Team Seven (22 page)

Tunnetta and I ain’t talked for the rest of that school year and that whole summer. In the months we stopped talking I took Reggie’s advice and focused more on ball. I heard Tunnetta got around plenty over the summer. Her name was starting to ring bells with niggas in the hallways and in the locker rooms. The word was that she turned into a real community ho jump-off type. Now she don’t know how to break it to Beezy that he’s nothin’ more than a long rebound she don’t know how to drop.

After I watched Sade Fulton beat her ass, I tried to act like there was nothing between us, but I felt horrible about how I just walked away from her. As much as I distanced myself
and kept away, I couldn’t get her out of my head. We were pretty close and I missed talking to her on the phone. Even with all the rumbles about her gettin’ around, I still felt like things weren’t finished with us. So in the fall when school started back up, I slipped a note in her locker that said, “I’m having Mary & Jane over for an afterschool study session at 4:20, we need your help with math homework. We miss you.”

She showed up that day after school in my backyard blushing, but she was a little awkward and standoffish at first. She told me not to get any ideas and that she didn’t want to smoke inside the toolshed, so we went off into the woods behind Decker Street. We sat on a big boulder, and as we blazed I apologized for not doing something to help her. She accepted my apology but said she wasn’t going to break up with Beezy because he was nice to her. Still, she agreed we could be how we were if I promised not to tell, and just like that we been creeping ever since.

They officially became boyfriend and girlfriend at the end of the summer before the school year started and I got home from a basketball tournament in New York. Since I got back, I been wanting to smack him in his big mouth. He’s been stomping around the block and the hallways at school like he’s King Ding-a-Ling XL and shit, looking like a damn fool. He be acting like he was shitting on somebody, bagging Tunnetta. Like he can control that cageless bird. I wasn’t the only one enjoying her in her free time and I grew to accept that. She ain’t my girl and I don’t question her about the things I hear about her, same way she don’t question me.

In school, ever since Ma made them damn flyers I been trying to lie low and blend into the scene. I sit with the other cats from the basketball team at lunch and avoid any set of eyes that lingers on me too long. I act like I don’t know what they’re
laughing about. Beezy and Tunnetta sit across the cafeteria from the basketball players’ table and I be watching this cup-caking motherfucker Beezy kissing her on the mouth, holding her hand under the table like a little bitch. He’d even buy her lunch and let her get a second slice on pizza day for an extra $1.25. It’s weird watching how Beezy is for her. When he looks at her it’s like she’s the only person in the cafeteria, but only it’s sicker than that ’cause he looks at her like in her eyes he sees the honey-sweet version of his dreams.

But I don’t know what the hell he really sees when he looks at her ’cause how can’t he see her flashing the fuck-me eyes to half the niggas sitting at my table? When the bell would ring and we all worked our way back to class Beezy would toss his hand over Tunnetta’s shoulder and they’d stroll away, seesawing off to class together. It looked funny how Beezy would damn near be walking on his tiptoes trying to cuff her, and for whatever reason he just didn’t seem to see anybody laughing at him. I just be shaking my head and wondering to myself, How do you get like that?

I don’t even know why God even bothers blessing me anymore. After the high school basketball season I got ranked seventeenth out of the top twenty-five players in my class in the state of Massachusetts. So now I stay late after school doing workouts in the gym. Basketball’s been the only thing that helps ease up all the pressure that’s been building up inside me. It’s also the only thing I can do right. The weed ain’t strong enough anymore to affect how I play. It just don’t get me high like it used to. I get out on the court and play off pure instinct and it works. The weed just makes me eat and want to smoke more. Well, I guess that’s another reason I been doing extra workouts, ’cause I been sucking wind at practice and Coach said I’m getting bitch-tits and chipmunk cheeks, but
when the summer comes I’ll be ready. Talent always wins out, and bitch-tits or not I’m going to make Coach eat his words. Plus, I like the walk home better when everyone’s cleared out. That way, if Smoke or anyone tries to run up at least I’ll see them coming.

