Chapter 1

So......... remember the little exerpt I posted a while back from one of the books I was working on? Well, I think I can officially call it finished. Its a trilogy though and Im not quite satisfied with the later two, so I didnt want to do anything with any of them until all of them were done. I thought better of that today. I'm going to allow this first installment to stand alone initially and see how it is received. It's an adolescent tale from the bowels of my imagination, VERY lightly sprinkled with a little bit of truth and personal experiences, but for all intents and purposes, a work of fiction. I thought I'd share chapter 1 with you so.... here you go!

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March Madness in Rochester, NY was always a big deal. The war memorial, as it was called back in 1992, would be packed every night, for two weeks straight. High school students repping schools still in the tournament would crowd the place, proudly rocking their school colors and hoping for a victory, but whether your team was in the game or not, if you knew the deal, your ass was in the building. Anybody who was anybody was there.

Crews of young men planned ahead for it, knowing all the girls would be out, sporting their flyest, trying to catch the eye of some baller, and the girls all knew the ballers were doing the same. The ballers had to be careful though, because there were a lot of real young girls that made their way up into the arena, looking like they were in high school, with their faces all made up and their prematurely built bodies hanging out all over the place. Those were the ones who would get a cat caught up in some bullshit, and eventually, they'd be the ones with fucked up outlooks on life and no respect for other bitches - or dudes for that matter - cause some nigga left them all twisted up in the game. But the war memorial was the place to be during tournament time, and your girl was always right up in the mix.

I was always a different type of chick, way more laid back than most other females around the way. I was the cool one, with friends from all types of circles, and the fellas loved me. It would be years before I realized it, but most guys that I saw only as friends, actually wanted to be more and just found it a difficult thing to do because I was always so cool – at least, to let them tell it. Strange how I was always somehow affiliated with this dude or that dude, who I sometimes didn’t even know. I’d find out later in life that my name was in heavy rotation in some circles because one or more of the members of it was interested. As cool as I was with all the guys, I was still somewhat of a mystery to them. I wasn’t from Rochester originally, so nobody really knew “my people”, I was on the quiet side so I didn’t give much away, and no one could ever verify any of the few stories that did surface involving me and some guy. None of them really knew what I was about, and that garnered intrigue. Unfortunately for me, that made me a hot commodity in the worst way. It was like a race to be the first nigga to crack the code, you know? I was fighting them off with a stick. But I was never that chick. I wasn’t really fuckin and for the most part, if it didn’t say “Spalding” across it, I was rarely interested. A nigga would be hard-pressed for me to even give a fuck. I rarely gave out my number and if I did, you better believe dude was the truth!

I went to a suburban school for most of my high school years, but you had to know me like that to know. Even to this day, most people think I went to the school the rest of my crew went to – Edison Tech. I cant blame them for thinking it. I was at every Edison game and school dance and I even found myself there a lot during regular school days. My school schedule, by junior year, left me with a lot of open periods, and since my play-uncle worked and coached at Edison, it was easy enough to get a pass to be there for the day. Of the few guys I did really kick it with, the majority went to Edison too, only further fueling the belief.

I wasnt really a tomboy but I definitely didnt dress like a young lady. At any given time, you would find me in some baggy jeans and a Tommy Hilfiger or Nautica polo or rugby, or a t-shirt with the initials of my best friend or whole crew ironed onto it – ghetto fabulosity at its finest. No idea how my mother felt about it, but I had been working since I was fourteen, and buying my own clothes, so there wasn’t a whole lot for her to say.

My fetish for sneakers was very apparent too. While most of my friends kept a clean pair of Reebok classics or an occasional air max, my closet was full of them. I stayed in the latest Jordan, huarache or whatever hot kick was out, and because I had the hookup at Footlocker, where I would later work, I had them before anybody else. I had a couple different pair to match every outfit I owned, and it wasn’t unusual to see me in two or three different pair in a day. People always commented on whatever was on my feet, but I didn’t do it for the attention. I was just doing me. We all had our obsessions. Sneakers just happened to be mine.

