The Bet (Persaud Girl)

by Mott, Teisha

  “Shit!” He muttered to himself. “What am I going to do? What am I going to say to her?”

  Ten seconds later it didn’t matter, for Andie had gotten her book and was heading back downstairs to the main reading room.

  “Shit!” Nathan muttered again. His deep brown eyes followed her as she made her way down the steps. Her blue jeans had Izzy emblazoned on the back pocket. Izzy jeans; designed by her mother and Aunt Elisabeth, who together ran Izzy Fashions, a division of Persaud Enterprises. Her jeans hugged her trim figure and showed off the gentle curve of her hips and toned, slightly bow legs. Her hair was coming loose again from the makeshift bun, and Nathan felt something in his stomach that he could not recall feeling before.

  “Can I help you with something?” The librarian behind the counter asked, breaking his thoughts.

  “No, no. I’m fine, thanks.” Nathan quickly shuffled away from the counter and headed towards the main reading room where Andie, her cousins and her sister were seated. He needed a plan to get close to Anne Dru Persaud, or Jeremy would never let him forget it.

  ***

  “This weirdo was up in the WIC reading room just now!” Andie declared as she reclaimed her seat next to her cousin Klao.

  “Andie, really… stop being paranoid,” declared Klao.

  “For real. This guy upstairs,” Andie repeated. “He was staring the flesh off my body. It felt like he would have grabbed me at any moment. Ugh! Cooties!” She shuddered dramatically.”

  “You’re being ridiculous, Andie!” Samantha admonished. “I’m positive you’re overreacting as usual.”

  “I’m not!” Andie exclaimed. “Have you ever seen me overreact?” She blushed under the pointed look that Samantha and Klao gave her. “I’m not overreacting.”

  “Maybe you’re not,” Bianca agreed kindly. “I find that people on campus stare at me all the time.”

  “Duh! That’s ’cause you’re gorgeous, Bianca!” Andie suggested, looking at her cousin.

  Bianca smiled. “Thanks, Andie, but I think they stare at me because my last name is Persaud, and so is yours. People get all sorts of weird around us.”

  “Trust me, that wasn’t an ‘Oh my God, there goes a Persaud’ stare!” Andie insisted. “I’m used to those. It was a ‘there goes the girl I’m going to maim and murder’ stare, and…Oh my God! Don’t look, here he comes!”

  As on cue, Samantha, Bianca and Klao Persaud all turned to look at the tall, fair-skinned guy who was entering the reading room. At least six feet tall, he had curly black hair that he wore like an unruly mop on top of his head. He had dark eyes, thick eyebrows, and a few tiny nose freckles that dotted his otherwise clear skin. He was dressed down in loose-fitting blue jeans, grey t-shirt and brown slippers.

  “That’s no stalker dummy!” Klao said. “That’s Nathan Hansen. His mother is Dr Gina Hansen. She works at Mobay Mercy.”

  “Mmm, he can stalk me any day!” Bianca commented. “Yum!”

  “Yes. Good thing you already have a boyfriend, Bianca!” Klao chided playfully. “But seriously, he’s cute, and he’s a really sweet guy too.”

  “Oh him!” Samantha also recognised Andie’s ‘stalker’. “I know him. He’s in final year. I sat next to him last year in Statistical Methods I and he’s in my Intermediate Micro Economics class this semester. He is an Econ and International Relations double major, I think.”

  “So he wants to be a Diplomat,” Klao mused.

  “Or a Financial Analyst/psychopath, like in ‘American Psycho’!” Andie chimed in. “You should see the lascivious way he was looking at me.”

  “Taking you to watch that movie is haunting me in so many ways!” Samantha commented with a shake of her head.

  “Maybe he loooves you, and he wants to daaate you!” Bianca teased.

  “Grow up!” Andie snapped.

  “I’m calling him over here,” Samantha decided.

  “No! Don’t even…” Andie began, but it was too late. Samantha was already beckoning the starer over.