While I do my thing at the gym, if anyone comes around looking for trees, I get whatever bags off that I can, then I walk straight home looking at the fallen leaves on the ground while ignoring Ma’s Bible study flyers. I been trying to stick close to Reggie, really getting deep on my Team Seven shit. It’s starting to feel like a pressure cooker out there on the corner. Sometimes Smoke rides up the street all slow playing his music loud with his tinted windows half cracked like he’s ’bout to stop and do something. I love it when Smoke pulls dumb-ass tough-guy moves like this because I ain’t scared when I’m with Reggie. I never seen Reggie run from a fight in my life. He’s a laid-back cat, but when he gets going he’s another kind of animal. The day Reggie put me on with some work, he told me not to worry ’bout Smoke. The way Reggie called it was: me and Smoke have a low-level disagreement about some money. This is, he says, not his business. Reggie and I getting money is his business. If Smoke fucks up my getting the money, then that would force things to become Reggie’s business.

I’m probably two weeks away from having this nigga Smoke’s sixteen hundred dollars but I got a feeling he don’t really want it no more anyway. He wanted the money a long while ago, and Reggie’s trusting me on the re-ups now. I’ve seen Smoke plenty of times and he usually acts like I’m not there at all. He ain’t the passive-aggressive type, so I think he’s either plotting on me or maybe he wants blood now. Why else hasn’t he caught me coming out of school? For some reason,
even though Nina’s moody and we don’t really get along, I don’t think she wants to see something happen to me. So I wonder if she’s asked him to chill, because when he does acknowledge me there’s a certain fire in his glare that says, “Ain’t nothin’ forgotten.”

By the time Ma gets home from work and dinner rolls around, I’m high like I promised God that I wouldn’t be. This is how it’s been lately. One moment I was riding on top of the softest part of cloud nine and I was so busy looking up that I didn’t notice the moment when everything evaporated. Now every day I’m just confused and constantly wondering how I got so caught up trying to be the man that I ended up drifting deeper and deeper into the storm, with the rest of the niggas who be fucking up. It burns me that Reggie was sort of right about what he said to me that day at Kelly Park. Other than hoopin’ and playing hopscotch around the block trying to avoid Smoke, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing anymore these days.

Pop’s back living at the crib with us, which is another mind-fuck all by itself. He came home a couple of weeks ago and if anybody was styling on me it was Pop. Mr. Watson set his job up real proper and I know he’s making decent money. Just two weeks after he got home and started working he sold his Bronco and bought himself a white Chrysler LeBaron, a soft-top convertible too. It’s used but he cruises around the block with the top down, reggae music blaring, volume on asshole like can’t nobody tell him nothing. I be wanting to run my house key up the sides of that car so bad, but I got enough drama these days, not to say that I don’t get the urge.

When he first got home I was walking into my bedroom.
Nina and Ma ushered him, huggin’ on him like he’d just come back from a war. I heard all the noise of him coming up the hallway, but I wasn’t fast enough. Ma was on some bullshit acting like I was a little kid and she could make peace between us. Pop’s always kept me at an arm’s length and the issues between us run deeper than she’ll ever understand. I’m off the porch now, she can play like she don’t know, but the window for that man to be a father to me been opened and closed and that was his choice. I was literally inches away from closing my bedroom door when Ma called out, “Andre!” I paused and heard footsteps coming toward my room.

A boot kicked into the crack of my door and I stepped back and opened it and it was like I was looking into a broken mirror. We were face-to-face, me and Pop. My heart sped up and my knees wobbled, but I kept it cool. Never let ’em see you sweat. I looked at the floor.

“Hey, Pop,” I coughed it out and didn’t look up at him.

“Hi, Andre.”

I turned back to close my door when I felt Ma’s hand on my shoulder. “Nuh-uh, Andre, give your father a hug.”

She stepped beside him and the face she made said she was serious and I looked up and over and Pop was searing a sober glow into my hazy red eyes. He reached out and bear-hugged me and started shaking me like he wanted to pick me up. He clasped his arms around my head and in the noose of his elbows it started feeling like I wanted to tap out. He squeezed my head up against his chin stubble and slowly grated it along the side of my face.

“Remember me? Your dad?” He slipped me into a headlock. “Did you miss me?”

He pulled me tighter and everything slow-motioned in front of me and it sounded like I had water in my ears. He
rocked me back and forth and right before I felt like I was going to pass out I stomped on his foot and bucked my back against his ribs, threw a wild punch over my head at him, and he jumped. We looked at each other and I felt nothing for him. He flinched at me and I ran at him and we tangled like crabs in a pot and wrestled until I regained my balance and pushed him back off of me and he fell back against the front door. Nina and Ma were motionless, like statues or figurines. It felt like anything could have happened, and they’d never looked so small to me, huddled together in the kitchen door like that.

