Still Hood Read Online Free Page A

MORNING, WHICH was a relative miracle for the Brooklyn strip. The first pigeons were beginning to gather in front of the buildings to pick over the scraps left from the night before. Somewhere in the distance a tattered shade flapped in the light wind, applauding the coming of the new sun. The warm breeze washed over the curb, spinning a lone Budweiser can that had been abandoned by its five brothers. It wasn’t even eight o’clock and the air was already humid. Just another sign of what a hot summer the inhabitants of New York could expect.
    In the doorway of the fourth building from the corner a figure appeared. She was a brown-skinned cutie who let the front of her shoulder-length hair flop over her high forehead in bangs, while the back was flipped and pinned in place. A pair of cream-colored Capri pants hugged her hips and thighs as if they had been designed specifically for her. Removing a small mirror from her Gucci knapsack, she examined her face, making sure she didn’t apply too much eye shadow, nor that the lip gloss was painted on too thick. To her, appearance was everything. Confident that she was killing everything on the streets, Dena Jones stepped off her stoop to face the world.

    Dena was the youngest daughter of her mother’s, and hadn’t spent enough time with her father to find out where she fit in on the chronological scale of the scores of bastard children he had fathered. To her, the only siblings she had were the ones who had come out of her mother’s womb, regardless of who their fathers were. She was the youngest child of three, and in her opinion the only one not like the others.
    There was Shannon, her hotheaded older brother. He was what you would call a career criminal, spending most of his teenage and young adult life in someone’s detention center. Shannon was amongst the elite, as far as street niggaz went in Brooklyn. Everyone knew he wasn’t to be fucked with and tried to steer clear of him for the most part. Standing at about five-six, Shannon had what some people called a Napoleon Complex. He had long ago earned his hood stripes, but being insecure about his height made him feel like he always had something to prove.
    Dena couldn’t say that she agreed with Shannon’s lifestyle, but she also couldn’t knock his hustle. He never shitted exactly where he lived, and he broke his mother off before the weed man or one of his bitches ever saw a dime of his money. Since Joe, Shannon was the closest thing they had to a man in the house.
    Joe was a guy that Dena’s mother had hooked up with a few years after Dena’s father had taken off. He was a Puerto Rican cat who made his money between driving a delivery truck and slinging cocaine uptown. He treated all of the children as if they were his own, never trying to overshadow their fathers, no matter how fucked up they were. Joe had lost his life when Dena was about twelve or thirteen years old. Nostrand Avenue, formerly known as N.A. Rock back in the day because it was always rocking with one thing or another, would be Joe’s final resting place. He had been on his way to visit them one night when he lost his life. A young man shot him in the back while he was coming out of the Nostrand Avenue train station. He didn’t take Joe’s money or his jewelry, just shot him and ran off. The police would later discover that it had all been a part of a gang initiation and Joe had the misfortune of being a random target. Though Dena never admitted it, the scars from Joe’s murder had never really healed.

    Then there was Nadine, the oldest of the three. Behind her back Dena referred to Nadine as one of their mother’s greatest mistakes. At the time she had become pregnant with Nadine, their mother had been in her last year of high school and scheduled to leave for college in the fall. When she found out that she was pregnant things changed considerably. In the beginning she planned to just