by Noire
“What damn friends?” Pearl stood up and demanded. “You mean them trick bitches who hit the pipe with you while you was in labor then dropped you off at the hospital and left you by yourself? Those damn friends?”
“You know what I mean, Pearl. You ain’t gotta put so much drama into it, damn.”
“No, that ain’t drama, Diamond. Drama is you wanting to get out in the street a week after dropping a damn baby! For real, girl, you got on a short skirt up the ass and your coochie ain’t even closed up tight yet! That stank thang is still wide open! And look at your freakin’ shirt! Your titties is still leaking milk!”
It took another fifteen minutes, but Pearl was finally able to talk Diamond into going back to the treatment center. Diamond had begged Pearl to just let her climb in her own bed and go to sleep, but Pearl wasn’t having it.
“Hell, no! You ain’t the one tired. Mommy and Daddy are drag-ass tired! They been up at that hospital day and night worrying about Chante, then coming home and trying to help me with Sasha too. The last thing they need is to find out you snuck outta rehab. Don’t be giving them shit else to worry about, Diamond. They have enough on their shoulders. Just take your red ass back where you belong, and don’t come back here until you got your head right.”
Diamond had left to go back to the rehabilitation center that night, but Pearl wasn’t stupid enough to put any money on where her sister had really gone. What she did know for sure is that over the next couple of years her mother and father gave her a series of opportunities that she just couldn’t refuse. They encouraged her to put all her time and energy into school and to live her life just like any other young teenager who had college instead of dick on the brain.
Not only did Pearl study hard and get top grades in all her classes, she ran track, played basketball, and joined the school debate team too, and her parents bent over backward to make sure she had room in her life to do all the things that interested her without making her feel guilty as they raised her baby.
“Gone, Pearl. Go on and enjoy your life while you can. If we can take care of one,” Irish would say, nodding at Chante, “then we can take care of two.”
On weekends Pearl would try to make it up to them by doing laundry for the girls, washing and braiding their hair, and entertaining them on Sunday mornings while Zeta cooked a big dinner and Irish put on his glasses and sat at his desk going over work for his center.
Those were Pearl’s special times alone with her daughter and her niece, and she loved watching them play and grow. Both of them were gorgeous, but Pearl’s daughter Sasha was taller, and the quieter of the two. Despite what Zeta had predicted, she never did get much darker than her birth tone, and actually did look a lot more like Diamond than she did like Pearl.
Chante was still kinda tiny, but she was fast and bright and always into something. The girl was so quick you had to watch her or she’d be pulling stuff outta drawers, playing in the toilet, or putting something in her mouth that didn’t go there. She was as cute as she could get, and the family found it funny that she looked just like her aunt Pearl.
Neither one of the girls looked like their daddy, Pearl noted with relief. She had stared into their cute little faces for hours, glad to see that Scotch’s trifling ass was nowhere to be found in either of them. She still burned up just thinking about all them fuckin’ shots and pills she took trying to get rid of the venereal disease that bastard had infected her and Diamond with. Their babies could have been born blind, twisted, deformed, all fucked up, or even dead! That shit had been so humiliating and embarrassing that Pearl had sworn she would never let another dick slide up in her raw until she was married, and so far she had kept that vow. Scotch mighta been her and Diamond’s grimy sperm donor, but the Baines genes were strong as hell and that niggah hadn’t contributed hardly a damn thing to his offspring.
The girls’ baby years flew by, and before Pearl knew it she was graduating from high school. There had been a lot of cute dudes who tried to get her train to jump off the tracks, and she’d gone out a few times and gotten her sex thang rocked and her back knocked outta joint real good. Pearl attracted men like ants to a slice of watermelon and there was never a shortage on dudes who were eager to please her. She had a preference for dark-skinned guys with killer white smiles and hard bodies and could spend hours in bed on one sex session. Pearl didn’t get her swerve on that often, but when she did get it she pulled all-nighters. She liked it slow, hard, and nasty. She had mad respect for a guy who could hold out a long time. Long enough so she could cum at least three times. Oral sex was a must for her too. If she went through the whole process of making sure a dude was good enough to get up in her stomach, she was damn sure gonna get her pussy licked first. That was a requirement!
