On the Come Up(63)

She’s gotta step up her social media game. “I can’t even troll people who come at me?”

I’m a pro at trolling gamer boys online. In fact, I may put it on my future résumé as a skill, alongside rapping and laying edges. Honestly, trolling is easy. All you gotta do is find multiple ways to call a gamer boy’s penis little and he’ll rage.

“You better not say anything, period,” Jay says. “Matter of fact, hand me your phone.”

She holds her palm out.

My eyes widen. “You’re kidding.”

“I’m not. Give me your phone.”

“I promise I won’t—”

“Phone, Bri.”

Craaap. I take it out of my pocket and set it in her hand.

“Thank you,” she says, and slips it into her own pocket. “Go study for that ACT.”

I groan. “Really?”

“Really. The test will be here before you know it. That needs to be your priority. Gina says that Sonny’s been studying for two hours a day. You could learn something from him.”

Dammit, Sonny. His overachieving ass. Got me looking like I’m slacking. Okay, I am, but that’s not the point.

Jay turns me toward the hallway. “Go. Only thing I better hear is you studying.”

“Um, how do you hear somebody—”

“Just go study, girl!”

She doesn’t make me study for two hours. No, that’s too short for my mom apparently. It’s four hours before she brings me my phone. Four. I don’t know what words are anymore.

Jay steps over my dirty clothes and junk on my bedroom floor.

“I oughta make you clean this nasty-ass room before I give you this phone,” she says. “Bet’ not be bringing roaches up in my house.”

Grandma used to say the same thing. They make it sound like people smuggle them into houses. Do I look like I wanna be anywhere near a roach? They’re right below Big Bird on my “Things I Don’t Mess With” list.

Jay sets my phone on my desk and maneuvers around clothes and junk again. “Just trifling!” she says.

“I love you, too,” I call after her. I’ve got texts from Sonny and Malik that I delete. Yes, I’m still in my feelings about how things went down at Malik’s house.

I’ve got tons of notifications from Dat Cloud, too. It’s been like that for a minute now though. I usually open the app to make that annoying red-circled number go away and close it. But when I open it today, there are a lot of unread messages waiting for me.

Probably trolls. I mean, I dish it, so I should be able to take it, right? Trust, as many times as I’ve been called “nigger” and “bitch” by gamer boys, I can take a hell of a lot. Just need a moment to prepare myself.

The first one is from a user called “RudeBoi09.” Great sign. I open it. There’s a link and below that he wrote: This is bullshit! Don’t let them censor you, Bri!

Huh?

I don’t click the link. What I look like, trusting somebody named RudeBoi? It could be a virus or porn. But the next message from another user has the same link with a comment: You got them big mad hahahaha!

The third message has the link, too. The fourth and fifth. New texts from Sonny pop up on my screen.

U okay?

Call me.

Love u.

He sent me the link, too. I click it. It takes me to an article on the website of the Clarion, the local newspaper. The title stops my heart.

“On the Come Up” Should Come Down: Local Teen Rapper’s Violent Song Leads to Violence “What the—” I mutter.

It’s an entire page of some chick named Emily Taylor complaining about my song. Her thirteen-year-old son loves it, she says, but according to her, I “spend the entire track rapping about things that would make any parent hit the Stop button immediately, including boasts about guns and antipolice sentiment.”

The hell is she talking about? There’s not shit in that song that says anything against police. Just ’cause I’m tired of them patrolling my neighborhood like we’re all criminals, I’m in the wrong?

In the middle of the article, she embedded a video from the incident in the Ring parking lot. Emily uses it to describe me as a “gang-affiliated, unruly teen who was recently kicked out of a local establishment.”

Give me five seconds with her and I’ll show her unruly.

She goes on to mention the uprising at Midtown and actually says, “It only makes sense that a song that encourages violence encouraged them to act violently.”

But the end though. The end of the article is the real kicker, because that’s when Emily earns a permanent spot on my shit list.

“I respectfully ask the website Dat Cloud to remove ‘On the Come Up’ from their catalog. It has already caused damage. We cannot allow it to continue. You can add your voice by signing the petition at the link below. We must do more to protect our children.”

Protect our children. I’m definitely not included in that.

Fuck Emily. Yeah, I said it. Fuck her. She doesn’t know a thing about me, yet she wants to use one song to make me into the big bad villain who is influencing her precious son. God forbid he hear about what people like me have to deal with on the daily. It must be nice to panic over some goddamn words, because that’s all they are. Words.