After two days of not being able to find his ass, I picked Nikia up from the sofa, took Ashley by the hand, and got on the city bus to go to Derrick’s apartment, where he lived with his new girlfriend, Poochie.
Derrick moved in with Poochie after his wife Evaleen finally cut him loose for having too many extramarital kids. She had put up with his cheating when the only baby-on-the-side he had was Ashley. But when Derrick got me pregnant with Nikia, and at the same time got Celeste pregnant, Evaleen kicked Derrick to the curb. Then Celeste stopped messing with him, too. I thought for sure Derrick was gonna move in with me after those two told him “bye.” But instead Poochie came outta nowhere and jumped the line.
It hurt my feelings that Derrick wanted to live with Poochie instead of me. But he told me Poochie “don’t-mean-a-thing” every time he came over to see me. He kissed my neck and told me I was special. I believed him because I wanted it to be true.
At his apartment, I knocked on the front door and waited for Poochie to answer. “Hey, Rabbit,” she said. “How you doin’?”
When I told her I was looking for Derrick, her eyes got wide. “Nobody told you?” she asked, shaking her head. Derrick had gotten busted. The cops had been watching his ass and caught him with money in his trunk and dope in his fanny pack. They were holding him at Fulton County Jail. “He don’t even have a bond yet,” said Poochie. “No telling when he’ll get out.”
All that night and into the next day, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, trying to get a plan together. How was I supposed pay my bills without Derrick? I had no money, two kids, no job, and a three hundred and fifty dollar a month apartment I couldn’t afford on two hundred and thirty-five dollars in welfare. I had just gotten used to not having to worry every second of the day, and now I was even worse off than before. I lay in bed, tossing and turning, trying to figure something out. When the answer finally hit me, it was so perfect I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before. I got out of bed and called my best friend, Stephanie. She had a car and I was gonna need a ride.
“You sure you know what you’re doing?” Stephanie asked. The two of us were sitting in her Camry outside my apartment, with Ashley and Nikia in the backseat sucking on Blow Pops to keep them quiet. Stephanie had promised to drive me where I needed to go, but instead she was giving me the third degree.
“You sure you got this?” she asked again.
“Yeah.”
“So you don’t want to ask Shine?”
“Nah,” I said. “I’m good. I seen Derrick do it a million times.”
“Okay . . .” Stephanie turned the key in her ignition. But I could tell by the look on her face she wasn’t convinced.
I tried to sound confident: “I got this.”
Stephanie and I had been friends ever since the day I saw her standing at the corner pay phone. She was wearing red pants, matching red flats, a yellow top, and big-ass door-knocker earrings. “I like your outfit,” I said. She was so vain, that’s all it took for us to hit it off.
Stephanie was twenty-two—seven years older than me—with three kids and another on the way. Most girls in her situation would have been struggling, but Stephanie had a very strict “no broke niggas” policy, which meant she and her kids were always taken care of. Her drug-dealing boyfriend, Shine, wasn’t a low-level corner boy like Derrick. He was big time, slinging dope over at Techwood Homes, a huge complex of low-rise public housing apartments filled with folks looking to forget their troubles or, as Shine called them, “good customers.” Shine was the one who bought Stephanie her car.
“So you gonna spend your whole welfare?” she asked as we pulled away from the curb.
“Yeah.”
“All of it?”
“Yeah,” I said again. “Plus the fifteen dollars you’re gonna lend me.”
“Okay,” she said, laughing. “You better not fuck this up.”
The plan was simple. I had $235 from my welfare check that I cashed at the Super Saver, plus fifteen dollars from Stephanie. That was just enough for me to buy a quarter ounce of dope from Markee. If I chopped that quarter into fifty rocks and sold each rock for ten dollars, I would make five hundred dollars, enough to cover my rent with a little extra to spare.
I’d never seen a girl selling dope before, but how hard could it be? I’d been out with Derrick when he worked his corner and, by the looks of it, you just had to stand around and wait for business to come to you.
We drove over to Markee’s mama’s house in Ben Hill. She lived on a quiet street where folks kept their porches tidy and nobody dumped their old refrigerator in the yard. It didn’t look like the kind of place you’d find a stash house, but I guess that was the point. Stephanie pulled over to the curb and I paged Markee. Somebody in the front room of his mama’s house pulled back a corner of the window curtain. I gave a nod and Markee came right out.
“Hey, Rabbit,” he said, waving to Nikia and Ashley in the backseat. “The kids are getting big. That little boy look just like his daddy.”
“Yeah, he sure do,” I agreed. When I told Markee what I’d come for—to buy myself a quarter ounce—he raised his eyebrows.
“You got money?”
“Yeah, I got it right here.”
He held out his hand like we were gonna shake, and I slid the bills into his palm. Markee glanced up and down the street, checking for cops, then went back inside. When he returned to the car, he slid me a white disc, a little bigger than a silver dollar, neatly wrapped in a Ziploc bag, folded over and stapled shut.
“Be careful,” he warned. “I mean it, Rabbit. You got those kids to take care of. Don’t do nothing stupid.”
Stephanie and I had one more stop to make, at a convenience store called the BusStop. From the outside it looked like a regular corner store, with soda, chips, toilet paper, and tube socks hanging in the dusty window. But when you stepped inside, the place was like a Walmart for crack dealers. Underneath the glass counter and on shelves behind the register was everything you could ever need to cook, bag, sell, and smoke rock: triple-beam scales, baking soda, glass pipes, and sacks in every size, from one-inch dime bags to one-gallon Ziplocs. I bought a bundle of a hundred small sacks, a pack of Pace single-edge razor blades, and a box of sandwich bags. Then we headed back to my place.
At home, I gave Nikia a bottle and sat him on the sofa beside Stephanie, who was busy flipping through channels, while I got to work. The trick was to cut that piece into fifty rocks, all of them about the size of my pinkie fingernail. If I chopped them too big, I’d lose my profit. If the rocks were too small, nobody would buy them. I pulled a dinner plate from the cabinet, set it on the kitchen table, and unwrapped my product. With a razor blade in one hand, I turned the piece over, trying to figure out where to make the first cut.
“Don’t make them rocks too big, girl,” Stephanie said, looking over from the sofa.