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Now, she had the math test to tackle. She didn't enjoy calc much but she knew the material, she'd studied, she had the equations nailed cold.
"Girlfriend!" Lakeesha fell into step beside her. "Damn, you still here?" Her eyes were wide. "You nearly got your own ass killed this morning and you don't stress it none. That some mad shit, girl."
"Gum. You sound like you're cracking a whip."
Keesh kept right on snapping, which Geneva knew she would.
"You got a A already. Why you need to take them tests?"
"If I don't take those tests, it won't be an A."
The big girl glanced at Detective Bell with a frown. "You ask me, you oughta be out looking for that prick done attack my girlfriend here."
"We've got plenty of people doing that."
"How many? And where they be?"
"Keesh!" Geneva whispered.
But Mr. Bell gave a faint smile. "Plenty of 'em."
Snap, snap.
Geneva asked her friend, "So, how'd the WC test go?"
"The world ain't civilized. The world fucked up."
"But you didn't skip?"
"Told you I'd go. Was def, girl. I was all on it. Pretty sure I got myself an C. Least that. Maybe even an B."
"Funny."
They came to an intersection of hallways and Lakeesha turned to the left. "Later, girl. Call me in the p.m."
"You got it."
Geneva laughed to herself as she watched her friend steam through the halls. Keesh seemed like any other fine, hooked-up, off-the-rack homegirl, with her flashy skintight outfits, scary nails, taut braids, cheap bling. Dancing like a freak to L.L. Cool J, Twista and Beyonce. Ready to jump into fights--even going right in the face of gangsta girls (she sometimes carried a box cutter or a flick knife). She was an occasional DJ who called herself Def Mistress K when she spun vinyl at school dances--and at clubs too, where the bouncers chose to let her pass for twenty-one.
But the girl wasn't quite as ghetto as she fronted. She'd wear the image the way she'd put on her crazy nails and three-dollar extensions. The clues were obvious to Gen: If you listened closely you could tell that standard English was her first language. She was like those black stand-up comics who sound like homies in their act but they get the patter wrong. The girl might say, "I be at Sammy's last night." But somebody really talking ebonics--the new politically correct phrase was "African-American vernacular English"--wouldn't say that; they'd say "I was at Sammy's." "Be" was only used for ongoing or future activity, like "I be working at Blockbuster every weekend." Or: "I be going to Houston with my aunt next month."
Or Keesh would say, "I the first one to sign up." But that wasn't AAVE, where you never dropped the verb "to be" in the first person, only the second or third: "He the first one to sign up" was right. But to the casual listener, the girl sounded bred in the hood.
Other things too: A lot of project girls bragged about perping merch from stores. But Keesh'd never lifted so much as a bottle of fingernail polish or pack of braids. She didn't even buy street jewelry from anybody who might've fiended it from a tourist, and the big girl was fast to whip out her cell phone and 911 suspicious kids hanging around apartment lobbies during "hunting season"--the times of the month when the welfare, ADC or social security checks started hitting the mailboxes.
Keesh paid her way. She had two jobs--doing extensions and braids on her own and working the counter in a restaurant four days a week (the place was in Manhattan, but miles south of Harlem, to make sure she wouldn't run into people from the neighborhood, which would blow her cover as the DJing bling-diva of 124th Street). She spent carefully and socked away her earnings to help her family.
There was yet one other aspect of Keesh that set her apart from many girls in Harlem. She and Geneva were both in what was sometimes called the "Sistahood of None." Meaning, no sex. (Well, fooling around was okay, but, as one of Geneva's friends said, "Ain't no boy putting his ugly in me, and that's word.") The girls had kept the virgin pact she and Geneva had made in middle school. This made them a rarity. A huge percentage of the girls at Langston Hughes had been sleeping with boys for a couple of years.
Teenage girls in Harlem fell into two categories and the difference was defined by one image: a baby carriage. There were those who pushed buggies through the streets and those who didn't. And it didn't matter if you read Ntozake Shange or Sylvia Plath or were illiterate, didn't matter if you wore orange tank tops and store-bought braids or white blouses and pleated skirts . . . if you ended up on the baby carriage side, then your life was headed in a way different direction from that of girls in the other category. A baby wasn't automatically the end of school and a profession but it often was. And even if not, a carriage girl could look forward to a heartbreakingly tough time of it.
Geneva Settle's inflexible goal was to flee Harlem at the very first opportunity, with stops in Boston or New Haven for a degree or two and then on to England, France or Italy. Even the slightest risk that something like a baby might derail her plan was unacceptable. Lakeesha was lukewarm about higher education but she too had her ambitions. She was going to some four-year college and, as a coal-savvy businesswoman, take Harlem by storm. The girl was going to be the Frederick Douglass or Malcolm X of Uptown business.
It was these common views that made sistas of these otherwise opposite girls. And like most deep friendships the connection ultimately defied definition. Keesh put it best once by waving her bracelet-encrusted hand, tipped in polka-dotted nails, and offering, in a proper use of AAVE's third-person-singular nonagreement rule, "Wha-ever, girlfriend. It work, don't it?"
And, yeah, it did.
Geneva and Detective Bell now arrived at math class. He stationed himself outside the door. "I'll be here. After the test, wait inside. I'll have the car brought 'round front."
