YNs

2003

The tan 2002 Audi 80 parked near her English teacher’s 2000 Hyundai Sonata. Hazetta Vertick leaned back and steamed an L with her boyfriend, Rondell Boyler in her leather seat. He was fit as a wrestler where he had won championships for Delaware. A grey sweatsuit and blue jeans and butter Timberland boots enveloped his person. Both aged eighteen, they saw graduation from high school on the horizon and wanted desperately to just graduate and get it over with already. College would separate them by a few miles as she would matriculate to New Sweden University and he to First State Community College. She looked pitch black with blue eye contacts. Her cheek bones and nose all corresponded to an image of grace and harmony. A green blouse with a slim gold chain clung to her frame and hung around her neck, respectively. She wore icy white Adidas sneakers to compliment her black jeans. Her hair had flowed down to her shoulders and she wore cherry red lipstick. It was May 2nd. They listened to Get Rich or Die Trying on the car’s CD player. She looked over to him.

“This is senioritis right here.”

“It’s also incredibly dangerous,” he said with reserve and a bit of curiosity in his voice. He pulled on the potent marijuana.

“It is, it is,” she replied with a knowing glance. She took the blunt from his hands and inhaled. Her eyes closed as she released the smoke from her lungs.

“We’ve got twelve kilos coming to us in the next few days,” he reminded her for the fifth time.

She sucked her teeth. “You saying it again isn’t going to get them here any faster.”

“Just a friendly reminder….”

The hot box of the vehicle remained unchecked in the early moments of the morning as the sun wheeled its way across the sky. That was until a knock came to the car’s driver side window. It was one of the hall monitors, Magden Corovan. He looked prim and proper and ready to tell. He wore gold, too, and Reeboks with a red t-shirt and grey sweatpants.

“You know…” he said, getting into the back of the vehicle. “I could let the principal in on this little motion in the morning….” Hazetta handed the blunt to him. “Thank you. Newark just won’t be the same without y’all.” He had been a junior at the Delaware high school. He took a hit and relaxed, putting his head on the rest and extending his legs. “Don’t worry. I actually told Gaskins and Clement to fall back and I’ll cover the parking lot,” Corovan reassured. “There’s no classes for y’all anyway. What are you out here for?”

“Nostalgia….” Hazetta closed her eyes again and grooved to the music, making her fingers snap.

“I know about the bricks that are coming your way. Don’t worry. I’m not going to let anyone know about that either. But that four-year-old girl that got shot on West Side, I had to tell about that….” Corovan admitted. “I don’t care about those pumping in the streets. Get your money. All I want is for the neighborhood to be safe enough to have kids play in the playgrounds.”

“Man, what are you talking about? There was no little girl that got hit,” Boyler mentioned.

“No, sir,” she got gunned down just a week ago.

“Oh, you’re talking about that girl. Damn shame.” He passed up smoking the blunt. So did Hazetta. “You can finish that off if you like, Magden,” she said, spraying herself with Lysol and passing the aerosol can to her boyfriend. Corovan took two pulls and finished it. He took the roach and Hazetta handed him an empty Sprite can. He heard the little fizzle of the butt of the marijuana cigarette hitting the liquid remnants sound in his ears.

“Alright, all y’all have to do is get your caps and gowns and rehearse. You put those kilos in the street and continue to get money. I need that Lysol, goddamn!” He coughed and Hazetta and Boyler laughed. They coughed, too and laughed some more. Corovan left the car.

“What do you say we go in there and act like we’re not high?” Hazetta asked.

“If we show ourselves to be smelling as loud as we do we won’t make it two feet,” Boyler announced with the Lysol can swirling around his body like a ritual and the spray a jungle mist. He motioned to get out of the car. Hazetta impeded his progress.

“Wait, let’s stay back for a moment and talk about this supply coming to us,” she suggested.

“Why? We already know what’s coming. We should get $36,000 between the both of us for selling all of it. Just imagine…that’s how much Mrs. Harper makes in a year here. And she’s got a master’s degree,” Boyler observed.

“That’s great, but we have to make sure our couriers are game. We have to make sure they know what they’re doing, still. For the past few weeks, the weather’s broke and it’s been nice outside. They’ve been backsliding on their hustle,” she mentioned, she spread lotion on her inky black skin.

“I’m not even worried about Jarrod. Rizell is cool. Denton is cool. I’m not really worried about it,” Boyler replied as if he folded his hands behind his head and sighed…but didn’t.

“I’m serious, Rondell.”

“You don’t think I’m serious? When Bop got knocked, you don’t think I cried real tears? It’s wild what’s happening––” his phone buzzed in his pants pocket.

He looked at the caller ID.

“It’s Wis,” he informed Hazetta. She looked at him and encouraged him to pick up the phone.

“Hey.”

“Money is time,” the elderly woman said into the phone and then it clicked.

The click had not been from either transmitter or receiver but listeners over the line. He closed the flip phone shut.

“The feds are listening.”

Hazetta’s brow furrowed and she looked straight. The glint of the sun furthered the brows to be bunched up on her face.

“Well, break the phone. We’ll get new ones.” She snapped his own phone and hers in half and retrieved a pen and pad and wrote down the coordinates of where they had been positioned. Her AP calculus skills shone through on this one.

“Okay, we’re going to go to the corner store and pick up some minutes. We can only go to payphones,” Hazetta directed.

“Cool.”

“If we’re ever stopped, we’ll just say that we know only about what this car has in it, which is nothing.”

“If we’re riding clean, what are you so concerned about?” Boyler asked.

