Read Online Unruly by Ja Rule - Free Book Online Page A

before. But when Aisha said it, it sounded different. It made me feel that it may be safe to love her. I liked her. I wanted more of Aisha than I was getting. She and I were getting close but getting to the sex felt like an eternity. We hadn’t gotten there—yet.
    I never pressured Aisha because I felt that she was worth waiting for. She and I had lots of sexy fun together even though we weren’t having actual sex. She was affectionate and made me feel solid, like she and I were going to be together, always. There was just no me without her. It was just the way she held my hand when we walked.
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    THE ETERNITY WAS finally over.
    â€œI love you,” Aisha said to me as I kissed her forehead and held her tight.
    I didn’t say it, but I was thinking, Me too.
    I grew up without birthdays or Christmas so being with Aisha in this way felt like a Christmas gift that I’d been waiting to unwrap my whole life. She was sixteen and I was seventeen. I’d been trying to get with her like this for two years. Feeling her silky skin beneath me was like nothing I’d ever felt before. It wasn’t about me taking something from her or her giving me something. We were turning into us. I could feel my heart for the first time in years. Aisha was not like the other girls, she was everything.
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    MOMS AND I were on completely different shifts. She was never around. I’d barely made it to the eleventh grade. Although I was struggling to finish, my interest in school was totally gone. I had money and music on my mind. I thought that the shit they were teaching in school had nothing to do with my life. I used to think, fuck history and social studies. But I was wrong . If we don’t know our history, we are lost. This is most definitely true for Black men. We need to be constantly reminded of the great men that have come before us or we’ll believe what the TV says about us. The images on the screen rarely make us feel good about ourselves, rarely inspire us to do meaningful shit.
    Moms was on the night shift, four to two, and I was working a morning shift. Moms had lost track of me and didn’t realize why my heart was no longer in school. As with all mothers, she wanted better for me. She really wanted me to graduate from high school.
    My lyric notebook was filling up. I had written hundreds of rhymes, some that were going to be hits if I could just get them out there.
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    IN HIGH SCHOOL, my homies started calling me Left because of the knockout game. The object of the game was to see who could knock out a crackhead with a single punch. I guess my homies and me were actually the only ones playing the game. The crackheads were like our game pieces. The crackheads were always fucked-up, stumbling down the street like wide-eyed zombies. They would swerve from side to side as they approached us trying to get some crack for free. We were weeded-up, too, and everything was topsy-turvy. Everything was funny as hell. If the crackhead would sway to the left, I would hit him from the right with a left. The fiends couldn’t even see our punches coming and then with one light tap, BAM! they were out cold laying on the ground, with their head right next to my fresh new sneakers. So, muthafuckas started calling me Left. I kinda liked that shit, too.
    Every morning after a night spent playing with the crackheads, when Moms walked into my room, she saw a sight that made her mad. I was fast asleep. Towering over my bed one day, she said, “What the fuck ? Are you ever going back to school? What are you going to do with yourself? You’re seventeen years old! The school keeps calling me and sending letters. I don’t know what to tell them.”
    I rolled over, groggy from the night before. “Nah. I’m not going back. You can go and sign me out, so they can stop bothering you.”
    It had been almost twenty days straight that I hadn’t been to school, or at least that’s what