RedBone

by Styles, T.

  Farah choked back her guilt, covered the stains, and said, “No, I’m ’bout to see what Chloe doing.” She smiled. “I’ll be right back, Grandma.” Rushing away from her she opened the door to her room knowing she needed to change her shirt. Chloe was sitting on the bed, with her back facing the door. “What you doing, Chloe?” Chloe hopped up, and a tin can once used for cookies fell out of her lap and clanked to the wooden floor. Dried blood was smeared all over her outfit and she looked petrified. “What’s that red stuff?”

  “Nothing ... why?” she asked, as if she’d been caught doing the devil’s work. “I was just playing with stuff.” She looked at the floor. “Leave me alone.”

  Farah stepped farther into the room. “I sleep in here too.” When she was next to Chloe, she finally saw what was in the can, and she wanted to run. Chloe had severed the heads of two dead rats as if she were performing some type of sick surgery. “Chloe ... what the fuck are you doing? I’ma tell Ma!”

  Chloe rushed up to her and said, “Shh ... Please don’t say nothing! I won’t do it again! I promise.” Farah looked down at the dead rodents, and felt something strange come over her. The feeling was so awkward that she backed up toward the door just to get away. And when she turned around, she ran into her mother. Chloe had her mind so fucked up that she didn’t hear her come inside the house.

  Brownie was angry and it appeared to be directed at Farah. “What y’all in here doing now?” She looked at Chloe and then Farah. “I heard you all the way in the living room.” She went through the leather purse hanging from her shoulders.

  “Nothing,” Farah said. “Just playing.”

  “Well who the fuck drank my juice and put water in it?” Farah’s body started trembling. “I told y’all about drinking my shit, didn’t I?” Brownie removed a pack of cigarettes from her purse, lit one, and blew the smoke into the air. “Well ... which one of y’all touched my shit?” she asked, talking to them both but looking directly at Farah.

  Farah was overcome with the dead rats and the fact that her mother was asking her if she drank her juice as if she already knew. If she told the truth, since her father wasn’t home, she was positive Brownie would do her harm, even though she could count on her hand the number of times she’d done it. Although she was never the subject of her violence, it didn’t matter. Brownie’s name rang bells in the streets and her crimes caused more stitches then fifty handmade quilts. “Mia did it. She was in here earlier and I saw her.”

  Brownie didn’t believe her, but until she talked to Mia, she didn’t have proof. “I better not find out you’re lying! If I do, I’ma fuck you up!” Brownie pointed in her face. “Now clean up this room. I’ma take a bath and then prepare dinner.”

  When she walked out, Farah turned around to face Chloe, who had already cleaned up the carnage on the floor. “Why did you do that? That’s so gross,” she whispered.

  “I don’t know. I do it all the time. I guess I like it.” Chloe shrugged, walking toward the door with the can. “It’s not a big deal though. Relax.” She walked around her and out of the room.

  Wondering how she could get out of the lie she told on Mia, Farah walked back to the living room. Once again Elise stopped her. “Come over here and sit next to me.” Farah walked slowly to her grandmother. Steam rose out of the pot Elise’s toes were soaking in, and carried with it a scent similar to corn chips. “Sit down on the couch.” Farah sat next to her. “Why did you lie to your mother just now?”

  Farah looked at the TV and said, “I didn’t lie.”

  “Farah, I saw the juice on your shirt,” she said softly. “Baby, you have to be careful how you act. Lying and hurting people is the wrong way to live. And you gonna have a tough life if you don’t recognize that now. I’m talking about total chaos all the time.” She touched her softly on the knee. “You’re learning a lot of lessons you shouldn’t be from your parents and I know it’s hard, but I’m still here for you.”

  “But I didn’t do it.” Farah said, wishing she’d just shut the fuck up.

  “Farah, when you get older, maybe I’ll tell you why your mother is so angry with you, and focused on what people think about how she looks. I would tell you now if I didn’t think it would be so heavy. For now I just wanna make sure you kids don’t go down the same path they are. That road don’t lead to nothing but trouble.”

