On the Come Up

by Angie Thomas

  I push Trey’s chest and moonwalk away from him, hit a spin, and land on my tiptoes while flipping him off with both middle fingers. Like a legend.

  Trey cracks up. “That ain’t an MJ move!”

  “Nope, that’s a BJ,” I say.

  “That don’t sound right.”

  “I know, shut up.”

  He falls back on the couch. “All right, you win this round. I can’t beat that.”

  “I know.” I plop down beside him. “Since I win, you know what you gotta do.”

  “Hell no.”

  “It’s the rule!”

  “It’s Jesus’s birthday, therefore that rule does not apply since it’s a clear violation of one of the Ten Commandments.”

  I tilt my head. “You’re getting religious on me?”

  “You didn’t win! I conceded.”

  “That’s. A. Win.” I clap my hand with each word. “So do it.”

  “Man,” he groans, but he gets down on his knees and worships me. “All hail, the most excellent Bri.”

  “Who’s better at MJ than me,” I add.

  “Who’s better at MJ than me.”

  “And who beautifully kicked my ass.”

  “And who beautifully . . .” He mumbles the rest to the point it sounds like gibberish.

  I put my hand to my ear. “What was that?”

  “Who beautifully kicked my ass!” he says louder. “There? Happy?”

  I grin. “Yep!”

  “Whatever,” he mumbles as he gets back on the couch. “Be ready next time.”

  Jay comes back in the den, holding the phone with her cheek and shoulder. Her hands are occupied with a box. “Here they are. Y’all, say hey to Uncle Edward.” She shifts the box to one hand and holds the phone out.

  “He ain’t dead?” Trey asks.

  I elbow him. Rude ass. “Hey, Uncle Edward,” we say. He’s Jay’s mom’s uncle, making him my great-great-uncle. I’ve never seen him in my life, yet Jay makes me speak to him whenever they chat.

  She puts the phone back to her ear. “All right, you get back to your nap. Just wanted to say Merry Christmas . . . All right, now. Talk to you later.” She ends the call. “Lord. The man fell asleep in the middle of talking to me.”

  “You lucky he didn’t die in the middle of talking to you,” Trey says. Jay shoots him a stank-eye. He nods toward the box. “What’s that?”

  “Some Christmas surprises for y’all.”

  “Ma, we said we weren’t buying gifts—”

  “I didn’t buy anything, boy. I was looking through the garage to see if there was anything worth selling. Found some of your daddy’s things.”

  “This is his stuff?” I ask.

  Jay sits cross-legged on the floor. “Yep. I had to hide it from your grandma. Woman wants everything that belonged to him. Even had to hide it from myself.” Her eyes cast down. “I probably would’ve sold some of it back when I was sick.”

  That’s what she calls her addiction.

  I stare at the box. There’s stuff inside that belonged to my dad. Stuff he actually touched at some point, that may have been a part of his everyday life. Stuff that made him him.

  I pull back the flaps of the box. An army-green bucket hat sits on top. It’s dope, and it’s me. It was obviously him, too.

  “Law acted like he couldn’t be seen without a hat,” Jay says. “That man would get on my nerves. Didn’t matter where we were going, he needed some kind of hat. He thought his head was shaped funny.”

  I’m the same way. I lower the hood of my Pikachu onesie and put the bucket hat on instead. It’s kinda big and a bit floppy, but it’s perfect.

  I scoot to the end of the couch and dig some more. There’s a sweatshirt that still has the scent of his cologne lingering on it. There’s a composition notebook. Every page has something written on it in a sloppy handwriting that shouldn’t really be called handwriting. I can read it though. It’s a lot like mine.

  There are more notebooks, a worn leather wallet with his driver’s license inside, more shirts and jackets, CDs or DVDs, hard to tell which. At the very bottom of the box, there’s gold.

  I lift it out. A glistening crown pendant dangles from a gold rope chain. Diamonds spell out “Law” at the bottom, like the crown sits on top of his name.

  Holy. Shit. “Is this real?”

  “Yep,” Jay says. “He bought it with his first big check. Wore it all the time.”

  This thing has to be worth thousands of dollars. That’s probably why Trey says, “We need to sell that.”

