Hood (11 page)

You my sister and my soul at the same time

One of the reasons I’m going so hard when it’s game time…

ZENA BLOW-DRIED HER
just-shampooed hair and admired its thickness in the mirror. It felt clean and healthy as it bounced around her shoulders like a golden halo. She fluffed it from the roots with her fingers making sure it was completely dry, then unplugged the dryer and picked up a comb. Her hand shook as she leaned close to the mirror and pressed the tip to her scalp. She slid a straight part along the left side of her head and combed her hair downward around her face. With that done, she straightened up and put on a pair of gold clip-on earrings, then carefully picked up her false eyelashes from their case. Her fingers were sweaty and she dropped the spidery-looking things three times before she was able to get them on.

She’d been Dreko’s bitch for over three years and the whole experience had been brutal and destructive. Sackie had tried to warn her but she’d been blinded to her man’s true nature, and every single thing her brother had predicted had ended up coming true. With Dreko ruling and ruining her life, Zena had gone from a pretty white chick with a cute smile and a banging ass, to a washed out pipe fiend who got her grill smashed on the regular. Her slide downhill had been painful to watch, especially for her brother. Fucking with Dreko had put a wedge in their sibling relationship that left Zena feeling guilty and ashamed, but unable to find a way out.

“Aiight, you the one whose gotta live with your choices,” Sackie had told her after rolling up on her high for what seemed like the two-hundredth time. Him and Dreko had beefed and almost come to blows over Zena on more occasions than she could count. Sackie was furious because Zena had let Dreko talk her into giving him a key to their apartment, and then the fool came up in there with his boys and did any damn thing he felt like doing.

But if she thought the beatings were bad, sex with Dreko was the ultimate punishment. It may have started out hot and fabulous, but these days it was just full of depravities. Zena knew her man was wrong to be filling her up with liquor and drugs, but she had to get high just to force herself to do the sadistic shit he demanded. One time Sackie had come home and found her naked and high and fucked so bad she lay bleeding on their kitchen floor. He’d flown into a rage and gone looking for Dreko with his gun. Luckily, Hood was able to step in and shut shit down before it got ugly, but the bad blood between her brother and her man was almost always on boil.

Eventually Sackie had grown fed up. At a certain point he gave up and didn’t even try to keep her away from Dreko anymore. In fact, he told Zena she was a lost cause and said she should go for what she wanted with gusto.

“I’m out here deep in this game slinging rock to take care of us every day, and you out there smoking that yay just like you one of my customers? Fuck it. Do you, Z. Do you to death, baby sis.”

Yeah, the years of drugs, beatings, and torment with Dreko had just about sucked the life out of Zena and turned her into a shell of her former self. But things had changed for the better when she told Sackie she was pregnant. Sackie had offered to help her take care of the baby, and Zena was happy to have her brother back on her team. Sackie was showing affection and concern for her again, and she had promised herself that she wouldn’t let him down.

But today was a bad day, and that promise was feeling like a hard one to keep. It had been months since Zena had touched the pipe, and right now she felt so nervous and scared that she needed a hit and she needed one bad. Crack memories swelled inside her brain, giving her get-high flashbacks so vivid they made her shiver with desire.

Sackie had the music turned up loud in the living room, and Zena sang along to a Thug-A-Licious song being spit as she tried to distract herself and take her mind off both the pipe and the letter sitting on her dresser.

I got the haze, a whole batch to puff out

Goons in the back waitin for cats to stunt out

Ladies in the dugout,

Big breasts and butt out,

No names needed

That takes the fun out!

With the fake eyelashes secured, Zena pencil-darkened the arch in her eyebrows and then drew a faint line around her lips. She was bullshitting and wasting time and she knew it. Makeup wasn’t even her thing. She was just stalling and trying to find a way to convince herself not to do what she knew definitely had to be done. She covered the two steps between the bathroom and her bedroom and stood facing the dresser. The folded sheet of paper she had been trying so hard to ignore sat harmlessly beside her radio.