  Andie’s face burst into flames. She had noticed his striking good looks, and could only hope he was staring at her because he thought she was good-looking too. But then, she had to check herself. She was not cute—not in the least. Samantha, with her brown/blonde hair, sparkling eyes and pouty lips was cute. Klao, with her wavy black hair, high cheekbones and modelesque figure was cute. Bianca, with her Barbie doll curves, chocolate brown skin and silky black hair was cute. Surely that was not why this gorgeous Economics and IR major whose mother was a doctor at the hospital that her Uncle Michael and Aunt Kimberly -- Klao’s parents -- owned was staring at her. He was staring because she was a weirdo. She was the ugly Persaud, and Nathan had never seen the ugly Persaud before. Now he was coming over to see how freakish she really was.

  In an instant, Nathan was at the table. Samantha was smiling. “Hey, Nathan!”

  “What’s up, Samantha?” Nathan was smiling back.

  “Everything cool. You good?”

  “Yeah. Working on a paper for Sports, Government and Society now. Want to finish it by weekend.”

  “How the Econ classes going?” Samantha returned.

  Anne Dru wished her sister would quit the small talk and let Nathan go on, but she didn’t.

  “A’ight,” replied Nathan. “Actually, I have International Economics with your pops this semester.”

  “I hear that’s a tough course—a safe ‘A’ for you I bet!” Samantha nodded.

  “Dunno ‘bout that,” Nathan smiled nervously. “Not everyone’s an Econ whiz like you. Plus Dr Persaud is no joke.”

  Samantha smiled and casually flipped her hair over her shoulder. She was flirting shamelessly, and Andie wanted to punch her. “Nathan, these are my cousins Klao and Bianca. Klao is in first year Law, and Bianca is first year Medicine.”

  Nathan turned to acknowledge Samantha’s cousins.

  And this is my little sister, Anne Dru Junior.”

  “Nice to meet you, Anne Dru… Junior,” Nathan said, turning to Andie, and flashing a brilliant smile.

  “It’s just Andie thank you,” corrected Andie, not even bothering to look up at Nathan.

  Samantha frowned at her then turned back to face Nathan. “Andie is first year too, but she does Finance and Banking.”

  “Three cousins in first year?” Nathan questioned. “That’s different. Are you all the same age?”

  “Pretty much,” Klao answered. “We were all born in the same year. I’m the eldest, then Bianca, then Andie. 1982 was a good year for Persaud babies. We have another cousin, Alex, who is a freshman at Yale.”

  Nathan smiled. Bianca smiled. Klao smiled. Samantha smiled. Andie frowned. Nathan did not miss it.

  “So…um I better go get some work done,” he said finally. “See you Samantha. Nice talking to you, Klao, Bianca, Andie.”

  Samantha, Klao and Bianca waved. Andie pretended to be turning the pages of ‘The Making of the West Indies’. Nathan walked away.

  “’You’re such a little retard!” Samantha snapped, once Nathan was out of earshot. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “What’s wrong with me?” Andie squeaked. “You mean what’s wrong with you. ‘Hi Nathan! How you doin’, Nathan?’” She imitated her sister’s breathy voice. “The library is for studying not for flirting, Samantha!”

  Andie scowled at the three girls.

  “What?” Klao exclaimed in her best whisper.

  “Gimme a break... ‘1982 was a good year for Persaud babies!’ What was that? And Bianca…”

  “I never said anything!” Bianca quickly defended.

  “You didn’t have to!” Andie accused. “You were just there grinning and undressing him with your stupid old eyes.”

  “What?” All three girls exclaimed simultaneously, and earning angry stares from other students who were trying to
study.

  “It’s called being friendly, Andie!” Klao stated. “You could learn a thing or two from us Miss ‘Sulky Mc. Sulkerson’. A smile once in a while won’t kill you, you know.”

  “Whatever!” Andie replied tartly. “I don’t need to learn anything from you, and I certainly don’t need to be friendly to that lanky, mophead, psychopath in training, Nathan Hansen.”

  Bianca opened her mouth to comment, but Samantha cut her off. “Don’t argue with her, Bianca. She can’t help it, she’s just a curmudgeon!” She flipped her long hair over her shoulder and opened her International Finance text and started reading the chapter on Money Laundering.

