A Girl From Flint Read online

  Ray looked back at Lisa and her swollen belly and felt an agonizing pain in his heart. He might spend the rest of his life in jail for a crime he didn’t commit. He felt tears well up in his eyes as he mouthed the words, “I love you,” to her.

  Lisa looked into Ray’s eyes and began to cry. She knew that the chances were slim for him to get off. She gripped the bench she was sitting on. Please God, let them find him not guilty. Please! I need him, she prayed as the jury deliberated in a private room.

  Half an hour later, the jury returned to the courtroom with the verdict. An overweight old white man stood up and looked into Raymond’s eyes and said, “We the jury, find the defendant, Raymond J. Parks, guilty of murder in the second degree, and guilty of strong-armed robbery.”

  Lisa screamed when the verdict was pronounced.

  Ray dropped his head as the guards came over to escort him out of the courtroom. He looked at his attorney. “That’s it? You said you could beat this case. I’m innocent, man. I’m innocent.”

  His attorney looked at him, shrugged his shoulders, and gave a sly smile. “We’ll file an appeal.”

  Ray knew that his chances of winning the appeal would be just as slim as his chances of winning the trial. He looked at Lisa as they carried him out of the courtroom. “I love you,” he mouthed again as the guards handcuffed him.

  Lisa felt so much pain in her heart. She just stood there and watched her only love leave her life. Helpless, she didn’t know what to do. Ray was going to prison, and there was nothing she could do to stop it from happening. She was so distraught, she couldn’t control herself. She felt her dress become soaked and thought she had peed on herself. She felt liquid run down her legs, and then realized it wasn’t urine. Her water had broken. “I’m going into labor!” she screamed to Ray just as the guards took him from her sight.

  Her mother told her to sit down, and then called a guard over for help.

  Later that evening, Tasha Parks was born. It was the worst day of Lisa’s life. The love of her life had been convicted of murder, and ironically, their child was born on the same day.

  Lisa was depressed for months and cried herself to sleep every night with her newborn baby in her arms.

  Ray left behind a house and some money in the bank, so she supported herself and her daughter with that.

  Lisa visited Ray as soon as they let her. He had grown a beard and walked to the table where a thick glass window separated them. She picked up the phone, and so did Ray. Ray did not have the same look in his eye that he used to have. The sparkle had diminished. Lisa desperately looked, trying to find a piece of the man she had fallen in love with, but it wasn’t there. He had changed. There was no warm feeling in his eyes anymore, only coldness.

  “How are you?” she asked, trying to be supportive.

  Ray shook his head and smiled. “Don’t worry about me. Just make sure you take care of our child. Lisa, I’m gon’ be in here for a long time. I love you, and I want you to always remember that. I’ll love you to the day I die.”

  Lisa noticed his hopeless vibe. It seemed as if he was telling her good-bye forever. “You’re coming home, baby. Your lawyer is gon’ file an appeal, and you’re coming home.”

  Ray had to stop himself from becoming emotional. “That appeal is bullshit, baby. They are going to find me guilty, just like they did this time. That’s even if the judge grants an appeal. Just remember I love you, and don’t let my baby girl grow up not knowing that I love her too.”

  Lisa looked at their daughter, and then at Ray. “Tasha and I need you, Ray. You’re all we got. We need you.” She put her hand on the glass.

  A single tear streamed down Ray’s face. “Tasha? That’s my baby girl’s name? Make sure you tell her I love her. Every day, make sure that she knows that.” He rose from his seat, kissed his fingers, and pressed them against the glass. He then began to walk out.

  Lisa gripped the phone tightly and banged it against the glass, “No!” she screamed. “Ray, I love you! I love you!”

  Ray walked back over to the glass and picked up the phone. “I love you, Lisa, but don’t come here again. I don’t want you or my daughter to see me in here. You deserve more. I love you.” With those words, he headed to the cage that would be his home for the rest of his life.

