After Tupac & D Foster Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Acknowledgements

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  A division of Penguin Young Readers Group.

  Published by The Penguin Group.

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario

  M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.).

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England.

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  New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd).

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa.

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.

  Copyright © 2008 by Jacqueline Woodson.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Woodson, Jacqueline. After Tupac and D Foster / Jacqueline Woodson. p. cm.

  Summary: In the New York City borough of Queens in 1996, three girls bond over their shared love of

  Tupac Shakur’s music, as together they try to make sense of the unpredictable world in which they live.

  [1. Coming of age—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Shakur, Tupac, 1971-1996—Fiction.

  4. African Americans—Fiction. 5. Queens (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.W84945Af 2008 [Fic]—dc22 2007023725

  eISBN : 978-1-101-17654-2

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Toshi Reagon and Jana Welch

  PROLOGUE

  The summer before D Foster’s real mama came and took her away, Tupac wasn’t dead yet. He’d been shot five times—two in the head, two down by his leg and thing and one shot that went in his hand and came out the other side and went through a vein or something. All the doctors were saying he should have died and were bringing other doctors up to his room to show everybody what a medical miracle he was. That’s what they called him. A Medical Miracle. Like he wasn’t even a real person. Like he was just something to be looked at and turned this way and that way and poked at. Like he wasn’t Tupac.

  D Foster showed up a few months before Tupac got shot that first time and left us the summer before he died. By the time her mama came and got her and she took one last walk on out of our lives, I felt like we’d grown up and grown old and lived a hundred lives in those few years that we knew her. But we hadn’t really. We’d just gone from being eleven to being thirteen. Three girls. Three the Hard Way. In the end, it was just me and Neeka again.

  The first time Tupac got shot, it was November 1994. Cold as anything everywhere in the city and me, Neeka, D and everybody else was shivering our behinds through the winter with nobody thinking Pac was gonna make it. Then, right after he had some surgery, he checked himself out of the hospital even though the doctors was trying to tell him he wasn’t well enough to be doing that. That’s when everybody around here started talking about what a true gangsta he was. At least that’s what all the kids were thinking. The churchgo ing people just kept saying he had God with him. Some of the parents were saying what they’d always been saying about him—that he was heading right to what he got because he was a bad example for kids, especially black kids like us. Crazy stuff about Tupac being a disgrace to the race and blah, blah, blah. The wannabe gangsta kids just kept saying Tupac was gonna get revenge on whoever did that to him.

  But when I saw Tupac like that—coming out of the hospital, all skinny and small-looking in that wheelchair, big guards around him—I remember thinking, He ain’t gonna try to get revenge on nobodyand he ain’t trying to be a disgrace to anybody either. Just trying to keep on. Even though he wasn’t smiling, I knew he was just happy and confused about still being alive.

  Went on like that all winter long, then February came and they sent Tupac to jail for some dumb stuff and people started talking about that—the negative peeps talking about that’s where he needed to be and all the rest of us saying how messed up the law was when you didn’t look and act like people thought you should.

  Spring came and Pac dropped his album from prison and this one song on it was real tight, so we all just listened to it and talked about how bad-ass Pac was—that he wasn’t even gonna let being in jail stop him from making his music. Me and Neeka and D had all turned twelve by then, but we still believed stuff—like that we’d grow up and marry beautiful rapper guys who’d buy us huge houses out in the country. We talked about how they’d be all crazy over us and if some other girl walked by who was fine or something, they wouldn’t even turn their heads to look because they’d be so in love with us and all. Stupid stuff like that.

  In jail, Pac started getting clear about thug life, saying it wasn’t the right thing. He got all righteousabout it and whatnot, and with all the rappers shooting on each other and stuff, it wasn’t hard to agree with him.

  Time kept passing on that way. Things and people changing. First, D turned thirteen, then me and Neeka were right there behind her—us all turning into teenagers, getting body, getting tall, boys acting stupid over us.

  Seems soon as we started settling into all that changing, D’s mama came—took her away from us.

  And time kept on creeping.

  Then Tupac went and died and it got me thinking about D. About the short time she was with us and about how you could know somebody real good but not know them at the same time. And it made me want to remember. Yeah, I guess that’s it. I guess that’s what I’m trying to do now. . . .

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Maybe, while he was in jail, Tupac started thinking about his Big Purpose. That’s what D called it—our Big Purpose. She said everybody’s got one and it’s just that we gotta figure out what it is and then go have it.