So there we were, at the War Memorial. My crew was five deep that night, walking across one of the upper levels of the arena, looking for a good place to set up shop. Everybody knew the place to be was up high, about 2 or maybe 3 levels from the very top. That way, you could have a bird’s eye view of the whole place, and people walking by couldn’t help but see you. Even if they didn’t wind up sitting there, everyone cruised the upper levels. People walked around like it was what they had come to do, while others gathered in groups in the hall, around the bathrooms and concession stands. No matter what the marquee said, socializing was always the main event.

A lot of the seated sections we could see down into were overly crowded, or filled with folks my crew generally wasn’t feeling. Other sections didn’t offer the best opportunity to be seen by people passing by, which was high on our list of objectives. We almost ended up in a section with a bunch of loud, older guys, in mad gold chains, probably trying to relive their own high school glory, until we saw a familiar bunch of people – a mixture of girls and guys who mostly went to Edison – seated one level higher than where we were about to sit.

My girl, Kim, was standing on the bars of one of the aisle railings when our boy, Reggie, called out to her. She turned toward the direction the voice came from, screaming “What up, Reg!” when she saw who it was, and we all did the same as he beckoned for us to join them in the better section they had clearly been holding hostage from undesirables. There were jackets and purses and bookbags in like twenty seats, preventing random people from sitting down. If anyone asked, they just said someone was already sitting there.

It really was a premium location. We were right in the first rows of the section, with the walking aisle just on the other side of the gray rails in front of us. We barely watched the game’s second half, with all the well-known cliques from every school eventually making their way past us, reaching out hands to slap some or all of us up, or stretching up to hug someone over the rail and stopping to chat. We even got up close and personal visuals of some of the popular drug dealers that most girls were trying to get down with. I was never much for dope boys, but I couldn’t manage to keep them out of my face. There was always one or another trying to run me down on the street, hollering out the window about whether or not I had a man. Even in high school, I thought that was lame. My cousin Tammy had a big thing for this one cat though…Dro.

Dro had “dro” before hip hop made it popular. I admit, he was a cutie, but he was definitely not my type of hype. He dressed nice, but he had this Saab that was all tricked out, with a Louis Vuitton rag top and Louis Vuitton accented seats. I thought that shit was tacky as hell, but you couldn’t tell Tammy it wasn’t the flyest thing she had ever seen. Most girls felt that way. I always pretended not to see Dro when he came around because whenever we made eye contact, he was always staring me up and down and winking and licking his lips and all that type of corny shit. It wasn’t exclusive to me though, he did that to any girl he thought had it going on or thought he could get at and a lot of them responded to it, knowing full well that he was a ho. Better them. Dro couldn’t do nothing for me and I made sure Tammy didn’t get caught up either. Call it cock blocking or whatever you wanna call it, but he had trouble written all over him. I never took him for the sharpest tool in the shed either. It didn’t surprise me at all when he eventually got sent up the river, although it must have been for something else. Thirty years is a long muthafucken time, and you don’t get that just for selling no weed.

I fucked with one hustler though.

City was probably a mid-level cat in the game, but he was known more as a thug than a dealer. He wasn’t really associated with any crew in particular. He was kinda freelance muscle, as the hood had it. He was a few years older than me and got a lot of respect in the streets. I never heard anybody get outta pocket with City. Rumor had it that he had been involved in numerous brutal killings and disappearances over the years, but the cops could never connect him to any of it, and I, for one, didn’t believe a word of it.

City was originally from the Bronx, like me – hence the name – and we bonded over that. When I moved around the way, I was probably thirteen or fourteen years old. He was probably seventeen or eighteen, but already had a rep. He used to see me at the store, or standing around somewhere, dribbling my basketball, and he’d ask me what I was doing out there. I’d say something smart like “What it look like Im doing?” and he’d laugh and tell me to be safe and stay outta trouble. He liked my flow, recognizing my still moderately heavy accent. Eventually, he kinda took me under his wing. He schooled me on all the neighborhood cats, told me to stay away from hustlers, showed me how to load and shoot a 9mm handgun, and taught me never to look back in “goodbye,” all in one summer. Four years later, I had a mammoth crush on dude, but to him, I was still a kid – his little sister.

