After Tupac & D Foster Read Free

D that. She was our girl and she needed to keep on keeping on like that.
    “That’s gonna be tight,” D said softly. “Real tight.”
    “Yeah,” Neeka said. “Until she puts you on lockdown worse than Flo.”
    “Or worse than your mama,” D said, and me and her started cracking up again.
    Neeka tried not to, but she couldn’t help smiling.
    “You remember how our mamas were when you first starting coming around?” Neeka said. “All suspicious and whatnot.”
    “Like you were going to ruin their innocent girls,” I said. “Meanwhile, Neeka already looking at every boy that got half a leg and—”
    “It wasn’t deep,” D said, cutting me off. A look came across her face, tired, old like a grown-up. “I would have been suspicious of me too—coming to this nice neighborhood out of nowhere. No mama or dad or even little sister to be coming over here with me.”
    “They got cool about it, though. My moms was just glad I had another friend,” I said.
    “And my moms was just glad you had some sense. And being how she seems to love kids so ding-dang much, she probably fell asleep dreaming me and you was a third set of twins in the family.”
    Me and Neeka laughed. D smiled, but she looked faraway. Like she was already on that bus and gone.
    “I used to be roaming all over the place,” D said. “And I’m glad because it got me here.”
    “Why did you roam, though?” I asked. Whenever D talked about her roaming, I always asked why. I wanted to understand—deep—what it was like to step outside.
    D looked at me and shook her head. “Why? Why? Why, Miss Why? You know why .”
    “I know you be telling us why, but I still don’t get it. You say you want to see how other people be living, but that still don’t make a lot of sense to me.”
    “You really not curious about how other people be living?”
    “Yeah right,” Neeka said. “I guess you read all those biographies and all them other books just to feel the pages turning between your fingers.”
    “Shut up, Neeka. I’m talking to D. Doesn’t have anything to do with the books I read.”
    “Yeah it does,” D said quietly. She looked at me, her green eyes like tiny mouths asking me all these questions— Don’t you ever want to know the answers? they were saying. The real answers . . . to everything?
    “Uptown they got those fancy buildings. Out in Brooklyn they got those pretty brownstone houses. West Side got Central Park and people going all over the place in those bright yellow taxicabs.” D looked at us and I knew a part of her knew how much me and Neeka lived for the rare moments when she talked about her life, when she showed us where she’d been and, by doing so, we got to go to those places too.
    And then it made sense to me—crazy-fast sense in a way it hadn’t before. D walked out of her own life each time she stepped into one of those other places. She got off the bus or walked up out of the subway and her life disappeared, got replaced by that new place, those new strangers—like big pink erasers. Before me and Neeka started asking D about her life, we were erasers too—she got to step into our world, with all the trees and mamas calling from windows and kids playing on the block, and forget.
    “I can’t even imagine being as free as you,” Neeka said. “I’d be all over the place!”
    “That’s why your mama got you on lockdown,” I said.
    “Like yours doesn’t?” Neeka said back.
    D laughed, but then she said, “Some days I be feeling like I’m too free.”
    “You really think there’s such a thing as too free ?”
    “Heckio no!” Neeka said. “And I can tell you for a fact, D—you’d be kissing all that good-bye with a real mama.”
    D leaned her head on Neeka’s shoulder and smiled. “I’m done, girl. That’s what I’m saying. I seen everything I want to see. Lockdown like that ? I’m ready. As long as it comes with my mama.”
    D started singing real soft “Dear Mama,” the Tupac song where