  “No, hell no.” Jay shakes her head. “I want Bri to have it.”

  “Really?” I say.

  “And I want Bri to have food and shelter,” Trey says. “Come on, Ma. Sell it! Hell, it’s worth more than he was.”

  “Watch. Your. Mouth,” Jay growls.

  When it comes to Dad, Trey’s not a fan. I don’t mean he doesn’t listen to Dad’s music—he doesn’t do that either—but let Trey tell it, Dad died over stupid stuff he could’ve avoided. Trey never talks about him because of it.

  Trey tiredly wipes his face. “I . . . yeah.”

  He pushes off the couch and goes to his room.

  Jay stares at the spot where he sat. “You can have everything in the box, Bri. Your brother obviously doesn’t want any of it. I’m gonna go start dinner.”

  Yeah, she’s starting dinner already. Christmas is for eating in Jesus’s honor.

  I sit across the couch. The chain’s draped over my hand, and the hat’s on my head. I hold the pendant up against the living room light, and the diamonds glisten like a lake on a sunny day.

  The doorbell rings. I pull the curtain back and peek out. Aunt Pooh’s got on a Santa hat and a dabbing-Santa sweater. Her arm is hooked through Lena’s.

  I open the door for them. “Where you been?”

  Aunt Pooh slides past me into the house. “Merry Christmas to you, too.”

  “Don’t even bother, Bri,” Lena says. “It’s the same as usual.”

  Considering half the stuff Lena puts up with from Aunt Pooh, she’s a saint. They’ve been together since they were seventeen. Just like Aunt Pooh has Lena’s lips tatted on her neck, Lena has “Pooh” on her chest.

  “I’m grown,” Aunt Pooh says, sitting on the couch. “That’s all Bri need to know.”

  Lena plops down extra hard on her lap.

  “Ow! Get your big butt off of me!”

  “You gon’ tell me you grown, too?” Lena says. She pinches Aunt Pooh, who laughs and winces at once. “Huh?”

  “You lucky I love your annoying ass.” Aunt Pooh kisses her.

  “Nope. You lucky,” Lena says.

  Fact.

  Jay comes in, wiping her hands on a towel. “I thought that was y’all.”

  “Merry Christmas, Jay,” Lena says. Aunt Pooh just throws up a peace sign.

  “I figured Pooh would show up soon as I started on dinner. Where you been anyway?”

  “Dang, can y’all get up out my business?” Aunt Pooh asks.

  Jay sets her hand on her hip and gives her the say that again if you’re bold look.

  Aunt Pooh glances away. It doesn’t matter how old she gets—Jay will always be her big sister.

  Jay kisses her teeth. “Thought so. Now get your shoes off my couch.” She swats at Aunt Pooh’s feet.

  “You gon’ stop treating me like a kid one day.”

  “Well, today ain’t that day!”

  Lena covers her mouth to hold back a laugh. “Jay, you need help with dinner?”

  “Yeah, girl,” Jay says, but her glare is set on Pooh. “C’mon.”

  The two of them go into the kitchen.

  Aunt Pooh starts to put her feet up again but Jay hollers, “I said keep your big-ass shoes off my furniture!”

  “Goddamn!” Aunt Pooh looks at me. “How she do that?”

  I shrug. “It’s like a sixth sense.”

  “For re—” My dad’s chain catches her eye. “Oh, shit! Where’d you
get that?”

  “Jay gave it to me. It was in a box of his stuff.”

  “Damn.” Aunt Pooh takes it between her fingers. “That thing still clean as hell. You don’t need to wear it though.”

  I frown. “Why not?”

  “Just trust me, a’ight?”

  I’m so sick of these answers that don’t answer anything. “Was I supposed to ‘just trust you’ when you left me at the studio?”

  “Scrap was there, wasn’t he?”

  “But you were supposed to be there.”

  “I told you, I had something to take care of. Scrap said you got the song done and that it’s fire. That’s all that matters.”

  She doesn’t get it.

  Aunt Pooh slides her Jordans off and throws her legs across the couch. She eagerly rubs her hands. “Let me hear it. Been waiting for this since the other week.”

