It was around 3 p.m. My mom wouldn’t be home from work for three to six hours; I couldn’t be more precise because Mom never disclosed her estimated time of arrival. This was her way of keeping us on our toes. We’d call and ask, “Mom, when you gettin’ off?” But she’d respond, “You ain’t gotta worry ’bout it if you just do what you supposed to do.”
I was used to being with older girls, but Nicole had my nerves snarled worse than the headphone cords coiled in my pocket. I escorted her to the couch and dashed upstairs to find my boom box. I emptied a box of CDs on the bed, frantically searching for the one inscribed with marker GET WET MUSIC VOL. 2. It was a chopped and screwed mix I’d curated for occasions like this. I returned and set the mood by closing the blinds. She slipped off her jacket and we sat close. My arm was draped around her shoulder and my hand dangled just enough to gently graze her right breast. I continued our small talk from the bus, until she stopped me. She climbed on my pelvis with her legs bestride. She filled my mouth with her tongue. I sunk my teeth into her neck. Her head leaned back and the music played as our bodies wound in cadence.
I sat still afterward, not knowing what to make of what just happened, or how it happened at all. I thought of the report I’d give my eager friends. Maybe I would Diddy-bop through the halls the next day. Maybe I would gleefully skip to the main office, seize the microphone, and tell the entire school during morning announcements. Talking afterward can be so awkward, but I murmured inconsequential things because I didn’t want this amazing encounter to feel like a heartless transaction. Nicole, however, was impatient. She reached for her clothes and dressed in haste. “I have to go,” she said.
I walked her to the door and thanked her for coming. I leaned forward to kiss her, but she turned away. “So, when can we do this again?” I asked, to which she responded, “We can’t.” “Well, maybe we should exchange numbers,” I continued. But she answered back, “There’s no need.”
Geez, was I that bad? I asked myself. It took me a minute to regroup, but I finally stammered out a question. “So, what happens from here?”
She looked at me, chuckled softly, and said, “Just tell Bre that we’re even now.”
I must have looked like someone hit me with a cattle prod.
“Ask Bre about Trey,” she said, and then the screen door slammed behind her and she walked off into the distance.
As soon as I got to school the next day, I headed for Bre’s locker, our usual rendezvous. My friends were panting for salacious good news, but I shoved past them: seeing nothing, hearing nothing. I marched a flaming, furious path straight toward Bre. And there she stood, gazing adoringly toward me. I was defused by her innocence, her benevolence, her beauty—but only for a moment.
“Hey, baby,” she said, opening her arms and inviting me in.
“Bre,” I snarled, “who the fuck is Trey?”
She froze, seeing tears of anger and vengeance welling in my eyes. “Brandon—”
But I interrupted. “Tell me the truth.” I banged the locker with my fist. A thunderclap reverberated through the hall. People stared. Bre stared. I stared as we all stood still.
After school, I sat alone in my room, marinating in my sense of betrayal—Bre, Nicole, Trey. Somebody had to pay. My dark and vengeful mood was interrupted by footsteps in the hallway. It was Peanut, my sister’s dope-dealing boyfriend. He opened the door and asked where Sierra was, but instead of saying anything, I shrugged my shoulders and looked away.
“The fuck wrong with you, lil nigga?” he asked. Embarrassed, I didn’t want to say. I figured that a cheating man is expected, but a cheating girlfriend is an abomination to male pride. Eventually, I gave in and told him. In response, Peanut surveyed the hallway to confirm we were alone, then he came into my room and shut the door.
“So what you gon’ do?” he asked.
I fought back tears to avoid looking weak. I tried to act like I didn’t care, and called Bre foul names, saying that I had broken up with her. But this wasn’t the answer Peanut was looking for. He reached into his back pocket and withdrew a weapon: a deadly six-inch Smith & Wesson switchblade. He flipped it open to reveal the blade’s acute tip and jagged edges. He took a few steps closer, his demeanor militant and unyielding.
“I ain’t talkin ’bout her,” he said, “I’m talkin ’bout him.”