But sex always took a backseat when it came to her family or to her education. For the most part Pearl had done her best to ignore the call of the streets and stay on point as she finished high school, and her reward had come in the form of a full academic scholarship to the University of Georgia.
“You doing the whole damn neighborhood proud,” Irish had beamed and told his daughter. Him and Zeta had thrown Pearl a big-ass party at Studio Sass, and all the nigs from No Limitz had turned out to see his baby girl off to college. They had catered ribs and wings and buckets of potato salad from a local joint called Nastee’s up the block, and even though Irish didn’t tolerate no drugs, there was plenty of Krug and Cristal flowing, and of course chicks was sneaking all up in the bathroom hitting lines and blowing sticky like crazy.
Diamond was at the party too. Even though she was brilliant in school and had a damn-near photographic memory, there was no way in hell she could have graduated on time with the small amount of credits she’d earned. School had never interested Diamond much, although she was practically a genius in math. She’d gotten high almost every day between classes, dropped out after completing less then two years, and began living on the streets shortly after that.
Over the past three years she’d been in and out of the house, only coming back home to pull herself together when she was so far down in the gutter that she had nowhere else to go. At those times Zeta would run into her daughter on the streets somewhere looking tore down and shot out, and she’d cry and beg Irish to go fuck up whichever drug dealer was banging Diamond at the time, and bring her baby back home.
Diamond’s street addiction was extremely hard on her family. Irish cursed himself for being a hustler and kingpin when he was younger and didn’t know no better, and he swore that street shit was in his blood because his daddy had been a street niggah and so had both of his brothers. All three of them had lived by the street code and died by that shit too, getting popped in a blaze of gunfire while trying to defended a cache of drugs that they’d stolen from somebody else. When Irish saw how helpless Diamond was when it came to the lure of that kind of lifestyle, he never blamed his daughter. He always blamed himself.
“Congratulations.” Diamond had hugged her sister and given her a card and a long-stemmed rose at the going-away-to-college party. “I always knew you would turn out to be somebody, Pearl. It was always in you. I know you prolly ashamed to be my sister, but I’m really proud to be yours.”
There had been tears in Diamond’s eyes, and Pearl had started crying too. She couldn’t help but feel a little guilty and a little selfish for wanting to up and leave Harlem and everyone in it far behind. Pearl was grateful that her parents were willing to keep Sasha for her and told herself that there was nothing selfish about wanting to pull herself up out of the sewer. Shit, Harlem was no joke. Growing up on these city streets was enough to make any person with dreams and goals a little bit selfish.
“I love you, Pearl,” Diamond sniffled. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and Pearl cringed at the sight of her sister’s grimy, bit-back fingernails and all the city dirt that was caked up beneath them. “I might do a lot of fucked-up shit,” Diamond continued, “but it’s all aimed at me. Never at y’all. I swe
ar. No matter how low I get, I never get too low to remember how much I love my family.”
Pearl sighed and took her sister into her arms as she heard a familiar melody playing in her head.
Diamond and Pearl, two hearts, one world.
I love you my Diamond.
I love you my Pearl.
Pearl had held on to those words while she was in college, because over the next three years Diamond continued to sink lower and lower. In her senior year Pearl got a call from a guy named Vince who used to give her crazy-good head back when they were in high school. Vince was cute and had a stacked body like he inhaled weights for breakfast, but he was short up top under the cap, and would never make it much further than the block.
Still, he was a cool guy who was bent on Pearl, and he had spent years trying to get in her panties. But after giving birth to Sasha, Pearl was done fuckin’ losers, so the most she would let Vince do back then was suck her titties a little bit, and a few times he’d pulled her panties to the side and licked her pussy gently until she came, but she’d always maintained control and sent him on his way with a big-ass bulge busting outta his pants. Vince had stayed in touch with her all throughout college, and now he was calling to tell her that her twin sister was raking in big doe pole dancing at a new strip joint that had just opened up.