Zena touched her thick stomach and lost every ounce of her false bravado. For the third or fourth time she fought the urge to show the letter to Sackie. She was too pregnant and too scared to go through something like this by herself with no drugs or drink to help her. Zena wished there was someone she could depend on for comfort and help. Anyone. She’d wanted so badly to confide in Egypt, but shame had kept her lips locked. Besides, Egypt was busy all the time. She was hardly ever around. It was her last year of high school and she was taking pre-college night courses at a school downtown. The two of them were still really close, but Egypt’s life seemed to be going somewhere while Zena’s had stalled and felt like it was about to fizzle out.

Deep inside Zena hated that she’d ever gone to the clinic in the first damn place. Most girls she knew never bothered to get any prenatal care at all. They just showed up at the emergency room when they went into labor and it was time to have their baby.

And hell yeah, she’d seen all them stupid commercials on BET talking about wrap it up and know your status, but that shit wasn’t for real. Those was just paid actors up there on a screen who weren’t even facing what she was facing, and Dreko wasn’t the kind of guy who would ever agree to use a condom anyway. The truth was, she felt better not knowing her status. She could have lived the rest of her life not knowing, and been cool with that.

But it wasn’t just about her no more. At the risk of pissing off Dreko, Zena had put the brakes on all that partying and getting high and drinking and unnatural fucking stuff. For the past seven months she’d had something other than herself to think about, and unlike some girls, she had wanted the best for her baby and that meant putting down the crack pipe and seeing a doctor and getting a checkup and some vitamins. She’d gone to her first prenatal appointment when she was four months along, and had submitted to all of the necessary blood tests and stuff with no problem.

Ignorance had been a good thing at the time, and even though she had her suspicions about Dreko, she had no idea they’d be giving her that particular test. But the nurse at the clinic had filled up quite a few of those glass vials for blood, and when they’d called her a couple of weeks later she’d sat there dumbfounded as the doctor patted her hand and told her that one of her important test results had come back abnormal.

“Don’t start worrying yet,” he had reassured her. “There are a lot of factors that can cause a false positive response. We’ll take another blood sample in a few weeks and go from there.”

Zena had forced herself to go back and be tested the second time, but now her fear was strangling her and she was too scared to return to the clinic for the final results. She’d been getting out-the-ass phone messages from the nurse instructing her to come in to the clinic immediately, and when she didn’t respond they’d sent the certified letter she now held in her hands.

Zena unfolded the letter and a shiver ran through her as she read the words that had been neatly typed in the center of the page. “We have been attempting to contact you regarding the results of your laboratory tests. This could be a health care emergency detrimental to you or your unborn child. Please contact the clinic immediately.”

Panic held her in a tight grip. Fear of the unknown. But for her baby’s sake she had made herself call the clinic this morning and had quietly agreed when the nurse demanded she come in today. Right away.

All kinds of twisted images were running through her head as Zena left the apartment without confiding in her brother. She walked past the projects slowly, heading toward the health clinic and remembering every horrible thing she had ever heard about people who got caught out there with this particular disease.

She’d taken a couple of sex education and health classes before she dropped out of high school, and there were enough people walking around with it right here in Brownsville for her to know what the future held. It might take a long time, but unless you were Magic Johnson or somebody rich, eventually it showed up on you in unmistakable ways. She’d seen the kind of damage the sickness could do. Stick figures with sunken eyes and skin stretched tight over their skulls. Wasted-looking skeletons walking the streets filled with hopelessness and despair.

Zena raised a hand to the thick, bouncy hair she loved so much. All that shit would be gone. Either on the floor or down the drain, leaving her with nothing but a few scraggly strands floating around on her pink scalp. And what about her baby? Would it be sick too? If something happened to her, who was gonna take care of her child?

She was scared out of her mind, but a part of her was mad as hell too. The moment she got with Dreko she had stopped fucking around with ten and twelve different dudes like a cheap jump-off, so if she had caught some scary shit it wasn’t her fault. It had to be Dreko. It could only be him. Him and that grimy shit he did when he didn’t think nobody was watching.