  ***

  Tuesday afternoon, 1.00 pm

  Nathan was still in shock. There he was, trying to come up with an excuse to talk to Anne Dru Persaud, and it all went down so easily. “Thank you Samantha!” He couldn’t believe she actually remembered him.

  His jubilation quickly soured when it occurred to him that he now had even bigger problems. Anne Dru was, in a word, mean. She seemed so uptight and snobbish, and downright rude. He could not believe that such a pretty face had such a mean spirited character behind it. If only Jeremy had chosen Samantha instead. Her character appeared to be as beautiful as her face and she was so much easier to talk to.

  “Focus, Hansen!” He brought himself back from his musing; determined to see this through to the finish. Miss Anne Dru Persaud has no idea what she’s in for.

  Two days later, he had neither seen nor spoken to Andie, and he was starting to sweat around the collar. Jeremy would soon start pressuring him, and he shuddered to think how Jeremy would mock him if he failed.

  Nathan could not understand how he had ever become friends with Jeremy. Born in New York, Nathan was the older of two siblings. His mother, a Jamaican national, had become a widow when his father, an Investment Banker, had committed suicide. Nathan was only nine years old, but he remembered quite vividly when the NYPD had come to his home to arrest his father. The charge was fraud to the tune of over fifteen million dollars. Mr Hansen had not resisted arrest, but he had wanted to retrieve some personal belongings from upstairs. The police had granted his request. More than ten years later, memories of the sound of the gunshot reverberating through the house still gave Nathan nightmares.

  The state had seized all of Mr Hansen’s assets, including the sprawling Long Island home that they had lived in. Nathan and his mother, who was pregnant at the time, moved to St. James, Jamaica, where she had grown up. They moved in with Nathan’s maternal grandparents. Grandma looked after Nathan while his mother tried to get through the rest of what was already a difficult pregnancy, heightened by the fact that her husband had taken his own life, leaving her broke, homeless, and embarrassed. Nathan worried about his mother. She cried all the time and hardly ate or slept. He also worried about the new baby. They had lost their father, and from the looks of things they could lose their mother too. But Grandma worried most about Nathan. She was convinced that Nathan had seen too much and had too much to worry about for a little boy who had not yet turned ten. Nathan had recorded in his mind that day in August when the baby was born. He remembered it as the day when everything looked better. In Nathan’s mind, it had rained every day since his father’s funeral. It had rained every day of the five weeks since they had lived in Jamaica. It was Saturday morning, and the sunshine had woken him up. He ran outside, and was surprised to find it was a brilliant morning, and extraordinarily warm. Most importantly, his mother was not crying. She was sitting in the rocking chair in the kitchen, knitting a blanket for the baby. Grandma was pickling ackee and saltfish for breakfast, and Grandpa was slicing a huge breadfruit.

  “Hello little man!” Grandma greeted him. “How comes you wake so early?”

  “The sun got me up, Gran,” Nathan replied. He loved to hear Grandma’s accent. Mom had an accent as well, but sometimes when he listened to Grandma and Grandpa talk by themselves, he could not understand a word they were saying.

  “So you can come to church with me and Grandpa then!”

  Nathan frowned. “Church on Saturday Grandma? That is so weird!”

  “Gina, what you been teaching mi grandson?” Grandma had declared, rolling her eyes. “You grew up a good Seventh Day Adventist girl. What happened when you went New York to live?”

  “Don’t start, Mom!” Dr Hansen declared. “You want some warm chocolate milk, Nathan?”

  “Yes, thanks, Mom,” Nathan replied.

  His mother put down her knitting, and moved towards the kettle.

  “Mom, you’re leaking!” Nathan screamed.

  Indeed she was. It was the most exciting day of Nathan’s life. The house was in turmoil, as Grandma and the neighbour, Mrs Lemming rushed Dr Hansen off to the hospital. They left Grandpa to baby sit Nathan and to finish making breakfast. The new baby was almost here! No one realised until Dr Hansen was being wheeled into the delivery room at Montego Bay Mercy Hospital that Nathan had stowed away.

