“Mr. Hunter,” Ms. Gorman said as Xavier walked back into class to take his seat. “I’m glad that you could grace us with your presence, just in time to introduce yourself to our newest student.”
The beef with Dylan was still so fresh in his mind that Xavier hadn’t even noticed that the girl sitting directly to his right was new. He was slippin’—a fool like him usually noticed the honeys. The new chick was not only gorgeous, but a dime piece—straight Beyoncé in the face, long, flowing hair, a soft brown complexion, and juicy lips that had been designed for extra intense kissing sessions. Her eyes were her most endearing feature. They were big, brown, and almond shaped, with naturally long eyelashes.
Xavier couldn’t see much of her body because she wasn’t advertising it—meaning the girl wasn’t dressed like a skank. Skinny jeans, T-shirt, chocolate brown UGG boots, same color leather biker jacket, and a nice pair of diamond stud earrings made this girl look like a superstar. A brown Michael Kors bag sat on the floor by her feet. The fragrance that girlfriend was rocking smelled better than any Xavier had ever come across.
“I’m Xavier.” He reached his hand out to shake hers.
She looked hesitant at first, but shook his hand. “I’m Samantha—Samantha Fox.”
“Fox, hmmm—yes, you are, ma. Maybe we can have some lunch, get to know each other.” Xavier was quick with his game.
“Pump your brakes, Romeo,” someone yelled from the back of the room. The entire class laughed.
“Yes, Mr. Hunter,” Ms. Gorman butted in. “Please try to contain yourself.” The teacher went into her desk and retrieved a thin book. “Everybody, can you please take out”—she held it up in full view of the class—“Shakespeare’s Hamlet.” Ms. Gorman said to Samantha, “Looks like we are short one play. I won’t be able to get another until tomorrow, so would you mind sharing with someone?”
Xavier saw his chance. “Ms. Gorman, I’d like to volunteer my play.”
“Respectfully—Xavier is it?” Samantha asked in a serious tone. “My father taught me never to accept anything from bad boys.”
“Ooooh,” a few of the male students instigated.
“Oh, it’s like that?” Xavier asked, still slyly smiling. “Don’t say that because most girls love us bad boys. This school ain’t the most secure place in the city for a beautiful girl such as yourself to be walking around alone. You might need somebody like me to protect you.”
Samantha smiled flirtatiously and batted her long, thick eyelashes. “Your offer for bodyguard services is tempting, but that’s why the school has security.”
The “oohs” and “aahs” started again.
Cheese butted in, “Girl, the jackers will be off with your goods before these security guards get off their butts to do something.”
Some of the students laughed at Cheese’s sense of humor.
“It’s all good, Cheese,” Xavier said. He turned to Samantha. “Security, huh? Okay. But just keep in mind that my door is always open for you, gorgeous.”
Samantha blushed, smiling.
“Excuse me, Xavier,” Ms. Gorman said. “This is not some mall where you can openly flirt. The only hook up that will be happening in my class is you hooking up with William Shakespeare. Now that you’ve volunteered your play to Samantha, tell me how will you be keeping up with the rest of us?”
Xavier smiled confidently. “No sweat. I read Hamlet this past summer. I don’t need the book.” He tapped his finger on the side of his head. “Got it all up here.”
“The only thing you got up there is a lot of fat,” Sally Peoples bitterly cut in, apparently still fuming from their earlier argument.
Xavier turned his back on Sally’s comment. The girl was old news and he wasn’t about to go there with her again.
“That will be enough out of you, Ms. Peoples,” Ms. Gorman scolded. The teacher looked back in Xavier’s direction with an inquisitive expression on her face. “Okay, Mr. Hunter, I’m going to ask you to sum up the play, in your own words.”
“Oh, Ms. Gorman, you’re trying to play a brotha out. I got this.” Xavier flirtatiously smiled at Samantha. “Peep this. Prince Hamlet takes revenge on his uncle Claudius for murdering King Hamlet, Claudius’s brother and Prince Hamlet’s father. Claudius then takes the throne of Denmark by marrying the king’s widow and Prince Hamlet’s mother.”
“Don’t let that steroid freak fool y’all,” Sally interrupted by snapping on Xavier. “Anybody with Internet access could log on to Wikipedia to print the summary.”
“Sally, one more outburst out of you and I’m going to send you to the principal’s office,” Ms. Gorman scolded. She then returned her attention to Xavier. “Mr. Hunter, would you please be so kind as to tell us what method Claudius used in killing King Hamlet, and what does the third guard, Marcellus, report to Hamlet that he saw one night?”
Xavier had to keep from laughing at the question. He knew Ms. Gorman was trying to set him up. “Teach, you gotta come up with something better than that if you’re trying to throw me off my game. Marcellus didn’t tell Hamlet anything. It was Hamlet’s friend Horatio, who said he had seen a ghost who looked like King Hamlet. And as for the method Claudius used to knock off his brother—it was hemlock, a poisonous plant that he’d cooked into a liquid. One afternoon, Claudius crept on his brother while the king was sleeping and poured the poison inside his ear.”