Pop stood up huffing and puffing. As I rested my weight on my knees looking up at him, Ma screamed out, “Stop it, you two! Please,” and the dryness in her voice was enough to break my heart.

I can only describe the feeling that crackled up my spine as Pop hugged me with his man strength as something close to getting your eyeball crushed inside an eagle talon. He stepped toward me and I threw my fist up, ready to swing, but he could tell I wasn’t really ready to throw hands with him. But I was sure pissed enough to try. He stood there looking at me, smiling and winded, and I kept my fists up and backed away, eyeing him the whole way back into my room until I closed my door.

He called out, “Ah, Andre, come on!” Like it was a joke and he can laugh all he wants. Shit ain’t no movie, he was lucky Nina and Ma were around or I’d have pulled my shank on him—see how bad he was then. It’s all good, though, it ain’t over. In every direction I turn, it seems like there’s a new person popping up who’s got an issue with me, and at this point he can just add his name to the list. If he tries to come at me on some rah-rah billy-bad-ass shit again, he’ll get his issue.

Since Pop works the day shift for Mr. Watson, Ma set it up so that he takes me to AAU practice on Tuesdays and Thursdays at this fancy-ass private school called Baxter out in Weston. It’s about an hour away or forty-five minutes if the highway’s clear and there’s no construction on Route 9. The ride is always awkward, and I listen to my headphones and act like I’m asleep until we get to the gym. We don’t say much more than “hi” and “bye” to each other and around the house we stay out of each other’s way. He mostly hangs out in the basement, listening to old records and drinking Heineken. With all that’s gone down, you’d think we’d have something to say to each other, right? Sometimes as we ride to practice I can feel him electric-eyeing me all deep like he wants to talk, but I don’t play his game.

He drops me off at the gym around seven thirty and peels rubber out of the parking lot, knowing he has two hours to be back to pick me up. He never stays to watch me play like all the other fathers sitting up in the bleachers, holding cups of coffee or straight stealing swigs from a flask. Sometimes he fucks up and comes back too early and comes inside to pee and gets caught up talking to Mr. Watson or some of my other teammates’ fathers. The white fathers—businessmen types—seem to like him. I can see their inner laughter under them fake smiles. But Pop hates white people all the same, and I could see the bullshit dripping off him too.

I hated seeing him up there acting like he really had something to do with me, fronting for all the other fathers up in the stands with the sleeves of their dry-cleaner starch-creased white oxfords rolled up, their Brooks Brothers ties hanging
slack around their necks. Pop’s no angel, but I can’t blame him for the way shit is right now. I did it all to myself. I fucked up the money and he ate a charge for me. I know. I remember. But karma and bitch-ass niggas will get you in the same way.

When Ma’s not around, all the silence and tension in the house make it feel like being at the library, everybody quietly studying each other, doing their best not to talk unless it’s absolutely necessary. Since I clapped Nina we don’t hardly speak and when we do she’s talking shit. I feel bad for smacking her, but now she’s made me a bit nervous ever since, it always seems like she’s up to something. She knows if she comes out on the back porch, after Ma’s in bed, I’ll let her blaze with me, but that don’t mean I trust her, ’cause I don’t. Right about now I don’t trust anybody other than Reggie. Nina’s too tricky. Other than the fact that she’s sleeping with the enemy, or whatever she terms what she’s doing with Smoke, she also be trying to hang around Pop, being all friendly and shit, acting like his spells of doing the right thing ever last. She can call me an asshole all she wants, but I’m not buying it, Pop will never change, he just gets better at hiding the shady bullshit about himself. Just the other day Nina told me she really thinks Pop reformed when he was away and that I should give him another chance. Then again, this is the same girl who believes that every bitch who tells her Smoke is creeping around is a hater. Ma and Smoke’s mother, Miss Myra, are friends, and I guess they’re trying to be supportive or just ignoring it, in hopes that it’ll be a phase and they’ll fizzle out. Nina’s eighteen, they can’t stop them and neither can I, but all I know is I’m sticking to my guns.