“Whatever makes you clever,” Galleria cuts in, interrupting Red Snapper’s plea.
The Red Snapper, though, isn’t trying to give up. “What do I have to give you for one tiny kiss?”
“Cyanide?” Galleria snaps back, referring to a deadly poison.
Meanwhile, Chanel does what she always does best when there is drama in her midst—turns chirpy and sweet. “I’m so sorry to hear about the hurricane,” Chanel coos to Mackerel, referring to the mischievous “Mabel” who blasted through the Pensacola region of Florida, where his family lives. “I saw it on the news!”
“Guess we know who’ll be kissing under the mistletoe,” remarks Dorinda, trying to lighten up the situation. It’s obvious Mackerel and Chanel are smitten with each.
Galleria, however, isn’t in the mood for jokes. “Let’s bounce,” she announces loudly.
“You think they’ll have mistletoe at the Eggnogger?” Chanel giggles to Dorinda, ignoring Galleria’s orders.
“I can’t believe they pulled that okie-doke behind our back,” huffs Galleria, intent on staying angry.
“I think it’s tan coolio that Mackerel and Red Snapper get to perform together again, mija,” Chanel says sweetly. When she sees the dejected look on Galleria’s face she quickly adds, “I mean, we don’t have time for that now anyway, since we’re going into the studio.”
“Right about now—all I have time for is stewing and brewing,” moans Galleria, getting the final say.
Angie and I walk home, glum as plums. Along the way, my mind keeps going back to the same dreadful thought: How are we going to get to stay in New York this month so we can finish the demo for Mouse Almighty?
“We were waiting forever to hear from him—now we gotta jump?” I complain to Angie.
“Daddy is going to have a conniption fit when we ask him,” Angie groans back.
“I know he wants us outta here,” I mumble, dangling my cowboy-boot-shaped leather key ring by its toe.
“What do you mean?” Angie asks, like a dunce.
“Dag-on, Angie—you know Daddy is seeing somebody.”
“Oh, right,” she says in her forgetful manner. “You think he’s going out with Aballa again?”
“I don’t know what I think,” I say, realizing that I’m starting to perspire even though we just came in from the cold. I guess I’d rather face Count Dracula instead of Daddy any day of the week!
Chapter
3
Daddy must have come home in the wee hours of the morning, because I didn’t hear him. “Even if Hurricane Mabel took the roof off our room, you’ll still be sleeping with your mouth open, and drool dripping by the faucet-full,” Angie humphs while we make up our twin beds before going downstairs for breakfast.
“And you heard him?” I ask, testing Angie’s veracity.
“Yup, I heard him come in, but I didn’t see any reason to wake you,” the fake-tress continues. “Just as well we ask him after he’s had his two cups of coffee.”
“What time did he come home?” I ask. She can tell lies as greasy as burnt bacon.
When Angie doesn’t respond, I realize I’m right. She was out like a log, too. Patting down the corners of my ugly bedspread, I fantasize about a shopping trip at the Galleria Mall when we go back home. I’m getting awfully tired of this powder-blue bedspread with the annoying nubby pom-poms that shred after each machine wash.
“Did the Ooophelia catalog come yet?” I ask Angie. I know she snatches the catalogs out of Daddy’s mail pile and hogs them all for herself.
Sure enough, Angie pulls the catalog out of her cheetah backpack. “I don’t think you should bother Daddy, because he is going to say no anyway,” Angie warns me, dropping the catalog on my bed.
“About staying in New York for Christmas? Or getting the cheetah shelf organizers and matching comforter?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.
“Both,” Angie retorts, then puts on more tape to secure the upper left corner on the Mariah Carey poster hanging on our wall. Pointing her finger at Mariah’s pouty image, Angie quips, “Don’t give me no drama, because you’re not my mama!”
By now, you’ve probably figured out that we’re both scared of Daddy. Our puppy, for example, Coco, that Galleria and her mother, Ms. Dorothea, gave us? Well, Daddy wouldn’t let us keep him here until he is housebroken. God forbid, the adorable creature should pee in his kitchen. But don ’t get us wrong, Daddy isn’t always mean: sometimes he surprises us. Like the poster of Mariah with her navel hanging out—he bought it for us after her concert at Madison Square Garden and even let us put it up on the pristine white walls in our room. I guess we should be grateful—but I’m sorry—our bedroom is still too plain. I wish we could redecorate it in cheetah, like Galleria’s and Chanel’s bedrooms.
