Hood by Noire Page B

questions coming outta his mouth.
    It was Fat Daddy who had Moo buried a week later. He had sent a crew out looking for Marjay, but she must have been locked up because nobody had seen her on the streets and she ended up missing the boy’s funeral, just like she had missed almost every other event in his life.
    Hood’s heart was crushed. Reem and his mother came by the shop and cried with him. Dreko was there for him too, night and day, and so was Sackie. His boys didn’t crowd him or nothing, but they definitely let him know that their hearts was paining for him and Moo and that they had love for him like a brother. Moo had been their baby boy too.
    But something deep inside of Hood seemed to be permanently damaged after Moo’s death, and for the first time Fat Daddy allowed himself to feel for the boy. His grief was strong, almost overwhelming. But there was something else mixed in with it too, and Fat Daddy saw that shit real clear. It was rage. Aimed at life on these streets and at his mother, Marjay, too. Complete rage and utter helplessness. The kind of dangerous emotions that if not countered, can drive a man to commit an act he could wind up in jail for.
    Fat Daddy walked up on Hood in the small kitchen behind the shop late one night three days after Moo had been buried. He had eased downstairs and into the back room, lured by a sound that he had never heard before. The boy stood next to the microwave with his back to the door. His head was bent and his small shoulders shook as he cried from his natural soul.
    Fat Daddy never said a word. Instead he walked up behind Hood and put his arms around him, comforting him. To his surprise, Hood accepted his touch and didn’t pull away. Fat Daddy wasn’t father-figure material and wasn’t even trying to be. But he was the only man alive who could show Hood any real concern or affection. He held the boy and let him grieve.
    Regardless of the distance Fat Daddy had tried to keep between them, from that day forward Hood saw himself as Fat Daddy’s son. As much as it hurt him he’d had no choice but to say good-bye to his little brother, and while searching for a connection to fill up the emptiness left by Moo’s death, Hood rebuilt himself a family out of the people who were there for him in a major way every single day. Egypt became his soul mate and lover, Sackie became his closest confidant, and Dreko became his brother.

Chapter 11
    I can tell watchin her walk, what she workin with,
    Frame-fitted cat suit like Eartha Kitt…
    SACKIE HAD A sister named Zena. She was a blondie who liked to fuck. The two of them had been sent to Brownsville to live with their elderly grandfather when he was four and she was two years old, after their parents were killed in a boating accident. They were two blond-haired, blue-eyed white kids in a tough neighborhood overflowing with brown bodies. Quite often they stood out in a crowd, but they were just kids and Brownsville was the only home the pair had ever known.
    Sackie and Zena attended the mostly black and Hispanic schools in their neighborhood, and by the time they were in the third and fifth grades the fact that they were geographical minorities was no longer easy to ignore.
    While Sackie was big for his age and had been quick to join up with the dominant click and earn himself a rep as a white boy who had mad fist skills, Zena had always been shy and hesitant and very insecure. Her timid demeanor made her an easy target for the chicks in the hood who felt superior to her, and whose impressions of white people in general were already mostly negative and contemptuous.
    But it didn’t take long for Zena to figure out something that the black girls in the hood didn’t like and definitely didn’t care to admit: Zena had a nice plump ass and brothers wanted to fuck her. Yeah, she knew the guys weren’t all up in her face because she was brilliant and popular or anything, because she really wasn’t. She had gotten the looks in the