Pride(48)

I see him typing. The three dots hover.

Zuri? he writes.

I pause.

I promise not to tell, I write back.

“Yo, Zuri. What. Is. Going. On?” Warren says.

I turn toward him, but I can barely look him in the face. My blood is boiling.

“Is it true?” I ask Warren point-blank. I narrow my eyes at him.

“Zuri, is what true? What just happened?”

“What you did to Darius’s sister.”

“Damn, is that what he just told you? Seriously, I can explain.”

I get up from the stoop and start pacing, my mind buzzing. “The only thing you need to explain is how you were nasty enough to take pics of a fifteen-year-old girl. What the fuck, Warren?”

“So it’s like that, huh?” He gets up too. He’s a step above me, and now he towers over me. But I refuse to be intimidated.

“Get the fuck outta my face, Warren!”

Warren glares at me, but he does what I say. The gate slams shut behind him, and he walks down the street without looking back. I feel all the air leave my body, and it seems like my heart is screwed on backward. I went from catching feelings for Warren to cursing him out in the span of a minute.

I look up and see Darius is still standing in the window. He nods at me, once. I bite my lip as I nod back. Darius steps away from the window. I sink down onto the steps and cover my head in my hands.

“What’s going on?” Janae calls out from upstairs.

My sisters are watching from the bedroom window. Madrina’s curtains are open. And maybe the whole block had their eyes on me, Warren, and Darius.

And that’s when I know for sure that those boys moving onto this block has changed everything.





Twenty-One


WHEN I REACH Madrina’s door, it’s already slightly open. I can see her colorful walls covered in bright artwork: fake Picassos, African masks, Caribbean art, and even the stuff my sisters and I made in grade school, framed and placed beside all the other eclectic knickknacks Madrina has around her home. It was Madrina who gave me my first poetry journal, who encouraged me to write down everything I saw.

“Madrina!” I call out, and my voice echoes. I need to talk to Madrina about this boy. That kiss. Those photos. And this thing I can’t quite describe that’s swimming deep inside me.

I search the kitchen, the bathroom, and finally I hear a faint voice coming from behind the closed door of her bedroom. I knock first. Then I open the door to find Madrina lying in her bed.

“Madrina, what’s wrong?” I ask. I rarely come into her bedroom because never, ever have I seen her laid up in bed in the middle of the afternoon.

The lump beneath the blankets shifts, and she mumbles something.

“Madrina?” I take slow steps toward her bed.

She pulls back her covers, and for the very first time in my whole entire life, I’m seeing my madrina without any makeup. She’s a little darker and her face looks smaller. The wrinkles on her forehead are like ocean waves, her eyes are deeper and piercing, and her thin lips stretch into a weak smile when she sees me.

“Zuri? Cómo ’tás?” she says. Her voice is still deep and booming, but it comes from a shallow place now.

“Why are you in bed?”

“Because I’m resting,” she says, and turns over to her side to face me.

“No riddles, Madrina. Tell me straight up. What’s going on?” I crouch down beside her bed so that we’re eye to eye.

“You’re so bossy, you know. The bossiest of all your sisters,” she says, smiling.

“I get it from you, Madrina. Where’s Colin?” I take her hand and squeeze it. It’s cool, smooth, and dry.

She squeezes my hand back. “Zuri. You’re also hardheaded. You have all these walls around you that it’s like your heart is locked up in some room.”

I pull away from her. “You want me to get you some water? Did you have something to eat yet?” I’m too worried about Madrina to even tell her about what happened with Darius on the drive from D.C.

She starts to get up from beneath the covers. She’s wearing a flowery nightgown, and for the first time, I suddenly see how thin she’s gotten. She’s still a little chunky and soft, but it’s different. For the first time ever, she looks frail. She opens a drawer in her nightstand, pulls out a fifty-dollar bill, and slides it over to me.

“Keep the change,” she says, and gets up from her bed.

I take the fifty dollars from her with no questions asked. And no answers, either. I watch her for a long minute as she struggles to pour the boiling water from an electric kettle on her nightstand into a mug. Her hand is shaking like I’ve never seen it before. I quickly get up to help her, but she shoos me away.

“I had this nice soup called el bisqué at that new farm restaurant. Go get me that el bisqué, Zuri! It was so delicious,” she says.

Slowly I walk out of her apartment, feeling as if I should still be in there with her. And hoping that when I come back, she’ll be all dressed, with her head wrapped and beads and makeup and deep, joyous laughter.

“I kept trying to get her to order something else, but she kept asking for more bowls of the bisque,” Charlise says as she goes through a stack of paper menus. “And I kept saying, ‘Madrina, it’s bisque, not el bisqué. The E is silent.’ She spent like two hundred dollars all by herself.”