls my name.

  “Get out! Get the fuck out, Drayton!” Matant Jo’s voice explodes.

  “I’m not trying to start no shit, Jo. I just want Donna to listen to me!”

  “Out of my house!”

  Dray’s footsteps head back down the stairs.

  Then he says, “Donna. I love you. I swear to God, I love you!”

  “Shut the fuck up!” Pri yells back, but Dray is already out the door.

  I rush to the window to make sure that he leaves, that he is finally out of Donna’s life. But before he gets back into his car, he looks up toward the window and sees me. For a moment, our eyes meet. I stare back at him, hard, squinting. If only he could hear my thoughts saying, I will destroy you, malfekté. He is the first to look away.

  He might be Baron Samedi, guardian of the cemetery, but he is digging his own grave, and all I have to do is push him in.

  TWENTY

  I MISS RICE and beans. I miss spicy stewed chicken and red snapper seasoned to the bone. I miss banan peze, fried plantains—not like the too-sweet ones that Chantal gets from a Jamaican restaurant. I miss the hot sun and sweating all day and the beach and eating cold fresco with my friends and long walks up and down hills and Cola Lakay and deep-fried beef patties. I miss my mother.

  I can tell that I’m skinnier because the thin gold bracelet I’ve been wearing since I turned sixteen now slips down my hand. I have to keep pushing it up to my wrist. Nothing tastes good. The most exercise I get is the short steps in front of the house and the stairs at school. Nothing else. Still, I’m skinny and it’s not a pretty kind of skinny like fashion models. It’s my body slowly giving up on everything, including the flesh on my bones.

  But I know this won’t last. I just need one more piece of information on Dray that I can give to Detective Stevens. This is the drought before the cleansing rain, as my mother would say—the storm cloud before the sun.

  “You on a diet or something?” Imani asks. She’s sitting next to me in the loud cafeteria. I’ve managed to block out all the noise to let my thoughts wander. I don’t notice how I’m picking at the ham, lettuce, and tomatoes from the sandwich and pushing aside the thick bread and slices of cheese.

  “Come with me to the supermarket later,” I say. “I can cook you a good meal. Come over.”

  “This is like the tenth time you asked me, Fab. Ain’t no way in hell I’m going to, one, the Three Bees’ house, and two, the west side.”

  “Donna stopped bothering you, right?”

  “Yeah, that don’t mean shit. I could just be walking to class one day, minding my own business, and her twin might decide that she remembers why she had beef with me in the first place.” She takes a big bite from her sandwich.

  “I got your back, Imani,” I say.

  She coughs and almost chokes. “What’d you say?”

  “I got your back.”

  She laughs and has to spit out her chewed-up food. “Say it again.”

  I don’t because I’ve heard that before. A laugh followed by “say it again” means that I’ve said something that makes me sound stupid.

  “Daesia!” Imani calls out to her friend who’
s coming to sit next to us. “Fab said she got my back.”

  “Oh, you the Fourth Bee, now?” Daesia asks.

  I shake my head.

  “Who’s the Fourth Bee?” another girl asks, and sits right next to me. Her name is Tammie.

  Imani points to me with her chin while still laughing.

  “No, I am not,” I say, taking a bite of the too-salty ham.

  “But we good, though, ’cause she says she has my back,” Imani says. I can’t tell if she’s serious or making fun of me.

  “If you got her back, then you gotta have our back, too,” Daesia says. “We’ve been friends with her for much longer than you.”

  “I’m not a Fourth Bee,” I say really loud, so everyone who might be listening can hear me.

  “If she says she’s not the Fourth Bee, then she’s not,” Imani says, and smiles at me.

  “Good, ’cause I wouldn’t want to be around you if you were,” Daesia says. “Why do they have to be so nasty to everybody?”

  “’Cause people were nasty to them,” I say.

  “Not us,” Tammie says.

  “’Cause they don’t even see us unless somebody’s man does,” Imani adds.

  “That’s not true,” I say.

  “Donna didn’t even know my name until she saw me on Instagram sitting on Dray’s lap.”

  “Is that why you started hanging with me?” I ask.

  Imani laughs again. “No. You just looked lost, that’s all. And you have to say the h sound when you say ‘hanging,’ okay?”

  So I say, “Hanging.”

  Imani makes a breathing sound from the back of her throat and I try to do the same. Now Daesia and Tammie are laughing.

  “It’s a lost cause,” Tammie says. “Why don’t you teach us some Haitian curse words instead?”

  I smile, because not even my own cousins have asked me to do that. So I start with bouzin. Then I move on to kolan guete, and zozo, bounda, coco. All the words that would make my mother rip my lips from my face if she heard me right now. Watching my friends try to twist their mouths to say these words, I laugh as much as my cousins do when I try to say American curse words. I laugh so hard that my belly hurts; tears come out of my eyes.

 

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