Brianna’s unresolved trauma

Brianna’s unresolved trauma is not a single memory but a set of losses that recur in sleep, bodily distress, and strained relationships. Her father’s killing happened outside the family’s old house when she was four; years later, she still hears the shots and remembers Jay’s grief. Jay’s departure during Brianna’s childhood becomes a second wound, one Brianna conceals to spare her mother guilt. As Brianna faces suspicion and gendered scrutiny in school and music, the story places those public pressures alongside private grief rather than treating them as separate burdens.

The killing of her father

Brianna remembers the evening through its ordinary beginning and abrupt interruption. Her father and Jay were leaving for a date night, while Aunt Pooh stayed with Brianna and Trey. Brianna and Trey had started a game of Mario Kart; her father kissed them goodbye, and the car started outside. Five shots followed. Brianna was only four, but the sound remains with her.

The memory is registered not only as an account of what happened but as something still heard and seen. Brianna recalls Jay wailing after the shots and her father in his coffin, cold and still. These fragments connect the circumstances of his death to its aftermath: the child who heard the violence also witnessed the family’s grief and the finality of the coffin. The past therefore returns as an experience that has not become emotionally distant.

Jay’s departure and the recurring dream

The book presents a second painful memory in the form of a nightmare that Brianna recognizes as a memory. Jay left Brianna and Trey at their grandparents’ home because she could not care for them while also managing her drug habit. Brianna’s childlike understanding of the event is expressed in the thought that when people die, they sometimes take the living with them: Jay was alive, but her departure felt like another kind of loss.

Even after five years back with Jay, Brianna still dreams about being left. The recurrence can arrive unexpectedly, making the earlier separation part of her continuing life rather than a closed episode. Brianna does not tell Jay about the dreams. She anticipates that Jay would feel guilty, then imagines feeling guilty for causing that guilt. Her silence protects their present relationship in the moment, but it also leaves Brianna carrying the memory without sharing it with her mother.

Distress in the present

Brianna’s distress also appears in bodily terms. At one point, breathing becomes harder; elsewhere, she experiences the sensation of an invisible grip inside her chest and gasps for air. After closing a door, she wants to hide under the covers, but even her bed feels distant; she lowers herself into a corner and draws her knees to her chest. These episodes show how emotional pressure can become an immediate physical experience, without the narrative reducing her to a diagnosis.

The story places these moments amid present-day conflict as well as remembered loss. At Midtown, Long and Tate restrain Brianna and search her backpack; the narration stresses that Long is not a police officer. That distinction matters to the scene’s account of authority: Brianna is subject to force from school security, and the encounter adds to a life in which institutions can make her feel endangered rather than protected. Her earlier grief does not explain away this event; it forms part of the context in which new fear and mistrust take hold.

Public judgment and private vulnerability

Brianna’s identity as a young rapper brings another form of pressure. Aunt Pooh had warned that she would have to work twice as hard for half the respect, remain as cutthroat as men in the field, and avoid showing weakness. Brianna understands the advice as a demand to become one of the guys and then some to survive. It describes an industry expectation shaped by gender, and it sits uneasily beside the vulnerability she cannot simply choose to suppress.

The public response to “On the Come Up” intensifies that scrutiny. A news report identifies the track as Bri’s and describes its violent nature, framing it as popular among young listeners and as an attack on law enforcement. During a radio interview, Hype challenges lyrics about being armed and killing police. Brianna points out that the reaction is not simply about a sixteen-year-old rapping those subjects: it is also about a sixteen-year-old girl doing so, and she compares the scrutiny with the reception of her father’s work at the same age. James Irving’s praise for what he calls her “sassy black-girl shit” likewise reduces her performance to a racialized and gendered label. These encounters make public judgment another setting in which Brianna has to defend the meaning of her voice.

The wound remains open

Brianna’s trauma is conveyed through recurrence and withholding: the shots remain audible, the departure returns in dreams, and painful feelings are kept from Jay to avoid deepening her mother’s guilt. Present pressures—school security, media framing, and the gendered expectations of rap—do not replace these earlier losses, but they make the present another place where Brianna must manage fear and judgment.

The narrative does not claim that one conversation or achievement resolves these experiences. Instead, it shows how Brianna continues to move through family bonds and public life while carrying memories that surface unpredictably. Her reserve is not presented as a flaw; it is part of how she tries to protect the people she loves and herself. The distinction between surviving an event and being free of its return gives the subject its force: Brianna can be back with Jay, making music, and still be haunted by what happened before.