Page 26 of Stay Dangerous

“Alvarez? Y’all Blaxican?”

A laugh erupted from my chest, making her smile broader. She couldn’t have been thinking before she spoke.

“My daddy side is Belizean. I can speak Spanish, though.”

“Oh, yeah? Say something,” she said, shifting in her seat.

“Eres única de especie, Nieve,” I blurted without thinking.

“Okay,” she drawled. “What does that mean?”

I grinned. “You ain’t earn that yet. You hungry?” I for sure wasn’t going to tell her I said she was one of a kind. It didn’t matter how she had me feeling, the fact of the matter was I just met her, and I could never show my hand like that.

“I thought we were friends, Rico?”

“Webestfriends, Snow,” I confirmed. “You still gotta earn it.”

I ended up taking Snow to this taco spot in South East and got us a tray of different tacos before going back to the view. We hopped in the backseat and ate, before I threw away the trash in one of the residential trashcans and got back inside with her. The street was quiet, and from the back, we could see the twinkling lights of the city.

I took out my phone again and finally sifted through the different messages muthafuckas was leaving on my instant messenger.

“How you get the new iPhone?” she squealed, snatching it from my hands. She exited out the instant messaging app, not caring about what anyone was telling me, and started playing with the home screen.

“Why? You want one?”

She froze briefly, before her head slowly craned toward me. “Stop playing, Rico.”

“I told you, Snow. I’m rockin’, and you rollin’. Say you want one and I’ll get you one.”

She shook her head before handing my phone back to me. “You arenota normal fourteen year-old.”

I shrugged, glancing at my trap phone before pulling out my earphones for my iPhone. “I’m one of one.”

After detangling my earphones, I plugged them in and offered her one. She took it eagerly, placing it in her ear closest to me and settling into the backseat.

“Your playlist better be good or I’m judging you.”

“I bet,” I chuckled, scrolling for the perfect song. “You be having songs on your page I’ve never even heard of.”

“I be friending rappers and singers on MyRoom, and they be putting me on–ooh! Good choice, Rico. I approve.”

I smiled in the dark as Nothing Even Matters began to play in our ears. I couldn't find the version I wanted on any of thetorrent sites I had for downloading music, so I finally had just went into Ma’s room and got her Lauryn Hill CD.

I didn’t know why that song had been stuck in my head since I first saw Snow. But in the back of my whip, letting D’Angelo and Lauryn serenade us, it fell into place.

I didn’t think females could be as cool as she was. I had to bite my lips to keep my life story from leaking out. I wanted to tell her about Ma, and Nan, and Pooh. I wanted to tell her how I was more afraid of living without Fredo than dying. Or how the first time I cried this year was after I had a nightmare that Ty-Ty got killed over gang politics after I found out he got put on.

I wanted to press her about Set and his friend Turk. Did they know how cool she was? Was she listening to music with them?

She probably thought I was playing when I called her my best friend. But in that backseat, she did become something to me. Especially when she put her earbud in her other ear to lay on my shoulder.

I closed my eyes to savor the feeling. That was the first time I ever hung out with a female and didn’t have sex with her. I wasn’t on that with her when I asked to pull up, but I didn’t expect sex to be the furthest thing from my mind when she got in my presence.

It actually traded places with the last thing on my mind; peace. Peace took over, and pulled me under, as I grounded myself to the weight of Snow’s head on my arm.

My eyes popped open and scoped the scene. I was horizontal now, sprawled out on the backseat of my car. It wasn’t the first or second time I slept there, but my mind was slow as hell, anddetails of the night before were lost. When I shifted to grab my trap phone, I heard a groan, and that’s when I realized someone was laying on me.

Intricate red cornrows lay on my chest. Her arms were around me, and tightened when I moved again to grab my phone off the floor.