  A few weeks later, Lisa was breast-feeding Tasha when she received a phone call. She felt the floor spinning as she tried to understand the news from the other end. When she was sure she’d heard what the voice said, she dropped the phone and fell to her knees, her baby in the other arm. “No!” she screamed as she cried. Tasha was startled by her mother’s roar and began to cry too.

  A fellow inmate had stabbed Ray to death fifteen times in the chest.

  Lisa sank into a deep depression and moved back home with her mother after Ray’s death. She would go for weeks at a time without talking to anyone or even bathing. She often blamed herself for Ray’s death, believing he wouldn’t have stormed out of the house if she hadn’t confronted him that night. He would have stayed home with me, she often thought to herself.

  Lisa, looking for the same love that Ray had shown her, began to let men manipulate her into doing what they pleased. Any man who dressed nice and approached her had a chance. It became a problem when her mother grew tired of caring for Tasha while Lisa ran the streets.

  Four years after Ray’s death, another death was about to hit Lisa, her mother’s. When Lisa’s mother died, she finally felt the burden of being a mother. Tasha had grown so attached to her grandmother that she thought she was her mother, and called her Mama. She called Lisa by her first name.

  Lisa met a man by the name of Glenn, a pimp in the neighborhood. He was in no way as successful as Ray, but Lisa was drawn to him. In some way, he reminded her of Ray.

  Glenn introduced Lisa to weed. She liked the way it made her feel and began to smoke it so much, it didn’t get her high anymore. Then, he introduced her to cocaine, telling her, “It makes you feel good.”

  Lisa used to snort a little cocaine with Glenn, but that quickly grew old. Eventually, she needed a new high, and Glenn provided that too. And so it was then that she got hooked on heroin.

  Chapter Two

  I forgot how much I hate school, Tasha thought as she heard the irritating shrill of her alarm. She drowsily reached over and hit the snooze button. She looked at her clock and got out of the bed. Seven o’clock is too early to be getting out of bed, she thought to herself on her way to the bathroom.

  She opened the bathroom door and saw her mother leaning over the toilet, a scene she’d witnessed many times. Tasha’s eyes filled with tears as she closed the bathroom door and walked down the hallway to return to her room. She had witnessed her mother use heroin before, but every time it happened, it hurt her even more than the time before. Her life didn’t seem fair. She was only sixteen, but had seen things . . . so many things over the years, it had almost hardened her. Her mother’s addiction was never a secret to her. Tasha knew what heroin was before she knew how to spell, and her rough childhood was something that she resented her mother for.

  Everybody else seemed to have it easy, at least easier than she did. While her friends were complaining about how much they wished their parents would leave them alone, Tasha yearned to know what it was like to have someone who cared about her, a real mother who yelled and nagged.

  She hated her mother more than anyone in the world. She was embarrassed by her. Lisa would do anything to feed her habit, and Tasha wasn’t dumb to this fact. She knew that all the men that ran in and out of their house were there for only two reasons—to give her mother drugs, and to receive payment for those drugs. And since Lisa didn’t even have money to keep clothes on her daughter’s back or food in their refrigerator, Tasha knew how Lisa was paying the drug dealers. Lisa had become the neighborhood ho, spreading her legs for any man who could give her a temporary fix.

  Tasha looked in the mirror and admired her brown skin and hazel eyes. She looked at a picture
of her mother that sat on her dresser. It was taken before her mother had become addicted to drugs. She put the picture face down on her dresser and picked out some clothes to wear to school.

  Tasha didn’t have a lot of clothes, so her best friend, Amra had let her borrow an outfit to wear on the first day. She got ready for school and walked out of the house without even saying good-bye to her mother. She walked the five blocks to Amra’s house, hoping she would be ready to go. She didn’t want to be late on the first day.

  Tasha knocked on Amra’s door, and Ms. Pat answered and greeted Lisa with a familiar smile. “Hey, Tasha, baby. How are you?” She opened the door and motioned for her to come in. “Amra is upstairs getting dressed, but I made you two breakfast. You know, I want y’all to have a fresh start for the new school year.”

