I grabbed Moonie’s arm and waved as they walked toward the security checkpoint. G never looked back, but Jimmy did. He looked just like a little boy again as he turned and waved, a gold hoop earring in his left ear and a pair of expensive headphones hanging around his neck. I wanted to run over to him and snatch him back, to tell him he couldn’t go. But then he grinned, so excited. “You my heart, Juicy-Mo,” he told me, just like he used to.

“And you, Jimmy-Jo,” I said, loving him more than I ever had, “you my soul.”

Five days was gonna seem like five minutes. Pacho and Moonie dropped me back at the apartment. “Make sure you call me before you make any moves,” Moonie said. “If you need a ride over to the Spot, Pacho will pick you up. G said you supposed to stay close to the apartment and just chill until he gets back, so I’ll give you a buzz a few times every day just to check. Okay?”

I nodded a few times and tried not to look like I was in a rush. As soon as they pulled off I ran upstairs to the apartment, changed into my hooch gear, and threw a bunch of stuff in a Coach bag and then called Rita. All the shit I packed was raggedy in comparison to the way I dressed when G was around. Yeah, I still had diamonds and designer labels hanging everywhere, but I was done with all those high heels and slinky-ass dresses G liked to see me in. For the next five days it was gonna be short-shorts, halters, jeans, and tank tops. And no damned makeup either. I wasn’t putting nothing on my face except a little bit of lipstick and nothing hot was gonna touch my hair. It would get washed in the shower and brushed out with a little Pink Oil Moisturizer, then thrown back in a long curly-ass ponytail. That was about as much trouble as I was willing to go through since G wasn’t gonna be around to make me get all dolled up for nothing.

G had told me to see Moonie if I needed anything, but that was the last thing I wanted to do. He didn’t leave me no money and I’d been scared to ask for any because he would have gotten suspicious and probably ordered me to stay my ass inside the apartment. As it was, his boys had been ordered to keep their eyes on me, but they were gonna have to get up just a little bit earlier because I was outtie.

I watched from the window as Rita pulled up with her cousin Cat and gave the valet her keys. She was pushing her aunt’s Range Rover, and hitting the FDR Drive and then sliding over the Brooklyn Bridge was our ultimate goal. But first we had some shopping to do. Thank God Rita had my back with the dollars. She and Cat took me to Delancey Street and showed me how they hustled the merchants down. Then we went to Chinatown and me and Rita looked at all those naked chickens and pigs hanging in the windows while Cat boosted stuff she planned to sell in Brooklyn later on.

I had been born and raised in New York, but I was taking stuff in like a tourist. I hardly ever got to travel to Brooklyn and I’d never stepped foot on Staten Island. My eyes were wide and excited and whenever I saw a sister my age who seemed like she was out doing her own thang I felt sad because that would never be me as long as I was trapped with G.

Rita had a friend who lived in Lambert projects in the Bronx, and we hung out there for a minute. We played handball in the park across the street, and then decided to take her cousin’s two kids to the Bronx Zoo, which was another place I’d never been.

“Not even on a school trip?” Rita asked. I knew it was hard for her to understand that I’d been so sheltered, and I tried to explain that I’d gone directly from my grandmother’s house to G’s house, with nothing at all in between. And with Jimmy acting all crazy half the time there was never money for school trips or stuff like that, so on those days I just stayed at home and helped Grandmother clean house.

There was something about the zoo that bothered me though. All those damn animals locked up and stuck behind bars. All they could do was look out at the people every single day and I recognized the look in a lot of their eyes. They were bored and pissed. Pissed and bored. I’d seen that look in my own eyes on many days.

The Bronx Zoo was really big, and Rita made sure we marched our asses from one end of it to the other. I had just followed her and the kids into the stink-ass monkey house when I thought I saw a familiar face. I didn’t know how everybody else was standing that doo-doo smell, but it felt like it was getting into my mouth and skin and even in my hair.

I was trying to push my nose down into the low neck of my shirt when I saw him. He had on a white T-shirt and a beat-up-looking New York Yankees baseball cap, but it was him. A little girl was riding on his shoulders who looked to be about six. He was holding hands with a dark-skinned woman who had thick black locks down to her ass, and she had another little girl by the hand, this one slightly older.

Damn, I thought, messing around and breathing in that monkey air without even realizing it. Moonie looked just like a regular brother out chilling with his woman and his kids. He was such a small man that there was no sign of a killer in him, and the way he patted and stroked that sister and them kids almost made me jealous that he had a regular life outside of the Spot while that one building was just about my whole world.

His girl was slim but had a nice body, even if she did dress like an old woman. My shorts were ten times tighter than her jeans, even though we were about the same size, and compared to the Million Man March shirt she was playing, I felt real slutty with my titties hanging out of my tiny T-shirt that said SWEET POTATOES on the front.

I couldn’t stop looking at them. Grandmother had sworn you could stare somebody into looking at you, and I guess that’s exactly what I did. All of a sudden Moonie’s head swung around and his eyes jumped dead on me. Scared that he’d bust me out to G, I tried to step behind a fat white man but I wasn’t fast enough. For the briefest second we stared at each other and what I saw in his eyes looked a lot like disgust. When I blinked again he was walking away, pulling his woman quickly through the crowd. I followed him with my eyes as far as I could. Gone were the fine clothes and the jewelry and the playa-daddy image. The pants he wore looked like some white-boy Levi’s and his sneaks were dirty and run over on the sides. It was like Moonie had completely shed his G-Spot persona for the day, and the sight of him with his family stayed with me for a good long while.

Five days went by in a big fat blur. I barely slept at all we were so busy running all over New York trying to see and do every damn thing we could. Rita liked showing me around. She had been on her own for so long that it was hard for her to believe that I had never gone to the Statue of Liberty or ridden the Staten Island ferry. She was real generous with me, too, offering to buy me outfits and sandals when we shopped, but I kept reminding her that I had more clothes than I knew what to do with and I promised she could come upstairs and raid my closet and pick out anything she wanted when she took me back home.

Day five snuck up on me when I wasn’t looking. It was almost time to head back to the boring routine that was my life, and I had my lip poked out in resentment. It was my last night out, so I got loose. I put on my tightest booty-chokers and Rita took me to East New York to a house party where I slow-grinded for the very first time with some guy I didn’t even know! I didn’t wanna know him either, and when we pushed our way into the crowd and he asked me my name I just smiled and shook my ass. He was on the short side but he had a nice smile and that cologne he was wearing had cost over two hundred dollars a bottle. Best of all, he was a black man with a dick, and tonight that was my only requirement.