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Kyla Santana Brown St. Louis
I've always been bad. Bad, bad, Kyla Brown. Around these parts, the Brown name alone determines your destiny. All the women in my family were fine sexy by nature. My granny, my momma, and my three aunts who raised me had an uncanny ability to get what they wanted out of men. All they really wanted was money and status. Their beauty was so potent, they literally stopped hearts, conversations, and traffic when they entered the scene. That's why folks around north St. Louis started calling them the "Badass Browns." I inherited that beauty and that mentality from them.
"Don't you let any of those confused young girls try to tell you what you should be doing, and who you should be doing it with," Granny had cautioned me the night before my first day of high school. "Misery loves company, and they'll try to influence you to do everything they're doing just so you can ruin your reputation the way that they ruined theirs. Don't let them make a fool out of you, you understand me?" I had nodded my head. "Yes ma'am, I understand."
Granny was my maternal grandmother and had raised me from an infant. She was more of a mother to me than her daughter had ever been. Everyone thought of me as the "baby" of the Brown family, as if I were Granny's child, and not merely a grand-child. My momma, Camille Brown, lived over a thousand miles away on the East Coast. She had gotten pregnant with me when she was a sophomore in college. I had been told that she never had a real relationship with my father for three very good reasons: He was her professor. He was married. And he was white. Taking responsibility for her own had never been her forte.
Camille was young and restless, so after I was born, she took me back to her native inner city, Atlanta, and left me there with her mother. At Granny's house, I was treated like a little prima donna and taught how to walk, talk, and dress just to turn heads.
"High school ain't nothing but a fashion show, girl," my aunt, Jazz, told me the next morning as she watched me get dressed. "You can't go up in STL High half-stepping. That would make all of us look bad." Jasmine "Jazz" Brown was the youngest Brown girl, still in her late twenties at the time, and the only one who still lived in Granny's house. She had actually done some modeling during a brief stint in California, but had returned to Atlanta after getting pregnant with Will.
The night before my first day of school, Jazz had picked out every article of clothing that I needed to wear to make that all too important first impression. That morning, she actually took off from work to supervise me while I styled my hair and applied my makeup.
"Too heavy on the eye shadow, Kyla," she said, grabbing a Kleenex and swiping at my skin. "And put on a little more gloss. Make it look dewy, but not shiny.
"Why are you putting all your hair up? Let it hang, girl. Here, just let me do it. Pass me those curlers."
After Jazz was satisfied with the job she had done, she stood back and admired me. "I heard what Momma was telling you the other day about staying away from boys," she told me as she fussed with a stubborn lock of my hair. She sighed softly and shook her head.
"Momma just doesn't understand that you can't chain a teenaged girl's legs together. She tried to do that shit with us when we started high school. I'm not gonna tell you to fight the feeling. When it's your time, you'll know." She clutched both of my shoulders and stared into my eyes. "But don't give it up to the first little fool that asks for some. Save it for somebody with some status. Status is everything. Don't forget that."
It occurred to me that morning that nobody had asked me about my class schedule. Nobody had asked if I would be trying out for band or joining the debate team or even trying out for cheerleading. None of that shit mattered to my folks.
All they cared about was maintaining the bad Brown family name.
At St. Louis High School, I had to start at the bottom of the social ladder. My cousin Nina, who was the daughter of my aunt, Denise Brown, had always been my closest friend. She attended high school in East St. Louis, Illinois, St. So she wasn't even around to help ease me into the transition. The Brown name meant virtually nothing to my new school-mates. At STL High, you had to earn a name for yourself.
I have to admit that I got off to a damn good start, though. I had always known that I was above and beyond plain ole pretty with my lightly-toasted skin, curly black hair that fell several inches past my shoulders, slanted brown eyes, and deep dimple engraved in the center of my chin. Everyone that I had ever met had told me how gorgeous I was, and I knew it was true.
I walked through those doors that first morning, looking like a centerfold for Teen Vogue magazine, gliding down the halls at the slow, calculated tempo I had learned at home, gently swaying my hips to a rhythm that only I could hear. I remembered what Granny had said about never making the "switch" in my lower body look too obvious. When you threw it too hard, you looked like you were trying too hard. A woman's sexiness should always be subtle, and never overt.
Fellow freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors stared as I passed. Conversations came to a halt, and eyes followed my path all the way to my locker.
"Damn, man, who is that?" I heard guys murmuring to one another as they broke their necks trying to get peeks at me.
"I heard that she's just a freshman," an upperclassmen git informed the guys as she paused to self-consciously pat her hair and reapply her lipstick.
"How come they didn't look like that when I was a freshman?" a guy in a letterman's jacket demanded while his friends laughed and voiced their agreement.
I walked right past all of them, as if I had better things to do than linger in the hallway and listen to their whispered exchanges.
When one of the boys would catch my hand and ask me my name, I would give him a smile softer than the one on the Mona Lisa. Then I would shyly and breathlessly reply, "I'm Kyla."
