Hotlanta

by Mitzi Miller

  “Sorry, bro…” the guy began.

  “I ain’t your bro,” Altimus shot back. “Back off my girls.”

  Lauren decided that day that nothing on God’s green earth could convince her she’d ever set foot on somebody’s MARTA train. But then again, she never imagined she’d have a reason to be in the West End, either. But this night, she wanted—needed—to be there. And seeing as her car was off-limits—Sydney’s keys had been confiscated from both girls—and there was no way in hell she was going to call in a favor with Dara, who still wasn’t really talking to her, MARTA it would be.

  “You’re going to meet me, right?” Lauren said nervously.

  “Yeah,” Jermaine said. “Just get on the North-South line, headed south. I’ll be standing at the exit.”

  Within fifteen minutes, Lauren was sitting on a train, squeezed up against the cold window, hoping the cooties of the thousands of commoners who had ridden that nasty train throughout the day wouldn’t rub off on her. There were only a few people riding with her—a girl about her age, sitting with some boy who looked like he was straight off the set of Menace II Society; an older woman in a uniform, maybe a waitress or office cleaner; two men in work suits; and the thirty-something guy in a dirty, dusty, funky coat sitting closest to her. He stank. Lauren, horrified at the prospect of having to smell him much longer, pulled a tissue from her purse and not so discreetly held it over her nose until the computerized voice on the loudspeaker said, “Next stop, West End.”

  And when she stepped out of the door and ran up the stairs and toward the exit, there he was. The tears welled in her eyes with each step and turned into a full-on sloppy cry when she fell into his arms.

  “Damn, babe,” he said, squeezing her in his embrace. “It’s going to be all right. Come on, don’t cry.”

  “It’s all just a shitty mess, and I don’t know how to fix it, Jermaine,” Lauren sobbed. “I can’t take this—I just can’t.”

  “I know, I know—shh. It’s going to be all right,” he said. Jermaine pushed Lauren back, tilted her head up toward his, and kissed her lips. “Come on, let’s get outta here. My man let me borrow his car; it’s parked right up the steps,” he said, wiping the tears from her eyes and grabbing her hand. They walked out into the bright streetlights of the still bustling neighborhood.

  Lauren didn’t know what to expect or how to act walking into the tiny, decrepit house Jermaine called home. After all, what do you say to someone whose place could practically fit into your foyer: Love what you’ve done with the place? Nice “vintage” furniture? I’m feeling that old, stale-fish smell, reminds me of home?

  Jermaine sensed her discomfort. “Well it ain’t much, I know, but it’s home,” he mumbled, looking around at his place almost as if it were the first time he’d seen it, too.

  Lauren wiped her eyes some more and folded her arms. She heard some movement in a room toward the back of the house. “Your mom here?” she asked, startled.

  “Nah, she’s, um, out,” Jermaine said. “That’s my brother.”

  “I didn’t know you had a brother,” Lauren said.

  “Yeah, well, I do. He ain’t around here much.”

  “Oh,” Lauren said, growing uncomfortable. She was so sure that running to Jermaine was the right thing to do, but just then she started to question what the hell she was going through when she decided it was a good idea to darken a doorway in the West End after midnight. “You know, maybe I should go,” she said.

  “No,” Jermaine said softly, taking her hands into his. “No, stay. I’ll drive you home in a little while. Just—just stay. Let me talk to you. I want to know what happened.”

  He led her to his room, which was down a small hallway just off the living room/dining room area. It was neat—a small bed covered with a hand-sewn quilt was pushed up against the white wall next to a small window overlooking the faded yellow siding of the neighbor’s house. An iPod hooked up to a speaker sat on a small, rusted table next to the bed, squeezed next to a metal folding chair. Sneaker boxes were piled one on top of the other in the closet, which was covered awkwardly by a curtain that Jermaine hadn’t gotten around to closing.

  “Soooo…this is where the magic happens, huh?”

  “Oh, you got jokes, huh, Ms. Duke?” Jermaine laughed.

  “Actually, I’m not really in a joking kind of mood,” Lauren said, getting quiet.

  “Just trying to lighten the mood up a little, you know…” Jermaine said, extending his hand to invite her to sit on his bed.

  Lauren gave a half smile and sat on the folding chair next to the table. Jermaine chuckled and fell backward onto his bed.

  “So?”

  “So?” Lauren mimicked back.

  “What happened? Whose ass I got to kick tonight?”

  Lauren looked down at her hands and fiddled with her fingernails, buying herself time while she decided just how much she wanted to tell this boy. She looked up and into his eyes and, without having one good reason why she should trust him, Lauren let the events of the past few weeks—the Dara and Marcus mess, the dance-squad debacle, the nasty e-mail, Sydney’s outing Donald—tumble from her lips.

  “I mean, everybody thinks that just because we’re twins we’re supposed to act alike, too, but my sister and I are two totally different people and there’s no changing that,” Lauren said, getting teary again. “We fight like everybody else, and every once in a while it gets a little nastier than it should, but what she did this time was bananas. What’s worse is that I’m starting to think she had something to do with that e-mail.”

