Man of the Year (Drake Story)

Chapter Seks

The next morning was quiet.

The birds weren’t chirping. The chefs weren’t cooking and nobody was eating. Either that or I was dead.

But I wasn’t; I could still hear my heartbeat. Was that a good thing? I usually couldn’t hear it unless something was wrong. Maybe I was afraid.

I’d assume anybody would be afraid in these conditions. Waking up to a room cramped full of what felt like a million people, but wasn’t that far from it. Everybody smelled bad; horrible. It made my eyes water. Some of them were naked. I could feel the private business of the man behind me on my leg, and whenever I tried to move away, I’d only be doing the same to the man in front of me. A couple times, when the guy behind me turned in his sleep and I figured he was awake, I’d whisper to him to move away from me, but he would only tell me to shut up; “people are trying to sleep”. So I shut up.

The morningtime though, right now, was scary. I felt like any moment somebody would come in and shoot me. All of us. Maybe that was why all of us lay there, eyes open and barely breathing: because we knew we were to die this morning and there was nothing to do but wait.

Impatiently.

Eventually, I heard irritated grunting from a few of them, one after the other until I finally looked up to see a slender girl trying to make her way across the room, stepping on the feet and legs of the others to do so. When she got close to me and sat down on the leg of one of the guys beside me, I saw her.

Haley.

“Wh...Haley?”

“Yes, Aubrey. Whisper please; they don’t like it when we’re loud.” She said.

Somehow, her presence suddenly opened my eyes to the situation. Last night Cyrus made me inject Belphoebe with something. And this morning, I was here, instead of in my luxurious bed like I should’ve been. Why?

“Why?”

“Because Drake could be listening to our conversations, and when we talk too much he suspects we’re plotting against him.”

“No, I mean...why am I here?” I asked. I stared at her strangely. At the rest of them. All of them.

The mini-mansion? Why was I in the mini-mansion?

“For the same reason that the rest of us are here, Aubrey - because Drake has something against us. He has a plan for us, and our lives are on thin ice.” Haley told me. It was strange talking to her; I was in a fight with myself to decide whether I should look at her or not, since she was completely naked yet completely comfortable with it.

“But I didn’t do anything to him,” I sat up now, not caring whether they got frustrated with me. “He’s my uncle. Why would he put me down here?”

“Listen here, white boy,” A tall, strapping black guy from all the way across the room called to me. “You’re down here because not everybody gets a free ride in life, alright? Shut the hell up and let us sleep for at least ten more minutes.”

I didn’t like being called white boy, nor did I like being yelled at period, but above all I really wasn’t looking forward to being either punched to death or raped by this man. So I lay back down in my little spot between at least a hundred people, and closed my eyes. I lost. There’s no debating that - Belphoebe was dead and I, her murderer, was going to stay down here and rot like the rest of them.

Because not everybody gets a free ride in life.

“Get up.”

I ignored Haley. She couldn’t help me; she couldn’t even help herself. Still, she pulled me by the arm and dragged me to my feet. I looked at her confusedly, but she kept walking, forward and forward until we were completely out of the mini-mansion. No one told her to sit down like they told me, and nobody called her white girl. They simply ignored her.