After Tupac & D Foster Read Online Free Page B

us had a rhythm going.

CHAPTER THREE
    Neeka’s big brother Jayjones was going to be a pro ball player when he grew up. But in the meantime, he played ball for Grady High School and worked at KFC. At night he smelled like chicken grease and sweat, but he was so fine, most girls ignored the smell.
    His full name was Jackson Jones, but the first time he got on a basketball team, he was just a little kid playing for the Police Athletic League. There was another kid named Jones on the team, so they put J. JONES on one jersey and P. JONES on the other. After that, we all started calling him Jayjones.
    When he was a freshman at Grady, he scored forty points in his play-off game and me and Neeka made T-shirts that said I KNOW J. JONES and wore them for a week straight. That felt like a long time ago. He was still a high scorer, but we weren’t trying to wear any T-shirts about it anymore.
    “Y’all want some chicken?” Jayjones asked, coming over to my stairs and sitting down with me, Neeka and D. It was Saturday and D had turned twelve the Monday before. Leaves were falling off the trees all over the block and even though it was October and we still had some warm days, most days you could tell winter was starting to get its groove on. But it was Saturday and the temperature had gone up to eighty degrees. We were all sitting on my stairs, trying to catch the last few crazy hot days. Jayjones was wearing his basketball shorts and his hair was braided in zigzag cornrows. His legs were long and skinny with big calf muscles. He had a dimple right at the top of his cheek and when he smiled, it got deep—making you do a double take if you didn’t know him, because that was a strange place for a dimple to be. I saw D look at it. Then frown a little bit and look again. In the little while we’d known her, she’d met Jayjones a couple of times. I couldn’t tell if she thought he was fine or not because she didn’t say anything one way or the other about him. But I knew Jayjones thought D was cute. She’d only turned twelve, but she looked a lot older and guys were always trying to talk to her. Jayjones was see-through like all the others—you could look dead in their faces and see everything they were thinking about somebody.
    Jayjones stretched his legs out down the stairs and crossed his ankles, his big basketball shoes looking a mile long. He held out the chicken box and Neeka took an extra crispy wing. D took a leg.
    “Pretty girl like you should be eating a wing,” Jayjones said, smiling at D to show off that dimple. D didn’t say anything and Neeka told him to shut up.
    “Like a wing’s that different from a leg, fool,” Neeka said.
    Jayjones ignored her and held the box out to me. I waited for him to tell me to take a wing too, but he didn’t. I shook my head and pushed the box back at him. It was too hot to be eating fried food anyway.
    We had been talking about our families. D hadn’t said much about hers, but Neeka was talking enough for both of them. She’d just finished giving D the four-one-one on her oldest brother, Tash, who was doing time for something stupid. Tash had gotten arrested right after D started coming around, so D hadn’t got to know him like we did. Before Tash went to jail, he mostly hung out at the Piers in Greenwich Village where all the gay people seemed to hang out. Tash had been a sissy from day one and most people just accepted it. Sometimes when the rappers started going on and on about how much they hated homos, me and Neeka would turn the TV off. We didn’t really talk about why—just both of us knew that crap was hard on the ear when the homos they were hating on was your own family.
    Neeka was telling D how she came a few years after Jayjones.
    “And then,” Neeka said, as if Jayjones hadn’t even come over and interrupted us. “After she and my dad had Albert and Emmett, they had to go and have another set of twins. Had the nerve to have girl twins at that. Crazy! How you