“Man, I just dragged this bed up a hundred stairs. I ain’t going nowhere.” I slap my hand against her door. “Open the door!”
“If she don’t want it, I’ll take it.”
I jerk my head toward the husky voice. Her neighbor had eased out, braless and barefoot, with her nipples poking through her white tube top.
Smitty lets out a low whistle. “Lord hammercy.”
He pushes off the headboard. “It’s all yours if you want it, baby. I’ll even put it together?—”
“Nigga, how you gon’ give away something I bought?”
“Well, that crazy ass sister of yours obviously don’t want it. Let lil’ mama have it.”
“Hell nah!”
The girl folds her arms across her perky nipples. “Well, that ungrateful girl don’t want it.”
I suck my teeth. “Man, take your nosy ass back in your apartment.”
“Nigga, you ain’t my daddy.”
I frown, slapping the door again. “Nez!”
The deadbolt clicks and the bottom lock jiggles as Arnez flings the door open, wearing a moomoo and a bright pink bonnet. The silky fabric of the moomoo clings to her skinny body that she’s been hiding under baggy hoodies and sweats. I ain’t seen her this small since the summer she tried intermittent fasting just to fit into a bikini before a girls’ trip to Miami. My stomach turns at the way her clavicles poke out.
“Smitty, you got some nerve. If you give away anything my baby brother bought me, I ain’t never buying you another pack of cigarettes or case of beer.” She slams her hand into my chest, pushing me to the side and shuffling into the breezeway in a pair of house shoes.
She curls her upper lip, eyeing her neighbor up and down. “Tell that lazy nigga in there eating up all your kid’s snacks and wearing a hole in your couch to buy you a bed. My brother ain’t Goodwill. Soscram.”
The girl rolls her eyes like they argue all the time.
“Hateful bitch,” she mumbles, walking back into her apartment.
After her door closes, Arnez cuts her eyes at me in a way that makes me feel like I need to get as far away from her as I can even though she was just taking up for me.
It ain’t nobody but Jamari again.
He’s still in her head and he wants her to hate me and forget that I’m her baby brother. I feel like we’re back to how things were two months ago when I came home and found all of her stuff gone. She didn’t pick up my calls for a week, so I had to find out through Senior that she “moved out” after she promised him she’d keep the house andI’dleave. She even picked out the pewter color for the cabinets and the subway tile for the backsplash in the kitchen after studying a fancy decor magazine she found at Whole Foods, because a remodeled house and a Lockwood degree were supposed to nudge her out of this Jamari-funk she just couldn’t shake.
Her eyes rove to the pieces of the queen-sized bed I overpaid for at some no-name furniture store off 45 because I didn’t wanna buy the matching nightstands and dresser. I spent an hour trying to explain to the girl that worked there that I only wanted the canopy bed because Arnez thinks bedroom sets are tacky.
“When I gave you my address, it was for emergencies,” she says, folding her arms. “Not for you to just pop up. What you buy this for?”
I fling my arm up, shrugging. “I just thought you might need it.”
She turns around and walks back into her apartment, letting the door swing shut behind her, but she doesn’t lock it back.
Smitty smirks, holding his arm out toward the door. “You first.”
I pick up one of the slats from the ground and my toolkit and follow her.
It’s cold and empty inside.
The ten boxes she packed her life into sit stacked in the living room where her couch should be even though she moved in two months ago. Her clothes spill out the top of one of them, and her laptop sits on the floor playing Martin reruns next to a pallet.
My stomach turns again.
“Thebedgoes in thebedroom,” she mutters from inside the shoebox of a kitchen where all the shit she hates surrounds her, like an off white refrigerator that had lived through too many families, and a ruddy brown dishwasher that probably didn’t have a wash left in it.