Taking a deep sigh, we climb down the stairs to face the music. Angie whispers, “It could be worse, we could have Dorinda’s bedroom.”
“Hush,” I shoot back. Poor Dorinda has to share her bedroom with two other foster sisters, and it’s a mess. Actually, her whole apartment is shabby. It’s a dag-on shame that Mrs. Bosco doesn’t use some of the money we raised from the benefit to fix up that awful apartment.
Meanwhile, Daddy looks all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in his white shirt and tie, even though I know he probably didn’t get much sleep. He obviously had a good time with whomever he was tipping out with. “Where did you go last night?” I ask him, even though I know our tight-lipped father probably won’t take the bait.
“None of your concern. How was the meeting?” asks Daddy, proving me right.
“It was real good. Um, Daddy, we need to talk to you about something,” I blurt out, because I can’t take the anxiety anymore. “They’re throwing a Christmas Eggnogger, which we want to go to, and we are in charge of the Christmas Volunteer Drive at our church—”
“But you told them you’re going home for two weeks, so you can’t go,” Daddy says, glancing at me for a second, then looking back down at his newspaper. I stand silent, peering at the article Daddy is reading: about a six-foot baby giraffe making his debut at the Bronx Zoo. I know Daddy doesn’t care about giraffes—he’s just trying to ignore me.
“Well, that’s not all,” I start in, feeling winded already before the battle begins. Angie stops scraping the mayonnaise jar with the butter knife, and the kitchen alcove gets real quiet. We already know what Daddy is going to say: because the only place he wants us to be is out of his hair until after the ball drops in Times Square on New Year’s Eve!
“Um, Daddy—you know how well that benefit went for us—I mean not just us raising the money for Mrs. Bosco’s attorney and all for the court case,” I say, babbling on. Angie just stands there holding the butter knife in midair, like a mime taking a break! I can’t believe she isn’t helping me. “Well, we didn’t know that the producer, Mouse Almighty, was going to work with us again—you know—back in the studio.”
“What does a Mouse have to do with the benefit—he wasn’t there, was he?” Daddy asks sternly, like he is a prosecutor trying to trap a witness in a shaky alibi.
“No, but the Def Duck Records people were there and they—well, that’s not the point,” I stutter, pulling the yarn on the sleeve of my turtleneck sweater.
“Well, I wish you would get to the point, because I have to go to work, and I’ve got meetings all day for the spring campaign,” Daddy announces gruffly. Suddenly I feel guilty for making Daddy go from cheerful to stressed out in the span of two minutes.
He does have so many responsibilities with his new job as marketing manager of SWAT, the biggest bug repellant company in the country, but killing cockroaches can’t be more important than his own daughters getting a record deal!
“Daddy, we have to stay in New York to finish our demo tape so Mouse can take it to the record company because he has to go to Amsterdam and work on Sista Fudge’s remixes,” I spit out quickly.
“You mean, not go to Houston for two weeks?” Daddy asks.
“Yes, sir,” Angie says, finally piping up in our defense.
“Have you both lost your minds?” Daddy responds sternly, shaking his head in disbelief.
“No, sir,” I say quietly.
Angie chimes in a “No, sir,” right behind mine.
“Um, we just want to finish working on the demo tape,” I add, after another beat has passed.
“There are a few things I would risk in life,” Daddy starts in, then pauses, putting the newspaper down on the kitchen alcove counter, “but crossing your grandmother and raising her blood pressure is not one of them. Y’all are going to Houston.”
“Big Momma would understand. She loves us being in the Cheetah Girls!” I say, getting hysterical. I can’t believe that Daddy is going to stand in the way of us making our dreams come true. He knows how hard we have worked to make this happen. We love our family more than anything. He knows we would never do anything to hurt Big Momma, or Ma, or anybody in our family.
“Oh, yeah, you think Big Momma will understand?” Daddy asks, challenging us. Then he points to the telephone on the wall. “Get her on the phone right now and find out.”
We stand there awkwardly for a second.