  He found himself being ushered into the waiting room, very much against his will.

  “You have to sit here and wait while we take care of your mommy,” the kind faced nurse said to Nathan. “Would you like a bubble gum?”

  “I want to be with my mother!” Nathan told her.

  “’You’re too little,” the nurse explained. “You can’t go where mommy is now.”

  “But I am the man of the house now that Dad is dead!” Nathan insisted, wondering why the nurse was talking to him as if he was a baby. “I have to be with my Mom. It’s my job!”

  “No. Your job is to sit here and wait until your grandmother comes to get you,” the nurse said, firmly. “Now, would you like a bubble gum?”

  The nurse did not allow Nathan to be with his mother, but she presented him with huge purple bubble gum. Grandma soon came out to report that his little sibling had arrived. It was a little girl. After much pleading, she finally allowed him into the room where his mother and baby sister were. He looked at the wrinkled bundle in her arms and wondered why his mother belly still looked fat.

  “She looks all crushed up and tiny!” Nathan commented. “But I guess she will have to do.”

  Grandma and his mother laughed. The baby yawned.

  “What do you think we should name her, Nathan?” Dr Hansen asked.

  Nathan looked at the baby again. “Can I touch her?”

  “Your hands are dirty, Nathan,” Grandma chastised.

  “It’s all right, Mom,” Dr Hansen said. “Go ahead, Nathan. You can touch your sister.”

  Nathan touched one of the tiny, wrinkled fingers. He stroked his little sister’s tiny arm. He felt a lump in his throat, and he hoped he would not cry. But why should he cry? He was happy. It was the first time he had felt happy since his father had died. His mother wanted him to name his sister. He couldn’t name her ‘Happy’. She was not a puppy – she was a little girl. He thought hard. What was close to ‘Happy’? Finally, he decided.

  “Joie!” He said. “We can call her Joie!”

  Joie Aimee Hansen became the world to Nathan. She was a radiant, happy baby, and Nathan was fiercely protective of her. He had thought he would never be happy again, and then Joie came along.

  When Joie was one month old, Nathan started Cornwall Prep School. It was hard to leave Joie to go to school every day, but his Mom took good care of her. And when Dr Hansen went to work at the same hospital where Joie was born, Grandma took over and was ably assisted by Nathan. Two years later, he went to the seventh grade at Cornwall High School for Boys, but his routine did not change. It was school, homework and Joie, who took delight in toddling behind her big brother. His grandfather thought he spent too much time buzzing around the baby, and convinced his mother that it was a good idea for Nathan to join a club or sports team at school. His mother agreed, much to his chagrin, and Nathan found himself on the swim team. That was wh
ere he met Jeremy Malcolm. They were both in the same grade, but not the same class. Nathan did not like him one bit, but Jeremy had managed to latch himself on to Nathan somehow, and Nathan had been unable to shake him ever since. Jeremy was always able to get him into trouble: expulsion from the swim team and suspension from Cornwall High for smoking marijuana—even though the chillum pipe had never touched Nathan’s lips; being grounded for driving his mother’s car into a wall— he had warned Jeremy about driving the car... Now Jeremy wanted him to sleep with Anne Dru Persaud, and this was another disaster waiting to happen...

  Nathan stopped in his tracks. She was sitting by herself under the tree by the Pure and Applied Sciences kiosk. Evidently she was waiting to get into the Interfaculty Lecture Theatre for class. Andie had her binder open across her bare knees. She was wearing short blue denim shorts and a white baby tee. One finger twirled a red lock that had strayed from her loose ponytail, and her pink lips encircled the cap of her pen.

  Nathan took a deep breath. He decided that he would try to approach her again. Maybe she was a little friendlier when her sister and cousins were not around.

  He had to get her to trust him, and he had only seven and a half weeks in which to make it happen.

  ***

  Anne Dru reread the question for the fifth time. It read: ‘On the eve of the 2000 U.S. Presidential elections, will it matter which candidate, George W. Bush or Al Gore, is elected to lead the Americans into the 21st century.’