Chapter 1
The Carter house had one bathroom.
One bathroom, seven people, and a hot water heater thatgave up around the forty-minute mark — which meant that if you weren’t in theshower by 6:15, you were washing your ass with water cold enough to make youquestion every life decision that led you to that moment. Reggie learned thisearly. Not because she was a morning person, but because she was the youngestof six and the only girl, and her brothers treated the bathroom like a rotatingthrone room. Darius took the longest. Twenty minutes minimum, and that was on aday he wasn’t trying to impress somebody. Tyreek was fast but loud — singingoff-key R&B at a volume that shook the medicine cabinet. Marcus, DeShawn,and Little Mike were somewhere in between, each with their own rituals andtheir own disregard for the people banging on the door behind them.
Reggie’s solution was simple. She woke up before all ofthem.
Five forty-five. Every morning. Not by choice at first —her mom had shaken her awake when she was eight and said, “You want hot wateror you want to fight your brothers for it?” She chose hot water. And somewherebetween eight and seventeen, the early alarm stopped being a punishment andstarted being the only peace she got. Fifteen minutes in a quiet house. Thehallway dark. The floors cold. The shower hers.
She didn’t need long anyway. Her routine was efficient.Shower, deodorant — men’s, because her brothers bought it in bulk and it wasright there — brush her teeth, line up her fade in the mirror. She’d beencutting her own hair for three years now. Fifty dollars for a fade was highwayrobbery, and her mom wasn’t paying for it, and she damn sure wasn’t paying forit with the thirty dollars a week she made helping Mrs. Patterson nextdoor with her garden. So she watched YouTube tutorials until she could do itherself. Wasn’t perfect at first. Marcus had roasted her for a solid monthafter her first attempt, said she looked like she’d lost a fight with alawnmower. But she got better. Three years later her lineup was crisp enoughthat guys at school asked who her barber was.
“Me,” she’d say. And they’d nod, impressed, and she’d feela small, quiet pride that she never made a big deal out of.
Getting dressed was the easiest part. She’d cross the hallto Marcus’s room — he was the closest to her size, just two years older andonly a few inches taller — and pull whatever was cleanest off his floor or outof his closet. Today it was a black hoodie with a faded Nike swoosh and a pairof gray joggers that pooled around her ankles. She rolled the waistband twiceand they sat fine. Good enough.
Her mom had opinions about this.
“Gina, I bought you clothes. You have a whole closet.”
“I know, Mommy.”
“Then why are you wearing Marcus’s crusty hoodie?”
“It’s not crusty. I washed it.”
“You washed his hoodie but you won’t wear the jeansI got you for Christmas?”
“Those jeans are tight.”
“They’re supposed to be tight. They’re jeans.”
“Marcus’s jeans aren’t tight.”
“Marcus is a boy.”
“And?”
Her mom would shake her head and wave her off. Thisconversation happened at least once a week and it always ended the same way —with Reggie in her brother’s clothes and her mom muttering something aboutwasted money under her breath. It wasn’t that Reggie was trying to make astatement. She wasn’t rebelling. She wasn’t confused about who she was. Shejust liked what she liked. Baggy felt comfortable. Hoodies felt safe. Herbrothers’ clothes smelled like the house she grew up in — detergent and cocoa butterand whatever cologne Marcus was experimenting with that month. There wasnothing wrong with that.
And the stuff her mom bought her — the dresses, the fittedjeans, the tops with thin straps and low necklines — they just didn’t feel likeher. She’d tried. Put on a dress once for Easter when she was twelvebecause her mom begged and her grandma was coming. She spent the whole servicepulling at the hem and sitting with her knees pressed together and feeling likeshe was wearing someone else’s skin. After church she changed in the car beforethey even got to the restaurant. Her mom sighed. Her grandma said, “Let thatchild be.” And that was the last time anyone forced the issue.
School was where Reggie made the most sense.
Not in class — she was fine in class, B-average, did herwork, didn’t cause problems — but in the spaces between. The hallways. Thecourtyard. The gym. The cafeteria table near the window where her crew set upcamp every day like they were claiming territory.
There were six of them. Hector, Tevon, Darius — her actualbrother, a senior, who’d been bringing her into his friend group since she wasa freshman — plus Tyreek, who was Darius’s best friend and thereforegrandfathered in, and two other guys who rotated depending on the week. Reggiewas the constant. She’d been sitting at that table longer than some of them.And nobody questioned it. Nobody treated it like it was unusual for a girl tobe the only girl. Because Reggie wasn’t “a girl” in that context. She wasReggie.
She talked like them. Louder than most of the girls in hergrade, rougher, with a cadence that made her sound like she’d grown up exactlywhere she had — three blocks from Hector, five from Tevon, in a neighborhoodwhere everybody’s mom knew everybody’s mom and you didn’t talk soft unless youwere in church. Her voice was high. Couldn’t help that. But the things thatcame out of it — the trash talk, the slang, the way she could dismantlesomeone’s ego in four words and make the whole table lose it — that was alllearned. Earned. She’d grown up in a house full of boys and she spoke thelanguage fluently.
She played like them too. Basketball, mostly. She’d beenon the boys’ team since sophomore year — not because the girls’ team wasn’tgood, but because the boys’ team practiced harder and the competition wasbetter and honestly, she just fit. She wasn’t the best player. Wasn’t theworst. She could run the floor, hit an open three, and guard anybody within twoinches of her height. The guys didn’t go easy on her. She’d asked them not to,early on, and they’d listened. She caught elbows and set hard screens and tookcharges and never once asked for a foul that a boy wouldn’t have gotten. Therespect she earned on that court carried into everything else.
She got along with girls fine. She wasn’t antisocial. Shecould hold a conversation about nails or hair or who was dating who with thesame energy she brought to debating whether LeBron or MJ was the GOAT. But itdidn’t feel like a natural fit. With girls, she was translating. Adjusting hervolume, softening her edges, filing down the parts of herself that were tooloud or too blunt or too much. With the guys, she just existed. Notranslation required.
Nobody hit on her. Nobody flirted. She was just part ofthe group.
And she liked it that way. She really, honestly, trulyliked it that way. She didn’t need to be desired. She didn’t need boys to lookat her the way they looked at Jasmine Torres or Kehlani Mitchell or any of thegirls who walked the hallways like the hallways were runways. She had her crew.She had her game. She had her fade and her hoodie and her spot at the table.What else was there?
She didn’t know yet. But she was about to find out.