  “You’ve definitely made it a priority.” Yeah, I said it.

  “Bri, I’m sorry, a’ight? Now c’mon. Let me hear the song.”

  I pull it up and toss her my phone.

  She takes out her own earbuds. I can tell when it starts—she dances while lying there on the couch.

  “That hook,” she says loudly. She must not be able to hear herself. “Love that shit!”

  Suddenly she stops dancing. She points at my phone. “What’s this?”

  “What’s what?”

  She tugs the earbuds out and looks toward the kitchen. Jay and Lena are busy talking as some old R&B Christmas song plays. “What’s this shit you saying on the song?” Aunt Pooh asks in a low voice. “You not ’bout that life!”

  She can’t be serious. Malik is one thing, but Aunt Pooh, who walks around with a piece all the time? Who disappears for days to do her drug-dealing shit? “Nah, but you are.”

  “This ain’t got shit to do with me, Bri. This about you portraying yourself as somebody you not.”

  “I never said it’s me! The whole point is about playing into the stereotype.”

  She sits up. “You think these fools in the streets gon’ listen for ‘deeper meaning’? Bri, you can’t go around talking street and not expect somebody to test you. And what’s that shit about the Crowns? You trying to have problems?”

  “Wait, what?”

  “You said you don’t need gray to be a queen.”

  “Because I don’t!” Damn, do I really have to explain it to her? “That was my way of saying I don’t claim any set.”

  “But they gon’ take it some kinda way!” she says.

  “That’s not my problem if they do! It’s only a song.”

  “No, it’s a statement!” Aunt Pooh says. “This is what you want folks to think of you? That you pull triggers and stay strapped? That’s the kinda reputation you want?”

  “Is it the kind you want?”

  Silence. Absolute silence.

  She crosses the room and gets all in my face. “Delete that shit,” she says through her teeth.

  “What?”

  “Delete it,” she says. “We’ll make another song.”

  “Oh, so you’re staying around this time?”

  “You can point fingers at me all you want, but you fucked up.” She pokes my chest. “You gon’ record new verses. Plain and simple.”

  I fold my arms. “What you plan to do with the new version?”

  “What?”

  Supreme’s on my mind. “If you think it’s good, what’s your plan for it?”

  “We’ll upload it and see what happens,” she says.

  “That’s it?”

  “Once you do a song that’s actually you, you gon’ blow up,” she says. “I don’t need to know how.”

  I stare at her. She cannot be for real. That wouldn’t fly on a good day. When your family’s one missed check away from rock bottom? That shit wouldn’t fly if it had wings.

  “It’s not enough for me,” I say. “Do you know how important this is?”

  “Bri, I understand, okay?”

  “No, you don’t!” Jay and Lena laugh about something in the kitchen. I lower my voice. “My mom had to go to a fucking food drive, Aunt Pooh. You know how much I got on the line right now?”

  “I got a lot on the line, too!” she says. “You think I wanna be stuck in the projects? You think I wanna be selling that shit for the rest of my life? Hell no! Every single day, I know there’s a chance it could be my last day.”

  “Then stop doing it!” Goddamn, it’s that simple.

  “Look, I’m doing what I gotta do.”

  Bullshit. Bull. Shit.

  “Getting our come up with this rap shit?” she says. “That’s all I got.”

  “Then act like it! I can’t wait around for ‘something to happen.’ I need guarantees.”

  “I got guarantees. We putting you back in the Ring after the holidays and we gon’ make you big.”

  “How?”

  “Just trust me!” she says.

  “That’s not enough!”

  “Hey,” Jay calls. “Y’all okay up there?”

  “Yeah,” Aunt Pooh says. She looks at me. “Delete that shit.”

  She goes off to the kitchen, joking to Jay and Lena as if everything’s all good.

  Hell no, it’s not. Supreme said I have a hit. Aunt Pooh thinks I’m just gonna let that slip through my fingers?

  I can show her better than I can tell her.

  I go to my room, close the door, and get my laptop. It takes ten minutes for “On the Come Up” to upload on Dat Cloud, and twenty seconds to text Supreme the link.

  He responds in less than a minute.

  I got you, baby girl.