“Go on,” repeats Daddy.
I wipe the sweat that has piled up on my forehead with the sleeve of my sweater.
“Don’t do that. Get yourself a tissue,” Daddy barks at me.
Angie runs and hands me a tissue. I pick up the phone, my hand shaking, and dial Big Momma’s house. The phone rings. Inside I’m praying she doesn’t pick up the phone, but I know it’s too early in the morning for her to be tending her garden. She is probably sitting right there, sipping her sweet iced tea and eating her biscuit with peach or strawberry jam.
“Hello.” Big Momma answers the phone in her deep morning voice. By midafternoon, her voice always gets a little softer.
“Um, hi, Big Momma—it’s Aqua,” I say softly, trying to hide the anxiety in my voice. I should have known I couldn’t fool my smart grandmother, though.
Sure enough, she asks quickly, “What’s wrong, Aqua?”
“Oh, nothing,” I say before I can stop myself from telling a lie.
“Hush your mouth,” responds Big Momma. “You wouldn’t be calling me at this hour if nothing was wrong.” Who do I think I’m fooling? Angie and I always speak to Big Momma on Sundays—usually after church. She can see through my lie clearer than she can see an army of red ants climbing into her cabbage patch in the backyard.
“Remember we told you about that record producer who put us in a studio to make a demo?” I say, stalling while I try to figure out how I can explain this to Big Momma so she won’t get upset.
“Yes—y’all been waiting to work with him again,” Big Momma says, proud of herself for remembering something that is important to us.
“That’s right!” I exclaim breathlessly. I can just see her sitting in that house all by herself. My heart starts sinking again. “Well, we can’t come home for the holidays, because we have to work with him right now.”
“What you mean, you can’t come home?” Big Momma says in such a startled voice that my heart sinks even lower. “Pauletta and her kids are coming in from Galveston. Jelsetta got the week off so she can take y’all around. Uncle Skeeter done arranged a party for y’all. And Indigo and Egyptian will be beside themselves if they don’t see their favorite aunts.”
“I know that, Big Momma,” I say, close to tears, “but this is the break we’ve been waiting for.”
“Your father got something to do with you not coming?” Big Momma asks curtly. I can hear the wheels turning in her mind.
“No!” I say quickly.
“’Cuz your mother would come up there and slap him till next Tuesday, you hear me?” commands Big Momma.
“Yes, ma’am,” I say quickly, praying she doesn’t ask to speak to Daddy.
“So I don’t care what you do, you just get your butt over my house like you do every year, you hear?” Big Momma says in the same tone of voice Reverend Butter uses when he’s finished talking at the podium—it means, the sermon is over.
“Yes, Big Momma,” I say, caving in. I feel like my chest is going to collapse.
When I get off the phone, Daddy stares at me with a steady gaze. “I see that went very well.”
“Yes, it did,” I say defiantly. Then I start crying like a baby who didn’t get her pacifier in time.
“Stop that,” Daddy says gruffly. He rises from the alcove, leaving behind a full cup of coffee and half-eaten English muffin.
“Well, now you really did it!” Angie says desperately, letting the knife free-fall on the counter.
“I didn’t do anything,” I protest. “Nobody will listen. What am I supposed to do?”
“Well, Big Momma sure crunched you like corn chips,” Angie says sarcastically. “You’re the one who’s going to tell Galleria and Ms. Dorothea tonight at dinner that we can’t stay and finish the demo because we have to go home and eat peach cobbler instead!”
I resist the temptation to scratch out Angie’s eyes. I can’t believe her nerve, standing there with her twitching eyebrows, giving me orders like she’s been anointed the Wicked Witch of the Upper West Side.
By the time we walk to the subway, I have calmed down, but I’m racking my brains trying to think if there was anything I could have said differently to Big Momma. All of a sudden, this lady with a double-carriage baby stroller knocks me from behind and doesn’t even say excuse me, or nothing! The rude woman has snapped me out of my daze and got my heart pounding.
“These women with the baby strollers ought to have a license,” I moan to Angie, but she doesn’t say a word. I know what she is thinking: how could this be happening to us? Of all the people, we thought Big Momma would be on our side.
