Let Me Hear a Rhyme Read online

  Quadir blinked. “Huh?”

  “Steph said he had a part-time job at this shipping company. I went by there to pick up his last check, but they never heard of him. But that don’t make sense because Steph was giving Mom money, and some nights he’d even come home late.”

  Jarrell and Quadir share a quick look.

  “Nah, I don’t know nothing about no job,” Jarrell says, rubbing the back of his head.

  They know something. Something that may help me find out what really happened to Steph. But I can’t go searching for answers alone.

  “Alright. I’m in.”

  The boys grin. “Aight! Yo, thanks, Jazz!”

  “But under one condition. Y’all have to help me find out who killed Steph.”

  Jarrell waves his arms. “What? Aw, hell nah.”

  Quadir tries a softer touch. “Jazz, I don’t think that’s such a good idea. We don’t want to go barking up the wrong tree or nothing.”

  “But we have to try, right? Somebody gotta know something. I can’t just move on like Steph didn’t exist. He would do it for me. He would do it for you!”

  Quadir swallows, rubbing his hands together. It’s something I picked up on when he’s thinking hard. Jarrell clears his throat with a sharp nod.

  “Uh, Quady, can I see you in my office?”

  “Be right back,” Quadir says with an uneasy smile, and follows Jarrell into the kitchen, where their whispers echo off the hanging pots and pans.

  “Son, no way,” Jarrell starts.

  “Yo, just chill, b. How else you expect to get Steph’s stuff?”

  “Psst! I don’t know, but not like this!”

  “We can’t just try?”

  “What you gonna do, Inspector Gadget? You and Pink Panther in there gonna run around the hood playing Law and Order?”

  “So who you plan on being? Scooby-Doo?”

  “Son, this shit ain’t funny. We cruising for a bruising even considering this shit. Mess around, and we gonna end up just like Steph! Nah. Nope. Negative. Not happening.”

  Quadir took a deep breath. “Jazz is right, though. He’d do it for us.”

  Jarrell grumbles. “Aight. But we got to keep this on the low low for real, though.”

  “No doubt.”

  The boys walk back into the living room.

  “Aight, Jazz. You got a deal, but with limits. We’ll ask around if anyone knows . . . anything.”

  “Cool.” It’s a start.

  “Okay, so if you could just hand over Steph’s music, we’ll bounce and get to work.”

  Before I even realize, I’m up on my feet, blood surging.

  “Hand what over? Whoa . . . y’all really thought you were gonna do this without me? Nah. We in this together.”

  “We good, Jazz, we got it covered.”

  I shake my head. “I know my brother’s music better than anyone. You need me.”

  “Yo, this ain’t no game,” Jarrell grumbles. “Shit could get real out here, and we can’t have some girl slowing us . . .”

  “Oh, so you don’t think chicks can hold it down?”

  Jarrell rolls his eyes. “Here. We. Go. Not chicks . . . girls! You just turned fifteen.”

  “And! What my age got to do with pushing music?”

  Quadir, always the peacemaker, tries it. “Jazz . . . I don’t think you . . .”

  “That’s right, you DON’T think. ’Cause if y’all even think you doing this without me, you tripping. I ain’t no little kid, and you ain’t messing with MY brother’s music without me. So stop with the bullshit, and let’s get to work.”

  I storm down the hall to Steph’s room, before hearing Jarrell chuckle.

  “What you laughing at?”

  “Hmph. She tooolllddd you!”

  “Man, shut up and come on.”

  No one has stepped foot in Steph’s bedroom since the funeral. Untouched, the door creaks like a crypt when I open it, light blazing through the small window. Someone built some type of invisible glass force field that won’t let me pass the threshold. My muscles ache to take a step, but my bones froze to the floor.

  The boys join me a few moments later, smart-ass tongues locked to the roof of their mouths, taking in the neatly made bed, the book bag hanging on the back of the chair, and the dust floating in the air, all from the safety of the hallway.

  A roach the size of a tic-tac crawls up Snoop Dog’s face. Jarrell takes two quick strides, brushes it onto the floor, and gives it one stomp with his massive foot.

  “Nah, can’t let homie disrespect Snoop like that!”

