I wanted to thank her. Wanted to rage at her for not doing more. But there wasn’t time for either.
Five minutes.
We had five minutes to say goodbye to the only home we’d ever known.
Zahara leaned on me as we stumbled toward the front door. I could feel her trembling. Could feel the blood from her wounds seeping through her shirt and onto my hands.
“It’s okay,” I told her, even though nothing was okay and might never be okay again. “I’ve got you. We’re gonna be okay.”
The front door opened. The cold Baltimore night rushed in, biting at our skin, our wounds, our broken hearts.
We stepped outside.
The door slammed shut behind us.
And just like that, we were alone in the world.
Two sixteen-year-old girls with no money, no family, no future. Standing on the front porch of a house that was no longer ours, wearing clothes stained with our own blood, with nothing but each other to hold onto.
Zahara looked at me, her face swollen and tear-streaked and still somehow beautiful. “What do we do now?”
I didn’t have an answer.
But I wrapped my arm around her waist and started walking anyway.
“We survive,” I said. “That’s what we do. We survive.”
3
ZAINAB
TWELVE YEARS AGO—BALTIMORE TO CALIFORNIA
We ran straight to Meech.
Looking back, I can acknowledge how stupid that was. How desperate. But when you’re sixteen years old, beaten bloody, with nowhere else to go and two hundred dollars crumpled in your fist, you don’t have the luxury of making smart decisions. You make survival decisions. And Meech had an apartment. Meech had a bed. Meech was the father of the baby growing inside my sister’s belly.
So we showed up on his doorstep at eleven o’clock at night, bruised and broken and homeless, and he let us in.
For a while, it was almost okay. Meech wasn’t a good man—I knew that even then—but he kept a roof over our heads. Let me sleep in his spare bedroom while Zahara slept with him. Gave Zahara money for prenatal vitamins and maternity clothes. Played the role of doting baby daddy whenever it suited him.
But Meech was still Meech.
The cheating started before Zahara even hit her second trimester. Different women. Different nights. He wasn’t even slick about it—came home smelling like cheap perfume andother people’s beds, lipstick on his collar like a walking cliché. Zahara cried herself to sleep more nights than I could count, and I held her through all of it, whispering promises I didn’t know how to keep.
Then she got sick.
At first we thought it was just pregnancy stuff—the nausea, the discomfort, the general misery of growing a whole human being inside your body at sixteen years old. But the symptoms got worse. Burning when she peed. Discharge that wasn’t normal. Pain that made her double over and cry.
The free clinic confirmed what I already suspected: chlamydia. That trifling nigga had given my pregnant sister a whole STD.
I wanted to kill him. Actually wanted to wrap my hands around his throat and squeeze until he stopped breathing. But Zahara begged me not to make a scene. Said we needed him. Said we had nowhere else to go.
So I swallowed my rage and watched the doctor give my sister antibiotics and prayed the infection hadn’t hurt the baby.
Yusef was born healthy, thank God. Seven pounds, four ounces, with a full head of curly black hair and lungs that could wake up the whole hospital. Zahara cried when she held him for the first time—happy tears, finally—and I cried too, because despite everything, something beautiful had come out of all this ugliness.
But Meech didn’t change.
