January 2016
A group of young men stood out on the curb in the shadow of Terrebonne Parish’s well-known High Rise apartment building. The streetlights that hadn’t been shot out flickered in and out as they tried to shine whatever light they could on the pavement below. The sounds of people further up the street at a local corner store wafted on the night air and provided a bit of background noise whenever one Kevin Gates song gave way to another.
Nearby two young boys threw a football between one another. Most of the passes were well short and the catches were even worse, but they both thought they were Cam Newton so it didn’t make much of a difference to them.
“Hey, Ro,” one of the older boys called to one of the kids. The taller of the two ran over and bent over somewhat out of breath. “Go in the house and tell Rana to give you that box off top the refrigerator and bring it to me.”
“Alright,” the boy said, running toward one of the nearby houses.
He burst through the door, causing the dogs at the next house over to start barking uncontrollably inside. He dodged between the dining room table and an old, tattered sofa, pretending that he was still the NFL’s most valuable player and was running for a touchdown in the upcoming Super Bowl between the Panthers and the Broncos.
He pictured himself juking defenders. He stiff armed the wall in the hallway for good measure, causing a picture to shake a little. Then, he skidded to a stop at his sister Rana’s room. She was sitting on the edge of her bed doing his younger sister Roni’s hair. Roni sat quietly watching TV except for the occasional sharp inhale when Rana was a little too rough with her hair and scalp.
“Stop running in the damn house, Royce,” she said as she looked up.
“Sorry,” he said under his breath. He knew he was in trouble when anyone in his family called him Royce instead of Ro.
“What you want?”
“Reg said to get you to give me the box off the top of the refrigerator so I can bring it to him outside,” Royce said in a hurried, jumbled mess in an attempt to get the whole sentence out before Rana told him to “carry his tail to bed as stay his ass in the damn house” as she was prone to do.
She sucked her teeth. “You ain’t got no damn business being outside with them anyway. Tell Reg to come get the damn box himself. Mama at work if he want someone to be waiting on him hand and foot.”
“I could just get a chair and get it myself.”
Rana stood up abruptly, barely missing hitting Roni in the head with her knee. She brushed passed her younger brother and stalked toward the kitchen. She snatched box from the top of the refrigerator and opened it.
Royce tried to stand on the tips of his toes to get a peek inside of the box, but Rana pulled it away.
“Get back,” she said, swatting at him with her hand. She closed the box again and held it out to him. “Don’t your little bad ass look in this fucking box either. Just bring it to him and then both you and Romeo need to bring y’all asses in this damn house.”
“Okay, okay,” Royce said, taking the box from her.
“Hanging out on the fucking corner at night like they little tails got a job or something,” Rana said to herself as she retreated back down the hall.
Royce ran to the front door and opened it but stopped in the threshold. He looked over his shoulder and slightly opened the box. He expected to see something interesting inside, but instead it was just a few cigarillos and a Ziploc bag of weed.
He didn’t know why Rana didn’t want him to see that there was weed in the box. Reg, or Reginald, had taught him how to roll a blunt a few summers ago, and no one said anything whenever Reg would go sit out on the porch and smoke.
Sighing, he jogged out to the street and held the box up to his older brother.
Reg took the box from him. “Thanks, Ro. Rome!”
Royce’s twin brother Romeo looked up from where he was spinning the football on the pavement, pretending that he’d scored a touchdown and was celebrating in front of a crowd of cheering fans.
“Both of y’all go in the house. It’s damn near midnight,” Reg said.
“Aw, c’mon,” Royce said in protest.
“Yeah, it’s not that late,” Romeo said, looking at his wrist as if he was wearing a watch.
“Rana gonna kick y’all ass if y’all don’t go inside. And I’m just gonna watch and laugh,” Reg said, drawing some laughter from his friends.
The twins glanced at each other then ran in the house, the threat of drawing the ire of the eldest sibling in the family being enough to kick them into gear.