Earlier that day, I had demanded that Bre tell me where Trey lived. He was a sergeant and lived on base in military housing next door to her family. I gave Peanut the intel, and he told me that there was only one option: I had to handle my business like a man.
Before I knew it, we were in Peanut’s two-door Pontiac and headed for Trey’s house. Peanut had the bucket seat on his side reclined so far that it grazed the back seat, which was littered with cigarette butts, scarred with burn holes, and scattered with dozens of empty beer and Hennessy bottles that spilled onto the floorboard. Peanut sat off-center, clutching the steering wheel with one hand and fisting a Corona in the other. As if drinking and driving was not bad enough, he made an art of drinking while driving. Then he reached for the joint neatly tucked behind his right ear like a pencil. He fired it up. Smoke filled the car like steam in a sauna. I sat beside him, his angry apprentice, with my adrenaline surging and his knife clenched tightly in my sweaty hand. He called me “lil nigga” a few more times.
We parked at the corner, close enough to spy Trey and three friends drinking beer on his porch. Trey wore cargo pants, combat boots, and a wifebeater, like he had just gotten off duty. Peanut delivered his version of a halftime speech: “Handle your business, nigga,” he said. “Don’t be a lil bitch.” I repeated his words like a mantra, my eyes locked like lasers on my unwary enemy. I popped the door lock, flipped open the switchblade, and inhaled deeply. I looked at Trey one last time. I looked at Peanut. I nodded with certainty and said, “Drive the fuck up.” I was ready to kill him.
We pulled up directly in front of the porch where Trey sat with his friends. Their laughing waned when they spotted our car slowing to a stop in front of his house. Peanut glared at them from the driver’s window. He said nothing. He clutched the wheel with one hand and the gear stick with the other, prepared to speed off for our getaway after the job was done. He gave me a look that said You know what to do.
I opened the door and stepped out slowly. I walked around the hood of the car and planted on the pavement at the foot of Trey’s porch. From the look in his eyes, I could tell that he knew exactly who I was and why I was there. My eyes were full of vengeance. I looked like a madman, spouting expletives and brandishing a combat knife. That’s when he lifted his shirt just enough for me to see the gun holstered on his waist. I’d brought a knife to a gunfight, but I did not care. I knew what Peanut was packing behind me. I stood there, clutching the knife, rage shooting through my body like a bolt of lightning.
“You fucked with the wrong one!” I yelled as I started to charge toward him. But I was stopped by Bre, who came dashing out of her house next door, screaming, “Brandon, stop!” She ran to wrestle the knife out of my hand. She wanted to save me from making a grave mistake, so much that she had already called the police when she’d spotted me from her window.
“Get the fuck out of the way!” I shouted at Bre.
I was ready to complete the mission. Nothing would change my mind. Especially when Trey looked at me and laughed like I was some little bitch ass nigga with a toy. His gun did not scare me. Nothing scared me, until Bre yelled, “The cops are coming!” and I froze in my tracks. Peanut yelled from the window, “Get back in the car, nigga, let’s go!” I dove back into the passenger’s seat and Peanut slammed the gas. Somebody was supposed to die that day. And if Bre had not betrayed me by calling the cops, the death might have been my own.
CHAPTER SIX
FOULING OUT
When Mom was called to duty in 2007, we didn’t realize that her deployment would abruptly end our life together as a family. She was not being sent away for a few days or weeks this time. Pre
sident George W. Bush had ordered her battalion to join the war in Iraq. She had six months to prepare for deployment, and we did not know when—or if—she would return.
“So what does this mean for us?” I asked, distraught at the prospect of being separated from my friends, my teammates, and, most of all, my siblings. It was among life’s deepest sorrows. Especially as I was about to enter my senior year. I could think of no siblings who were more closely knit than us. We had survived so much together, and through it all, Sierra was our protector. Now our childhood was breaking apart and ending. Sierra moved in with her baby’s father. Barry had just graduated high school and moved to New York with his dad. My options were few, and Ben’s even fewer.
