Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc Page B

answered, there was no need to use his name; her friends’ voices were hushed:
    “He in?”
    “Where he at?”
    “You alone?”
    Usually, she was. She saw George late at night if she saw him at all. George would have given Jessica money if she’d asked, but Jessica was more interested in winning his love. “Less money for her meant more money for me,” George said. He teasingly referred to Jessica’s need as her “attention attraction.” It would be years before he understood that Jessica’s desire for attention had the strength of a weed pushing through cement.

    Late that summer, Jessica was staying in one of George’s rentals, a basement apartment at the bottom of a flight of stairs on Henwood Place. George sometimes used Henwood as a drop for shipments of guns. The guns came up from Virginia. A runner by the name of Wayne drove themto the Bronx. Wayne was scheduled to make a delivery during another of George’s trips to Puerto Rico. George instructed Jessica to stay in the apartment until the shipment arrived. Instead, Jessica broke out. She had decided to go dancing with her thirteen-year-old cousin, Daisy. Daisy’s pretty young mother, who had divorced Lourdes’s brother, worked as a cocktail waitress and partied after work. Daisy spent a lot of time alone and bored. She was in awe of her older cousin.
    “She makes you feel good about yourself. She’s beautiful, but she doesn’t make you feel that she’s the most beautiful, that’s what I love about Jessica,” Daisy said. Daisy stunned audiences in her own right, with her coltish body, unmarked face, and mane of curly brown hair. Daisy was at the dangerous age, already cutting school and noticing boys. She rode the train uptown to visit Jessica; sometimes she cabbed there, and Jessica paid the fare.
    The night Wayne was due in with the weapons, Jessica and Daisy went out to the Herpes Triangle, three popular clubs clustered beneath the elevated subway tracks on Westchester Avenue. Wayne arrived, found no one at Henwood, and paged George. Meanwhile, George had just landed at the airport, unannounced; he didn’t have a set of house keys, and Jessica still hadn’t returned by the time George caught up with Wayne at the apartment. It infuriated George that Jessica had not upheld her part of their arrangement—her doing whatever he told her to do and him paying for everything. But George knew where to find her: Rascal shuttled him to the Herpes Triangle. Danny sat morosely in the passenger seat. George paged Jessica, punched in the number of his cell phone, and waited.
    Jessica scooted outside as soon as she received George’s page. She didn’t dare call from inside the club with the music; she dialed his cell from a pay phone on the street.
    “Where you at?” George asked.
    “I don’t know, I can’t tell, the signs is all messed up,” Jessica lied. Just then, Daisy stepped outdoors in search of Jessica, and Jessica flagged her down. George caught sight of her waving arm.
    “I just want you to do one thing for me,” he said in the tone of voice that made Jessica’s heart race. “I just want you to turn around and look down the other side of the street.”
    Jessica had a choice: George could beat her at home, or right there on the sidewalk. She chose home and joined George in the backseat of the car. Her decision didn’t matter; before they reached Henwood, he’d already started punching her. Then she realized that she had left her keysin her coat back at the club. George administered what she later called a double beating—during the ride back to the club, and on the trip back to the apartment again. Then he shoved her bloodied body onto the sidewalk and ordered Danny to bring her inside. As an afterthought, George told him to chop off Jessica’s hair.
    “I forgot scissors,” Danny lied. He gently dragged Jessica down the stairs into the building and whispered, “He treats you so bad. I wish I could take you and the kids away.” All