Motherless Child #3
My dash told me it was three in the morning, but I didn’t give a fuck. I needed Snow.
So I got out my whip and cut through where I’d seen her walk toward after we got done hanging out.
They didn’t have much of a backyard or even a fence. There were a couple of windows, but there was a toilet in the first one, so I walked to the second and knocked my knuckles onto the glass.
It didn’t take long for my Snow to appear. She wiped the sleep from her eyes and took me in.
We hadn’t seen each other since she found out about Kisha. I meant what I said about giving her space. Plus, as much shit as I talked, I didn’t wanna give her no reason to really try to fuck with one of the Babies.
Niggas like them would fuck with a bitch just because they knew you did. Kilo and Lem didn’t think I knew they’d tried to fuck with Kisha on some dirty-macking shit. The only reason they didn’t try to outright take her from me or hurt her was because they knew my get down.
I didn’t even wanna give them the chance to do that with Snow. They’d been asking Fredo who she was, so this time away was needed.
Still, seeing her calmed my heart enough for me to know I did the right thing.
“Go to the front,” she said through the window. I didn’t walk away until she left her room.
By the time I rounded her crib, she was there, in a shirt and shorts that were for sure too damn small for her. She was retying her scarf as I breezed passed her, making a beeline for where I thought her room was.
It wasn’t pink like I thought it would be. Her bed was white, with a canopy and white iron posts. But that was the beginning and end of the girly shit.
Posters of different rappers and singers covered every inch of her walls. On her ceiling was the Native Sons, a local group that made it big. A desk and computer was on the wall closest to the door, a blue iMac with matching keyboard and mouse.
She pushed me more into her room before closing and locking the door.
“What are you doing here, Rico?” she asked, leaning onto her door.
I toed off my shoes and sat on her bed, facing her. “Where your parents? You not whispering.”
“Working. And Auty sleeps like the dead. So yeah, why are you here? Shouldn’t you be with Kisha?”
“I’m hurting, Snow,” I whispered, holding her gaze. “Shit’s all bad. It’s fucked up, actually.”
I pulled my hoodie off of me and threw it on the floor.
“Can you keep a secret, Snow?”
She came around me, and climbed onto the other side of the bed as I lay down, too.
We were shoulder to shoulder, both staring up at PC and Trippy as they posed for whatever Hip Hop magazine she got the poster out of.
My mouth opened to tell her what the fuck just happened. But it couldn’t come out.
Not because Snow wouldn’t get it. By then, I knew all about her own parents and the fucked up games they played to put her against her twin. We’d talked about it at length, all night, more than once.
But in listening to her, I never got around to telling her my own shit.
At first, it wasn’t her business. Not even Peanut knew how bad shit could get with Ma. Now, though, there was so much I would have had to say. I couldn’t start off telling her Ma was… what she did. She wouldn’t get it.
I had to start from the beginning.
“My pops is a pimp. There’s a street in Lightning Heights, called Quixote Road. It looks like a dead end, but if you keep going, you eventually get to The Hive. There’s another way, but that’s the way to get there from the city. That’s his brothel. He stays there with his girls,
and most of the important niggas in the state are his clients.”
I turned my head. Snow lay there, with measured breaths, digesting what I said.
“Is your mom his… worker?”
The corner of my mouth pulled. “You mean his ho? No. She knew what he was, but he never put her to work. He kept her away from his shit. She was his safe place, and I think he was the same, until he wasn’t. Because the type of shit he did, it always catches up to niggas.
No one talks about what happened, but something did, and my Ma was never the same. Shit, none of us were never the same. Now, me and Fredo and Ma, we live with my Nan, and Pooh is at The Hive.”
“Pooh?”
“That’s why I’ll never call you Wynnie. Too close to my Pops’ name.”
We both snorted, but it didn’t make the heaviness of my words go away. I could practically feel the questions lined up on Snow’s tongue. Why, all of a sudden, was I so forthcoming, tonight of all nights?
But to her credit, she didn’t ask them. She shuffled closer, until our bare arms were touching. Snow had hairy arms for a girl, but I didn’t mind, not at all.
She was still perfect to me.
“I can’t apologize for the shit I said to you, Snow, because that’s the type of nigga I am.”
I turned my head, facing her door, unable to look her in those cocoa brown eyes of hers.
“I may not be pimping hoes, but I gangbang. I sell drugs. I’ve killed niggas before. And Kisha may not be my girlfriend, but I’ve fucked her before. I’m living the life of a nigga twice my age, and been doing it since, like, the sixth grade. I’m into shit I want you nowhere near.