There was no way that my paternal grandparents would accept me and my wayward ways. Plus, Ben and I were a bundle. Whoever took me in would have to take him, too. Ben’s paternal family was nowhere to be found. So my mother sent the two of us to live in South Carolina with my godparents, whom I called Aunt Carolyn and Uncle Eddie.
Not only was I grief-stricken because my family was scattered, but I also lost longstanding friendships with my teammates and the momentum we’d created. We had spent the past four years playing together, traveling the country, and winning championships. Now that I was a rising senior, I was one step away from becoming an NCAA Division I athlete. My years of running the streets were over. The same friends that had once introduced me to the drug game had forced me to quit drugs by cutting off my supply. They really believed that I could make it with basketball, so they stopped feeding my drug habits and started supporting my future. Instead of spending Friday nights on the street corners, they were now in the front row of the gymnasium—still high and smelling like weed—yelling, “Fuck them niggas up!” A familiar phrase but a new context, and it was music to my ears.
Even when they smoked in my presence, they would not allow me even one courtesy puff. “Ayo, let me hit that,” I said when the rotation came my direction. But they skipped me every time. “Touch that shit if you want to,” Que said, clenching his fist. “I’ll beat yo muthafuckin’ ass.”
They would not allow me to ruin my own life. Together, they decided that if I wasn’t going to protect my future, they would.
“Listen, lil nigga,” Que said. “We not gon’ let you fuck up your future. You gon’ be better than us.”
I believed them, because they believed in me. No matter how much I resisted, they held me accountable and supported me. I eventually became clean. With a clear focus, my basketball performance rose to another level.
I was a rising senior. After investing years in this school, this city, and this basketball program, the triumph that should have been mine was stolen by my exile from the DMV. But maybe, just maybe, what seemed like a theft was a gift in disguise.
I was saddened that my run with Marquel was officially over. For four years, since we first squared off at the rec center, we had been an unstoppable force. I played point guard and he played shooting guard and we flew up and down the court at speeds that no one could match. But I was heading to a new state, a new school, a new team. My days of being his Pippen were over. For my senior year in high school, I would finally be number one.
Greenville High School was a magnet school admired for academic quality and envied for athletic prowess, but they rejected me immediately. Looking at my disciplinary history and my low GPA, the administrators no doubt profiled me as exactly the student they hoped never to enroll. My aunt’s address was zoned for Woodmont High School, which—I was horrified to learn—had one of the worst basketball records in the entire upstate region. The school was notorious for losing at the time. The school is in Piedmont, where we lived, a small town whose business district had been hollowed out by Greenville’s sprawl. There was one grocery store, one fast-food restaurant, and one high school. All other needs were fulfilled in the larger city. Many Black kids came from families with little resources, and white kids wore hunting gear and cowboy boots and drove monster trucks with huge wheels. The spectrum was broad and utterly foreign to me.
Woodmont basketball was abominable. The local news made a spectacle of my arrival. I was regarded as the miracle that the school desperately needed. My new coach’s enthusiasm said the same. I was in my first period class during the first week of school when he appeared at the door and politely asked the teacher if I could step outside.
“You’re the transfer from Virginia,” he said. “I’m Coach Morris. I’ve heard a lot about you from your former coach.”
Once preseason practice started, I seized the spotlight that had belonged to two other seniors, Ronell the point guard and Twan the shooting guard. They had been the starting varsity duo since their freshman year. They were the Woodmont version of Marquel and me, but without our winning record. Ronell had been the high-scoring starting point guard since his freshman year, a notable achievement. We were all issued reversible white-and-blue jerseys, and Coach used these to separate us into teams for scrimmaging. The starting lineup always wore white. Ronell flipped his jersey to the white side as usual. I flipped my jersey to the blue side, but Coach said, “Brandon, you take white.” I obeyed his directive. “Ronell,” Coach yelled, “you take blue.” The whistle sounded for practice to begin.
The season started and we won one, then two, then three games in a row. Three consecutive wins is not typically breaking news, but it was for Woodmont. On December 26, 2007, a headline of the Greenville News read: “Fleming Tries to Keep Focus” as “Wildcats Improve to 3–0 in Western AAA Region Play.” Reporter David Hood wrote, “Fleming was an artist at work. That he is able to run and fly around, almost lighter than air at times, is amazing considering the heavy heart that he has to carry around as he attempts to familiarize himself with a new school, new community and new teammates.”