  And just like that, the force field is broken, and we tiptoe inside. The room feels smaller. Steph surrounded us with his scent, mixed in with the stale air, clogging up our noses and my eyes water.

  Don’t cry. Don’t let them see you cry.

  I pinch my arm and clear him out of my throat.

  Quadir takes one look at me, then opens a window, letting a breeze run in.

  “Close it,” I snap, my voice scratchy. If we leave it open, his scent will vanish, and I can’t take losing my brother again.

  Quadir and Jarrell glance at each other. They’re having second thoughts. I sure am.

  “Um, he keeps . . . kept . . . all his music under his bed in shoeboxes.”

  They turn to the bed, the comforter dangling off the side kissing the floor, and gulp.

  “Aight,” Jarrell says. “Let’s see what we got.” Jarrell lifts the edge of the comforter, then throws it back, gasping at the assortment of shoeboxes packed underneath, nearly lifting the bed off its legs.

  “Damnnnn!” the boys shout.

  I’ll admit, I only expected to see a few boxes, not a whole shoe store.

  “Three stacked up, six across, at least three deep,” Jarrell says, doing the math in his head. “Son, that’s fifty-four shoeboxes!”

  “And this is all music?” Quadir asks me.

  “No, I think some of it is his journals and rhyme books. Maybe magazines and comics.”

  Jarrell kneels to the floor and quickly pulls out boxes one by one. Quadir helps, scattering them around the room. I sit cross-legged by the window and grab one, lifting off the lid. A box of black-and-white composition notebooks, the edges colored, some folded, others with sheets ripped and sticking out sideways.

  “Yo, this kid was a beast,” Jarrell chuckles, sitting next to the bed, a box on his lap. He lifts a tape and shakes his head. “Some of these date back to the sixth grade!”

  Quadir laughs from the opposite side of the room with a box of Vibe magazines, Steph’s favorite pages folded.

  “He’s been collecting these for almost six years. Like, when we were in elementary school!”

  We spent almost an hour opening boxes, shouting out the inventory: tapes, CDs, journals, Spider-Man comic books, all tucked away and surprisingly organized.

  “Son, we got enough for like . . . ten tapes at least,” Jarrell laughs.

  “We gotta go through them, pick the best ones,” Quadir says, his nose in a journal. “Yo, listen to this. . . .”

  Words from the Blind Soldier

  The soldier I knew well,

  He wouldn’t talk but he always answered.

  I would read his blind eyes.

  He would nod. . . . I asked him in abundance,

  How could a Blind Soldier enter a war?

  How would he know what he was fighting for?

  How would he know if he was fighting for wrong or right?

  How could he understand the struggle between Evil & Righteous?

  Would he still be a soldier?

  When his eyes read nothing he asked me . . .

  “Would you?”

  “Damn. That’s deep,” Jarrell says, pensive. “I didn’t know Steph could write like that.”

  “Neither did I,” Quadir mumbles, glancing across the room at me, searching my face before reaching for another box.

  “Oh snap, check it,” he laughs, dangling a porn magazine like a carrot in f
ront of an ass. “I found his sticky pages.”

  “Aye. Give me that!” Jarrell says, ripping the magazine out of his hands and grabbing the box. “I’ll take those. Youngins like you don’t need to be seeing all this.”

  I let out a chuckle lifting the lid off an Adidas box before my heart hiccups out my mouth and splats on the floor. Quadir turns to me, still laughing.

  “Hey, Jazz, what’s that? Condoms?”

  With a mouth full of cotton, I don’t know what to say. My shaky hands can’t hold the box steady.

  Quadir crawls across the floor, still laughing.

  “What’s up? Let’s see what we got,” he says, leaning to peer over the half-open lid before his head pops up to look at me. Jarrell’s too busy checking out girls’ titties to notice our dead silence.

  Inside a large ziplock bag, the kind of bag that Mom marinates chicken in, is at least a hundred mini vials of crack with red caps. Lying on top of the bag like a paperweight is a black gun and a red Motorola beeper.

  Quadir’s shock matches mine, which means he had no idea either. I open my mouth, eager to defend Steph against whatever Quady could be thinking about my brother. But the words are stuck and tangled up in fast-growing questions. Steph? A hustler? He wouldn’t.

