Shattered (7 page)

“Looking for me?” I couldn’t believe it.

“You’re going home tomorrow,” she said, smiling.

I ain’t know what to say or how to feel. Instead of feeling happy like I thought I would, I felt sick to my stomach.
What was Mommy gonna think of me after all this time? After all the gross things I had been doing?
I looked at Nausy and she looked away. How come now they gonna let me live with Mommy when they said she couldn’t keep us at first?

“Maybe Nausynika can help you pack your things tonight,” Sister Melanie said with a warm smile on her face, but after dinner I found Nausy crying in her room. She was lying on her bed, her face buried in her pillow.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“You leaving,” she said through snotty breaths, “and I’m gon’ be here all by myself.”

I rubbed her back, not sure what to say to her. “Wherever I go, I’ma leave you the phone number so you can call me. I know Sister Melanie won’t mind.”

She sniffed. “I’ma be in that dumb school all by myself.”

I bit my lip as I tried to think of something to say. “Well, can you do me one favor?” I asked.

She rolled over and looked at me. “What?” she asked, wiping her face with the back of her hand.

“Can you at least make sure you don’t run away so I can come visit you?”

She gave me a half smile. I reached out and hugged her as tightly as I could. Nausy hugged me back tighter.

“Come on,” I said, smiling.

The next morning while Nausynika was getting on the school bus, me and Sister Melanie was pulling out the driveway, headed for D.C. I waved bye to Nausynika, and she waved back. I was gonna miss her a lot.

Sister Melanie got on the highway and drove for a long while until we hit Rhode Island Avenue. Everything looked the same in the city, just like it had looked at the beginning of the summer. Sister made a right on Fourth Street, then a left on W Street.

“Well, Shakira…this is it. You’re home. It’s right there,” she said, pointing to the brown brick building with four levels. “Let’s grab your stuff and head upstairs.”

It wasn’t the same place where we lived before we got split up, but if Sister Melanie said this was home, then it was home. I felt so nervous. Would Mommy tell I was different? That I had been doing strange things with my body? Would she still love me?

“Let’s go, Shakira,” Sister Melanie said.

I bit my lip and squeezed the latch to open the car door.

O
nce inside the building, it wasn’t just Mommy who opened the apartment door. It was Toya and Yodi standing there, too. Mommy screamed and hugged all over me. Yodi was so much bigger and looked more like Daddy than I remembered. Toya waved and stepped back so me and Sister Melanie could come inside. Sister Melanie waited for everyone to calm down, and then she came in with my bags. Mommy tried to tell her how the system had lost track of me, but Sister Melanie was having a hard time understanding everything she said. Toya explained what Mommy was saying and signed for Sister Melanie that Mommy was finally able to prove to the courts that she was a good enough parent to get all her kids back.

Mommy said, “Seemed like they ain’t wanna believe me cuz I’m deaf, but once they sarr I had a job at Gallaudet, working in the cafaturia, they funally let me have another chance to have my kids.”

Toya and Yodi took me around the apartment while Sister Melanie and Mommy wrote on a notepad to each other. Yodi tugged me down the hallway to show me the room I was gonna share with her, then Ryan’s dark room.

“Where Ryan at?” I asked.

“Outside, I guess,” she said, looking so much older and different than I remembered. She seemed quieter, too. Yodi was the opposite and full of energy, holding my hand and tugging me around the apartment.

Toya showed me Mommy’s room and then her room with all her posters on the wall. We was in there for a while looking at CDs before Sister Melanie came in to tell me good-bye. She gave me a hug, and then I remembered to get Mommy’s phone number for Nausy.

“Please, don’t forget to give this to her. Please,” I begged. “She’s my best friend.”

“I won’t, sweetie.” Sister Melanie hugged me again and walked out the door.

I looked at Mommy and signed, “I missed you, Mommy.”

She signed, “I love you.”

It ain’t take me long to figure out how different we all had become. True strangers for real. It seemed like we only remembered bits and pieces of what life used to be like before we got separated. It had been four years since we all was together last. A lot seemed to change, too. Mommy had a weird new habit. She colored in coloring books and cut out coupons whenever she got stressed out. Toya and me ain’t never seem to get along. She was always extra mad now and treated me like I wasn’t even her sister, especially whenever we was in front of her friends. I knew she was sixteen and I was just twelve, but she acted like she ain’t want me around her. Whenever Ryan was around, he was in his room with the door closed shut, blasting music, playing video games, or watching movies. He was so strange to me and not the same brother I remembered.