  “But why would she tell everybody you was shaking your ass in a video? That’s some foul stuff that nobody would even believe—” Jermaine began.

  Lauren cut him off. “Well, uh, thing is…” she hesitated, trying to find the right words to explain why she was at the video shoot in the first place.

  Jermaine laughed. “Hold up—you did try out for a Thug Heaven video?”

  “It’s not funny, Jermaine,” Lauren shot back, jumping out of her chair.

  “No, no, come on, I’m not laughing at you,” Jermaine said. “It’s just that, you know, you all from Buckhead and whatnot, dressed in the hot clothes, riding in the hot car, Daddy all rich and stuff. I can’t really picture you getting grimy on a Thug Heaven video set.”

  “I didn’t get grimy, Jermaine!” Lauren sneered.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way…”

  “Then what did you mean, Jermaine?” Lauren asked as she paced the room. “I mean, if I wanted to be judged I could have stayed home.”

  Jermaine stood up and pulled Lauren to him. “Come on, baby, I’m not judging you. I’m here for you—you know that,” he said, looking in her eyes. “You know that, right?”

  “Well, let me break it down for you, okay, so you have all the right information. I did try out for the Thug Heaven video. I did not screw anybody in Thug Heaven or on the set. I do not know why my sister is telling the whole school I’m a ho, or what made her tell my folks that Donald is gay. Well, Donald is gay, but still…”

  “Who’s Donald?”

  Lauren’s shoulders slumped; she pulled back from Jermaine’s embrace. “Donald is my friend, is all.”

  “A friend, huh?”

  “It’s complicated,” Lauren said, twirling onto his bed.

  “Complicated, huh?”

  “For the record, Jermaine, Donald is gay. And up until tonight, my parents thought he was my boyfriend.”

  “Now I’m really confused.” Jermaine laughed as he sat down next to Lauren.

  “I’m his beard, he’s mine when I need him to be,” Lauren said simply. “Or at least he was. His parents are shipping him off to boarding school on Monday.”

  This time, Jermaine contained his laughter. “Wow. Um, and you don’t know why Sydney did all of this?”

  “She’s mad about something—probably her damn boyfriend. I just can’t figure out why she can’t take it out on him. It’s not my faul
t he’s a dog.”

  “But didn’t you say he and Dara had something going on?”

  “Yeah, but it wasn’t a big deal, and I made sure that Dara ended it.”

  “So how you know your sister didn’t know about it?”

  Now as crazy as it sounds, this was the first time that Lauren had considered just how much intel her sister might have had on the Dara and Marcus situation. “Damn,” she said.

  “Look, Lauren, word is bond; your sister went out like a sucker if she sent that e-mail calling you a ho. But imagine if she really does know about the Dara situation? I mean, at the end of the day you can’t care so much about what the people at your school think about you. You know what you are, and your sister does, too. And I’m guessing it’s the same for anybody else who truly cares about you.”

  She didn’t know what came over her when she did it, but just at that moment, Lauren leaned over and kissed Jermaine full on the lips—a soft, passionate one that said all the “thanks” she needed to convey. Jermaine returned it with a hearty “you’re welcome,” as the two of them fell back onto his bed, kissing and touching and kissing some more. Jermaine touched her face softly, then let his hands linger from her neck, down to her shoulder, and along the side of her body. She returned his passion with an embrace, inviting him into her mouth and wrapping her arms around his neck. Lauren hadn’t had any intention of doing this; she truly went to Jermaine’s house to talk—just talk. Not do this. But she couldn’t help herself.

  Still, when he climbed on top of her and she felt his fingers on her breasts, she got nervous. And when she heard shuffling in the living room just beyond Jermaine’s bedroom door, she jumped up.

  “I gotta get out of here,” she said in a loud whisper.

  Jermaine looked over at his digital alarm clock; it read 12:52 A.M. “Yeah, it’s late, huh?”

  “I need to get home,” Lauren said, adjusting her shirt and tugging at her jeans. “Is that your brother out there?”

  “Yeah,” Jermaine said quietly. “Don’t worry about him. Let’s get your coat—I’m going to take you home.”

  “If you could just drop me off at the train station, I can get home from there. There’s no way you’ll be able to pull up into the driveway anyway,” Lauren said. “The car will set off the sensors and Keisha will be all up in the monitors and dialing the police all in the same motion.”

  “Come on, now—this ain’t the time or the neighborhood to be outside at this time of night. I’m going to drive you and drop you off at the end of your block and you can call my cell when you get inside. And don’t bother saying no—I’m not having it any other way.”

  Lauren laughed. “Fine,” she said. “But how are we going to get out of your house with your brother in the next room?”

  “Who, Rodney? Please, that ain’t nothing. He don’t have nothing to do with me and how I handle mine,” Jermaine said, sounding agitated.

  “Okay,” Lauren hesitated, clearly taken aback by Jermaine’s sudden change in tone. “Well, um, let’s get going,” she said, looking at her watch nervously.

  “Yeah, let’s bounce.”

  Jermaine flung the door open, gave his brother a stare-down worthy of a scene in The Wire, and brushed past the chair he was sitting in. Lauren followed close behind, trying not to look too hard at Rodney.