  When there was a heavy knock at the door, Chloe came running out wearing a change of clothes to answer it. Farah was relieved because her grandmother’s words of wisdom were weighing on her more than a sack of potatoes on her head. A few seconds later Chloe said, “Farah, that popular girl is here to see you. She wanna know if you can come outside.”

  The sun was nowhere to be found and it looked as if it would rain as Farah sat on the steps of her building. It was the perfect type of weather for her. When Chloe told her Coconut was there, she almost didn’t believe her. But since Coconut and her crew barely spoke to her, she wondered why they bothered. The way they looked at her scarred face and carried on conversations without her made her uncomfortable. So she preoccupied herself with small pebbles by throwing them toward the wired fence.

  She saw a local drug dealer named Randy Gregory standing in the doorway of the building across from hers, holding a bag. He looked around before exiting and approached a white Yukon. Throwing the bag inside the back of his truck, he was approached by an angry man, and Randy walked his way. Whatever was going on, it didn’t look nice. Although Randy was six years older than her, she had a crush on him like no other. His smooth dark skin and low haircut reminded her of Ashur, except he never noticed her. Randy would wear all the latest fashions, and kept a fresh pair of tennis shoes on at all times. A gold chain hung from his neck with a medallion that read RANDY RAN.

  “We gonna have so much fucking fun when we go to Virginia Beach!” Coconut said, louder than before. “You sure your mother won’t let you go, Farah? Some cute boys gonna be there too.”Farah stopped throwing rocks, and looked at her. This was the first time she’d acknowledged her since she asked if she could come out fifteen minutes earlier. “I know you missed my sleepover, but this is gonna be even better.”

  “What’s gonna be happening at the beach?”

  Coconut looked at her friends and fell out laughing. “We gonna be on the sand ... getting tans. And stuff like that. Also we gonna get finger fucked by cute boys.”

  Farah thought about the illness the doctor said she had, which required a lot of medicine that never seemed to work. Since she couldn’t pronounce the term he used properly she’d say “Porpia.” He explained that she could be stricken with it her entire life. Under no circumstances, he’d explained, was she to be exposed to strong chemicals and the sun. Out of the entire family, her condition was surely the worst. “I gotta ask my mother.” She looked at all of them and could see their irritation. “She might say yes.”

  “If your mother won’t let you hang out with us, we can’t be friends,” Rhonda said. “We only roll with girls who can do what they want.”

  “Stop coming down on her,” Coconut said, walking up to Farah. She sat on the step next to her and pulled a joint out of her pocket. Farah examined the small white roll. “You wanna hit this with us? In your basement?”

  Farah didn’t want to do drugs, but she’d already disappointed Coconut so she said, “I guess so.” She wanted to go to the bathroom first, because she could feel a tingly sensation pulsing between her legs.

  “I’ma use the bathroom first.”

  “Later for all that,” Coconut said, putting her arm around her. “You can do that after we’re done.”

  Leading the way, Farah and the girls walked down the steps, and into the dark, musty basement. She could hear rusted pipes dripping water onto the floors. The thought of bugs crawling on her made her nervous. She was about to go to the laundry room when Coconut said, “Don’t y’all have a storage room down here?”

  Farah knew the place well. It was where she’d seen Mia get fucked by he
r boyfriend, when she followed her last month. While being nosey, a spider dropped on her upper lip and sent her into a panic, which ended in her being hospitalized for a month. It was her longest stint yet and gave her another phobia. She finally made it to the storage room door, but when she looked behind her, the girls stopped. “We going in?”

  “You not going nowhere,” somebody said.

  Farah turned around and faced the voice. Shannon, Wendy, and Nova walked out of the darkness and into her path. Their hard facial expressions were serious as they slapped their fists into the palms of their hands. “You told Coconut I talked about her at school?” Shannon asked, ready to drop her on the floor. “I’ma fuck your ass up for lying on me!”

  When Farah turned around she bumped into Coconut and her friends, who formed a human wall that blocked her escape. She walked right into a setup and she was ill prepared. “Tell her what you said she said at school that day,” Coconut said. “If you ain’t lying it shouldn’t be a problem for you to say it to her face.”

