Platinum

by Aliya S. King

  But no matter how many times they tried to make her feel at home, it didn’t work. Port Antonio was home. A two-room house she shared with her parents and three sisters. A patch of dirt outside, a clothesline with her father’s clothes pinned up. That was home. Walking out to the Blue Hole, where her father was a boatman and gave rides to tourists. Eating saltfish and ackee stew with her sisters and her father during his lunch break. That was home.

  Greenwich was not home.

  Six months ago her father had taken Robert, a record producer, and his wife on a boat ride. As usual, he sang for the entire trip. And like most tourists, Robert told him he had a beautiful voice. Robert said that if the boatman were twenty years younger, he’d bring him to the States and make him a star.

  Derryn Clifton looked at the producer and told him he knew someone twenty years younger whom he could make into a star. The very next day Bunny sang for Robert and his wife in the lobby of their hotel. Two days later she was in New York City, in a real studio, with headphones on her ears, listening to her own voice being played back.

  When Robert asked Bunny’s mom if Bunny could stay in Greenwich and finish her demo, the young girl’s heart sank. She knew there was no way her mother would return to Port Antonio and leave her with this white couple who walked around barefoot and smoked weed on their patio at night. But Mrs. Clifton agreed, quickly, and flew back to Jamaica two days later. She told her youngest daughter to mind her keepers and keep her legs closed.

  Bunny had opened her legs two days after she met Zander. But she’d managed to mind her keepers until the night she decided to cut all her hair off.

  BUNNY KNOCKED ON THE DOOR OF THE MANSION WITH HER LEFT HAND, her right hand on the nape of her neck. She’d never realized how soft the skin was on the back of her neck. Or how intriguing her natural curl pattern was. She waited at the door, twisting and twisting the short curls.

  “Bunny, is that you?” she heard Robert say from the other side of the door. “Use your key!”

  Bunny waited. And the twelve-foot-high door opened.

  Robert, Bunny’s producer and caretaker, took in a sharp breath and grabbed Bunny by the shoulder. “In the living room—now.”

  Bunny slunk into the living room and settled back on the white leather sofa.

  “Sally,” Robert yelled. “You need to get down here right now!”

  He sat across from Bunny. “Why would you do this? Why would you cut your hair?”

  “You don’t like it?”

  Before he could answer, his wife was in the doorway. She gasped and then clapped her hands over her mouth. “Bunny! What did you do!”

  Bunny rolled her eyes and her hand went to the back of her neck. “It’s just hair. It grows back.”

  “Robert, don’t panic,” Sally said, holding out both hands. “She can get a hair weave before the photo shoot.”

  Robert just stared at Bunny, shaking his head back and forth. “How much did we pay for the hair that was in there this morning?”

  “Five thousand dollars,” Sally said.

  Bunny swallowed. “I know you all think that I should have the traditional long-hair look,” she said. “But this haircut makes me feel more confident. It feels like me.”

  “Does it make you confident that you’re going to sell records?” Robert said, looking down on the floor. “ ’Cause I don’t really give a fuck about your self-esteem.”

  Bunny sucked her teeth. “Obviously.”

  “Look, you’re here because we’re investing in you, Bunny,” Robert said.

  “I know that.”

  “You don’t act like you know that. We have a responsibility to your record label to deliver a certain look. And this is not it.”

  “I met Kipenzi Hill recently,” Bunny said. “I had the exact same weave she has. Why do we all have to look the same?”

  “You have to look like whoever the hell is selling records. That’s why we sent you to the same woman who does Kipenzi Hill’s hair. There’s no reinventing the wheel in the music industry.”

  “There should be.”

  “You can take your ass back to Jamaica and reinvent the industry. You’re not doing it on my dime.”

  Robert stood up and walked out of the room. Sally lit a cigarette, inhaled, and exhaled.

  “I’m not getting my hair done over,” Bunny said. “I’m wearing it short like this.”

  Sally nodded and inhaled again.

  “Robert needs to trust me. This cut is hot. It will set me apart.”

  Sally shrugged and blew out three perfect smoke rings.