  “Well, well, baby brother, nice midnight snack,” he said. “You sharing?”

  Jermaine laughed, but clearly, his chuckle was not one meant to show he was humored. He started grinding his teeth; his temples bounced in circles. “Rodney, Lauren. Lauren, Rodney. She was just leaving,” Jermaine said as he practically pushed Lauren toward the front door.

  “What’s the rush, baby brother?” Rodney asked, turning in his chair to face the couple. “Why don’t you both stay and chat?”

  Jermaine rolled his eyes and took Lauren’s hand into his. He didn’t say another word, just walked out into the autumn chill, Lauren in tow.

  “Y’all come back now, ya hear?” Rodney called out as Lauren and Jermaine pushed through the door. “Maybe we can talk about getting me one of them Duke rides.”

  The door slammed.

  Lauren wasn’t sure if she heard it right, but it sounded like Rodney said her last name. How does he know me, she asked herself. She looked at Jermaine, but he didn’t say anything. She wasn’t even sure if he heard it.

  But Lauren wasn’t about to push the issue. Something about Rodney didn’t set right with her. She wasn’t about to start asking Jermaine questions about his brother, though; she didn’t know him like that and was almost afraid of what he might say. Besides, Lauren just wanted to get back to Buckhead and pretend like this day never happened.

  15

  SYDNEY

  “Actually, Caesar, you can just drop me off right here,” Sydney requested in her sweetest voice as the car service pulled up at the bottom of her driveway.

  “I would love to, miss, but my company has strict orders from your father to drop you off directly at the front door. No exceptions,” Caesar explained apologetically as the black Cadillac Escalade continued up the long stretch to the main entrance of the Duke estate.

  “Fine,” Sydney huffed as she flopped back into her seat feeling more like a prisoner headed to the guillotine than the princess headed to her storybook castle.

  In the seventy-two hours since Lauren dropped the bomb about Sydney’s secret relationship with Dice, Altimus had literally snatched Sydney’s life away. Her driving privileges, iPod, flat screen, and all phones were immediately confiscated. Weekly appointments at the spa, with the trainer, and her hairdresser were canceled indefinitely. The only thing Sydney was still allowed to do was eat, sleep, go to school, participate in after-school activities, and come straight home.

  When Carmen and Rhea noticed Sydney getting dropped off by a car service on Monday morning, they were dying to know what was up. But honesty required spilling the beans about Dice. What would Rhea and Carmen, the daughters of two prominent lawyers, a psychologist, and a housewife, respectively, know about having a parent on lockdown? Instead, Sydney created a story about car issues and played it off as if she had requested the driver to avoid dealing with the responsibility of a loaner from her dad’s dealership on the days that Marcus couldn’t drive her. Luckily, the girls were too busy buzzing about Dara’s “crazy” Boobgate rumors to bother prying any further.

  “All right, miss, I’ll see you tomorrow morning at seven-thirty sharp,” Caesar announced as the SUV came to a stop.

  “Mmm-hmm,” Sydney replied as she hopped out and slammed the door shut. Even though she understood it wasn’t Caesar’s fault, his refusal to let her out before the Dukes’ state-of-the-art surveillance camera caught her arrival still annoyed the hell out of her. Caesar waited patiently until Sydney pulled out her keys and opened the front door before he drove off slowly.

  Sydney stepped inside the foyer and closed the front door. “Hey, I’m home,” she said to no one in particular as she dropped her bag and started taking off her gray Miu Miu ankle boots.

  “Welcome home, Ms. Sydney,” Edwina answered as she came around the corner.

  “Hey, Edwina,” Sydney replied halfheartedly as she noticed her car keys sitting in the bowl of keys on the foyer table. “Why’s it so quiet around here?” At 4:45 P.M. on a Tuesday, the sound of her mom blasting Access Hollywood from the den was noticeably absent.

  “Oh, Dr. Chin was a guest on the Oprah show this morning and his flight back from Chicago was delayed, so your mom’s acupuncture appointment got pushed back,” Edwina explained. “She probably won’t be home for another two hours.”

  Sydney immediately straightened up. “Two hours?” she asked as if she didn’t quite hear the elderly woman correctly the first time.

  “Yes, miss, at least two hours.”

  Sydney started putting her boots back on as fast as she could. With her mom at the acupuncturist, Altimus working, and Lauren probably at practice, Edwina had just waved the gre
en flag in Sydney’s face. “Edwina, do me a favor? Can you please go upstairs and close my bedroom door?”

  “Sure, no problem, miss…”

  “Thanks. I’ll be right back, I’m just gonna step out for a second, okay?” Sydney continued as she turned to grab the keys to her car. “But if anyone asks, the last thing you saw was me go up to my room. Okay?”

  Edwina didn’t even blink. “Of course, miss.” She hadn’t managed to keep her job at the Duke family estate for the past twelve years by not knowing when to mind her business.

  “You’re the best,” Sydney thanked her as she hurried out the door. She had two unsupervised hours and she wasn’t about to waste a minute. The front door barely closed before the sound of Sydney’s car engine roared to life.