was still paying my car note after the stunt Tariq pulled with my mortgage. He hadn’t returned any of my calls. He hadn’t even bothered to call me and check on me. I was heated.
“O, listen, if you got another girl or something just let me know. It’s cool, you do your thing, I’ll do mine. Just let me know what you’re going to do about my car, that’s all. You can fuck all the bitches you want. You can disappear for a month all you want. Just call me about my car, please!”
Damn, I’m good, I thought, but it wasn’t O.
“Hello,” I answered the phone quick.
“Hey, sexy,” the voice greeted me.
I felt chills go up my spine. “What’s up?”
“I want to see you today,” Darrell said.
“Likewise,” I said.
“Let’s go down to the shore,” he said.
“The shore?”
“Yeah, we can chill at my beach house, maybe get something to eat, walk the boardwalk, see a movie…”
“I’m sold,” I said, smiling. I was into that romantic shit.
I hung up the phone with Darrell feeling giddier than a mothafucka. This dude is good, I remember thinking. Fuck O.
May
“TINA!” I said, crying.
“What the hell is wrong?”
“O!”
“Celess, calm the fuck down and tell me what is going on,” Tina demanded.
I tried to stop crying and held back my tears.
“They kidnapped O,” I explained.
“Who? When? What happened?”
“I went to Delaware ’cause I ain’t hear from him in a minute, and when I was ringing his bell the young bull that always used to be with him came up to me and told me he was missing,” I quickly said in one breath.
“Well, when did this happen? I mean, do they know anything about who did it?” Tina sounded concerned.
“Whoever did it was close to him and been planning it for a while, ’cause they snatched him up on 95. He was making a major run to D.C.”
“How the hell they get ’im on 95?”
“He must have stopped at a rest stop, ’cause that’s where they found his car,” I explained. “All of the seats were cut open.”
“Yeah, they knew ’im and they knew exactly what it was hittin’ for. Anytime they know where his stash was,” Tina concluded.
“I know,” I said, sniffling. “And they got about forty thousand pounds and three hundred thou in cash.”
“Them pussies made sure they wouldn’t need ransom,” Tina said, as if she was in thought.
I started crying again. “That’s how I know they killed him.”
I guess it wasn’t “fuck O” after all, because I really got depressed after I found out about his kidnapping. It was weird that out of all the dudes I fucked with, I felt for O the most even though he was the one who brought me so much drama and treated me like shit sometimes. I didn’t realize how much I felt for him until that shit happened.
Tina arrived at my house on a Friday afternoon. She had come to offer moral support. I was still in my pajamas in the bed. I hadn’t been dressed since I last spoke to her on the phone five days before. I spent my days crying and thinking and crying some more. I couldn’t help but think about all the brutal and crazy things they might have done to O or where he could be or if he was alive somewhere hanging on to his life. The thoughts I was getting were driving me crazy. I wished I could have done something. I just kept imagining him somewhere getting tortured or somewhere dead. I couldn’t stop thinking or crying.
“You have to snap out of this, Celess,” Tina insisted. “Celess!” Tina sang as she waved her hand in front of my face. “You need to get in the shower, sweetie, and do something with yourself.”
She sat down on the couch next to me.
“You need to find a way to get in his house,” she continued. “He gotta have a stash at his crib. And find out where to send your car payments to before they come and repo that shit. You can get that new dude you got to pay the note. I don’t know who gonna pay the insurance.”
I just glanced up at her in disgust in between zoning out. Sometimes I wondered if she had a heart, or at least a conscience.
“Yup, I’m tellin’ you, you should go back down to Delaware and see if somebody has a key. Oooh, no, call up a locksmith and tell them you locked yourself out. They’ll make the key on the spot. You go in, find his stash, and roll out,” she explained.
“Tina, please just be quiet,” I finally said.
“Shit, it’s just a matter of time before one of his fake-ass friends think to do it,” she said, trying to justify herself.
“Maybe that’s true, but O is out there somewhere probably getting fucked up or shot up or just lying somewhere dead, and you…” I burst into tears again.
“Celess, I know you hurt and everything, but that’s the game. Shit, I saw my whole family murdered behind that shit,” Tina said with attitude. “After a while you just learn to suck shit up.”
Tina could play tough all she wanted, but I knew walking in and seeing her mom, dad, and older brother dead in pools of blood cut her deep. She was only ten. Can you imagine seeing something like that at ten? She swears it had no lasting impact on her, but I’m not sure. The fact that she pretends like she doesn’t care about anything or anybody is the result of seeing her murdered family’s bodies at ten years old, among other things.
“Tina, it’s easier said than done,” I said, ignoring her facade.
“Well, be like Nike and just do it, hah!” she said, giggling, with a huge smile on her face. She slapped my leg in a joking, playful way.
“What DVDs you got?”
I just gave Tina a blank look and felt sorry for her.
Tina’s visit ended as awkward as it began. I was still depressed, and she gave up trying to make me feel better.
It was a rainy Monday. I had been sitting in the house all morning contemplating what I was going to do about my car. I had the registration. It was in somebody named Carolyn Rodriguez’s name. It had her address, so I decided to go to her house.
A short, chubby Puerto Rican girl came to the door. “Who you?”
“I’m Celess, Omar’s friend,” I said, trying not to offend anybody.
“Mommy!
I waited at the door while a heavyset older-looking woman slowly walked down the stairs. She had long dark hair and a chubby face. She was wearing an oversized T-shirt that came past her knees and a pair of slippers.
“Come in, sit down,” Carolyn said with a heavy Puerto Rican accent.
I walked into the small row house. “Hi, I’m Celess, a friend of Omar’s,” I introduced myself as I took a seat on the black leather couch beside Carolyn.
“Yeah, I know who you are,” Carolyn said, looking me over. “Omar told me about ju. You one of the girls from Philly, right?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Which car you have?” she asked while motioning for her daughter to give her some papers from off the sixty-