He strolled through Dro’s clique with three other dudes I didn’t recognize, stopping to give dap to him and the rest of his crew, before continuing over to us.

“What you doing out here, yo?” He threw a nod to the rest of my crew and slapped Kim up, before looking back at me.

“What it look like Im doing?” He shot me a look and I laughed, knowing he no longer found that response cute. “Im just chillin, City. Just kickin it, like everybody else.” He was always in big brother mode – overprotective and in my business – but I didn’t really mind. I liked feeling looked after.

“Yeah, aight. I don’t wanna have to fuck nobody up out here, don’t you get in no shit, you hear?”

“Aww, is my big brother worried about me?” I grinned wide, stroking the side of his face. He pulled my hand away, blushing and looking around like he had hoped nobody saw it.

“Stop, yo.” He had such a pretty smile. “Just stay outta trouble, aight? And don’t be out here too late, I don’t want you caught up if these young niggas get to trippin.”

True enough, “them young niggas” always got to trippin. Games, school dances, teen club spots – there was always at least one fight when the shit was over. Every now and then, there would even be a shootout. Dro lost somebody from his camp recently, after some knuckleheads decided to turn out a local club. Some of his posse was still rockin t-shirts with dude’s picture on it. I bet that was why they were so deep tonight, hoping to catch up with the fools that bucked. I told City not to worry. I knew what time it was.

Anyway, City kept it pushing, and our five-girl crew decided to mingle in the hallway before the next game got underway. Me and my girl, Lena, both had to pee, so we all went into the bathroom together. You could never be too careful at an event like this – the niggas wasn’t the only ones that liked to wild out.

A chick somebody might have beat down in school, weeks before, might have been lurking around, waiting for payback. Or some nobody bunch of broads might all of a sudden start wilding out, usually just hating, or more likely beefing over some stupid dude. A girl I knew ended up with twenty-six stitches in her face, after another girl I knew sliced her with a razor, over some nigga. That shit aint hardly worth it.

Our crew didn’t tend to be in drama like that, but girls got jumped all the time at events like that. Sometimes you never knew you had a problem until you had a problem, and Lena… well Lena Rodriguez was the poster child for that, with her long, silky hair, smooth, fair complexion and blue eyes. That black and Puerto Rican mix blessed the hell outta her ass and bitches would sometimes come outta nowhere, wanting to fight her for no reason. Their man, or whomever they perceived to be their man, might get caught looking just a little too long at her, or maybe talking to her, and all hell would break loose, but most of the drama came from Lena’s own boyfriend, Ricky.

Ricky Bien was a fine Puerto Rican something and he knew it. He wasn’t your garden variety man whore – he made sure Lena and everybody else knew she was his heart, and he showed her the utmost respect at all times, but Ricky was a hustler too. Girls came through his spot all the time. They had mad parties. It wasn’t uncommon for some chick to leave there saying she had slept with Ricky or gave him head, but there was never any proof of it, and of course, Ricky always blew it off, like it was too trivial for him to even address. To Lena, that was proof enough that it never happened. I knew better though. He just didn’t wanna lie.

But the long and short of it was that mad girls wanted Ricky and mad girls hated Lena cause she had him, and because she was too bad for them to compete with. It wasn’t just her face either, Lena was stacked. Like I said, she was blessed. Ricky and his drug money looked real good on her, and them bitches was sick about it! They should be. What kinda chick chills up in a drug spot anyway? Fuckin birds. Point being, we never let Lena wander off in a place with crowds that thick by herself. Them rats couldn’t wait for a chance to try and slice her face up. Not on our watch.

