Rico was born in D.C., and spent a few childhood years in New York and Virginia, but she’s lived most of her life in Prince George’s County, Maryland. Statistically, P.G. County is home to the wealthiest black-majority neighborhoods in the country, with a median household income of $75,000. Maria and her mom, however, lived right outside of those developments, in the less affluent Palmer Park.

When she was in sixth grade, her parents enrolled her in a boarding school in Baltimore, in the hopes of providing her a better education than the one her school district offered. A bus would pick her up from a local rec center every week and return her to spend weekends at home. After three years, when she was 14, a boy named Martinez invited her outside to smoke weed. She was so young, she says, she didn’t even know how to use a lighter. The pair got caught at a bus stop. They weren’t even stoned yet — “and that was the worst part about it,” she says — but she was expelled and sent back to a public school near home.

“I was a wild-ass bitch. Like, imagine my 14-year-old. I wish Cam fucking would,” she tells me, talking about her son, now 2 years old. “I would take his weed so fast, like, Who do you fucking think you are, you little shit? You think this shit is a game? Your brain cells are my brain cells.”

Returning from Baltimore, Rico felt different — “the weird one out the pack,” she says. Her new schoolmates, many of whom she’d known since elementary school, treated her with disdain. “They remembered when I left. And they was just like… ‘So you’re from Baltimore, now?’ And I’m like, ‘Bitch, I’m from the same spot.’ My mom did not move. We were still living in the fucking hood… That hard-ass switch from boarding school to a school in P.G. County, that shit was crazy as hell. They talked different. They dressed different.”

That, she says, is when Maria Kelly became Rico Nasty: “I started doing shit the way I like to do it ‘cause I got tired of waiting on everybody else to do shit for me.”

