A Player's Prayer

Two

One week later

B walked between the six foot, two fifty pound guard clutching her belongings and gate money as she tried to keep up. She's been walking for what felt like ten minutes already, going through a series of doors and hallways. She didn't care though, she was going home after five long years. Finally. She would do whatever to get the fuck up outta MCC.

Being locked up in the notoriously inhumane prison was her hell on earth. Metropolitan Correctional Center was known to hold the likes of the Gambino and Bonnano crime family bosses, Jeffrey Epstein and El Chapo. The shit she seen and heard over the past five years would be a humble reminder that she would never be going back. It would change her mental forever.

Shit was already weird for B after all these years. Touching money again felt foreign to her and being able to wear clothing apart from her prison attire was crazy. It was all she knew at one point.

She felt tears of joy welling in her eyes as she noticed her family waiting outside the prison walls just as happy to see her. Her grandma even pulled up. She knew how hard it was over the years for her grandma to even see her behind bars.

Her face was wet with tears as she hugged her grandma first, feeling the weight of the world lift from her shoulders. Her grandma had a way of making her problems feel insignificant. She didn't know when she would be able to hug her again.

"Let me look at you." Her grandma said with a sniffle as they pulled away from each other. B was always slim and tall with a small frame, but now she was even smaller than when she went in. The clothes she went in with from five years ago were slightly loose on her. She lost a significant amount of weight. Her high cheekbones appeared more sunken in. Overall she was looking depleted.

"They got my baby fucked up." Joyce sighed, shaking her head. B knew her grandma was gonna cook everything under the sun to get her back to looking healthy.

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"What you mean we live in Queens now?" B asked with a frown, mugging her parents who were seated up front driving uptown from Manhattan to get to Queens. The whole six years she was locked up nobody felt the need to tell her they moved to a whole other borough.

She side eye'd her sister who was seated to her right pretending to be so engrossed in watching the buildings go by out the window.

Desirae moved to Atlanta a year before B got locked up cause she got into the school of her dreams; Emory University. Desirae wasn't aware of the move until a couple months ago, but she and B practically spoke on the phone every day. She could of mentioned it at least. That shit was throwing B all the way off.

"As in we moved Britney. We got a nice spot in Astoria, we been saving for a minute. We thought you would be happy to be moving to Queens since you're familiar with the area." Her mother said, briefly glancing at her in the rear view mirror.

B spent a lot of her childhood going to Queens while she lived with her grandmother after her mother kicked her the apartment countless of times after they would argue. She would take the L train from Bk to Ditmars Boulevard to go to her grandmas house near Steinway. It was the longest commute ever with some shit always happening on Broadway Junction, but she learned to love it.

Regardless, she didn't want to move there. And how the fuck were niggas even affording to move to Queens anyway? And Astoria at that.

"So we just up and moved to Queens outta nowhere?" B frowned.

"It's been a long time coming Britney." Her father said.