  “Yo, what’s in that one?” Jarrell asks behind us.

  Quadir and I lock eyes. Panicking, I shake my head slightly.

  Please. Please don’t tell. I don’t want anyone to know.

  Quadir takes a breath, grabs the beeper, and closes the lid.

  “Nothing man. Just some old sneakers.”

  Jarrell shrugs, continuing to flip through his magazine.

  He gives me a once-over and crawls back to his side of the room.

  I push the box back under the bed, wondering how I can unsee what I’ve seen.

  “Hey. Look what I found in this box,” Quadir says, holding up the beeper.

  “Yo, when did he get one of these?” Jarrell asks, grabbing it out of Quadir’s hand. “Your mom bought him one?”

  “Nah. He must have found it or something,” I say, playing along with Quadir’s story.

  “This shit is like new. Looks like he missed a bunch of calls and codes. 343. 044. 943. 943. Again, 943.”

  “What’d all those mean?”

  “Well, 343 means call back. 044 means Thursday. 943 means where you at? Last one says 911,” Jarrell says.

  “Emergency,” Quadir mumbles, shooting me a look. “Someone was definitely looking for him.”

  I swallow, trying to keep a brave face.

  “Well, we should keep this,” Jarrell says. “Use it, in case anyone wants to contact us about Steph’s music.”

  “Can I hold it? Just in case anyone tries to call him. They might not know he’s . . . gone and I want to be the one to tell them.”

  “Who else besides us would hit him?”

  Quadir’s jaw tightens, ignoring Jarrell. “What if someone hits him thinking he’s still alive. May owe them money or something.”

  “Why would he owe anybody money?” Jarrell barks, outraged.

  Quadir glances my way again and it hits me: if Steph really was hustling, he wasn’t working alone. He would’ve had to answer to somebody to get that product. Maybe he owed that somebody money and that’s why they killed him. But it doesn’t make sense. Steph had no reason to sell drugs, ever.

  “I’ll be careful,” I promise, grabbing it from Jarrell.

  Jarrell left with some of the tapes to transfer to CD, leaving Quadir and me alone to make the track list. I brought him out into the living room just in case Mom came home early. I don’t know what she would’ve been mad at more: the fact that we was in Steph’s room, messing with his stuff, or that I was in a room alone with a boy. Even if it’s just Quady.

  “Aight, so I think we should decide what kind of rapper we want Steph to be.”

  Quadir sits on the floor, leaning against the sofa, sorting through Steph’s CDs while I use my science notebook to take inventory.

  “What you mean ‘kind of rapper’?”

  “Steph got a large catalog. And if we gonna put him on the map, we gotta decide if he’s gonna be an underground rapper like Mos Def, a conscious rapper like Nas, a gangsta rapper like Dr. Dre, or a crossover, like Puff Daddy. That way we know who we aiming for. And that’s how record labels will find him.”

  “Why can’t he be all of them? I mean, Biggie did it! On Life After Death, he had tracks that touched everything. ‘Hypnotize’ was for the club, ‘Ten Crack Commandments’ was for the goons, and ‘Going Back to Cali’ was for the West Side.”

  “Yeah, but you talking about his second album. What really put Big on the map was ‘Juicy’ from Ready to Die. But . . . you onto something, though!” He hops to his feet and starts pacing. “We need to attract the shorties. That’s what Big did with ‘One More Chance.’ And chicks be loving rappers who gonna bark at them like DMX or lick they lips like LL Cool J. If we get the chicks, the fellas will follow.”

  Dag, I’m kind of disappointed Quadir thinks so little of women. We don’t all want those type of guys. Some of us want someone we can keep it real with.

  “Steph would’ve wanted to show everyone all his skills,” I say.

  Quadir stops pacing and crawls back on the floor.

  “Well, how about we do a ‘A side, B side’ type thang. A side will be all his bangers, B side, the hood shit. Good?”

  “Yeah. That’ll work.”

  I tear out a sheet of paper and divide it into two, labeling each side A and B as Quadir sorts through the CDs.

  “Aight, so this pile over here is the party hits, this pile over here is that real hip-hop shit, and this pile . . . I don’t even know.”

