Chapter 3 Zainab
ZAINAB
TWELVE YEARS AGO—BALTIMORE TO CALIFORNIA
We ran straight to Meech.
Looking back, I can acknowledge how stupid that was.
How desperate. But when you’re sixteen years old, beaten bloody, with nowhere else to go and two hundred dollars crumpled in your fist, you don’t have the luxury of making smart decisions.
You make survival decisions. And Meech had an apartment.
Meech had a bed. Meech was the father of the baby growing inside my sister’s belly.
So we showed up on his doorstep at eleven o’clock at night, bruised and broken and homeless, and he let us in.
For a while, it was almost okay. Meech wasn’t a good man—I knew that even then—but he kept a roof over our heads.
Let me sleep in his spare bedroom while Zahara slept with him.
Gave Zahara money for prenatal vitamins and maternity clothes.
Played the role of doting baby daddy whenever it suited him.
But Meech was still Meech.
The cheating started before Zahara even hit her second trimester.
Different women. Different nights. He wasn’t even slick about it—came home smelling like cheap perfume and other people’s beds, lipstick on his collar like a walking cliché.
Zahara cried herself to sleep more nights than I could count, and I held her through all of it, whispering promises I didn’t know how to keep.
Then she got sick.
At first we thought it was just pregnancy stuff—the nausea, the discomfort, the general misery of growing a whole human being inside your body at sixteen years old. But the symptoms got worse. Burning when she peed. Discharge that wasn’t normal. Pain that made her double over and cry.
The free clinic confirmed what I already suspected: chlamydia. That trifling nigga had given my pregnant sister a whole STD.
I wanted to kill him. Actually wanted to wrap my hands around his throat and squeeze until he stopped breathing. But Zahara begged me not to make a scene. Said we needed him. Said we had nowhere else to go.
So I swallowed my rage and watched the doctor give my sister antibiotics and prayed the infection hadn’t hurt the baby.
Yusef was born healthy, thank God. Seven pounds, four ounces, with a full head of curly black hair and lungs that could wake up the whole hospital.
Zahara cried when she held him for the first time—happy tears, finally—and I cried too, because despite everything, something beautiful had come out of all this ugliness.
But Meech didn’t change.
The cheating continued. Got worse, actually, now that Zahara was focused on the baby and not on him. He stayed out later. Came home less. Treated his bedroom like a revolving door for whatever hood rat caught his attention that week.
And then he asked for a threesome.
I still remember the way he said it. Casual. Like he was asking us to pass the salt. “Y’all twins, right? Ever thought about… you know… sharing?”
Zahara’s face went pale. I saw the hurt flash across her features before she could hide it—the realization that the father of her child saw her as nothing more than a sexual opportunity. A fantasy to be fulfilled.
“No,” she said quietly.
“Hell no,” I said, not quietly at all.
He laughed it off. Played it like a joke. But he asked again a week later. And again the week after that. Each time more insistent. Each time less playful.
“Come on, Zai,” he said to me one night when Zahara was in the shower. Cornered me in the kitchen with that look in his eye. “I know you ain’t never had none. Let me break you in. Zahara don’t gotta know.”
I kneed him in the balls so hard he couldn’t walk straight for two days.
After that, I knew we had to go. But leaving meant being homeless again, this time with a newborn baby. Zahara wasn’t ready. Wasn’t strong enough yet, still recovering from childbirth, still breastfeeding, still believing somewhere deep down that Meech might change.
So I took matters into my own hands.
I knew Meech kept drugs in his car. He moved so messy, despite his ambitions of being a kingpin—something that was never going to happen. He was too arrogant to think he’d ever get caught, too comfortable in his little corner boy kingdom.
I called the tip line from a burner. Gave them his license plate number, his description, the times he usually made his runs. Anonymous. Untraceable.
They picked him up two days later with enough product to catch a trafficking charge.
Zahara was furious. Screamed at me for an hour straight, called me every name in the book, said I’d ruined everything, said Yusef needed his father.
“His father is trash,” I told her calmly, already packing our bags, stealing every hidden dollar in the house. “And we’re leaving. Tonight. We’re getting as far away from here as possible.”
She didn’t speak to me for three days.