Our whole crew was fly really, and tight as it got – to different degrees. There was me – Lynn Carl – there was Lena (Rodriguez), and then there was my blood cousin, Tammy Carl, my play-cousin Kim Wilson and her blood cousin, Ivy Horton, both of whom I had known since I moved to the town five years prior. Taisha Chase, who we called Tai, was part of our crew too, but she was on punishment again, so she couldn’t come. Me, Kim and Lena were like the three amigos, while Ivy and Tai were thick as thieves. Tammy floated mostly between Ivy and me, but together, we were a crew and we held each other down, no matter what.

Tammy was kind of weird-looking when we were younger, but puberty had been kind. She filled out – even more so than me – got braces to pull back that crazy overbite she had, and ditched the geeky glasses for contacts. In truth, by sophomore year, she looked a lot like me. That’s partially because of the clusterfuck that is our family dynamic. Our mothers are sisters, and our fathers are brothers. She took mostly after our dads’ line though, while I took after our moms’ side. I was thinner, about two inches taller, with light eyes, and we didn’t dress quite the same, but from a seated distance, it would be a pretty close call. Sometimes it was.

Tammy had a habit of wanting to borrow my clothes, so much so, that if I had it, I often times would just pick up two of whatever I knew she’d come knocking for. It was much easier than trying to get my stuff back in the same condition I gave it to her in. That girl couldn’t manage to get food directly from her fork to her mouth for nothing, and laundry wasn’t her forte either. She’d ruined more than a few of my shirts, trying to wash out stains, bleeding colors together or over-bleaching something. On more than one occasion, when we weren’t together, someone would come up to her, thinking she was me, until they got close enough to realize she wasn’t. Most people who knew me knew her too, so they wouldn’t be embarrassed upon approach, but people always told us to watch our beefs or one might end up paying for the other. I told them to just look down – you could always tell it was me by my kicks. I never let anyone borrow those.

Kim has been my girl from day one, of all the girls, my best friend.

When me and my mom first moved to Rochester from the Bronx, we lived with my grandmother for a little while. One of my aunts also lived in the house at the time, and she was dating a guy named Preston, who turned out to be Kim’s uncle. He stopped by the house to see my aunt one day, with Kim in the car, and they took so long, doing whatever they were doing in the house, Kim ended up getting out of the car and sitting with me, on the porch. Both our parents’ only children, we became fast friends and got even closer when Preston told my mom about some openings in the apartment complex Kim and her mother lived in. We moved there and I ended up at middle school with Kim and her cousin Ivy, which is how Ivy and I met. The three of us got into a whole lotta shit together, but it was all in good fun.

I went to school with them for a year before my mom transferred me into the urban-suburban program – a program that bused inner-city kids to suburban schools. I didn’t really mind because Kim and Ivy were the only people I really cared about at that school and I saw them all the time at home. It was at the new school that I met Tai and Lena. Tai was fast and her parents thought the suburban school would slow her down. Lena’s dad thought she would be safer amongst the Jewish kids out in Brighton and Pittsford, after staying in a mess of shit in the city school district. Both their parents were wrong.

Tai was good for bouncing for half the day, which was easy to do out there, with what was called “open mods” – periods where a student didn’t have classes. Of course, as a freshman, she didn’t have as many open mods as an upperclassman, but apparently, when you’re fucking one whose parents are never home, you work it out.

Ricky was cool with the cat Tai was dealing with, so he’d sometimes be at the guy’s house during the day, if he wasn’t at the spot. I went over there with Lena once, during lunch time, and there were three other females there. Tai clearly had an attitude and Lena’s questions to Rick were simply met with, “Hey, this aint my crib. I cant tell that man who to have up in here.” Turned out the girls were already there when Tai first arrived, and she wouldn’t leave because she knew one of them was the kid’s ex-girlfriend. He’s arguing with Tai about even showing up over there when he hadn’t invited her that day, but she felt she was his girl and had the right to show up whenever she felt like it. The ex and her girlfriends kept giggling and whispering, so Lena and I, seeing the writing on the wall, tried to get Tai to leave peacefully with us. We eventually got her to leave, but there wasn’t anything peaceful about it. She got into it with one of the girl’s friends, barely avoiding a physical confrontation, but she wasn’t so lucky the next day.

