“Jay?” Nic says, or I think she says. Her voice is muffled, hushed. And there’s a steady bass line in the background like she’s taking a break from bumping and grinding in somebody’s cramped living room. “You . . . gotta . . .” More thumping music. Someone yelps in the background, followed by laughter.
I roll my eyes. Glad she’s off having fun while I’m here researching Othello and fending off blissheads. “What is it this time, Nic? Crinkle? Bliss? Or were you adventurous and partied with both?”
“No . . . no. Just . . .” More bass. More laughter. Nicole says something else and lets out a heavy breath that turns our connection into static. Almost like she’s stifling a laugh. I grip onto my phone. I’ve seen or heard her like this too many times in the past couple of years. When she’s so cranked up on bliss that MiMi can’t even get through saying grace over dinner without Nic breaking into a fit of giggles. She’d been doing okay lately. Gone to school at least four days during the week. Even pulled up her grades in two classes. Not necessarily the honor roll student she was back in middle school, but at least she was thinking about her graduation in a few months. But here she is, dirtying things up on the other side of my phone, expecting me to clean it all up again.
“Kind of hard to talk straight with all that bliss bopping through your veins, right?” I have to push the words out of my throat. If I hold them in, she’ll keep clowning around. Maybe move on to something more twisted than what Javon’s pushing. We had already lost so much, so I wasn’t trying to lose her, either. “Call me back when your head’s clear.”
“Wait! Jay—”
I hang up. Don’t let her get out what she needs to get out because it’s all bullshit. At least when she’s like this. My phone buzzes and her name pops up again. She’s not letting up. Javon’s probably putting her up to this. I could see them now—laughing as she redials my number. Trying to pull a fast one on her dope of a little brother. That’s what Javon called me the first time we met. Like met met, not just me avoiding his side of the street as I walked to the store or waited for the school bus. He rode up to our building in his Charger, rims blinging brighter than the custom-made platinum grills hugging the bottom row of his teeth. Righthand man, Kenny, sat in his passenger seat, warning the neighborhood kids to not toss their balls too close to the car. Nicole bent over to kiss Javon through his window, pointed at me over on the curb as I clicked through the latest from Colson Whitehead on Bowie’s hand-me-down iPad.
Javon scoped me out, the only thing shining on me was the silver cross around my neck that matched Nic’s. “Yo, that’s one dopey-looking nigga.” He made sure the whole neighborhood could hear it over the booming bass of his sound system. And my sister laughed. She fickin’ laughed at me. I pulled the iPad closer to my face but the words on the screen lost their form.
Before I can hit ignore on my phone, Nic hangs up. A couple seconds later, she shoots me a text:
Never mind. All good.
All good? Of course she is. She’s always good when she’s buzzing. Hell, she’s good even after the buzzing goes away because I’m always here to help quiet the storm, like the dope I am. I shove my phone under my pillow and get back to work on Meek’s paper. Nicole won’t remember any of this in the morning. Why should I?
I go to sleep that night and dream of snakes. It’s Nicole, not Pooch, outside my window, and the braids in her hair have been replaced by snakes. They curl around her neck, squeeze at her throat until she can’t even choke out my name. Every time I reach for her, one of the snakes strikes at me—so close I can feel its venom spritzing my skin.
Two
THE ALARM ON MY PHONE GOES OFF AT 5:57 A.M., PER usual. The sanitation truck beeps down the street, collecting the week’s trash, per usual. I hear my neighbor through the walls, trying to wake up her three boys for school. Per usual. Canal Street lives on.
No lie, sleep was thin last night. Every creak, every tap, every whistle my apartment made during the night, I assumed was Nic. Tiptoeing into her bedroom, sleeping off her latest head trip. She’s probably in bed now, snoring the bliss away. We have things to iron out, but I’ll let her catch some extra z’s before I begin my Q&A session.
“Jay!” MiMi taps, taps, taps on my door. “Jay! I know you heard that alarm go off. Get up.” I mouth along to her follow-up threat: “If you miss the bus, I’m not driving you!”
I peel away from my mattress and let my feet graze the carpet. Scratch the side of my face. “Easy, MiMi,” I call out. “Can’t a brother take a moment to collect himself?”
“A brother can collect the crust out his eyes and come eat this breakfast. Get a move on. That bus driver of yours is crazy. Showing up all early, making y’all miss the bus so folks gotta waste gas to get y’all to school. Ain’t got time for her shenanigans today.” She knocks against my door one last time—as if I could still be sleeping through all her killjoy-ing.
I grab my phone, expecting to see my usual morning text from Camila. Nothing. Great. She’s pissed about how I ended the call last night. I send her a winking emoji before pulling up my calendar, glancing through all my alerts for the day: meeting with Meek before first bell, Taco Bell interview right after school, then hitting up the CVS around the corner for MiMi’s meds. Now I have to find time to check in on Nic, make sure all that bliss she smoked up with Javon last night is not seeping through her pores before she heads to school. Last thing we need is for her to get suspended. Just another Friday for me.
Before I hit the bathroom, I poke my finger through the slit I cut in my box spring. Let my fingers run across the bills I’ve collected so far. Can’t start my day without touching them, seeing if they’re still there. $4,210 so far. I have a long way to go until I reach $112,000. Not even sure if MiMi has seen that amount of money in her lifetime. But she’s had to. After a Google search, CNN told me that it costs about fourteen grand a year to raise a child. Multiply that by the eight years I’ve been here, and MiMi has spent over a hundred grand making sure I’m fed and still breathing. Money that could’ve gone toward her retirement. That’s not even including Nic’s expenses. I don’t care how long I have to hustle. If I have to stuff burritos or write Meek’s English papers until his dumb ass graduates—MiMi is going to retire in Florida, or wherever the hell else she wants to.
Florida was always my dad’s endgame. “Soon as I hit sixty-five,” he’d always say. “Mornings with Mickey, and sunsets by the sea.” I found out that Mickey Mouse and the sea aren’t near the same city in Florida, but it didn’t matter. Dad never made it to sixty-five. The cancer barely allowed him to make it to thirty-five. It ate away at his smile, his laugh, his everything, until Dad was nothing but an outline with a pout. Did the same to my mom even though she never had cancer. She was a different kind of sick. Mornings with her were the toughest after Dad passed. Nic making me pause at Mom’s bedroom door so she could be the first to peek in, see if Mom was sleeping in her own vomit or worse. I can still hear the loud sigh that tumbled out of Nic’s mouth when Mom got caught behind the wheel with too much booze in her system for the last time. Nic wasn’t disappointed—hell, she wasn’t even sad. That breath was relief.