Four hundred viewers. People respond with or high-five emojis.
“But check this,” I say. “I got something for everybody who wanna come at me ’bout my song.”
I lift my middle finger without hesitation.
Five hundred viewers. More comments.
Preach!
Fuck em all!
We with you, Bri!
“So, Ms. Reporter,” I say, “and anybody else who wanna call ‘On the Come Up’ this, that, or whatever the hell else. Do it. Hell, get the song taken down if you want. But you’ll never silence me. I got too goddamn much to say.”
Twenty
I’ve only been drunk once in my life. The summer before sophomore year, Sonny, Malik, and I decided to try the Hennessy Sonny’s dad keeps in his cabinet to see what the big deal was. Biggest. Mistake. Of. My. Life. The next morning, I severely regretted touching that bottle. I also regretted it once Jay released her wrath.
I think I have an Instagram hangover. I went to bed pissed at Emily and all the Emilys of the world. But when I woke up, I was like, “Oh, shit. Did I say that?”
Too late to do anything. I may not have saved it on my page, but somebody saved it and now it’s spreading. I’m praying that my “you better stay low and not respond to anything” mom doesn’t see it.
I’m not sure she’d care, though, considering how she’s acting today.
She came to my room as I was getting ready for church. But Jay told me, “You can go back to bed, baby. We’re staying home.”
Any other day, I would’ve ironically shouted, “Hallelujah!” It’s nothing against Jesus. It’s his people I’ve got a problem with. But I couldn’t celebrate—Jay gave me this smile that couldn’t really be called one because it was so sad. She went to her room and hasn’t come out since.
I couldn’t go back to bed. Too worried about her. Trey couldn’t either, so we’ve been watching Netflix for a couple of hours now. We got rid of cable a while back. It was either that or our phones, and Jay and Trey both need those for potential jobs. I prop my feet on the back of the couch, inches from my brother’s head.
He pushes them away. “Move them ol’ stanky, crusty feet out of my face, girl.”
“Trey, stop!” I whine, and put them back up. I always have to have my feet up high on the couch.
He throws back some dry knockoff Cheerios. Trey rarely eats cereal with milk. “Ol’ Bruce Banner Hulk–looking feet.”
Just for that, I stick my big toe in his ear. He hops up so fast, his cereal bowl almost falls from his lap, but he manages to catch it. I die laughing.
Trey points at me. “You play too much!”
He sits down and I’m still cracking up. I rub my foot all on his cheek. “Aww, I’m sorry, big bro.”
Trey moves his face away. “All right, keep playing.”
The floorboards in the hall creak, and I peek around the doorway. It’s not Jay though. Granddaddy says that houses this old sometimes tend to stretch. That’s why they make sounds on their own. “You think she’s okay?”
“Who? Ma?” Trey says. “Yeah, she’s fine. Just needs a day away from all the church gossip.”
I get it. Church is full of people with plenty to say and nothing to do. You’d think some of them would help us instead of talk about us, but I guess it’s easy to say you love Jesus and harder to act like him.
Anyway.
“Soooo . . . ,” Trey says as I get some of his cereal. “You no longer give a fuck, huh?”
I come this close to choking on a knockoff Cheerio. This close. I cough to clear my throat. “Hold up. You have an Instagram?”
He laughs. “Wooow. You online, showing your ass, and the first thing you wanna know is if I got an Instagram profile?”
“Um, yeah.”
“You need to get your priorities straight. For the record, Kayla convinced me to get one.”
There go the dimples. They appear whenever he talks about her. “Is she gonna be my future sister-in-law?”
He pushes the side of my head. “Don’t worry about me, worry about yourself. What’s going on with you, Bri? For real. Because that? That video was not my little sister.”
I pick at a thread on the couch. “I was mad.”
“And? How many times I gotta tell you—the internet is forever. You want a future employer seeing that?”
I’m not as worried about them as I am a certain person. “Are you gonna tell Jay?”