Ryan used to talk a lot more. I asked him once why he was so different. He shrugged his shoulders and kept playing his video game. I wondered if it had something to do with where he was sent when we was all split up. Toya told me he was put in a group home for young boys uptown, a place where she heard all kinds of strange stuff happened. Sometimes his friends Marlon and Kris came over to play video games. The only time I seen Ryan kirk out was when Kris grabbed my butt when he thought nobody was looking. Before I knew it, Ryan punched Kris in his throat and kicked him out. I couldn’t believe how pissed Ryan was.

After I finally got settled back home, I called Nausy a couple times. She said she was actually starting to like St. Francis since I left. She was in the drama club, and she had a huge part in a play that her and her new friends made up. Whenever we did talk, the less we had to talk about cuz our lives was so different now. She talked about people and places I ain’t know nothing about. Nausy was so excited about a school trip she was gonna go on at the end of the year to Philadelphia. I felt a little jealous and sad about it.

My school was okay. No amazing school trips to talk about, though, and I still couldn’t focus in class. When I found out my new school had a step team, I tried out for it, thinking that was probably my best chance of learning anything about dancing since Mommy still wasn’t making a whole lot of money.

The day after I tried out, Toya came home and found me crying in my room.

“Come in my room and show me your moves,” she said after I told her what had happened. I wiped my face and followed her down the hall. She turned on her radio, and 702 was singing “Where My Girls At?”

“Come on, let me see,” Toya said, standing in the middle of the floor. I was surprised she was actually talking to me since it always seemed like I was getting on her nerves. I showed her a couple of my moves, and she started laughing.

“What?”

“Why you look so awkward? Stop being stiff. Loosen up.” She did a couple of moves and told me to do it, too. The more she moved her hips, the more I realized it was more about the middle part of my body than anything else. So I did what she did but moved like how I used to move when I was with Dizzle. When I looked at her, Toya’s face looked tense. Then she cocked her head to the side. “Are you fucking?”

“Huh?” I said, nervously fixing my shirt.

“You heard me,” she said, taking a step closer.

I looked away and rocked back on my heels, swinging my arms back and forth.

“You little tramp,” she said.

I bit my lip. Why was she smiling like a witch? She pushed me over to her bed and sat down.

“Okay, so tell me about it! Who? When? Where?”

I looked up at her nervously. “His name is Dizzle. We did it last summer in a motel not far from here.”

“A motel?!” she asked, even more shocked, and then she shook her head and looked away. “How you have sex at a age younger than me?”

“You had sex before?”

She nodded. “But I was fourteen, not twelve! Wait, in June you was still eleven then. Dag, girl. Your ass fast. Did you like it?”

I shrugged. That was too hard of a question to answer. In a weird way, I missed Dizzle.

“Where is this Dizzle now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Niggas,” she said, shaking her head. “Well, I hope you learned your lesson about giving it up. Trust me, I had to learn the hard way, too.”

I chewed the inside of my cheek again. I ain’t wanna talk about it no more cuz I could tell she wasn’t gonna understand nothing about what I had been doing since I last lived with her. If she was this shocked about Dizzle, she’d absolutely die if she knew about all the others. It would be my secret.

About a year after I had been back home, Mommy finally started going out a lot with some of her friends. They went out to eat and for drinks. The more she went out, the more Ryan hung out late with his friends, smoking on the block. Toya began sneaking in her boyfriend Demari from the building across the street when both Mommy and Ryan was gone. She promised to let me wear some of her clothes if I kept Yodi busy in her room. Everything was going good until the time Toya caught Demari playing in my hair in the building stairwell.

“What you doing letting him touch you?!” Toya snapped.

It was something Demari always did when he seen me. He’d crack a joke about something, then play with my hair. I never stopped him. I thought he was just being playful.

“Stop tripping,” Demari said. “It ain’t no big deal.”

“What?” Toya said as she slammed her hand on her waist. “What you mean it ain’t no big deal? That’s my little sister and she’s only thirteen!”

Demari threw his hands up. “Look, I ain’t got time for this shit.” He walked down the stairs.

“What else you let him do to you, slut!” Toya yelled and pushed me down the stairs as soon as Demari disappeared. I stumbled down a couple steps but broke my fall.

“You think cuz you got titties now and cuz you fucking, you can have my boyfriend?!” Toya yelled. “Your ass make me sick!”