Zena had faked confusion the first time he made her wait downstairs as he took a young pipe-head cat up on the roof to get his top done. She had gotten her ass kicked good that night too. The guy she never saw again, but Dreko had come back down fifteen minutes later sweating and looking fucked-out in the face, then started a fight with her over something stupid. By the time the night was over Zena had a split earlobe, a busted lip, and a loose bottom tooth.

Another time he had gotten a set of SUV keys from Lil Jay, then made her stand in the lobby of the building while he put a neighborhood cat named Turtle in the front seat and made dude bob his head to pay off a ten dollar debt.

“Wait ya ass right here,” he told her as he pushed Turtle toward the whip. Turtle stumbled over to the Expedition with his head held down, and Zena felt sick as she watched Dreko toss the young man inside the ride and then climb in beside him on the other side.

She was really sick when she saw Turtle lean over as his head disappeared in Dreko’s lap. Zena watched wide-eyed as Dreko lounged back in the seat and Turtle’s red skully appeared and disappeared, like he was bobbing for apples.

There was no mistaking what was going down. Especially since Dreko had yelled like a girl the moment he nutted, and even though she was standing inside the foyer behind a pane of glass, Zena had heard him hollering loud and clear.

“Mind ya fuckin biz and keep ya gums shut,” was what he told her when she got up the nerve to question him later on that night while he lay across her bed waiting for her to toss his salad. “What I do is what the fuck I do.”

“But—that guy’s head was going up and down. He was in there sucking—”

Bang! Dreko capped her so hard in the nose that she lost her breath and rolled off the bed, collapsing on the hard floor.

“And stay your simple ass down there!” he had growled as she tried to rise up on her knees.

Terrified, Zena dropped back and lay on the cold floor crying and swallowing the hot blood that was running down her throat. It was a good hour before he let her get up to put some ice on her face, and by then not only did she have a broken nose, she had two black eyes to go along with it.

Zena wasn’t dumb, but she was stuck. And scared. Dreko wasn’t the kind of gangsta who would let something walk away from him. When he was done with something he either destroyed it or killed it. He never left anything laying around for somebody else to use.

Sackie was right. This is what your dumb ass gets for fucking with him in the first place
, Zena chastised herself as she thought about the girl Fatima she had beat down over Dreko back in the day. Egypt had warned her to let Fatima have Dreko, but Zena wouldn’t listen. Instead, she had stomped the shit out of Fatima and won the right to be Dreko’s bitch. But while Zena’s looks had fallen off fast, whenever she happened to run across Fatima these days the girl looked better and better. Whipped like butter. Fly and pretty. Happy as hell.

And now Zena was the one walking around pregnant and run down and craving a hit. She crossed Bristol Street and headed toward the clinic wondering what the hell it was that had had her so bent on Dreko from the gate. It was probably because she’d been secretly jealous of the closeness Egypt had with Hood. She had wanted a high-post baller of her own to roll with, but here she was almost three years later, hating the very thing she had begged for, fought for, and had gotten on her knees and sucked a glass dick for.

And look where all that bullshit had gotten her. Zena’s feet were heavier than concrete as she trudged down the street filled with dread. Damn. She could sure use a hit right now. It wasn’t just her mind that wanted it. Her body seemed to be screaming for it too. She’d taken a shower but still her skin was clammy and coated with stank sweat and her heart pounded so hard it made her back hurt.

Zena made it all the way to the steps of the clinic, but standing outside of the drab, gray building she could force herself to go no further. There were only three steps standing between her and the truth. The clinic doors stood slightly open and she could see a pale yellow wall decorated with baby emblems on the inside, but no matter how hard she tried, she just couldn’t move.

Suddenly the door opened as a pregnant girl and a toddler came out, followed by a slender nurse with long hair and light brown skin. The nurse reached down and smiled as she handed the toddler a green lollipop, and Zena panicked and ducked her head so she wouldn’t be seen.

Tomorrow
, she lied to herself, desperately craving a hit off the pipe.
I’ll come back tomorrow.