Chapter One
The loud clacking sound caused my shoulders to jerk out of pure nervousness, as I lifted my head and glanced over to three empty seats next to me -- seats that were supposed to have been filled.
I was dressed in the finest conservative business attire that I had in my closet and my hair was flawless.
Ordinarily, I’d be feeling good about the way I looked today and about having so many eyes on me. But, it was definitely not an ordinary day. Today’s reason for my special costuming had robbed it of its meaning. It was just plain necessary.
Though I’d been pre-warned that today wouldn’t be a long day, it didn’t diminish the fact that I hadn’t heard someone call me by my full name, Jazmyn Reneé Wallace, since high school home-room roll-call.
The next words out of my mouth would be the most important sentence that I’d ever utter. My shaking voice struggled and cracked as I vocalized a simple two-word response.
Less than two years ago I was basking in the warm sun of Negril, Jamaica with my girlfriends, Trina and Brea, on a College Spring-Break vacation.
We’d been a best-friends-trio since our freshman year at Spelman College in Atlanta. All of us were now sophomores.
“Look at Trina’s scandalous ass!” Brea smirked to me at the sight of Trina shamelessly walking up to us from the sandy beach.
Trina had a dynamite body and was never one to cover it up. Today was no exception as she paraded her thick-self up the sand, skirt-wrap in-hand, on her way to the grass-hut bar where Brea and I were seated, still dripping wet from her ocean swim.
Brea and I giggled while witnessing the domino-effect of every guy’s head turning as she swayed by them in her fluorescent yellow bikini that contrasted her jet-black skin.
“If this were a highway, you know she’da caused an accident!” I replied back to Brea, just before Trina made it to us.
“Ahhhhh! That felt good!” Trina referred to her impulsive ocean dip. “I told you, you guys should’ve come with me.”
“Umm, Trina. You do know that skirt-wraps are meant to go around your waist?” Brea humorously scolded Trina for bringing her bikini-only-covered booty back to us, along with the attention of the entire beach.
“Whatever,” Trina countered as she ordered a drink from the bar after showing identification that she was of legal drinking age, which was 18 in Jamaica.
Trina had always been a strange one. Though she looked every bit the part of the ultimate sistah-girl, we swore that there had to be some blonde hair somewhere in the roots of her braids, because at times, she had white-girl tendencies. None more evident than today’s impromptu swim. She was the only black person that I knew who would do that. It was like she’d been issued her black skin and didn’t know that as a black woman she was supposed to look good by the water, but not actually be in it.
I had always assumed the reason for Trina’s country-white-girl behavior was because she was from Savannah, Georgia, a small southern community about 250-miles southeast of Atlanta. Despite being born and raised in Georgia, her speech was absent of the usual southern twang. It was as proper as a news anchor, enunciating every word. Clear evidence of her, privileged, private school, up bringing.
Brea, on the other hand was from the hood – Brooklyn to be precise. Though her rougher edges had been smoothed a bit because of her year and a half at college, it wasn’t wise to let her model-like beauty fool you. She still had that fire that could come out at any moment, if provoked. Brea was sort of a mix of Alicia Keys and Lil Kim. I guess the best way to describe Brea is Sophisticated-Ghetto.
