Pride (Page 48)

“Does it matter?” he says.

“Yeah, you might not like your new neighbors.” I smile.

“You’re right. There’ll probably be some rich white girl who’ll be afraid of me and then she’ll realize that I’m not that bad since I go to private school and all and we’ll fall madly in love and the rest is history.”

“Why you trying to put that out there like that, Darius?”

“Are you jealous?”

“Hell yeah!” I say.

“Well, don’t be, ’cause I want to show you something.”

We get closer to my old building, and I notice that the crumbling sidewalk has been repaved. A tree stump that used to be there is now gone, and so is the rickety gate. My heart feels like it’s about to split in half. In about a year, I won’t recognize this place.

Darius pulls my hand and crouches down on the ground right in front of the building. And I immediately start laughing. “What are you doing?” I ask. It’s the corniest and sweetest thing I’ve ever seen. In elementary school, we’d spray paint on the handball wall, or on a park bench. But since sidewalks don’t usually get paved in this part of the hood, initials carved into the concrete are something I don’t usually see.

“I wish I could’ve showed off my artistic skills a little better,” Darius says with a huge smile on his face. “But I know you want me to . . . K.I.S.S.”

“Boy, I am not crouching down on that ground to kiss you!” I say, laughing.

“No. I just kept it simple stupid. K, I, S, S.” He grins from ear to ear, as if he just said the cleverest thing.

“You know what? With all that fancy education, you sure know how to keep it original.”

“I try,” he says. “So. Do you like?”

Right there, in front of the place I used to call home, the place I spent the first seventeen years of my life, are the letters and words Z + D FOREVER inside a heart with an arrow.

“I love it,” I say, taking his hand as he gets up from the ground. “So, forever?”

“Forever,” he says, slipping his arms around my waist. “Well . . . that will be there forever if they don’t repave it.” He tries to hold in a laugh.

I punch him lightly on the arm and say, “You wish it could be there forever, Darius Darcy!”

I wrap my arms around his shoulders, pull him in, and give Darius a deep, long kiss for what feels like forever.