Larceny Read Free Page B

You wasn’t even thinking about getting to know me better, huh?”
    Before I answered, I blushed a little. “Look, Mr. Smarty Pants, if I didn’t want to get to know you, I would have made the first right on Pennsylvania Avenue, headed home, fixed myself my own seafood salad, and watched the daytime soaps. And for the record, I must find you somewhat interesting, because I don’t miss my soaps for nobody.”
    â€œWell, excuse me.”
    We both laughed while looking each other in the eyes. I wondered if he was thinking what I was thinking, did he feel like I felt, and did he want what I wanted.
    â€œWell, Sonya, where are you from?”
    â€œI grew up in the northeast over in Trinidad, all the way up until I got in the ninth grade, and then we moved uptown to Webster Street Northwest.”
    â€œIs that where you went to school?”
    â€œYeah, I went to Roosevelt High, and I stayed there until I graduated. I had a rough time in school mostly because my mother stayed in the hospital a lot. She had cancer and died when I was in my last year of school.”
    â€œDamn, boo, I’m so sorry to hear that.”
    â€œIt’s cool. I’ve learned to deal with it. I can’t let that hold me back from achieving higher things in life. In fact, I use it as motivation,” I told Jovan.
    â€œThat’s good. Do you have any brothers and sisters?”
    â€œMy brother is—hold up. I just met you. I shouldn’t be telling you all my personal business like this.”
    â€œSonya, your business only becomes personal when you hold it in; and when you hold it in too long, sometimes it may hinder you from getting what you really want in life.”
    At that moment, whatever he said sounded good, and I thought about it for a second, especially when he said it may hinder me from getting what I really wanted in life. Right at that moment what I really wanted was to get to know Jovan better, so I continued with his little interview and anticipated the wait for my turn to ask the questions.
    â€œOkay, I have a younger brother. His name is Anthony, but we call him Li’l Tony. He’s locked up down in Lorton, Virginia, behind the wall. He’s been in prison since he was sixteen and he’s twenty-four now. He got thirty years to life for killing a guy who tried to rape me.”
    While I was telling Jovan about Li’l Tony, my eyes started to get watery, even though it had been a long time since that day when Li’l Tony heard me screaming in the alley on Sixteenth Street. He came to my rescue, only to see that the man he thought was his father was holding my throat and choking the life outta me while pulling down my pants and trying to take my virginity.
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    Jovan
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    Bilal stopped over at my grandmother’s house to see if I was coming outside. He had his little brother, Jamal, with him. Jamal was eight years old, and Bilal had nicknamed him Mal-Mal. He was the only true love Bilal had. Everything Bilal did, he did it for Mal-Mal. Their father was killed in a bank robbery shootout with the feds, which left Ms. Cookie, their mother, a nervous wreck. She didn’t know how to take care of her two boys because she had always been dependent on Bilal’s pops. To make matters worse, they were both dependent on heroin, so when he was killed, that left Ms. Cookie, the worst addict that northeast D.C. ever had, to take care of her two boys alone.
    Ms. Cookie never had any food in the house, so Bilal was the one who had to take care of Mal-Mal. He would go to the Safeway Grocery Market on Seventh and H Street Northeast and steal whatever kind of food they could eat without cooking because they didn’t even have gas on in the house.
    When Bilal and I used to go down to McBride’s Department Store to steal, we would see Ms. Cookie on the corner of Eighth and H Street, nodding and scratching. Once when he went up to tell her about Mal-Mal being sick,