Sleepyhead
by Adeola Adeniyi

We finally made love last Thursday three days after her seventeenth birthday and then the following Monday, Tuesday, and yesterday. She had some pretty good moves, but she wasn’t a whore. No doubt our lovemaking was why Roxanne felt cool with calling my house from a police precinct out in Coney Island and begging for me to come pick her up. I can’t act like she didn’t have a few problems in her life, but her calling from a precinct still surprised me. My gut just told me Fernando Riveria was responsible for her trouble. I still asked Roxanne why they arrested her and she swore a cop only accused her of attempting to draw on a train car because he saw her sketching in a notebook with a magic marker. I sucked my teeth but agreed to help Roxy because I loved her. She loved me. I knew I’d remember Foxy Roxy, her black hair past her back, and that Pangaea-sized ass of hers for the rest of my life. Even in old age when I forgot everything else, I’d still remember that butt. She thanked me for being the coolest big brother ever and I hung up, brushed my fade, and drove to the precinct. 

Stupid Girls
by Adeola Adeniyi

“You must smoke crack if you think we’d be dumb enough to ride with y’all,” Charlotte told Harold Briggs while standing near the closed Nevins Street subway as he sat behind the wheel of his dark blue Nissan Maxima. She already watched her friend Courtney go sit in the backseat the second after he pulled over five minutes ago and offered them a ride. At least her other friend Chanel stood beside her. Courtney ignored Charlotte when she knocked on the back window and ordered her to leave right now. The young dude with long blond dreadlocks riding shotgun told Charlotte and Chanel they’ll freeze to death if she didn’t take up the offer. Charlotte had seen the shotgun rider a few times before in the kitchen at the newly built art studio on Nevins and Livingston called In Craze where they just left from, but her, Chanel, and Courtney never talked to him before. To Charlotte, he looked like he went to high school during the Reagan years with his full beard and graying chin. The three almost seventeen-year-old girls would have already been riding the 3 train if all the MTA workers hadn’t gone on strike this afternoon and now they had to shiver in the cold with snow dropping from the cloudy sky to be with the four inches already on the ground.