By the time we got to California, she’d forgiven me. Mostly. Held my hand on the Greyhound bus and watched Yusef sleep in my arms and admitted, quietly, that she was relieved.
“I couldn’t do it,” she whispered. “I couldn’t leave him on my own. I needed you to make the choice for me.”
That was Zahara. Soft where I was hard. Gentle where I was sharp. She felt things too deeply, loved too easily, forgave too quickly. And I spent my whole life protecting her from a world that took advantage of people like that.
California was supposed to be our fresh start.
And for a while, it was. We found a tiny apartment in Inglewood—one bedroom that we shared, a kitchenette barely big enough to turn around in, a bathroom with a shower that only ran hot water for five minutes at a time.
It was cramped and loud and the neighbors dealt drugs out of the apartment next door.
But it was ours.
The problem was money. We didn’t have GEDs—Baba had homeschooled us, which really meant he’d taught us enough Quran to recite and enough math to work the register at his health food store. No diplomas. No transcripts. No way to prove we’d ever been educated at all.
So we took what we could get. Waitressing jobs that paid under the table. Cleaning houses for rich white women in Beverly Hills who looked at us like we might steal their jewelry. Retail gigs during the holidays that disappeared come January.
We traded off shifts like a relay race, one of us always home with Yusef while the other hustled for rent money. Some months we made it. Some months we had to choose between electricity and groceries. Some months we ate ramen for two weeks straight and pretended it was a choice.
But we had each other. And we had Yusef. And we had our dream.
Sweet Zin.
We’d been baking together since we were kids, back when our family’s kitchen was still ours to use. We’d learned business basics in his health food store—inventory, pricing, customer service—and we’d taught ourselves the rest through library books and YouTube videos and trial and error.
Our cinnamon rolls were legendary. We’d make them on Sunday mornings when we had the money for ingredients, and the whole apartment building would smell like butter and cinnamon and brown sugar.
If we had enough money to rent booths, we would sell at farmer’s markets or other local events. We’d sell out every single time.
“One day,” Zahara would say, flour in her hair and Yusef tugging at her apron, “we’re gonna have our own bakery. Zainab and Zahara’s Zinnamon Rolls. The Z’s.”
“Sweet Zin,” I’d counter, because I thought it sounded better.
“Sweet Zin,” she’d agree, smiling that smile that made everything feel possible.
One day. That was always the promise. One day, when we had enough money. One day, when we had our lives together. One day, when the world stopped being so goddamn hard.
Zahara decided to get her GED first. Studied every night after Yusef went to sleep, borrowed books from the library, took practice tests until her eyes crossed.
She passed on her first try—because of course she did, my sister was smart as hell when she applied herself—and enrolled in community college to study business.
“Someone’s gotta know how to run this bakery,” she said, grinning. “And we both know numbers ain’t your thing.”
She wasn’t wrong. I had hustle and talent. But she was far more analytical than I was. Together we made one fully functional adult.
To make sure she could focus on school, I took on more work. Found a gig at an underground gambling club in Koreatown, a spot run by a gang called Brick City Crew. Cash games, high stakes poker, sports betting—all very illegal, all very lucrative.
I worked the floor most nights. Serving drinks.
Running chips. Keeping the high rollers happy and the low rollers spending.
The money was good—way better than waitressing—and they paid in cash, no questions asked.
No need for a GED when you were pouring whiskey for men who had more money than sense.
I never told Zahara the full truth about what went on in that place. She knew I worked at a “private club.” She didn’t know about the drugs that changed hands in the back rooms. The guns that certain members carried. The way disputes got settled in the alley behind the building.
I wasn’t naive. I knew I was playing with fire. But the money let Zahara focus on school. Let us put a little aside each month for Sweet Zin. Let Yusef have new shoes when he needed them instead of hand-me-downs from Goodwill.
It was worth the risk.
Or so I thought.
The night everything changed started like any other.
It was a summer Tuesday. Slow night at the club—just a few regulars playing blackjack and one high-stakes poker game in the back room.
I’d been on my feet for six hours, and my dogs were barking, so when the manager asked someone to take out the trash, I volunteered. Any excuse to get some fresh air.
The alley behind the club was narrow and dark, lit by a single flickering bulb above the back door. It always smelled like piss and garbage, and I usually held my breath while I tossed the bags in the dumpster.
But that night, I heard something.