  Tasha smiled. She loved Ms. Pat as if she was her own mother. Ever since she could remember, Ms. Pat had been there for her.

  Ms. Pat knew about Tasha’s mother and thought Tasha was too good of a girl to have to go through that, so her door was always open to Tasha. “Why don’t you go tell Amra to hurry her slow butt up before this food gets cold?”

  Tasha laughed at Ms. Pat and ran up the stairs and into her friend’s room.

  Amra looked into her mirror and saw Tasha enter the room. “Hey, girl. Do these look right?” She turned around to look at her ass in the mirror. She was wearing skintight Baby Phat jeans and a matching wife-beater.

  Tasha shrugged her shoulders. “Yeah, you look good, so get out the mirror and let’s go.”

  Amra put on her gold hoop earrings and went extra slow just to irritate Tasha. “I’m so tired of school. One more year of this bullshit, and then I’m grown.” She grabbed her bookbag off her bed.

  They walked downstairs then into the kitchen and sat at the table. They ate breakfast together, then headed out the door for school.

  “What classes you got?” Tasha asked.

  Amra reached into her bookbag, pulled out her schedule, and handed it to Tasha for her to compare.

  “Damn, we don’t even have any classes together.” Tasha handed both schedules to Amra.

  “That’s because you taking some hard-ass classes. You know I go for the easy A’s,” Amra said, half-joking.

  Tasha was only in the eleventh grade, but she was taking twelfth grade English and science. Those were her best subjects, so it really didn’t intimidate her. Because of her dysfunctional home life, she threw herself into school and worked extremely hard to make sure her grades were on point. “Whatever! Just meet me after school.”

  They parted ways, and Tasha walked to her English class. She walked in and took a seat near the back of the class.

  Soon after, the teacher walked in and said, “Hi. I’m Mr. Benton, and I would like to welcome you all to my class. Now, one of you is joining this class as a junior,” he said as he looked for his attendance sheet. “Tasha Parks?”

  Tasha raised her hand. “Yeah, that’s me.”

  “It’s nice to meet you, Tasha,” Mr. Benton stated. “Now, since you’re a junior, I’m sure you will have some questions regarding some of the writing techniques used in this course, so I want you to feel comfortable asking anything you like,”

  Tasha smiled back. Damn! He ain’t have to put me on blast like that! “Okay.”

  After school, Tasha and Amra met up and began to walk home. “Did you see ol’ boy today?” Tasha asked Amra.

  Just as Amra was about to respond, a group of girls came up to them. “Ain’t you the little bitch that tried to talk to Dre today?” one of them asked.

  Amra stopped walking and looked at the girl. “Yeah. Who is you?” Amra wasn’t a fighter, but she had the mouth of one.

  “Bitch, I’m his girlfriend, and you need to stay your young ass out his face.”

  The girl was getting closer and closer to Amra’s face, and Tasha didn’t want her friend to have to fight. She said, “Look, she didn’t know that Dre even had a girlfriend, so you need to be checking him about that, not her.” She tried to sound as nice as she possibly could, not wanting to start beef with anybody, especially not with a senior.

  Amra, surprised that Tasha had said anything, looked at her. Ahh shit! We both about to get our asses beat! She looked at the crowd of girls gathered around them and clenched her fists. Shit, if I’m gonna fight, I might as well just hit her first.

  A girl walked through the crowd and stepped in the middle of the confrontation. “Sade, chill with this shit,” she said.

  Sade replied, “Honey, this ain’t got nothing to do with you, so why you so concerned?”

  Honey looked at Amra and Tasha. “ ’Cuz them my little sisters, and yo’ ass wouldn’t say shit to nobody else for talking to Dre, so don’t be trying to check them about it. Yo’ scary ass trying to front because they juniors. You wouldn’t be talking shit to me or any other senior girl if they were with Dre.”