Royce pulled the disposal medical mask from his face and tossed it on the ground outside of Terrebonne High School’s stadium as he and his twin brother Romeo walked toward the student parking lot. The two of them wore the letterman’s jackets that they’d just received a couple weeks before when the spring semester started.
The jackets were scarce as far as patches went, however, despite their one season playing for the Tigers’ football team. It wasn’t a great season by any means with Terrebonne posting a 1-7 record during a season hampered by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
“You talk to Rana? She said she was going to Venmo us some money to put on the car payment,” Romeo said as he flicked through TikTok.
“No. Not since a couple weeks ago. She only call you whenever she want to talk to one of us,” Royce said.
He took a set of keys out of his pocket to unlock the doors of a Honda Accord that was parked on the outside of the parking lot. It was a 2008 and had probably been flooded a few times over between hurricanes Gustav, Ike and Ida.
But their older sister Rana had promised that he would help the two of them get a car when they turned 16 and that she would help them with the payments and the insurance. Royce felt it was the least she could do after she packed up her and their youngest sister Roni’s things and moved to Baton Rouge just before the pandemic started.
“Let me drive, bruh,” Romeo said, holding his hand out for the keys. “You always driving.”
Royce sucked his teeth. “Because you don’t have your fucking license, nigga, now move. Ain’t nobody trying to end up in Gray behind your ass.”
“We twins. All you gotta do is give me your license if we get pulled over. They won’t know the difference. Acting like cops got Ph.D’s or something.”
As much as he wanted to argue, Royce couldn’t deny that the two of them pushed the extremes of being identical twins. There were some differences between them when they were younger, but as they grew up, they began to look more and more alike.
Now as teenagers, they looked alike, dressed alike, sounded alike, had a similar style and even both sported a little hair in the middle of their chin in what they tried to convince people was the beginnings of goatees.
Outside of a little extra muscle that Royce had, no one would be able to tell the difference – especially not a cop that was taking a five second glance at the person that had handed them a license.
“C’mon, Ro. You being a lil’ bitch. It’s not like I can’t drive. They just keep telling me that I need to take another one of them classes. We just going down the fucking road.”
“Fine,” Royce said, handing his brother the keys. “But we not going down the road. We gotta go pick up Reg from Ashland.”
“Why I didn’t know Reg was at Ashland?”
Royce walked around the passenger side of the car. “Reg always in fucking Ashland. Ask me when that nigga not in there.”
…
Royce, Romeo and Reg walked out of the parish’s jail, the sound of a heavy metal door slamming shut behind them. Reg carried a garbage bag full of the belongings that he’d been arrested with and wore tattered clothes courtesy of a police dog that’d chased him down.
No words were exchanged between the three of them as they walked to the car, got in and Romeo pulled out of the parking spot. He drove up to the massive gate that surrounded the levee that wrapped around the jail like a reverse medieval moat. He pressed the button on the intercom to be let out and waited for the gate to open.
Reg was the first to break the silence from the backseat. “Hey, either of y’all got a few dollars so I can get me a nick from Doodoo on East Street? You know the Jakes take all your shit when you get caught. Talking about my money from drug offenses.”
Romeo looked at Royce who only shrugged as he tapped his fingers on his knee, wondering why the gate was taking so long to open.
“Yeah, I got you,” Romeo said. “You gonna pay me back?”
“It’s $5, bruh. You can’t hook me up with $5? What you gonna do with it? Use it to buy some rubbers for that white girl you been fucking? You better be wrapping up to fuck her, too. Mama gonna kick your ass if you knock her up.”
“She ain’t white. She’s light skin,” Romeo said, feeling a little defensive.
“She kinda white, bruh,” Royce said under his breath. “And her name is Britni spelled B-r-i-t-n-i. Only way she could be whiter is if her name was Mackaleighlee.”
The name Royce came up with caused him and Reg to laugh at Romeo’s expense.
He waved his hand in their direction. “Man, fuck both of y’all.”
The gate finally started to slide open, and Romeo pulled out onto the street as his brothers continued to come up with names that were worse than Britni.