The girls showed up at the school. Ole boy was conveniently nowhere around. I came in late because I had a doctor’s appointment, so I missed everything. Apparently, the girls tried to jump Tai, but Lena and another girl named Sherri got her back. I heard they tore that lunchroom up! Both of them were kicked out of the urban-suburban program after that, even though the girls had trespassed. Sherri hit a girl in the face with a lock and swole her shit up pretty good, so she broke out before the security guards showed up. She woulda probably got locked up for that shit, but nobody told on her, and the girls didn’t know who she was, so she skated.

Lena and Tai got in cahoots to try and go to the same city school, and ended up at Edison, where Kim and Ivy now went also. Mr. Rodriguez wanted to move the family to the suburbs, so a suburban district would be their default, but Lena convinced him that it wouldn’t solve her problems and that she would be better off in a school where she at least had good friends. Of course, he went for it. She could convince that man the sky wasn’t blue.

Tai and Lena had already met Kim and Ivy. We had all hung out more than a few times, when they came to visit me, and everybody clicked right away. Tammy came around from time to time too, and eventually weaseled her way over to Edison Tech with everybody else – everybody but me. Tammy and Kim were always trying to convince my mom to let me transfer too, but she wasn’t having it. I told them ahead of time she wouldn’t go for it, but I didn’t want to transfer anyway. I liked the suburban school. We were juniors now – with the exception of Ivy and Tammy, who were sophomores – so I had a lot of freedom out there and a chance to be away from all the city antics that the other girls lived for. Most of it seemed silly to me, and I enjoyed being able to escape for a while and have something of my own. It didn’t matter anyway, because I was at Edison enough for even people who went there to be confused.

“Yeah! Yeah! Woo!” All this ruckus was coming from my left, as I stepped out of the bathroom, behind Kim. Lena and Tammy stepped into the hall, with Ivy bringing up the rear, “What the hell?”

Red and white jerseys flooded the far corner of the corridor, heading our way. It was the Fairport Raiders team that had just won, celebrating, with what appeared to be a host of groupies, both male and female. I couldn’t help but smile, watching them. Some members of the mostly white team still had red, tear-stained faces. Only three players were black, and one of them was about to change my life.

I turned to Kim, who was also infected by the incessant smiling and cheering, then back to the approaching crowd in just enough time to lock eyes with the player wearing the basketball net around his neck. Hmmm, must be the captain or the MVP or something. I didn’t feel like I was staring, but I couldn’t look away. For a moment, he didn’t either. Then some lanky dude, in street clothes, with his fitted turned backwards, ran up and jumped on him, screaming. The player laughed, being caught off guard, and hugged the dude back, equally hard. I got the impression they were family or best friends. He got turned around in the chaos and I took the opportunity to read the back of his jersey. Carter. Wait…. THAT’S Jason Carter?

Instantly, my mind went back to the game. I didn’t actually watch much of it, but all you heard, all game long, was “Jason Carter for the three!” or “Carter puts it up – and one!” or some other something about Jason Carter, and I just assumed he was one of them tall ass white boys. This cat was barely six feet, the color of those square caramel candies that I could never stop eating, even though they always got stuck in my teeth, with the sexiest bedroom eyes, and full lips that framed the most captivating smile I had ever seen. He turned back to look at me once or twice, in between congratulations, but even as my girls pulled me away from the scene, my eyes left him only when we bent the corner, and he was out of sight.

We did a little stroll around the arena’s half-moon structure, stopping to talk to various people along the way, and I was hoping the red and white sea would still be there when we came back around. It wasn’t, but City was. As the girls leaned against the concession stand, contemplating whether to stay for the last game, of another division, I acknowledged his nod, advising me to head out, still looking around and hoping to spot Mr. Carter. He was nowhere to be found. I figured the team had probably left to officially celebrate their win, and I was going home with an attitude.

Dro’s crew passed us in the hall and my eyes floated back toward City, leaning on a wall in the opposite direction. “Be out,” he mouthed, and I took my cue. Shit was about to get hot.

“Nah… lets break out.”

(c) 2012