It wasn’t even like that. I mean, I wasn’t trying to take her boyfriend. I did like the attention Demari gave me when he saw me every now and then, but he was older and
her
man. I ain’t want her boyfriend.

“Toya, it’s not what you think it was!” I said.

“Whatever!” Toya shouted back.

“Why you yelling at her for?” Ryan asked, coming up a flight of stairs.

“That bitch messing with Demari behind my back, that’s why!”

I shook my head, hoping Ryan ain’t believe her, but I could tell by the look in his eyes that he did and he was disappointed in me. I wanted to scream from the top of the building: “I wasn’t messing with Demari. He was messing with me!” I could feel tears about to fall.

“Get your ass in the house!” Ryan shouted, pushing me up the stairs. “Let me find out you in another nigga’s face around here!”

Why was he so mad at me for? Mommy noticed right away that Toya wasn’t talking to me no more. She tried to get us to be friends, but Toya wasn’t having no part of that. Every time she saw me doing my hair in the bathroom, she’d make some kind of crazy comment to hurt my feelings, calling me names like Project Pat Barbie. In the beginning she used to get to me, but after a while I ignored her.

On my way home from school a few weeks after the incident in the stairwell, I was about to cross the street when a light brown–skin guy riding in the passenger seat of a blue Cadillac STS yelled out the window, “Hey, cutie.” He was cute, too, with a beard outlining his chin. I smiled when I saw him. His friend pulled over, and then the cutie asked me if I had a boyfriend. I told him no. When he asked me for my phone number, I gave it to him, even though I knew if Ryan knew about it he’d be pissed. It would be worth it just to see Toya’s face when this Nut guy called for me. Since her and Demari broke up, she was always in the house, being pressed to answer the phone. I knew she blamed me for their breakup. I stayed out of the house as much as possible so I could avoid her tight face. The angrier she got about not being with Demari, the more she broke out across her forehead and her cheeks. Just about every chance Toya had, she was in the bathroom scrubbing different treatments all over her face to get rid of the acne. Mommy told her to leave it alone cuz it would go away on its own, but no, Toya wouldn’t listen, leaving a trail of tiny scars everywhere. That’s exactly what she got.

N
ut reminded me of Dizzle in a way. I never asked him how old he was, but I knew he was about Dizzle’s age. Every chance he got he took me somewhere new and bought me something cute to wear. The thing I liked about Nut most is how smart he made me feel I was, like I had the best taste in style ever and that I was willing to try new stuff at least once. He spoiled me in a way. All his friends knew how special I was to him cuz he always had a shopping bag for me whenever he picked me up after school. Bags from DTLR, Rainbow, Fashion Bug, and LVLX. Shoes, cute jeans, and sexy tops. All stuff I hid in my book bag or just left over his apartment around Saratoga.

“You should spend the night this weekend,” he said one night.

“I can’t spend the night,” I said, shaking my head.

“Why not?” he said passing me his blunt.

“My mother would kill me.”

“I dig.”

We was quiet for a while. I was lying on his chest, listening to his heartbeat and smoking weed with him. Mommy would die if she knew I smoked weed, but I liked it. I could stop focusing on the faces of all those men that kept appearing in my head at night. I could enjoy whatever was happening at the moment with Nut, who was so sweet to me all the time. All he ever wanted was for me to spend the night sometimes. Why not?

“What do you think your mother would say about me if she ever met me?” he asked, playing with my hair.

“Hmmm…she’d say you was handsome. I think she would think you was funny and smart, just like I do.”

“Good answer,” he said, kissing my lips before he took another hit of his blunt.

I smiled, but Nut already knew he was smart. He always talked about all these crazy ideas he had to make money. Sometimes he’d talk about how he wanted to have his own company and employees. One minute it was a cleaning company, another minute it was a mobile gourmet truck. Other times Nut would find a reason to show me something he read in this old, torn-up Donald Trump book he got from his uncle. I could tell he knew a lot.

“Them niggas ain’t getting it, for real,” he said about the corner boys in his neighborhood once when we pulled up in front of his apartment building. “They out here all day long, and the most they might make in a day is a hundred dollars. Them niggas gon’ stay broke! For the kind of risks they taking, they might as well work at McDonald’s or something. These niggas ain’t got no health insurance, no life insurance, nothing. They just standing out here like a target.”

