After Tupac & D Foster Read Free Page B

first when she kissed Tony Anderson in her hallway. “His lips tasted funny,” she’d said, scrunching up her face. “Like old cigarette ashes or something.” And later on, when we’d seen Tony up at the park, him and his boys passing a cigarette around, Neeka had run back home and started rinsing her mouth out real hard with mouthwash and a washcloth.
    “How come you let me kiss that nasty old boy,” she’d said. And I just sat there on her toilet seat, laughing at her craziness.
    But D was different. She just appeared one day. Summer wasn’t even over yet but fall was already turning a few of the leaves on our block red and gold. Me and Neeka had bought matching jean jackets with white stitching on the pockets for when school started and we’d worn them that day with these brown velvet pants we had. We’d walk up and down the block thinking we were bad, but we were just hot in our fall gear. We’d come back and sat down, hot and sweaty, on Neeka’s stoop. Down from my house, some little kids were taking turns on a Sit ’N Spin toy and we watched them, one by one, get up off of it and fall down on the ground from dizziness.
    When I looked away from watching them, I saw her standing across the street, leaning against somebody’s gate, watching us. Something about the way she stood there, just looking—no smile, no frown, nothing—it just caught something in me. Made my heart jump a bit. Something about the way she stood there was real familiar to me, like the way I’d want to stand someplace new and watch people I didn’t know.
    “Who’s that girl over there, staring us down like that?” I said to Neeka.
    Neeka looked to where D was standing and shrugged. Then she stood up.
    “You looking for somebody?” Neeka said. It wasn’t a real unfriendly voice, just a little.
    “Not really.”
    And I guess she thought that was an invitation to cross the street, because that’s when she came over to us. I looked her up and down. She was tall and skinny and looked like she thought she was cute with her green eyes and pretty sort of half way of smiling at us. Her hair was in a bunch of braids with black rubber bands at the end of every single one. The braids were long, coming down over her shoulders and across her back, and her hair was this strange dark coppery color I’d never seen on a black girl—not naturally . She was wearing a T-shirt that said “HELLO MY NAME IS” in green letters, only there wasn’t a name after that, so it didn’t make any sense whatsoever. I looked down at her feet. She had on white-girl clogs like you saw on the girls on TV—the ones with blond hair who lived in places like California and Miami or somewhere. Everything about her was screaming I’m not from around this way.
    “Those your real eyes?” Neeka asked, right off. I’d never seen green eyes up close like that, but that wouldn’t have been my first question.
    “Yeah,” D said. “Everybody be asking me that. This is my own hair too. Color and everything. It used to be real light but it’s getting darker every year. Figure by the time I’m grown, it’ll be jet-black.”
    I stared at her. Wondering what it would be like to have hair that changed like that, to have eyes that green against that tannish skin. She looked back at me and for a minute, or maybe for a few minutes, we just stared—like we were trying to take in every single bit of each other—each of us trying to figure the other one out.
    “Y’all sisters?”
    “Yeah,” Neeka said. “We came from different mamas and different daddies, but we’re sisters.” She held up her hand and I slapped it, saying You know it .
    “You always dress the same?”
    Neeka shrugged. “You got a lot of questions for a stranger.”
    “You could ask me some questions too,” D said.
    “What’s up with the shoes?” I said.
    She looked down at her shoes, then back at me. Something changed in her face that made me sorry I’d asked.
    “They just shoes,” she