Who Am I Without Him? by Sharon Flake

raising the boy than the people doing it now.
    â€œSure could,” Mookie said, putting the blanket back on the baby.
    Then he asked them if they wanted him to ask the mother if it would be okay for them to babysit. The nine sisters said it all at once: “Oh, my. Yes!”
    Mookie and Shanna been together for six whole months now. His mother never asks who he’s going out with. The aunts don’t care much if he comes by once a week or not. They always at his house, though—wiping green peas off the baby’s chin, patting his back, or bouncing him on their laps. “Ain’t he the cutest thing,” they say.
    â€œI thought I was the cutest thing,” Mookie said the other day.
    â€œYou was ,” my mother said, and laughed, tucking her nose deep in the baby’s neck and sniffing the lavender bath lotion on his skin.
    Mookie and me walked out the front door and around the corner. “See you later, cuz,” he said, hugging me.
    â€œLater,” I said, heading for the store, watching him and Shanna walk over to the park holding hands and laughing.

Don’t Be Disrespecting Me
    THE GIRLS LIKED Erin, but not his name. So they called him E. He liked it, especially when Ona called him that.
    E’s boys teased him about Ona. She lived in the suburbs and couldn’t even get phone calls from boys. But she liked E, even though he came from the part of town that everybody called Death Row.
    â€œOna think she better than us,” E’s boy Noodles said. They were at E’s house, lying on his bed—a pile of thin woolly blankets on the floor.
    E thought about Ona’s pretty smile and her apple-butter brown skin. “She’s all right,” he said.
    â€œInvite her to your crib then.”
    â€œOne day,” E said, rubbing his gloved hands together.
    Noodles stood up and looked through the thick, clear plastic covering E’s bedroom window. “Man, when your momma gonna get the heat cut back on?”
    Even with the plastic, E could see frost on the windows and his breath sometimes when he breathed out. “You got heat?”
    â€œWell, we . . .”
    â€œThen shut up.”
    For a long time, they talked about girls. Then E said they should go to the mall. “It’s warm there.”
    â€œThey got girls there, too,” Noodles said. “And girls always got some dough.”
    On the bus, Noodles talked about how he was gonna get some girl to buy him pizza. “And hot chocolate, too.” He wasn’t lying. E knew that. He once saw Noodles talk a girl into paying his way to a $60 rap concert. Saw him get girls in school to lend him bus money, even though the school already gives every student a bus pass.
    â€œDon’t be hustling girls around me,” E said, getting off the bus and heading for the mall.
    Noodles shook his head. “I was born broke, but that don’t mean I have to stay broke, especially when so many girls got so much money.”
    E ignored Noodles. He rubbed his big toe against the hole in his sneaker, then walked over to the pharmacy and put in a job application. A half hour later, E saw Noodles with his arms hanging over some girl’s shoulder. E stood nearby while Noodles took her over to a cold concrete seat, sat her down, and talked . . . till she took him to the food court and bought him two slices of pizza and a supersize drink. Noodles came back and told E he shoulda come, too. “She had long dollars. Shoot. I coulda got me a shirt out the deal if I wanted.”
    E’s stomach was growling. He hardly ever ate at the mall ’cause he didn’t ever have the money. “Let’s go,” he said. Then he told Noodles how he put in three job applications while Noodles was gone.
    Noodles pulled out five bucks. “Here,” he said, stuffing the money in E’s pocket. “She went to the ATM machine. I told her I’d pay her back, when I could.”
    E shook his