  The night she said it for the first time, it was late in the summer 1995 and we were all just hanging out—me, her and Neeka—watching music videos on TV. Before they started coming on regular, we’d have to watch the bootleg copies and sometimes those were so bad, we could hardly see the people in them. If it was a Tupac video, the only thing all the girls wanted to see real good was Tupac’s eyes. He had the prettiest eyes of any rapper—they were all big and sad-looking and he had dark eyebrows that were so thick, they made you think about soft things.

  That night, they showed “Brenda’s Got A
Baby,” one of Tupac’s old videos where Tupac sang about the young girl getting pregnant, and in the video Tupac was holding the baby because Brenda had put it in a garbage can. Me, Neeka and D was sitting on the floor in my living room. We’d put our money together and had enough for a small pizza and a liter of Pepsi. With a small pie, everybody could have at least two slices. D hadn’t eaten anything since school lunch, so her eyes got real wide when she realized how much we had.

  “Dag, my girls!” she said, her smile getting all big. “We gonna eat like we stupid tonight!”

  And we did. We’d each had our two slices and were working on the last two, passing the slices back and forth between us—me taking a bite, then passing it to Neeka, Neeka taking a bite, then passing it on to D. D had the slice when Tupac’s video came on.

  “They don’t hardly never be playing Pac,” she said. “It’s like they scared of him or something.”

  It was dark in the living room except for the blue light coming off the screen. D got real quiet and stopped eating. I could see the shiny line of pizza grease moving past her bony wrist and on down her arm.

  “Hey D,” Neeka said. “You babysitting that slice? Pass it on, girl.”

  But D just kept staring at the TV like she couldn’t hear anymore, holding the slice up, frozen in midair.

  “Forget about it,” I said. “I’m done anyway.”

  I leaned back against the couch. Tupac’s beautiful eyes came up close on the screen. His mouth moved slowly as he sang about Brenda never ever really having a chance in life. His eyes looked sad like he was really singing about the truth and somebody he knew real good. Maybe he was thinking about his own mama—how she’d been in jail when she was pregnant with him. Not because she’d done something real wrong or anything—just because she was in this militant group, the Black Panthers. Back in the day, the Black Panthers were always marching and trying to get things changed so that black people could live a little bit better—like they’re the reason there was free breakfast in school and stuff like that. Tupac’s mama had gotten arrested and when she went to jail, she started making changes there—making sure pregnant women had decent food so that their babies could be born healthy and all. Everybody who knew Tupac knew about his mama. He loved her more than anything. Maybe Tupac was singing about Brenda but really thinking about his own mama—how she could have just thrown him away but she didn’t. Instead, she made sure he was born healthy. And strong.

  “Him and me,” D said, real quiet. “It’s like we the same in some crazy way.”

  Neeka looked at me and made a face.

  “The only way you and him’s the same,” Neeka said, “is that you both Nee-groes. But you broke-ass and Tupac’s got some money in his pockets.”

  D kept staring at the TV. Tupac was walking slow with his boys all around. His head down. He was so beautiful, I felt like I could see Brenda inside of him. Like even though he was singing about a girl who threw her baby away, he was thinking about himself. Made me wonder if he was seeing himself as Brenda or the baby.

  “It’s like I look at him and I see myself. It’s like I’m looking in a mirror,” D said. She turned to the pizza slice she was holding, like she was just remembering it was there, then reached past Neeka. “Here,” she said, handing it to me. “I’m full.”

  “Me too,” I said, pushing the slice back at her. She dropped it into the empty pizza box, then took a napkin and wiped the oil off her arm.

  “You should just rub that in,” Neeka said.“Your arm’s all ashy.”

  “You hush!” D said. But she was smiling.

  “You still ain’t tell me what else you got in common with Tupac,” Neeka said.

  “Was your mama in jail like his mama?” I asked.

  D shook her head. She curled her fingers into her palm and stared down at them.

  “My mama is somewhere being somebody’s hot mess.”

  She got quiet for a minute. “He sings about things that I’m living, you know. When he be singing the ‘Dear Mama’ song, that makes me think about my own mama. It’s like his mama was a mess sometimes and he still loved her—people’s moms be all complicated, and it’s not like you got a bad mama or you got a good mama the way people be trying to judge and say.”

  D smiled.

  “It’s like he sees stuff, you know? And he knowsstuff. And he be thinking stuff that only somebody who knows that kinda living deep and true could know and think.”

  “Yeah,” Neeka said. “And he gets paid big dollars for those thoughts. That’s way, way, way different from us.”

  The Tupac video went off and Public Enemy came on. I couldn’t stand PE with their stupid big clocks around their necks and all that military stuff. It didn’t make any sense to me.

