After Tupac and D Foster

The narrator enters the jail with Neeka and her family. She thinks about how loud the clicks, slams, and clanks of each gate are and how they lock immediately—you have to depend on someone else to unlock them and let you out. She imagines that the guard watching them is thinking that they better watch out, or they’ll be in jail, too.

While Neeka’s family visits Tash in jail, the narrator stays quiet and makes observations. She watches all of the different kinds of families visiting their loved ones. Tash is confident that he’ll be released in a few months, but his family is not as positive. He is playful and fun, but he has lost weight and is quick to warn Jayjones and the little boys that they better not ever end up in jail.

His behavior is flamboyant, and he sometimes refers to himself with she/her pronouns, which bothers his mother, especially when he does it in front of his little brothers. No one else seems to mind, though, and when Tash asks his mother, “Ain’t I good enough?” and pleads with her to “let me be this way” (101), she relaxes and agrees to let him be.

There is a photographer in the jail who will take pictures of families for five dollars. Tash asks if they want to take a picture, but his mother declines. She says that once he comes home, she never wants to remember or talk about this time that he spent in jail. They agree, and Emmett brings Tash some peanut M&Ms from the vending machine before they leave.

The narrator explains that Tash ended up in jail because of a young man named Sly. Tash fell in love with Sly, not knowing how manipulative and dangerous he was. Sly was charismatic and made Tash feel like he loved him, then took advantage of him.

An older man named Randall had taught Tash how to play the piano, and Tash was very talented. Randall, who lived in a fairly nice house, let Tash come over and play his piano. Sly convinced Tash to bring him over to Randall’s house one night. Tash was playing piano for Sly and Randall, when all of a sudden, another of Sly’s friends showed up. This friend and Sly beat Randall and Tash up and ransacked Randall’s house. When the police came, Randall was unconscious, and Sly told them that Tash had been involved in the assault and robbery too, so Tash, Sly, and Sly’s friend all went to jail. When Randall was awake again, he couldn’t remember the details of that night, so he couldn’t clear Tash’s name.

One evening, the narrator is walking home with Neeka and Jayjones when they find D sitting on the narrator’s doorstep. She asks if she can spend the night with the narrator and they wonder what happened with Flo, who usually demands that D be home by nine every night. D doesn’t tell them at first—she just says that Flo doesn’t own her.

D comes inside with Neeka and the narrator and eventually tells them what is happening. She explains how she had been in and out of foster care for a long time and was finally feeling secure and like she had a home with Flo. However, recently, D’s biological mother got back in touch, and Flo told D that she wanted to come back and get D. At this point, D trusts Flo and knows her better than she knows her actual mother, so she is shocked and hurt to find that Flo is so willing to let her go back to her mother. She feels as if she doesn’t really belong to either of the women. She begins to cry, and Neeka and the narrator console her, reassuring her that the three of them will always be a part of each other.

As summer ends, Neeka and the narrator go shopping for new clothes with their mothers. They are excited that Tash, who is scheduled to be released from jail, really will be coming home soon, but Neeka and the narrator haven’t heard from D in weeks and they hope she is okay. They feel strange that in such a short amount of time she went from being their best friend to disappearing without leaving a way to contact her.

While the girls are talking about D and the mothers are talking about Tash, the girls are trying clothes on, and everyone notices how much they have grown and changed over the last year.