“I’m not about to get locked up over something goofy that happened. No. I don’t care what Magden has to say. He’s cool. Like he said, he doesn’t care about the work, just the lives of innocent bystanders. That’s honorable snitching right there.”

“Yes, agreed,” he replied.

“So, what we’re going to do is better understand our roles as those pumping in the streets. We’re graduating from school, finally, and we’re graduating from out of the streets. We have enough saved up to handle our tuition. There is no God but goddamn did we make it!”

The lingering effects of the marijuana continued to be in their system. They looked at each other for a long time and then kissed. It was a lock like two bonding cells in an animal. Their depth in their make out session became interrupted as they saw kids filing into the school. All seniors, they practiced the entrance to the ceremony to be held on the football field for the first time in almost three decades.

“I’m not sure about this.”

“About what?” Hazetta wondered.

“I mean we pick up the bricks and we move them but if we’re going to be graduating, who’s going to direct the young ones on the corner?”

“Wis can handle it.”

“Wis is almost eighty!”

“She’s still got spunk!”

“Alright, alright. We go in here…smelling loud!...and continue with our campaign to get these dollars. Hell, half of the cheerleading squad is on the powder. Since that is a fact, we owe it to ourselves to become even more engaged in the trade.” His economics major broadcast in the tenor of his tone.

“Good, good, good. But we have to remember that those boys on the corner––”

“And girl….” Boyler interrupted.

‘And girl…Vedretti is very much a part of this. If they continue on their course to making this money, we shouldn’t have to worry about it.”

“This is our way of showing that we’re ready to make that next step in this business and then we’ll be out completely,” Boyler reminded her.

“I’m just not about to go out like my father….”

“His situation was different; all you need to do is focus on what we’re doing right now. The eighties are over!”

“That’s true. What we should be leaning on is not the everlasting arm but the arms that protect us in these streets,” Hazetta acknowledged. She looked out her window at the sign that read “No Drug Zone” with a line going through an assortment of illicit materials. She grinned.

“This will be our final statement as students here. We’re going to keep going in order to make sure we have this on lock and not out of hand….” his voice sounded cryptic, almost furtive. It was like he was trying to hide an inner pain that pressed on his consciousness.

“I know,” Hazetta smirked.

“But what we have to contend with is the idea that these last few bricks are going to change our lives. We’re going to get our degrees and then find work, I mean literal work and then that’s it. Naw, I’m not really ready for that. Wis has been doing this for all these years. I’m still attached to the streets. I can’t shake it.” Boylston breathed a bit harder.

“It’s okay, baby. All we have to do is graduate high school and make your dad proud and make my momma proud.”

“We should be proud of ourselves.”

“That’s true.”

Her voice lowered a bit almost to a whisper like after a flame has gone out and just the faint trail of smoke remained, so did her voice.

“And also our addition….” Hazetta announced with calmness.

“I know you’re not talking about a baby….”

“I am,” she spoke with conviction.

“Well I’ll put whatever down to make that baby never arrive. I’ll put you in the stirrups myself. I thought you were pregnant. Goddamnit!”

“I’m having this baby. All we have to do is get married. We’ll be in school, but we’ll make it work.”

“No, there’s no baby in this picture. My dad raised me to be a man, I don’t think I’m at that point. I’m a coward, Haze.”

“You can do this. I know you can. We’ll be man and wife and have a junior or a little miss or twins! Think of that!” Her excitement belied the fact that her audience did not exude the same enthusiasm.

“I don’t want a baby. I can provide for it, but that’s a whole other issue.” The students poured out of the school like ants all in a line to go to the football field adjacent to the school.

“You go to the doctor and you get rid of that baby!”

“Why? Because you’re not man enough to take care of it? Because you don’t have what it takes to be a worthy parent. Are you unfit? Everyone always has an excuse but never wants to own up to anything. Sure, you’ll pay for me to stop the pregnancy, but you can’t man up and be a strong parent. Our times are tough but we’ve made money from this game together. They’ll never have to touch a brick. He or she will never have to get those things across state lines. We can build together. People do it all the time, have the baby and then get wedded. We can do this.”

“No we can’t and I’m telling you right now, you’re going to rid yourself of whatever little clump of cells that is growing on your body. I’m not going to entertain it any further. You see a doc and get rid of it and that’s the end of it.”

Hazetta didn’t burst into tears. She looked straight ahead at her classmates lining up in the order of their names. She kept that gaze for a long time as Boyler just leaned back and looked out the side window, silent but breathing heavily.

“I’m not giving up this baby. You can’t make me and I’m not about to do something I’ll regret for the rest of my days.”

“You’re going to stop it.” He pulled out a fat knot of hundred dollar bills and threw it in her face. “That should cover it.”

Stunned, Hazetta got out of her car and swung around to the passenger side. She possessed the strength to pull Boyler out of his seat and drag him away from the vehicle. She locked the car. Then, she returned to the driver’s seat, never minding her safety belt and turned over the engine. She put the car in drive and charged towards her fellow classmates. They saw her coming and dispersed quickly. She never hit anyone but she careened into the wall of the school, ejecting from the vehicle in the process.

Hazetta died on impact. Boyler ran to the scene but stopped short of seeing his girlfriend lifeless. In the week since the collision, Boyler had shook Mr. Boxwood’s hand in agreement to pay for all of the funerary costs.

“She was a fine young lady,” Boxwood opined.

“Yes, sir,” Boyler replied. Boxwood then journeyed over to the family.

Boyler looked down at his palms. They were big palms, open like ancient texts and holding history in them. A history that would not be found with a child from Hazetta.