  Neeka and D didn’t like them either. I turned the sound down.

  “Y’all spending the night?” I asked.

  Neeka nodded but D shook her head.

  “Flo said she’d beat my behind if I didn’t come home.” She got up off the floor. Her foster mom’s name wasn’t Flo, we just called her that. Short for Foster Lady Orderly. It was real late for D to be taking the bus back to Flo’s house. She started putting on her sandals and getting her stuff together. We’d been friends for almost a year but we’d never seen where she lived.

  “We gonna walk you to the bus stop,” I said, getting up off the couch. “C’mon, Neeka.”

  “You sure lucky,” D said to Neeka.

  “For what?” Neeka stretched real high and yawned, her skinny brown belly showing out from under her T-shirt.

  “Just ’cause you get to spend the night.” D took a brush out of her pocketbook and brushed her hair. It was straightened, but Flo wouldn’t let her wear any styles except two cornrows or a whole lot of box braids. Whenever D got around our way, she took the cornrows out and just let her hair be free. But she always remembered to put it back like it was before she got on the bus.

  “You should just tell the crazy lady you almost grown,” Neeka said. “And then come around here and let me hook you up with some fly hair and some good fashion.”

  D stopped brushing. I clicked the TV off and turned on the light. We all squinted against the brightness.

  “Dag, girl,” Neeka said. “Give a sister a warning before you turn on a light.”

  “Why you always gotta say that, Neeka?” D was pointing the brush at her.

  “Say what?”

  “Tell me to go tell Flo about herself.”

  “ ’Cause you should.”

  “And then what?” D looked mad now. Her eyes were dark green—pretty in a strange way, like they should have been on somebody different but at the same time looking like they almost belonged to her. Her skin wasn’t brown like mine or light brown like Neeka’s—it was kinda tanbrown in that way that made people always ask her what she was mixed with. When she said, “I’m half black and half your mama!” me and Neeka would laugh and the person would either get mad or laugh too. D hated people asking what she was. Maybe because she didn’t know who her daddy was.

  Neeka rolled her eyes. “If you told Flo to kiss your butt, she’d see you was half grown and stop treating you like somebody’s baby.”

  “Last I heard, twelve wasn’t half grown—”

  “In six years, you’ll be eighteen,” Neeka said. “You eighteen, you legal.”

  “If I make itto eighteen. If I don’t act right, I’m out of the system and on my own. And probably homeless.I been in the system long enough to see how jacked up it is. Kids living in the streets because they couldn’t get along with their foster mamas. Kids all caught out there and whatnot. I am sonot trying to go down like that.” D put the brush in her bag and started braiding, her hands flying through her hair like she’d been braiding it for a hundred years.

  “Why you getting so tight about it, D? Dag. I was just saying.”

  D finished the first braid and started on the other one. “You my girl, Neeka, but you got your folks looking out for you.”

&
nbsp; Neeka started to say something, but D put her hand up.

  “Let me finish. You got that nice house and cute clothes and stuff. All I got right now is Flo, and if Flo says go, then I gotta go. I ain’t ready to be trying to figure out how to fit in with some other family somewhere. I’m just trying to fit in with Flo.”

  “She just trying to go with the Flo,” I said.

  D looked at me and smiled.

  “You corny,” Neeka said.

  D finished her other braid and looked at her watch—she’d bought it for ten dollars in Times Square, and most of the time it worked. She always wore it and was always checking it.

  We headed out. It was warm outside. Some grown-ups were sitting on their stairs across the street next door to Neeka’s house. We waved and they waved back. Neeka’s mama, Miss Irene, must have smelled us leaving, because she raised her window.

  “Neeka, where you all think you going this late?” she yelled across at us.

  Neeka rolled her eyes and cursed softly. “That woman’s got radar, yo!” she whispered. “We’re just walking D to the bus stop, Ma! Then I’m gonna sleep over at—”

  “Oh, now you’re tellingme what you’re going to do?” Miss Irene said. She must have been in the middle of doing her hair because half of it was straightened, hanging down to her shoulder, and the other half was curling above her ear.

  “Just go with the Flo,” D whispered.

  “Can I . . . ?”

  “You call me when you get back inside and we’ll talk about it,” Miss Irene said. “You be safe going home, D.”

  “I will, Miss Irene,” D said, and Miss Irene slid the window back down to meet the screen and disappeared into the house.

  We knew she’d let Neeka stay. For some reason, moms felt like they had to put on acts and let you know who had all the power.

  Neeka put her hands in her pockets and frowned all the way to the bus stop. But the minute we turned the corner, me and D started cracking up.