  This wasn’t what she thought would happen when Coconut knocked on her door. Her chest moved up and down and she felt an outbreak coming on. Turning around, she pushed past the girls, and ran upstairs and out of the building. Running aimlessly for a moment, eventually she hid on the side of an adjoining building. From her viewpoint, she could see all the girls, with the exception of Coconut and Rhonda, running around outside looking for her. She reasoned the other two were waiting in her building so she couldn’t go home right now.

  Farah knew it was a matter of time before they found her, so when she didn’t see the girls outside anymore, she ran toward Randy’s truck, praying to God it was open. When she tugged at the back door handle, it clicked and she jumped inside, closing the door behind her. Luckily, a large blue moving blanket covered three bags on the back seat. She lifted the cloak, curled her body between the middle of two bags, and covered up. From under the sheet she could hear the girls running back and forth outside, trying to find her. She’d never been more scared in her life.

  Fifteen minutes later, when she heard someone open the door, she prayed it wasn’t them. Please don’t let them get me. If you don’t, God, I promise not to lie anymore, she lied again. When the engine started, and the car moved, she exhaled. Farah was fine, until she realized she was being driven away from home. Things were getting worse by the second, and she had no doubt her parents were going to flip the fuck out. After she came in the house that day from sitting on the roof, they demanded that she come in before the streetlights turned on, whenever she was allowed out. She had no idea how she was going to get out of the truck, or where Randy was driving. Five minutes into the ride, Farah began to feel hot, as if she’d been running around all day. A few minutes after that, she was full of energy and felt an extreme need to move. She’d inhaled the remnants of bags stored in a drug house.

  When the car stopped moving, she waited for his car door to close so she could run away. But when the cover was raised, and the tip of a gun was resting on her nose, she knew it was too late. “What the fuck are you doing under there?”

  Farah sat up and tears rolled down her face. “I was hiding. Some girls were going to jump me.” Her eyes rolled around and she was sweating profusely. Randy knew immediately she’d caught a contact from the bags. “I just wanna go home.” The moment she opened her mouth, he knew she was high.

  Randy Gregory, who was a runner for his father, Willie Gregory, was already having a bad week. Recently his girlfriend was kidnapped and murdered by two men looking for him, and today his father had, in no uncertain terms, said he would be nothing but an errand boy. Now, he had to deal with a girl who was high from sniffing his drugs. Normally he would not have been caught slipping by leaving his door unlocked, but when Willie called him back for the bullshit, it threw him off his game. If he had been more careful, he wouldn’t have to deal with her. Randy opened the back door, grabbed the bags, and said, “Come inside. I can’t take you home until you come down off that shit.”

  “Come down where?”

  “Just get the fuck out.”

  Farah eased out of the car and followed him to a nice-sized home. She had no idea where she was but she hoped he wasn’t a pedophile or a serial murderer. Once inside, she marveled at how bright everything was. The color white dominated, and that included the drapes, leather couch, and plush carpeting.

  Randy closed and locked the door, and placed the duffle bags on the kitchen table. “Ma ... I’m home!” he yelled toward the back.

  When Helen Gregory walked into the living room wearing a cream silk pants pajama set, which looked so elegant it could be worn outside, Farah felt inferior. She was extremely beautiful and favored her mother, Brownie. Helen was dipped in diamonds and gold and her long hair brushed against the sides of her ebony face. Holding a glass of cognac in one hand and a cigarette in the other, she looked at the scared child hovering in her living room corner. Placing her drink on the table, and mashing her cigarette in the ashtray, her white feather high-heeled slippers click-clacked in Farah’s direction. “Before I forget, honey,” she said, looking at Randy, “the nursing home called and said you can volunteer again next week if you want.”

  “Thanks, Ma. I’ll call them tomorrow.”

  Standing over her she said, “Now ... what do we have here?” She looked at her son. “You didn’t tell me you had company.”

  From the kitchen Randy said, “Oh, yeah ... Pops fucked my head up, and I accidently left my shit open. The bitch hid in my truck.” He placed the bricks of cocaine on the table. “I think some broads were after her or some shit like that. I’ma take her home in an hour.” He looked at her as if she were a pest. “She caught a contact from my coke and got high. I ain’t want to take her back to Ashur like that.” He focused back on the bricks. “I don’t feel like killing that dude.”

