“Tell me what’s wrong, baby.” Caesar made another attempt to get his girl to talk to him. Caesar grabbed Bianca by the shoulders and turned her to face him. Her eyes were puffy and red from all the crying she’d been doing. She looked like a totally different person. Her eyes were just blank. Whatever was going on was clearly detrimental and life-changing, but no matter what it was, Caesar knew one thing: Nothing and no one could ever make him stop loving her.
“I will always love you.” Whitney Houston might have said it best, but Caesar was saying it again. “I refuse to believe that you don’t know that about me by now. Nothing you can ever say, nothing you could ever do, will change that. Now, please, tell me what’s going on.”
“They think I killed my baby.”
“What happened to the baby?”
She took a deep breath and began to reflect on everything that happened.
CHAPTER 9
After the guys finished passing her around—while Bianca lay on the floor, warm semen dripping down her legs like a vile gumbo soup—Peanut threatened, “I’ll make you regret that you were ever born if you utter a word to anyone about what you’ve done.”
Peanut’s words—What you’ve done, what you’ve done, what you’ve done—careened around her head, over and over and over.
Scared and unsure of what to do, Bianca kept quiet. After all, who was she going to tell anyway? Her mother? It would break her heart to know that Bianca had been passed around like a church collection plate, having all the men put something in her. Her grandmother? Hell, no. She would believe Peanut over her any day. Besides, after all, she was sure that Bianca was already fucking one hundred miles in running anyway. And the lady loved the ground her dear Peanut walked on. In her eyes, he could do no wrong, so for Bianca to accuse him of rape, her grandmother would find that inconceivable. She was sure that no one was going to do anything but make her life more miserable.
She felt she had no choice but to keep quiet. But Bianca’s body . . . that was a different story. Her body never got the text, nor had it promised to keep any secrets. While getting dressed for school, four months to the day after being gang raped, Bianca noticed that her jeans no longer fit over her hips. If this was a joke, she thought, God had a strange and warped sense of humor.
A hundred and four days later, she gave birth to a five pound, eight ounce little boy. Bianca named the baby Babylon. Beside the fact that she’d been reading the Bible incessantly since the entire ordeal, she had no idea why Babylon was the name that came to her when, for the very first time, she looked into her baby’s liquid-brown eyes.
While her mother was at work, Bianca was sent to her grandmother’s with the newborn. As Bianca was gazing down at little Babylon, she couldn’t help but wonder, How can something so innocent have been created from something so evil?
Suddenly, Peanut walked into the room. It was the same room in which Babylon was conceived.
“What’s crackin’, B?”
Bianca wanted to throw up. She could barely stand to look at Peanut, much less occupy the same space, breathing the same air.
“If I didn’t know better,” he said, “I’d think you didn’t fuck wit’ me.” He smiled. “Don’t you fucks wit’ me?” He already knew.
“No, Peanut. I don’t fucks wit’ you. So, what do you want?” She hated him with a passion.
Peanut cut his eyes at her then looked toward the baby. “So, this here’s yo’ li’l nig, huh?”
Bianca watched Peanut watch the baby. She trusted him about as far as she could spit in his face—which she would’ve done if the fear of what he might do in retaliation hadn’t dried up all the saliva in her mouth. She refused to let Peanut know that he had that type of power over her. He was wicked enough as it was.
Suddenly, Peanut’s casual observation of Babylon mutated into an intense scrutiny. His brow furrowed like dry trenches on the side of barren a road, eyes narrowing into laser-like slits. Bianca thought something must be wrong with Babylon. For the first time since Peanut had walked into the den, Bianca switched her focus from him to the baby, hoping Babylon wasn’t choking, or something worse. God, she thought, if something was wrong with the baby, what would she do? She was clueless. And besides her and Peanut, no one else was there. Her mother was at work, and her grandmother was . . . shit, she had no idea where Grandmother Williams had gone. In the split-second it took Bianca to divert her attention to Babylon, she’d nearly worked herself into a full-blown panic attack.
“Thank God,” she whispered. Nothing is wrong, so she thought.
Then what was Peanut looking at?
The answer would hit her like a punch in the gut, knocking the wind from her lungs and leaving her stunned
The ears, she thought. How could she have missed it?
Babylon’s ears were pointed. The only person she’d ever seen with ears like that was the guy from Star Trek, and . . . Peanut.
Peanut noticed it too. That’s what he was staring at. And it wasn’t just the ears that were similar. They were the same complexion of milk chocolate and had the same pug nose.
To conceal the rape, she’d told her mother and grandmother that she had no idea who the baby’s daddy was—and she didn’t, but she had lied when she said it was “one of maybe ten to fifteen different boys at school.” She told the bald-faced lie, but she had just assumed the baby belonged to Cockroach or Dog.
This can’t be possible, she thought.
But it was possible, because Peanut had not only sat back and watched his friends violate Bianca. He’d also joined in on the perverted