Pooh has been telling Fredo and me since damn near birth, to steer clear of females, and I never got it foreal, not until I started hanging with you.”
“It sounds like we’re not gonna hang anymore,” she replied in a hoarse whisper.
“It’s not exactly a good idea, Snow. I just told you why.”
Her fingers slipped through mine, twining themselves until our palms touched. Her other hand cupped the back of mine, like she knew her touch was the only thing keeping me from being completely numb.
If only she knew how my night went. If only she knew just how fucked up I really was, how good I was at compartmentalizing any and everything except her. She’d be calling the police on me immediately.
Or maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe she was the type of good girl that saw the good in everyone. That had something that called to niggas like me. I knew I should have left her alone. Between Ma, this upcoming war, and the bitches I ain’t even mentioned, I’ma be stretched thin.
“I don’t care about that stuff.”
“One day you will. Or worse, one day I’ma hurt you. And you think I won’t, but I will, Snow.”
“Rico,” she sighed, squeezing my hand. “Can you… can you keep a secret?”
“Snow–”
“My parents are gone. They left us. No one knows, not even Auty. My mom left forty-thousand dollars that day we all hung out at that mansion.”
I popped up instantly, glaring down at her. “What the fuck, Snow? That was months ago.”
Seeing her blink back tears made me regret snapping, so I lay back down, facing her.
“I know,” she whispered. “My dad thinks my nana is out here watching us, but she’s been in the hospital. I’ve been making it work, but I don’t know how long this can go on without someone catching on. Both their phones are disconnected now. So, I know you think you’re this, like,
evil gangmember project kid. But you’re also, like, my best friend. And I can’t… we have to keep hanging out. You just can’t kiss me if you’re kissing other girls.”
“You the only girl I’ve ever kissed, Snow,” I blurted, chuckling when her face screwed up.
“Yeah, right.”
“On Baby. You seen that bitch kiss me on the cheek, and even that was a party foul.”
Snow sniffled as she shook her head, and wiped her face on her pillow.
“Nah but, I think you need to tell someone, Snow. Turkey’s grandfather, maybe. Someone.”
“Turkey’s dang near raising himself, too. And with the money I have, I don’t wanna tell his sisters. I’m handling it. Auty is in dance and has a weekend job to keep herself busy. And my parents were never around anyway, so it’s not like anyone is asking where they are. They’ll turn up.”
“But what if they don’t, Snow? Maybe…” I trailed off. Was I really going to suggest them come stay with us? Like Ma’s blood wasn’t still plastered all over her wall?
Hearing her woes almost made me forget mine that fast. Made me forget why I even came this way in the first place. My shit didn’t matter, not when it came to hers.
More and more I understood Pooh. How could I be numb to my own life going to shit, to go back into the fire to save Snow? Her problems were more simple, sure, but I couldn’t even save Ma.
I didn’t want to chance it a second time.
“I’ll start coming by, like once a week. Make sure shit is straight. Y’all got an alarm system right?”
“Dad had a gun, but their room is locked.”
“Nah, hell no,” I gritted. “I’ma get a deadbolt and some window locks, and then you sleep with your phone by you. I can make it here in ten minutes, so if some shit pop off, you lock yourself in the room with your sister and call me, and wait shit out. Aight?”
Snow showed most of her metal mouth in a blinding smile as she nodded. “I forgot how bossy you were.”
“Whatever, man.”
The longer she gazed up at me, the more her smile fell. “Something really bad happened, huh? That’s why you came. You said you’re hurting.”
Flashes of Ma’s room flew by my mind’s eye, but I still shook my head. “I was, but you made it all better.”
She didn’t believe my lie, but she let me make it anyway, and eventually fell asleep. I was too scared to follow her there. Too scared I’d have a nightmare, and then I’d have to tell her what drove me there foreal.
So I just watched Snow sleep. And when Fredo called me an hour later to tell me the coroner picked up Ma’s body, I slipped out of her front door, and went back to my own bullshit life.
The first and last time I smoked weed was at Ma’s funeral.
None of us wanted one, no one except Pooh. But because he “needed to pay the ultimate respect to the love of his life,” he paid for and arranged the most elaborate funeral the Birch had ever seen.
The whole Birch came out to Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church.
Everyone, from fiends, to Tiny herself. Politicians, a few mobsters–clients of Pooh of course.
Older Honeybees, old hoes of Pooh that aged out paid their respects, telling me and Fredo old stories that weren’t funny, before propositioning us.