“Yo, Diamond is the main attraction over at a spot called Club Humpz,” he told Pearl. “Her stripper name is N’Vee and that jawn is so hot she got her own fuckin’ set, yo! Niggahs gotta drop top dollas just to get a peek in the door, for real. I sweated five hunnerd on that gorgeous phat ass the other night, and if you anywhere near as fine butt-naked as ya sister is … shit I wish I had’a got them panties off in high school.”
Pearl was worried about her sister, but she wasn’t about to share this latest bit of news with her mother or her father. Zeta would only cry and wanna bust up in the strip club and drag Diamond home, and Irish would get mad and try to use all his street pull and political clout to try and shut the whole operation down.
Even though hearing shit like this hurt, there was really nothing Pearl could do to help Diamond. She had learned that a long time ago. There had been too many nights of tracking her sister down and pulling her out of whatever little drug spot she was holed up in, or sitting in the car while Irish rolled up on some niggah and cracked him in the dome and snatched Diamond out of his lap, to even count. The girl wasn’t just a hopeless junkie, it was the ballers and the playas that Diamond was addicted to as well. The street life. The whips and the bling. The status and the sex. Those were the things that called out to Diamond’s heart, so when Pearl had earned enough credits to graduate only three years after she started college, and her sister was nowhere to be found on her special day, she was hurt but she wasn’t surprised.
Irish had driven the family down to Georgia in his spanking-new Caddy, and as they stood outside the large auditorium he took his daughter in his arms and held her close. “Daddy’s Pearl. I can’t even describe how proud I am right now. You did it, baby. You did it.”
Irish had kissed his daughter’s forehead before continuing. “And just so you know, Diamond came by yesterday and said she didn’t have nothing decent to wear to your graduation, so I gave her a few dollars. She was supposed to buy some clothes and meet us at the house late last night, but she never showed up. We waited as long as we could, and I even swung by all the little cuts I know she likes to hang out in, but ain’t nobody seen her.”
“Your sister is trying her best to change,” Zeta butt in. “She knows how important today is to you, and as smart as she is she knows she could have been graduating right along with you if she had just stayed in school. But don’t be too hard on her, baby. I think she really wanted to be here.”
Zeta couldn’t meet the disappointment in her daughter’s eyes. Instead, she nudged Sasha and Chante forward. “Look at their little lace dresses, Pearl. Ain’t they cute? Sasha wanted to wear a pair of raggedy jeans and”—she nodded at Diamond’s daughter, Chante—“lil mama over here had the nerve to ask her Pa-Pop to buy her a red miniskirt. Hmph. If she ain’t her momma’s child?”
Both girls had curls in their hair and were dressed in gorgeous little dresses with crinoline slips and lace embroidery at the hem.
They looked like perfect six-year-old angels. Sasha’s dress was bright yellow and Chante’s was baby blue. They wore white-laced tights and white patent-leather shoes, and carried matching white patent-leather little girls’ purses.
Pearl had bent down and taken both of them in her arms. She hugged and kissed them, pressing her face deep into her niece’s neck to hide the tears that had suddenly sprung to her eyes over the absence of her sister.
Why the hell you crying over her? Pearl chastised herself, forcing her heart to go cold. Shit, Diamond didn’t show up for nobody and she wasn’t never gonna change. Not even for her own daughter. What made Pearl think her college graduation was gonna be more important than Chante’s kindergarten graduation had been? Diamond hadn’t shown up for that event either.
Pearl smirked.
No matter how much shit her sister talked about doing the right thing, Diamond had made her choices and was living them out on the streets.
Some shit, and some people, just never changed.
Two weeks after her college graduation Pearl headed to FBI training at Quantico, Virginia. She was one of fourteen females in a class of over two hundred students, and she had known from jump that it was gonna be cutthroat and madly competitive.
