Page 62 of The Prodigy 2: Rise of a Queen

I stood beside Malika while she stared at the coffin. Her eyes were hidden behind her Gucci shades, and her hands were shaking, but she held up strong. When she bowed her head, I bowed mine, too. Her prayer was silent, but powerful enough that I felt a chill go through me. After, she sighed like a weight had lifted. I tossed a rose on the silver coffin, and she followed behind me with another. And that was that.

I kissed her cheek, and then I took off my suit jacket, rolled up my sleeves, and got to work shoveling dirt onto the coffin. Bo helped, but it was mostly me, and that’s what I wanted. I needed Mal to see that I was finishing what I started. What my mama started, really, but I had to stand in for her. And of course, I was burying my part in it.

Once the deed was done, me and Mal walked hand-in-hand back to the car. Bo trailed a few feet behind us.

“How you feel?”

She shrugged. “Hungry.”

“Aight. Where you wanna eat? Anywhere in the world.”

“In the world?” She chuckled. “Don’t make me make you fly me to Paris for dinner.”

“You think I won’t?”

She bumped her shoulder against mine. “Maybe one day. For tonight, I have a taste for something greasy and salty. Something real unhealthy.”

I nodded. “I know a place.”

Thirty minutes later, I was wiping sauce off the corner of her mouth in a booth at Penelli’s New York. Their pizza was so greasy, they brought that shit to you on a towel. It sounds disgusting, but it works.

“Oh my God, this is so good,” she said between bites. “I’ve been in Midling all my life and I’ve never been here. Can you believe that?”

“I can, actually.”

Penelli’s was downtown, if you could call it that. Midling’s town square was what we called downtown. It was modern, and it had about ten tall buildings, so we let it rock, but it was a good twenty minutes from where everybody lived, and the drive wasn’t very scenic. Wasn’t shit to see but horses and grass.

“I was thinking about opening up a restaurant out here,” I said. “We need another cash business, and it’s either a restaurant, strip club, or laundromat.”

“Yeah, restaurant for sure.”

“So you gon’ help me think up a concept?”

“Of course.” She downed some water. “And maybe we could buy Sliders, too, and let me run it. I work there anyway, so…”

“You gon’ run a barandgo to school?”

“Yep.”

“Okay then, superwoman.”

She chuckled at that. “So…how do you feel?”

“About what?”

“Today.”

“I’m Gucci.”

She tilted her head. “Jakari.”

“What?”

She set her pizza down, and her voice got soft. “You’ve been carrying that around for eight years. I know it wasn’t easy.”

“This ain’t about me, Malika.”

“I know, but…you were just doing what you were told, and the fact that you’ve been feeling bad about it and dreaming about it for all this time lets me know you have a conscience in there. A good soul. It’s okay to admit you that you struggled with it. It’s okay to talk about how you feel.”

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