  “Do you like it?” Bunny asked.

  Sally leaned against the wall, narrowed her eyes, and inhaled again. “No,” she said. “I love it.”

  Bunny stood up and looked at her reflection in the full-length mirror in the foyer. “You think Robert will let me keep it like this?”

  Sally shook her head. “Second album. You can go dark and edgy and adopt a whole new persona. First album? Long hair. Weave. Get over it.”

  Bunny put her hand to her neck once more and rubbed. “We’ll see,” she said.

  She left the living room and climbed the steps to the attic.

  In the suite in the attic of the Greenwich home, Bunny sang into her mirror, shaking her bangs out of her face. The short cut could work, she was sure of it. But she was also sure that Robert wasn’t having it.

  Bunny hurled herself onto her bed and took out her cell phone. She sent a text message to Zander. When he didn’t respond immediately, she called him. When it went straight to voice mail, her heartbeat started to quicken. They always called each other when their batteries went low. It was common courtesy to give a heads-up if your phone was about to die. But Zander often forgot. Which meant there were times when Bunny could not reach him. And this was unacceptable.

  Bunny went into her email server, erased her own information, and put in Zander’s user name and password. Immediately all his emails popped up on her phone. She scrolled through, skipping her own name and looking for any addresses she didn’t recognize. She found one. From a girl who’d sent a picture of herself bending over at the waist and looking back at the camera.

  “I hope you come back soon,” the girl wrote, in a scripted pink font. “So I can come again. ;)”

  Blood dripped onto Bunny’s tongue. While looking through Zander’s emails, she’d been biting down hard on the inside of her cheek without even realizing it. She broke the skin when she saw the girl in the picture, and the taste was salty and bitter in her mouth. She went to the bathroom, spit, rinsed, and spit again.

  Zander was the first young person Bunny had met when she moved from Port Antonio. They shared a tutor who traveled to both their homes. Once a week, the tutor had them both meet her at the main branch of the New York Public Library to do research. The first time Bunny saw Zander, she knew immediately that she wanted to stand closer to him. And she did. She wrote her number in his spiral notebook and he sang for her over the phone that night. She sang for him. And they immediately began plotting how they could take over the world together.

  But Zander was a boy. A teenager. At 16, Bunny was actually younger than him by a year. But she felt much older. He played boyish games. And Bunny found herself chasing him when it should have been the other way around.

  And when Zander started playing games, the other Bunny came out. The one who once who smacked her own mother in the face and silently dared her to say something about it. The one who put her boot on her sister’s neck and tried to crush her before being pulled off by their father. Bunny was a sweetheart. Until she wasn’t. And then she was just trouble.

  Sally appeared in the doorway to the attic, cigarette dangling from her lips. “You okay?” she asked Bunny.

  “I need to go find Zander,” Bunny said, standing up and going to the closet for shoes.

  “Don’t get yourself in any trouble. You have a hair appointment first thing in the morning. And we’re flying to Atlanta straight from the salon. Dallas
Austin session starts at two. Interviews scheduled after that.”

  Bunny nodded and brushed past Sally, heading down the stairs and out the door.

  “I do like your hair, Bunny,” Sally called out to her. “Next album, I promise. You can wear it short.”

  “YOU REMEMBER WHEN THIS WAS THE OMNI?” Z THREW HIS ARM around Beth’s shoulders and stretched out his legs in front of him. Beth turned to him and smiled. She couldn’t nod or she would throw up.

  “Zander was six,” Beth said. She put a hand on Z’s knee. “Zakee was five and I was pregnant with the twins.”

  On hearing the word twins, Zachary climbed over his brothers and stuck his head between his parents’ shoulders.

  “You came here when you were pregnant with me and Zaire? Did we kick a lot? Could you feel us in your stomach?”

  Z’s nostrils flared and he turned to face his nine-year-old son.

  “Sit your ass down and shut up,” he spat. Even though Z never had a kind word to say to his next-to-youngest son, Zachary seemed to experience his father’s hatred anew each day. He stared at his father with his mouth open and then turned his head slightly to the right, fully expecting his mother to step in and berate Z for being cruel. And as always, Beth was silent.