He was right, I guess. I loved it when Nut talked like that. It was so sexy. Nut even made me want to be smarter, too. I tried to think like how he thought. When he watched business shows, I did, too, even though I couldn’t understand nothing. I would stare at the numbers scrolling across the bottom of the screen and listen to Nut react until I fell asleep. He loved that I was into it…or at least, that I acted like I was into it. I ain’t really know how Nut made his money. I just knew he always had it. The one time I asked him how he made money he said he was a hustler and nothing else. He didn’t even entertain my confused look.

Whatever that meant, I knew I never had to worry about him having money cuz every time I asked him for something, he made sure I had it. I felt more comfortable over Nut’s than I did at home. Ryan and Toya both got on my nerves. Either my brother was telling me what I wasn’t supposed to be doing or wearing, where I wasn’t supposed to be going, or Toya was busy telling me to get the fuck out of her face. Yodi was the only one who I talked to, but she was so young, wasn’t nothing we had in common for real. Mommy just wanted all of us to get along, but I knew it would never be like that.

The craziest thing happened the night I finally decided to stay the night over Nut’s for the weekend. We was up all night watching old movies—
Scarface
,
Menace II Society
,
Love Jones
, and
Jason’s Lyric
. We was in the middle of watching
Jason’s Lyric
when it happened.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

“I know your ass in there, open the motherfucking door!” a girl’s shriek voice yelled on the other side of Nut’s door. “Trying not to answer your phone. Open the fuckin’ door, Nut!”

“Shit,” Nut mumbled under his breath before he got up and went to the front room. “Hold on, slim.”

I was so confused. Who was at his door? I sat up on one arm and listened. All I could hear was a girl’s voice. If Nut was saying anything, I couldn’t hear it.

I heard: “Why your ass not answering your phone, nigga?! Who in there?! Let me in…No, cuz you do this shit every time I say I got something else to do…I’m tired of you doing this to me, Nut!…Yeah…but still…”

I couldn’t hear nothing for a few minutes, and then I heard Nut close and lock the front door before he climbed back in the bed.

“You can unpause it,” he said before wrapping his arms around me like nothing odd had even happened.

“Who was that?” I asked. It was the first time my heart skipped nervously. Nut had never given me a reason to think I wasn’t the most important person in his life. Now I was scared to hear his answer.

“Nobody,” he said, taking the remote control and pushing play without even looking at me.

“
Nobody
was real loud and real pissed. Why?” I asked anxiously.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, kissing me long and hard. “It’s nothing. I’m here with you, right?”

I was confused and scared that whatever the truth might be would mess everything up, so I played the game he was playing and ignored what had happened. Before the movie went off, I climbed on top of Nut and tried to make him feel good. The same way the men used to say I made them feel. Nut seemed impressed cuz of the smile on his face. I ain’t want him to forget how special I was to him, so I let him do whatever he wanted to me that night. It was the first time I did more than put him inside my mouth. I wanted him to know that I was better than whoever was on the other side of that door. I ain’t wanna share him. Nut held me tight and close the same way Dizzle used to do when he was done. I was hoping from now on I would be his favorite.

The next morning when I woke up, Nut was staring at me like I was a different person. I smiled. He smiled, then kissed me.

“You should be my business partner.”

I looked at him, confused, and then he told me he was about to start on his plan to rent and sell houses.

“I really think you’d be slick helping me.”

“Me?” I asked, confused.

He ran his fingers through my hair. “Yeah, you. You street-smart enough to make a lot of money.”

How could I help him start a business? I was only fourteen.

“I see something in you…You might not know it, but I can see it so clear,” he said, smiling.

I listened to his plan. He promised me that I would make a lot of money, that he would help me get my own apartment, and that one day I could own my house, too. My gut said that something wasn’t right, but the thought of having my own for a change was too good to pass up, so I told Nut okay. The next night he introduced me to a cute girl with a fly-ass hairstyle named Peaches. After she finished rolling her eyes and sizing me up, she told me all I had to do was help Nut recruit more employees. Sounded too easy. I never knew the taste I gave him the night before would be what he expected me to do for every nigga who was willing to pay for it from that moment on. When Peaches saw my head wasn’t into it, she made sure to convince me. “Own them niggas,” she used to say just before Nut sent me a new dude to trick. I loved getting the money for a change. Dizzle used to keep all the money. With Nut, he gave me some to keep for myself. Peaches helped me overcome my fears and reminded me of our goal every chance my mind started to slip. Soon me and her was best friends—closer than my own sisters, even though she made it real clear Nut was her man, even if he fucked me occasionally. For some reason it was fine with me as long as I was a big part of the “business.”

Little did I know, the business would be a part of my life for a long time to come.