Dark Beauty

C H A P T E R 6 : Crooked Smile.

Friday

Sept 9th, 2007

10:45 a.m.

*twelve Years Later*

      By the young age of fifth-teen, Layla was starting to mature in a way that showed she would be among the beauty scale elite. She now stood at about five-foot-four. Her hair was bone straight, black, touched the middle of her back, and had brown highlights throughout. Layla was fair-skinned and had beautiful, almond-shaped, mahogany-colored eyes. Over the years, her body had taken on the shape of a grown woman. Layla is the epitome of beauty. Young boys drooled over her as well as older men. She had them ready to risk it all, something that if Jeremiah were still here would have him catchin' bodies.

    By this period in her life, Layla and her family had bolted from Illinois to Indiana. They now resided in a small town called East Chicago, Indiana. It was a small metropolitan city between the city of Gary and Hammond. Most folks confused it with the east side of Chicago, but it wasn't; it was just a modest city on the coast of Lake Michigan. East Chicago was your accurate representation of a small town. Only about twenty-eight thousand people lived there. With those numbers, you would think it would be energetic, but instead, it was like a ghost town. It wasn't like your ordinary town. It had somewhat of a bustling downtown area, but it wasn't like the city. There was nothing but crooks, old pony-tale wearin broads, and niggas who strived to be drug dealers or rappers. There were no malls, movie theaters, or Starbucks, just gas stations, schools, ghettos, and little mom and pop restaurants.

   She resented it.

    For the last three years, Layla has been shuffling between her mother's house and her aunt Ravin's house. It was an attempt to keep Layla at a school in Chicago since she didn't want to go to school in Indiana. On the weekends, Layla would live with her mom and then get chauffeured back to her aunt's house in Illinois for the remainder of the school week. But now, things were different. She would no longer be attending Public school in the city; she would soon be attending high school in East Chicago. Something she had been regretting since she found out a month prior.

    Kodeni, James, and the twins had been living in East Chicago for a while. They were used to living out here; Layla wasn't. She disliked everything about E.C. she hated everything the small town had to give. She wanted zilch to do with it. As far as she was concerned, she wasn't a 'Hoosier'; she was a 'Chicagoan.' Her mentality towards the small town wasn't always like this. At first, she tried to give the city a chance, but after so many failed attempts, she developed a 'fuck it' mentality and gave up. When she first had arrived in the town, she was going out and taking walks, just trying to discover her new surroundings, but the constant drooling stares from men and scowls from the other girls on her street made her feel uneasy. Now, weeks later, all she did was linger in the house and watch t.v. Only going out when her mother and James were making her tag along with them.

   However today? Today was different. Today was Layla's first day at her new high school, and ever since four a.m., she had been dreading it.

"Are you almost ready, Layla?" Kodeni asked as she gathered her things and slung her purse over her shoulder. "Logan and Lola lets go." she called out to her youngest kids.