  Farah had to piss so bad now she could barely hold it, but she was scared to ask to use the bathroom. Helen placed her soft hands on her chin and lifted it up. “You know ... you would be a pretty red thing, if your face wasn’t so spotty. She looked at Randy. “You should keep her around. When she gets older, she can give you all kinds of yellow babies.” She released her.

  “That’s a kid, Ma. Why would you even say that?”

  “She got to be about twelve or thirteen,” Helen continued. “Five years is gonna fly by and before you know it, she’ll be having her period. What’s your name, girl?”

  “Farah.” She swallowed, placing her hand between her legs to pause the urge to piss. “Farah Cotton.”

  “Well, Farah, get something for that face. You too young to look so hard.” On to another thought, Helen turned to Randy and said, “Was that white bitch Eleanor around your father today?” She picked up her drink and lit another cigarette. “All she’s trying to do is steal my husband.”

  “Ma, I don’t know about all that. I just need you to cook this shit, so we can make the drop-offs.”

  Helen rolled her eyes. “Take your father’s side if you want to, but I’m sure he’ll stab you in the back just like he’s doing me before long.” She paused. “Let me go freshen up, and then I’ll start working on it.”

  When she disappeared into the house Randy asked, “You hungry? Thirsty?”

  Since she’d unconsciously sniffed cocaine in his truck, she’d completely lost her appetite. “No ... but I gotta go to the bathroom real bad.” She started moving around in place, pressing her hands between her legs. “Can I?”

  “Yeah ... it’s around the corner.” He pointed. “Hurry up back, because I’ma feed you anyway before I drop you off.”

  Farah rushed toward the bathroom, trying her best not to make any jerky motions, which would cause her to piss in her clothes. A fear of hers. When she opened the door, she was surprised to see Helen standing in the shower, naked from the waist down. She was squatting and holding a pink douche bag between her legs. The bathroom was heavy with the scent of the cigarette resting on the edge of the sink and t
he vinegar in the bag. “What you looking at, girl?” Helen said. “You never saw a woman douche before?” Farah shook her head. “Well, what you want then? I’m busy.”

  “I gotta pee.”

  “Well, come on in.” She squeezed the bag a few times. “I’m not gonna be much longer anyway.”

  Farah walked to the toilet, lifted the lid, and sat sideways on the cold seat to prevent facing Helen. When the urine poured out of her body, she exhaled. For the moment it was the best feeling in the world.

  “I don’t know why,” Helen said, removing the tube connected to the bag from the inside of her pussy, “but I got a feeling you gonna be my son’s wife.” Farah remained silent, and focused on the lit cigarette on the sink. “Make sure you take care of your body when you do get him,” she said, screwing off the tube and rinsing them under the tub’s faucet. “Men love a woman with a clean pussy and a pretty face.” She stepped out of the tub and eased into her silk pajama pants and slippers. “I don’t know why your skin so bad, but if you don’t do nothing ... You better take care of your looks. It’s all you got in life.”

  Helen opened the medicine cabinet, pulled out a pack of razors, and removed one. Without washing her hands, and while Farah was still on the toilet, she said, “Open your mouth.” She did. “Keep this in your mouth”—she stuffed it on the inside of her cheek—“but whenever you’re about to fight, or you think you may be in trouble, put this between your teeth and your cheek like I just did. Now close your mouth.” Farah was nervous as hell that she would get cut. “Whenever somebody fuck with you, slice them fifty times across the neck or the temple and your problems will be over.”

  Chapter 7

  “Dear God, please be with that child. I’m begging you.”

  —Elise

  Brownie was helping Elise prepare the project’s rec for her annual family celebration. Before bringing in the food, Elise had her friends check for roaches and bugs in case they needed to use any sprays. She wanted to prevent her family from having an outbreak. The theme was black and red and Elise saw to it that everything coordinated, including the plastic plates, forks, spoons, and napkins. With four sisters, their children, and their grandkids, the family celebration would be huge. When the hall was beautifully decorated, the food was brought in and laid upon the table. The moment Elise opened the doors for everyone they crowded into the hall. When all of her sister’s children started hovering around the food table Elise looked for Brownie. Spotting her sitting in a chair in the corner, rubbing her feet, she walked over to her.