  “Definitely this one for side B,” I grabbed a CD from unknown pile. “He sampled that Black Moon ‘I Got Cha Opin’ beat. Then you got to add this one too. Steph murdered that Smif-N-Wessun’s ‘Bucktown.’ Oh, and this one, he has that Gang Starr flow.”

  He smirks. “What you know about Gang Starr?”

  “Why can’t I know about Gang Starr?”

  He laughs, leaning back on his elbows. “I don’t know. ’Cause you a girl!”

  Steph must not have told him how we practiced together, how we spent nights studying tracks on HOT 97, how Steph been grooming me for the ring.

  So I close my eyes and spit a few bars of “Above the Clouds,” letting the words slice out and fill the room. Haven’t rapped anything since Steph died. It feels . . . good, but my heart aches when I open my eyes and Steph isn’t there.

  Only Quadir, with his mouth hanging open. “Damn! You got flow, Ma!”

  First time anyone called me “Ma” like a real compliment.

  “Thanks,” I mumble, shying away from his stare. “You really think this is gonna work?”

  “I don’t know. Music is kinda funny.”

  “How so?”

  “Seems like everybody’s trying to get on nowadays, there’s so much of it. Music from the East, the West, even the South with Master P and Silkk the Shocker.”

  “You right. It’s a whole bunch of different instruments in the band room making noise. Hard to hear the clarinet over the trumpet.”

  “Yeah like that!” He laughs. “Yo, it’s mad cool you doing this, Jazz.”

  “Well, yeah. He’s my brother. I mean . . . was . . . my brother.”

  My mouth feels stiff. I have a hard time talking about him in the past.

  Quady smiles. “Nah, Jazz, he’ll always be your brother. Always.”

  I swallow. “Well, he was . . . good. He ain’t did nothing to nobody for them to kill him! He ain’t never stole or hustle or . . .”

  Quadir shoots me a look, and a lump lodges in my throat. Neither of us is ready to talk about that box under his bed.

  He jumps to his feet again, heading to the stereo.

  “Hey . . . it’s uh . . . it’s mad quiet in here. How about some music?”

  “Um, yeah. Sure.”

  “Let�
��s see what y’all got.”

  Lauryn Hill was still on heavy rotation. The next track that played: “Every Ghetto, Every City.”

  Quadir laughs. “Ha! Figured you rocked with L-Boogie. Chicks at school love the album!”

  I ain’t feeling him trying to throw me in the category with all them other girls that be sweating him.

  “What, you not feeling it too?” I ask, meeting him at the stereo.

  “Nah, this joint is tight! I like that she can sing and spit bars. When she was still with the Fugees, she was killing them.” He smiles. “Softly.”

  “Rell’s right, you do have some corny jokes,” I laugh. “But nah, for real though, girls got bars. Not just L-Boogie.”

  “I know! Lil’ Kim’s Hard Core was fire!”

  I roll my eyes. “I mean, I guess. If you like those sort of chicks.”

  “What you mean by ‘those sort of chicks’?”

  “You know, the ones who gotta be extra sexy for you to listen to them, and they ain’t saying nothing of . . . substance.”

  “Oh, they saying a lot. You just not listening close enough.”

  “Nah, I mean ladies who are really saying something. Like Lady of Rage, MC Lyte, or Queen Pen. You ever listen to Queen Latifah? She talks about woman equality. Kim ain’t saying nothing, just talking about sex.”

  He shrugs. “So. What’s wrong with sex?”

  And just at that moment, the next song plays: “Nothing Even Matters” featuring D’Angelo. The most romantic song on the entire album. It starts with this real pretty piano before the drums kick in that remind me of hearts fluttering, and Lauryn sings . . .

  Now the skies could fall

  Not even if my boss should call

  The world it seems so very small

  ’Cause nothin’ even matters, at all . . .

  Quadir’s ears perk up as he stares at the speakers.

  “Damn,” he mumbles. “I ain’t hear this one yet. This is . . . nice. I mean, like, beautiful.”

  The room shrinks, heat cranking up to a million.

  “Um, yeah. It’s nice.”

  We listen in silence, just the two of us, and the whole world fades away. Like nothing really matters . . . except us. Quadir looks at me, his eyes softening, and I swear I could melt right into them.