“You remember that time Big Momma was watching us—when Ma and Daddy had to go to an Avon convention?” I ask Angie, ignoring the fact that she isn’t talking to me—a habit I developed a long time ago when I realized I was stuck being a twin.
“Yeah, I remember,” Angie pipes up. “When Big Momma nodded off after lunch, we thought we were cute strutting around in Ma clothes, until I fell down the stairs and broke the heel off her red shoes.”
“I couldn’t believe she fixed the heel for us and didn’t say a word about it to Ma,” I say, my eyes tearing up again. “We were real lucky Ma didn’t get hurt when she wore those shoes out and the heel got wedged in the sidewalk grate.”
“Yeah, Big Momma was never real good at fixing stuff—not like Uncle Skeeter.” Angie chuckles. Big Momma used to give Uncle Skeeter five dollars to walk around the house in her new shoes so he could break them in for her. Big Momma can’t stand her feet hurting for five minutes.
“What are we gonna do?” I ask Angie as soon as we get to the Performing Arts Annex at Lincoln Center.
Angie doesn’t have time to answer, because we run right into Malcolm Extra and JuJu “Beans” Quinnonez.
“Are you all right?” JuJu asks, like she cares, but I know she doesn’t. This is just her way of letting me know that I look a mess. I guess there is nothing like coming to school with puffy eyes to draw attention.
“Yes, ma’am, I’m fine and dandy,” I say, pretending I have no idea what she is talking about. I shoot Angie a look like, Do my eyes look that bad? By the way she shrugs her shoulders, I realize they do.
“Oh, Miss Aqua—my bill is in the mail,” Malcolm Extra coos in his singsongy voice.
“For what?” I ask, startled.
“For that fabulous performance I gave at your benefit,” Malcolm Extra shouts. “I may be free, but I’ll cost you!”
“Yes, m’—I mean, sir. I know those kind of thrills never come cheaply,” I say, chuckling. Malcolm Extra performed at our “Bring It On!” benefit. He is quite a character and we were lucky to have him. He sings in a falsetto voice that even rivals disco artists like Sylvester from the 1970s. (Once a month, we meet at Galleria’s house for
Seventies Appreciation Night and watch videos of artists from back in the day so we can be on top of our game.)
“Oh, well, one day, let’s hope there is a payday in this picture for one, for all!” Malcolm Extra shouts louder, sailing down the hallway to his class.
Plopping down in science class, I stare glumly at the blackboard, waiting for our teacher to start the class. Out of habit my eyes move to the big sign in red letters tacked to the side of the blackboard.
SCIENCE SAFETY RULES: 1) NEVER MIX UNKNOWN CHEMICALS JUST TO SEE WHAT HAPPENS….
Maybe that’s what I’m trying to do—mix things together, but instead I’m making a terrible mess. I mean, here we are in New York City, with the Cheetah Girls and all our big dreams. Then there is our whole other life back in Houston, where we always have to try to make everybody happy and get them to understand our new program. Yeah, well, I guess it sure has backfired. I get the feeling the whole thing is going to go kaboom!
Chapter
4
I thought the time to go meet the Cheetah Girls and Ms. Dorothea at Maroon’s restaurant was never gonna come, but then the drop-the-boom hour has finally arrived, and now I just dread it. Well, I hope you understand what I’m babbling about, because I sure don’t. Neither did Daddy. He made it real clear to us when we left the house to go meet our gang that we’d better just blurt out the truth, “or, so help you God, I’m going to ground you two for a long, long time.” Daddy did not want to hear any more nonsense about the recording schedule Mouse Almighty has mapped out for us. Daddy ended his “sermon” by saying that we have to go to Houston for two weeks, just like he planned, even if that means we don’t finish the demo. And that, “if we tell the truth, then God works in mysterious ways to make it all work out.”
Well, Angie and I may have to listen to Daddy, but we know better than to believe everything he says.
What we do have to do right now is show up at Maroon’s restaurant, even if we feel like the Lion in the Wizard of Oz, who is in desperate need of some spare courage. Angie and I drag ourselves into the restaurant, shaking in our boots. A real pretty lady wearing a blue polka-dot dress and happy red lipstick greets us at the entrance.
Twinkle, Twinkle, Cheetah Stars Page 3
