“I thought she had nine lives,” Jimmy cried like a damn fool when I jumped on him. I kicked him in the balls then punched him on the arm so hard he got a frog in his muscle.

I cried for weeks over that cat. Grandmother prayed for a while, then said that was the last straw, and she put Jimmy in a special day school so the doctors could find out why he did so many crazy things. Like she didn’t know! It took all the money we had to pay for Jimmy’s new school and his doctors, but we did it. Jimmy was a lot better now, but every now and then it seemed like he had a flashback that made him do something straight to the left. I tried to keep him as close to me as I could, praying like hell that that crazy bug wasn’t still living in his head because except for G, me and Jimmy were all alone in the world with only each other to hold on to.

So even though I felt cheated, I thanked God for sending G our way. He took good care of me and Jimmy, and without him we probably would have ended up in a shelter someplace. G was the father we never had, and he gave us everything we missed having when we were kids. The only difference between G and what I imagined having a father was like, was that I slept in the bed with him and he climbed on top of me twice a month. But even that part was over with so fast I sometimes thought I had dreamt it.

The apartment we lived in had four bedrooms. I shared the largest one with G, and Jimmy had a nice one that was down the hall on the other side of the kitchen. G gave us the best of everything. Jimmy had a wide screen television in his room, Xbox, and all the latest games that came with it. He was only seventeen, but he was as almost as tall and fine as G. Everybody in Harlem knew what had happened to my mother, so G understood the problems Jimmy had and didn’t mind paying for his special school or the medication my brother took to keep his brain straight. In fact, G didn’t mind paying for anything we wanted, and when I stepped out in the street people didn’t know what to do with me. I was just that fly.