My face appeared on grocery-store newsstands, and my growing reputation became a topic of conversation. Aunt Carolyn drove me to the local barber shop and we took a seat to wait. The shop was full and rowdy as the men bantered about local sports, talking mostly about the usual regional giants like Southside and Greenville and J. L. Mann.
“I tell you what,” a gentleman said, “y’all better watch out for Woodmont this year. Y’all heard about that new transfer?”
Not everyone knew my name, but many knew me as “the Woodmont transfer.” I sat anonymous in my durag and street clothes, listening to the men debate. Aunt Carolyn could not contain her pride and yelled, “This is him!” as I covered my face in embarrassment. But inside, I smiled. It was the kind of embarrassing maternal gesture that I had coveted for years.
I struggled to fit in with the guys. Many of them resented me. If not for stealing the spotlight in basketball, for stealing the spotlight with girls. I was new, the opposite of what these girls were used to. I had a New York accent, northern swag, and a clean slate. In a sea of high school jocks that they scorned as jerks, they thought I was a good guy. And I used this to my advantage.
It started one Saturday at the school dance. The winter social could not have been timelier. We had just beaten Southside the night before. Southside was the bully of the region, the high school version of the Detroit Pistons during the “Bad Boys” era. They were big, strong, and hood. In past years, this would have been projected as a blowout and the stands would have been empty. But the gymnasium was filled to capacity with standing room only. People wanted to witness this reformed Woodmont team firsthand. And we won.
My teammates and I arrived at the dance fashionably late. Our grand entrance felt like a homecoming. Our victory over Southside elicited cheers that sounded like we had won a state championship. As we made our way toward the main floor, someone starting chanting, “V-A, V-A,” and the crowd joined in chorus. “VA” was the nickname they had given me. I stopped and looked around the room, breathing in the claps and chants and cheers. The approving nods from the guys and the adoring smiles from the girls made me feel, for the first time, like the new school was home. I was ready to p
arty.
My teammates and I lined up against the wall, each of us with one leg kicked up like we were posing for a boy-band album cover. Despite the joy of victory, the floor was empty. It was that awkward moment when no one wants to be the first to dance, so everyone stands around talking until the DJ plays a song that no one can resist.
Line dancing is less of a risk than pairing off, so when the DJ played “Cha-Cha Slide” and “Cupid Shuffle,” people got on their feet and starting moving.
A few songs in, self-consciousness fell away when the DJ spun the iconic “Walk It Out” and “Crank That (Soulja Boy)” as everybody Yooouuu’d from the windows to the wall.
Then the air got thick. Heels were kicked off, skirts were hiked up, and the party escalated from family reunion to Freaknik. The DJ knew it was time to play the twerking song that would send the party through the roof: “Pop, Lock & Drop It” by Huey.
As soon as the prelude started, everybody yelled, “Ahhh, shit!” The wall cleared and everyone rushed to the dance floor. Through the fog, the effervescent floodlights silhouetted a curvaceous form advancing in my direction.
“She coming for you, dog!” my teammate said while shaking me by the shoulders. I played it cool, but I was breathless. It was Soraya, one of the most desirable girls in school. The prelude was rising and the beat was about to drop. Without an introduction, she grabbed my arm and pulled me onto the floor. There was only one problem: real niggas don’t dance.
We arrived at the middle of the dance floor and the party was suddenly no longer fun for me. The glamorous “Woodmont transfer” was about to be exposed as a fraud. As soon as the beat dropped and Huey said, “Toot that thang up, mommy, make it roll,” Soraya had both hands on her knees and started throwing and thrusting her hips back. She was a girl of shapely proportions—what the Commodores once called a “brick house.” In other words, she had a lot back there to handle. I fought to keep my feet planted as she twerked lightly and I tried to guide my hips to follow hers, but her moves were too sophisticated.
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