  Get ready.

  You about to blow up.

  Part Two

  Golden Age

  Fourteen

  On the morning of the first day after Christmas break, loud banging on our front door wakes me up.

  “Who in their right mind!” Jay snaps from somewhere in the house.

  “It’s probably Jehovah’s Witnesses,” Trey calls groggily from his room.

  “On a Monday?” Jay says. “Hell no. If it is them, they’re about to witness something, how ’bout that?”

  Welp. This should be fun.

  Her feet stomp toward the living room, and it’s quiet enough that I hear the “Aw, hell” she mutters. The lock on the front door clicks, and it creaks open.

  “Where’s my money?”

  Shit. That’s Ms. Lewis, our landlord.

  I get up, holey Spider-Man pajamas and all (they’re comfortable, okay), and rush to the front. Trey dragged himself outta bed, too. He wipes crust from his eyes.

  “Ms. Lewis, I need a little more time,” Jay says.

  Early as it is, Ms. Lewis takes a drag from a cigarette on our front porch. I’d lose track trying to count all of the beauty marks on her face. She has a black-and-gray ’fro that her brother, a barber, used to keep trimmed for her. He moved recently, and now her ’fro is all over the place.

  “More time? T’uh!” She sounds like a laugh got stuck in her throat. “You know what day it is?”

  The ninth. Rent was due on New Year’s Day.

  “I gave you a couple of weeks for the rest of last month’s rent, and I’m still waiting on that,” she says. “Now I need this month’s too, and your begging ass got the nerve to—”

  “‘Begging ass’?” I echo.

  “Now wait,” Trey says. “Don’t be talking to my momma like—”

  “Y’all!” Jay says.

  For the record, I’ve never liked Ms. Lewis. Yeah, my house is technically her house, but she can choke on her spit for all I care. She’s always got her nose in the air, acting as if she’s better than us because we rent from her. Like she doesn’t live two streets over in the hood, too.

  “Ms. Lewis,” Jay says calmly, “I’ll get you your money. But please, do me a huge favor and give me a little more time.”

  Ms. Lewis points her cigarette in Jay’s face. “See, that’s what’s wrong with so many of y’all blac
k asses. Think somebody supposed to do you a favor.”

  Um, she has a black ass too.

  “What? You back on that stuff? Wasting my money on drugs?”

  “Hold the hell up—”

  “Brianna!” Jay snaps. “No, I’m not back on drugs, Ms. Lewis. I’m simply in a bad situation at the moment. I’m begging you, mother to mother, to give me more time.”

  Ms. Lewis drops her cigarette on the porch and puts it out with the toe of her shoe. “Fine. You lucky I’m saved.”

  “Are you really?” I ask.

  Jay glares at me over her shoulder.

  “This the last time I’m doing this,” Ms. Lewis warns. “I don’t get my money, y’all out.”

  Ms. Lewis storms off, mumbling the whole way down the steps.

  Jay closes the door and rests her forehead against it. Her shoulders slump and she releases the deepest breath, as if she’s letting go of everything she wanted to say. Not fighting is harder than fighting.

  “Don’t worry, Ma,” Trey says. “I’ll go to one of those check advance places on my lunch break.”

  Jay straightens up. “No, baby. Those places are traps. That kinda debt is impossible to get rid of. I’ll figure something out.”

  “What if you don’t?” I ask. “If we get evicted, then we’ll be—”

  I can’t say it. Yet the word fills the room, like a foul odor.

  Homeless. One word, two syllables.

  This whole mess

  May make us homeless.

  “Somehow, it’s gonna work out,” Jay says. “Somehow, someway, it will.”

  It sounds like she’s telling herself that more than us.

  The whole thing throws me off. When Mr. Watson blows the bus horn, I’m still getting dressed. Jay takes me to school instead.

  She holds my headrest as she backs out of the driveway. “Don’t let this rent situation distract you, Bri. I meant what I said, it’s gonna work out.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t have to know how.”

  I’m so sick of folks saying that. First, Aunt Pooh and now Jay. They really don’t know how it will work out and they’re hoping it miraculously will. “What if I get a job?” I say. “It would help.”