  Sade rolled her eyes with an attitude and said, “Whatever!” then walked away.

  Tasha’s heart slowly stopped racing, and Amra sighed in relief.

  “Damn, Tasha! Where all them balls come from? I thought you would have let me get my ass beat,” Amra joked.

  Tasha shrugged her shoulders. “You know it ain’t even like that.”

  After the crowd dispersed, Honey approached the two girls. “Don’t worry about Sade. That bitch be fronting. She wouldn’t bust a grape in a fruit fight.”

  They started laughing.

  Honey introduced herself, “I’m Honey.”

  Tasha and Amra introduced themselves, and then Honey walked away.

  “Honey looked out because I wasn’t trying to fight over a nigga,” Amra stated as they started their walk home.

  “Yeah. It seems like she cool people.”

  They arrived at Amra’s house first, and then Tasha continued the walk to her house. “Call me later!” Tasha yelled. She dreaded going home to her mother, Lisa. She slowly walked down the streets, hoping that her mother would be gone when she got there.

  When Tasha walked into the house, like always, there was a new man lying up with her mother. Tasha smelled liquor. In fact, the house reeked of it, and she could tell that her mother was high. She had this dumb look on her face every time she got high, a look Tasha had come to know.

  She rushed to her room and locked her bedroom door. I am so tired of living here. I can’t wait until I’m eighteen. I swear to God, I hate her!

  Tasha watched TV and did her homework for a couple hours. Her mother accumulated more and more company, and when they became too loud for Tasha to concentrate, she turned on her radio and fell asleep.

  The next morning, Tasha awoke and got ready for school. She went downstairs and found her mother passed out on the couch in the living room. She shook her head in disgust and walked out of the front door before her mother had the chance to wake up and chastise her.

  That morning at school, she noticed that Honey was in her English class. She didn’t say anything to her though, she just went to her seat.

  At lunch, Honey saved two seats for Tasha and Amra at the senior table. “Hey, come chill with us,” she said as they started to walk past the table.

  They sat down and immediately clicked. Honey was real cool, and she was always talking about dudes and money. “Y’all should come with me to this party. It’s at Wayne State tonight, and it’s supposed to be jumping.”

  Amra looked at Honey. “Alright. I’ll just have to make up something to tell my moms, because she is not about to let me go to no damn college party.”

  Honey laughed. “The party doesn’t start until nine o’clock, so I’ll just come over after school and say that I’m tutoring you. And then I’ll ask if you can spend the night at my spot.”

  Amra didn’t know if her mother would buy that, but she agreed anyway.

  “What about you, Tasha?”

  Tasha looked up. “Oh, I’m down. My momma won’t care. I’m going over Amra’s today anyway, so I’ll already be out.”
She didn’t know Honey very well, and didn’t want everybody to know how her home life was, so she just left it at that.

  Honey smiled. “Alright then. Meet me in front after school, and we will ride to your house together.”

  Tasha was excited about going to a college party and couldn’t concentrate on any of her classes. She just wanted the day to be over with fast. As soon as the bell rang, she walked outside and waited on Amra and Honey. They came out of the school together, and they all walked to Honey’s car and got into a Nissan Maxima.

  Amra asked, “Is this your whip?”

  Honey shook her head. “Nah, this is my momma’s car.”

  Honey stopped at her house first. She went in and came out a couple minutes later.

  When they pulled up to Amra’s house, they got out and went in. “Mama!” Amra shouted as soon as she walked in.

  Ms. Pat walked down the stairs. “I’m right here, Amra. You don’t got to be screaming at the top of your lungs.” She walked over to her daughter and gave her a kiss, then gave Tasha a kiss. “How was school?” she asked.

  The girls shrugged their shoulders, and then Amra replied, “It was good. Hey, Ma, this is our friend, Honey. She’s a senior. She came over to help us with our math.”

  Ms. Pat smiled warmly at Honey. “It’s nice to meet you, sweetie. It’s about time these girls got another friend. Are you girls hungry?”