  For a few minutes, the entire car was silent. The driver, oblivious to anything but the fact that he was driving a celebrity, kept up a steady stream of small talk with Boo, Z’s personal assistant, who sat in the passenger seat of the Suburban. Beth and Z sat in the row behind the driver. Their four sons were all sitting side by side in the next row back.

  “We came down here and tore the ATL down,” Z said, more to himself than to his wife.

  It was in Atlanta, all those years ago, that Beth first realized that something might be wrong in her third pregnancy. As soon as she’d boarded the plane, she’d felt a strange emptiness in her belly. It was like when something stops humming or buzzing and you realize for the first time that the sound had even been there in the first place. She had reached over to strap in Zander and Zakee and then noticed that something had stopped communicating from her belly to her brain.

  For that entire summer, she’d traveled with Z and the kids while he crisscrossed the country with Jake on the Take No Prisoners tour. And she had greeted each city by throwing up in the car on the way to the hotel. In Seattle, she had a blinding headache at her right temple. In Cincinnati, she’d gone to the emergency room because she bled through the entire show. But when they landed at the airport in Atlanta, nothing. She’d had no nausea, no movement, and no headaches. Her belly felt like a prosthetic limb. She didn’t even feel like she’d overeaten on Thanksgiving. She just felt fat.

  “Mommy, I want to sit with you!”

  Beth turned around. Her youngest son, two-year-old Zeke, sat in her oldest son’s lap. Beth extracted herself from Z’s arms and reached back. Zander handed Zeke over, rolled his eyes, and continued staring out the car window. He had been trying to grow his hair into dreadlocks, so he constantly had his long, thin fingers in his hair, twisting and twisting the short braids.

  “Look,” Beth said, taking her son’s chubby hand and using it to point out the window. “That’s where Daddy’s going to perform tonight.”

  Zeke looked out at the Philips Arena and his eyes widened. “Daddy? You play basketball?”

  Beth smiled and looked over at Z. He had his head thrown back with his eyes closed. He wasn’t asleep but he pretended to be.

  “You know Daddy doesn’t play basketball,” Beth said, tickling her son under his chin. Beth’s youngest child was too beautiful for his father to love. With his café au lait skin, soft curls, long eyelashes, and light brown eyes, he looked too much like the girl Z wanted so desperately. And because he wasn’t a girl, Z just pretended he didn’t exist. Beth and Z’s first two sons were carbon copies of their father: temperamental and mean. Their third son, Zachary, who’d lost his brother while still in Beth’s womb, tried too hard to matter to Z, who had no use for him because he was sickly. He didn’t play sports, suffered from asthma, and had a slight speech impediment. Beth didn’t think Z had ever said a word to his two youngest sons after they were potty-trained. She cradled Zeke in her lap, which was getting smaller and smaller, although only her two oldest boys had even noticed she was pregnant again.

  “Daddy’s sleeping,” Zeke said. He held up his hand to his mother’s lips and she pretended to bite him. He giggled and Beth leaned in and smothered him with kisses. It wasn’t until she brought her head up to move her hair back behind her ear that she noticed Zander staring at her with more hatred than usual. Zakee, his shadow, both physically and mentally, kept his eyes darting from Zander to Beth.

  “Zander,” Beth said. “You okay?”

  “I want to go the fuck home.”

  Only the driver of the car was surprised to hear a teenager use the f-word not just in front of his mother but directed to her specifically. Beth just turned back around slowly, keeping Zeke on her lap and her eyes on the road. If she didn’t move, blink, address Zander, curse him out, or acknowledge his behavior in any way, if she could keep baby Zeke from realizing anything was wrong with his family, if she could keep still for a few minutes, she could make it to the hotel without smacking the shit out of Zander and then throwing up.