The first thing Pearl had done was put her family out of her mind, especially her baby girl, Sasha. She could become weak just by thinking about them, and she couldn’t afford to have any soft spots in her armor because she planned to kick ass in this class and graduate all the way at the top.
The next thing she did was let it be known that she wasn’t down with the rest of the females. She had peeped their game from the gate. Most of them were looking for somebody to latch on to to help drag their cute asses through the course. Pearl wasn’t going for it. She wasn’t that scared little Harlem girl anymore. These days she walked strong by herself, refusing to click up with anybody. If she hung out with anybody it was with a few of the smartest, strongest dudes in the class. She worked out with them, doing just as many push-ups as they did, and lifted crazy weights with them too. Every morning they ran together in a military formation and Pearl always got up front and set the pace. She had strong legs and mad stamina, and could run with those hardbody jocks until they were throwing up and ready to pass out.
When it came time to perform competitive chin-ups or climb the fifty-foot knotted rope, Pearl hoped her classmates wouldn’t let her ass weight fool them. Bodacious booty and all, she showed her unique upper-body strength and lifted her body weight more times than any of the men, and she scampered up that rope like she had some monkey in her for real.
Social time at the academy was another matter. Pearl knew she was considered fine, but she didn’t even speak to the idiotic men whose eyes got boggled watching her ass bounce when she walked by. They were too easily swayed and distracted, and that was a major weakness in Pearl’s book. She shook her booty because it rolled that way naturally, not because she was trying to keep a string of sweating dudes with hard dicks chasing behind her on the regular.
Overall, Pearl fucked heads up left and right at the Academy, and it wasn’t long before the cadre and administrators took sharp notice of her exceptional skills. It wasn’t every day that a beautiful black female from Harlem came through their doors kicking ass and taking names. Pearl had made a bold statement with her physical strength, work ethic, intelligence, extreme instincts, and competence. She won her class’s master fitness award, shot expert on all rifles and small-arms weapons, and when it came to hardcore tactics like non-traditional weapons employment, hand-to-hand combat, stealth operations, and evasive self-defense, most agreed that Pearl was one of the top students to ever come through the doors, black or white, male or fem
ale. As a result she received the Tip of the Spear award, which was the Academy’s highest honor, given for valor, strength, and superior performance in all areas of training.
Getting the top award was dope and all, but it was right before graduation when Pearl got the big break that would set her up lovely.
“We’re looking to fast-track a couple of agents for our Tactical Recruiting Program,” the senior instructor told her. He’d called her into his office and Pearl was standing at attention, her gear sharp as hell, her banging body fit to fight, nails done, and not a hair out of place.
“I’ve been authorized two waivers for our Hostage Rescue Team. If you’re interested, I can make sure one of the waivers has your name on it.”
Pearl had breezed through the next two weeks and floated on clouds all the way through graduation. Hostage Rescue was going to be tough and scary, but she was living a new and improved life, and somehow she knew that type of danger and excitement would also be right up her alley. So she’d stayed on at Quantico for further training, which is how she met her best friend Carlita a senior agent and cold-case analyzer, and her boyfriend Cole who was one of the few brothahs in the Tactical Recruiting Program.
Pearl was the only sistah in the program, so of course she had all the chocolate boys jocking for her attention.
“Yo, mami,” Cole had said to her during a break one day. They had been rappelling off the sides of staged buildings and kicking through windows to rescue mock hostages, and Pearl had laughed at the way he’d looked free-falling off the roof and over the edge. “What’s so damn funny?”
“You.” Pearl had shrugged. “You so damn funny.”
“Oh yeah? So what’s funny about me?”
“Hmph.” Pearl had cut her eyes and turned away. The requirements for all FBI agents was at least a four-year college degree, so she knew he was educated, but still, this niggah was hood. She had picked up on his city swagger and saw straight through his New York bullshit. “Your ass was shook up there. Shook for real.”