The Boy From Detroit

Chapter Seven

About a month ago, on a rainy afternoon, Kareem heard the faint screech of brakes of a taxi at the foot of his building in Slivering Heights. He assumed it was a taxi because he couldn't hear muffled hip-hop music seeping out of it. So it had to be a taxi. Or an unmarked cop car, which was not unusual in those parts, but God forbid.

Kareem swung his legs off the bed and curiously walked up to the fifth-floor window. He peered into the rain and noticed he was right. It was, in fact, a taxi.

While its engine and headlights continued to run, the driver's door opened, and a brown-skinned man climbed down wearing a golf cap and a floral shirt and rushed to the trunk in the rain.

Meanwhile, the back door opened and a shockingly white woman with long, whitish-blonde hair steadily climbed out and shut the door. She, on the other hand, had no golf cap on or any hat, for that matter. She didn't even have her hand over her head. It was almost as if she wanted to get wet. Kareem kept staring at her. He then quickly fished out a pair of binoculars from a drawer and ogled her. She flaunted her slender figure and combed her now-damp hair back rather seductively. At least, Kareem thought so.

Kareem knew right away that she wasn't married. She couldn't be. Not because of anything specific like the absence of a wedding ring, but just by the way she was. She exuded a kind of aura Kareem had never seen. Or maybe he was being too naïve. After all, Kareem wasn't used to seeing white people in The Neighborhood. She was the second white woman he'd seen in those parts in a long time. He reckoned the last time he saw one was at the St. Clair Orphanage; she was looking to adopt a black baby just a week before Kareem was kicked out for running out the clock.

Any white person who stepped into the neighborhood had to be lost, looking to adopt, searching for an escaped convict, or dumb as a bag of hammers. So, in a way, it was like seeing a unicorn—a unicorn in a white t-shirt cropped at the ribs and a tight butt short.

Needless to say, Kareem was stunned by her mere presence. And presumably, so was everybody else gawking at her, including Kareem's sister, whom he didn't realize was right behind him, peering at the woman downstairs over his shoulder.

"Is she lost?" Mable said.

Kareem shuddered. "Christ, Mable, how many times have I told you to knock?"

She'd apparently finished making her latest TikTok dance video that she'd been recording in the living room for the past hour. Sometimes she would drag Kareem into her videos, or make videos of her pranking him. Kareem hated it. She was now enjoying a packet of Doritos.

"Why is she in front of our building?" Mable said.

"I don't know," he replied. "But it looks like she's moving into the building."

Clearly not wearing a bra underneath, Kareem watched the woman heave her suitcase onto the top of the stairs with the taxi driver's help and disappear into the building, her duffel bag swinging from her shoulder.

"Did Stanley say that it was a white woman who was moving in next door?"

The next-door unit was previously occupied by a childless couple for six months until they moved out a week ago. The guy was a supervisor at a construction site which has since been abandoned and cordoned off because the cops got an anonymous tip that a dead body was in the foundation. And sure enough, upon investigation, they did find the corpse of an old man in it. It shook most of The Neighborhood because the old man was loved and respected by all.

"Not to me," Kareem replied.

"I'm gonna call him." Mable seemed pissed and confused.

"Timmy told me he lost his phone yesterday." Timmy was the man's grandson.