  Ever since the online videos of Zander and Bunny singing in his bedroom had taken off, he’d been insufferable around the house. It was a simple setup. He sat on his bed with his guitar; Bunny was off camera, playing piano and harmonizing. And they sang classics: “A House Is Not a Home” by Luther Vandross and “Time After Time” by Cyndi Lauper. At first he got attention because he was Z’s son. Ten million views later, he was a minicelebrity in his own right. When they’d landed in Atlanta, three giggling teenage girls approached Zander for an autograph while Z was in the bathroom. Beth saw the look on Zander’s face and knew she was in trouble.

  And then there was Bunny. They were attached at the hip. Every time Zander left her presence, he was tense and wound up, brooding and unruly. Always. Z said it was just blue balls. But Beth was pretty sure they were actually having sex. It was something else.

  In the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, Beth asked for a room service menu. The menu came with a separate list just for the different brands of water. Beth sucked her teeth and readjusted Zeke on her hip. Who the hell needed thirty choices for bottled water? It was yet another rich-folks thing that she just couldn’t understand. Kipenzi swore up and down that she could tell the difference between Perrier and Evian, but Beth didn’t believe her. They were supposed to have a taste test, with blindfolds and little paper cups. But they hadn’t been able to find the time.

  “Boo, can you go get the boys something to eat?” Beth held up the menu in front of Z’s assistant. “They can’t eat anything off here.”

  Boo nodded his head slowly and began to rise from the comfortable couch in front of the check-in counter, where Z was gathering keys and hotel maps from a pretty woman with two long braids on either side of her head. “Where you want me to go?”

  Beth bit the inside of her lip and scanned the faces of her four boys. Zander, standing next to his father and openly gawking at the hotel employee’s breasts, would eat anything. Zakee would eat anything Zander ate. Burgers and fries and sodas for them. Zach was lactose-intolerant and allergic to everything from shellfish to peanuts. And baby Zeke was in a chicken-fingers phase; he’d eaten nothing else for the past three weeks.

  Beth made a list on hotel stationery, gave it to Boo, and then headed up to the adjoining suites booked by Z’s record label. The four boys would share two bedrooms in one suite. She and Z would have the other suite to themselves.

  As soon as she got settled into her room, she noticed the red message light blinking on the hotel phone. She thought about not checking it. Who would call the hotel room instead of her cell phone or Z’s cell phone? She checked the message anyway.

  “Beth. It’s Kipenzi. Room three-twelve. I’m coming by around se
ven so we can eat in the Cheater’s Booth. I know your fat ass is hungry. Love you. Bye.”

  Beth smiled. It had been a tradition since Z and Jake first started rapping that the first person settled into the hotel (or, as was more likely back in the day, the motel) found a spot for dinner and left a message with the other couple. The first time Kipenzi had ever left Beth a message, they were at a Holiday Inn on the New Jersey Turnpike. Jake and Z were doing a ten-minute set at Rutgers University and they’d all met up the night before at a Fuddruckers on Route 9.

  Boo returned with the food for the boys. When he went in, they nearly attacked him. Beth closed the door joining their suites and then swept aside the draperies and took in the lights of nighttime Atlanta. She saw the NationsBank Plaza and realized it was the tower that Usher used for the “U Don’t Have to Call” video.

  She’d never liked Atlanta. It was where her son had died inside her, risking her life and Zach’s. Dr. Hamilton said they would never know for sure when Zaire passed away or how. But Beth knew that it had been in this city, where every street, diner, and park was named after a freaking fruit. She’d sworn she would never come to Atlanta again. Especially not if she was pregnant. But somehow Z had convinced her.

  Beth opened her suitcase to find something to wear to dinner. Z was at his sound check, and when he returned, he’d be ravenous. Beth was grateful that Kipenzi had made arrangements. She barely had enough energy to put a comb through her hair and check on Zeke to make sure he’d eaten.

  Three sharp knocks brought Beth to the door of her suite. They were staying in the Club Level, an ultraexclusive hotel within the hotel, so she knew it had to be someone legitimate. She looked out the peephole and saw Kipenzi sticking her middle finger up in the air.

  “Get in here, girl,” Beth said, pulling her friend in for a hug.

  “Damn! You are huge,” Kipenzi said. She held Beth’s hand and twirled her around once.