Dilapidated street lamps cast down flickering puddles of light across the cracked pavement. Shadowy alleys cloaked junkees and johns, whores and handshakes. Matte Black Air Force 1s stomped past the corner of 17th Street & Barrington Way, eyes darting from corner to corner scanning for the slightest hint of chaos. Any motion from the dark could be your last breath if you weren’t on point.
13-year-old Myles marched up the concrete steps into the dimly lit red brick 5-story apartment. He’d been living with his Aunty ‘Trice and cousin DeShaun since age 6. His mama was a dope fiend and his daddy died in a gang fight during a 25-year prison bid. Myles knew about his mom’s addiction and chalked it up to a shitty roll of the dice in life. What he didn’t know was Aunty ‘Trice didn’t have the heart to tell him his father wasn’t serving overseas in the Navy.
Orphaned in Kansas City, the foster system brought Myles to Aunty ‘Trice’s and that was that. He didn’t get a choice, life was decided for him. This kid from the Midwest had no business being in New York. Fast forward 7 years and the ghetto coated him in its grime; baptized into a cycle of violence, Myles learned how to move in silence and strike when they tried to punk on him. He wasn’t much of a talker and he buttoned up whenever Aunty ‘Trice would ask his whereabouts. The less she knew the better. When she found out his friend got killed over a dice game last summer, she didn’t let him out of the house for weeks.
When he strolled into the kitchen, DeShaun was hovering over a bowl of cereal like a snarling dog protecting his food. Myles grabbed a dirty bowl from the sink and dumped what was left of the stale Frosted Flakes into it. They couldn’t afford milk so he copied his cousin and topped off his cereal with sink water. He could feel the pipes shudder from the faucet as it trickled out a thin stream.
He sat at the small kitchen table across from DeShaun as Aunty ‘Trice scrolled on Facebook. When he and DeShaun locked eyes, he could sense the unspoken tension between them. He didn’t know why, but he was bound to find out. They shared a tiny bedroom, closet, and bathroom; privacy was so limited that any beef had to get squashed immediately. There was nowhere to retreat and avoid conflict, inside and outside.
The kid picked up a hard knocks fluency in hood politics early on. The rules are simple enough: Don’t speak on what you know, play dumb when the rollers shake you down, and don’t let anyone see an ounce of weakness. There was no justice system, only the laws of the jungle and prison’s revolving doors. Myles stayed in his lane and shut the fuck up.
Aunty ‘Trice muttered, “Raggedy bitch,” under her breath while gazing into the black-screened abyss. DeShaun slurped the last of his cereal and let out a quiet burp. His unwavering eye contact with Myles was off putting.
DeShaun sat on Myles’ bottom bunk as his cousin cautiously stepped in their room. The lamp tinted the entire room a soft yellow. Something about that dull yellow light made a small space less claustrophobic. Tiny shadows cascaded across DeShaun’s porous acne-scarred cheek; his oily skin reflected the light in a way that resembled melting chocolate. Myles squared his shoulders back and discretely clenched his right fist. He shut the door and stood his ground.
Myles: “What’s good?”
DeShaun: “Lock the door. I don’t want my ma’ seein’ dis shit.”
DeShaun reached under Myles’ pillow and pulled out a bundled handkerchief. The red bandana was a familiar sight to Myles.
Myles: “You bangin’ now?”
DeShaun shook his head. He unwrapped the bandana, revealing a scratched silver 9mm and a cellophane bag the size of an avocado twisted off at the top. Myles approached his cousin slowly, taking an angle to avoid the barrel’s pathway. He grabbed the cellophane bag and inspected it closely. White rocks the size of dice shuffled and settled into dense clumps as he rotated the bag. The opaque crystals glinted the purest white Myles had ever witnessed.
DeShaun snatched the bag back from Myles and stashed it with the gun in the red cloth. He tucked it under the pillow and stood up. He and Myles were inches away from one another, face to face. At that moment, they were no longer cousins, it was deeper than that. Bound together by the potential of a 40 or 50-year prison sentence up north in Attica, they were brothers and they were in business.
ONE WEEK LATER
Myles started getting worried. DeShaun left with the bag hours ago and still hadn’t come back. He kept replaying the same movie in his head: his cousin bleeding out all alone on the cold asphalt from a robbery gone wrong. Myles couldn’t shake the image from his mind. He winced as he absentmindedly bit off too much of his thumbnail. Uncertainty has the unique ability to produce cold sweats. The door silently cracked open and DeShaun crept through the gap.
His energy was frantic as he slid next to Myles on the bottom bunk. DeShaun released a deep breath and let out a nervous chuckle. His chapped lips stretched from his twisted grin, flaunting yellowed teeth that pointed in every direction but straight. His hands dipped into both pockets of his puffy jacket, producing two softball sized clumps covered in aluminum foil. Mission success. DeShaun and his friend rerocked that bag of pure white fish scale into almost three ounces of some sand-colored Chris Rock. DeShaun passed Myles the second aluminum foil ball to eyeball.
The aluminum foil crinkled as Myles peeled open the ball. To his surprise, those once-perfect white shards were now clumped into dusty nuggets that mirrored parmesan cheese. Both of those packages just added another 25 years a piece to that potential prison sentence.
TO BE CONTINUED
Read my mind. 