“Okay,” I mumbled, drifting back into sleep, believing Rasul was Everyman, he could do anything, and I could rest easy with him at the wheel. But he was getting tired. And though I wasn’t doing much but sitting down, so was I. So I decided to talk though it was clear he didn’t want to.

“Man, I can’t wait to get there. Wait ’til I tell Nakesha. She’s gonna be so jealous.”

I imagined the news spreading at school. This time, it wouldn’t be gossip. There would be no talk at the lunch tables or in the bathrooms or at the lockers about Shivana being bald-headed, or stupid, or fat, or getting pregnant by some old man who was locked up. No one would know. They only would know that I was no longer at school because I had made it somewhere they probably would never see—the Big Apple.

“I wonder what everybody gonna say when they see us on the BET Music Awards?” I thought, out loud. Rasul perked up as I stroked his ego and his dreams.

“Don’t forget the Grammys and the American Music Awards,” he exclaimed.

“Oh, and the MTV Video Awards, ’cause you know your first video gonna be the one everybody can’t stop talking about.” I started laughing. “Damn, Rasul, you gonna be bigger than LL Cool J!”

“I wonder if we gonna see him,” Rasul asked.

“Hell yeah! We gonna be in New York. We gonna see every-body—LL, Tupac, Queen Latifah. I bet we gonna see Mary J. Blige too. They all live in New York.”

“Yeah, but where? You know New York way bigger than Chicago. There’s Brooklyn, the Bronx …”

“So what? We gonna find out where they live, and we gonna go, and we gonna give ’em your tape. Matter fact, turn that shit up!”

He cranked up his tape. When I heard his voice muffled in static and bass that was turned up way too loud, I didn’t care. I imagined it was coming from the radio.

“What you think your mama and daddy gonna say when they hear you on the radio?” He trusted me now, I knew, believed that I was the woman who could bandage his wounds rather than throw salt in them.

“Shit, I don’t know,” he said with his eyes locked on the road ahead. “You know they probably gonna come out the woodworks and shit. After all this time.”

“What you gonna say if you see ’em?”

“I don’t know.” He was silent for the entire bridge. “Shit, I guess I’m gonna say, ‘What’s up?’ I don’t care. I ain’t mad.”