Cheese tapped Xavier on the shoulder and excitedly yelled, “Dazam, my boy’s a walking Hamlet encyclopedia! That’s my dude—y’all get up off him!”
Cheese’s energy had sparked a buzz of chatter among the students.
Xavier looked over at Samantha and winked. “Impressed, huh?”
Ms. Gorman said, “Yes, Mr. Hunter, fabulous job. We are all impressed that you took the time out of your busy summer schedule to look over this semester’s required reading. So I’m going to encourage you to keep your play in front of you. And, Samantha, please feel free to look on with another student.”
The class laughed while Xavier was smiling, hoping that he made enough of an impression to catch him a Fox.
Don’t miss the next exciting book in Calvin Slater’s
Coleman High series,
Game On
On sale in September 2015!
SATURDAY, JULY 8
8:23 AM
This was too early in the morning for him, and during his summer vacation. At a time when Xavier should’ve been in his bed, with the covers pulled up to his chin and copping some serious Zs, he was yawning while following a correctional officer with no neck and a butt the size of a small Buick down a drab, dreary corridor.
Xavier still couldn’t believe that in another month he would be entering his senior year of high school. Never in his wildest dreams when starting out as a freshman at Coleman High did he ever think he’d make it all the way, given all of the drama he had to deal with in his personal life. But as much as he wanted to celebrate, he knew there were some real hard truths he still hadn’t overcome yet. He was still a wanted man with an undisclosed amount of money riding on his bald head, placed there by Slick Eddie, a pissed-off kingpin who at one time owned and operated a multimillion-dollar chop shop out of a huge junkyard on Detroit’s Westside. Slick Eddie was now doing a life stretch in prison because Xavier had ratted him and his former soldier Romello Anderson out to the police. Since then Eddie had sworn revenge. Xavier was sure he would never live to see graduation, and Eddie had almost made good on his promise with a couple of unsuccessful attempts. It didn’t matter how many hitters Eddie sent Xavier’s way. Xavier was focused and he possessed a deep-rooted conviction that nothing, not even Eddie, was going to keep him from stepping across the stage at his graduation ceremony.
As he trailed the correction officer, Xavier had to admit to himself that it took a lot of guts to get him to this point. This was the women’s side of Portus Correctional Facility, a place where his mother Ne Ne had been cooling her heels for a little over a year now. There was a time where he d
idn’t care about ever seeing her again, especially after the crazy move she’d pulled at the end of his sophomore year. Ne Ne had breezed through Coleman High’s back parking lot in an attempt to abduct his now ex-girlfriend Samantha during the last school dance with her jailbird boyfriend, Nate. Ne Ne was the main reason why Xavier’s relationship with Samantha was no longer. But since then Xavier had had some time to think about mending fences with his mother. Although her selfish butt didn’t deserve his forgiveness, Xavier’s father, Noah, had been instrumental in convincing the boy that nobody was perfect. And everybody deserved a second chance.
That’s why Xavier was now sitting down inside a graffiti-riddled booth with a thick glass partition separating him from an empty chair, awaiting the arrival of his inmate mother. He hadn’t been able to understand it. Through the first ten months of her sentence, Ne Ne didn’t act like she gave a crap about her son.
No letters. No collect phone calls.
But Noah hadn’t left her with any room to bring the noise with some weak excuse. Even though Ne Ne had never passed any of the letters that Noah had sent to him and his brother, Noah wasn’t about to do the same thing to her. So he had gone online and found her inmate number and mailing address through OTIS (the Offender Tracking Information System) and wrote her, providing the address and phone numbers at which she could reach her boys. But still there was nothing. Then, all of a sudden, three weeks ago, it had been like a switch was flipped when Ne Ne started calling and sending the boys letters like she’d lost her mind. Each letter claimed that she was new and reformed from her old ways. She had found the Lord and became born again and whatnot. Just what Xavier needed—another highly religious nut running loose in the family like Noah. And just when he’d gotten his relationship tight with his Bible-thumping old man, too. Now he had to deal with this junk. But all the same, she was his mother and he respected her.
But nothing surprised him about his mother.
Even as she took her seat on the other side of the glass partition, Xavier wondered if her newly-acquired faith was some scheme she’d cooked up to weasel her way back into his life. To convince him by using King James scripture as some kind of prop to aid in her clever disguise of a woman who’d truly seen the error of her ways.
Ne Ne’s looks had changed a bit. Age seemed to set in overnight. Where her face once held the unmistakable arrogance of the ghetto, it now seemed to be home to traces of humility. Gray color showed in the tangles of her hairline. There were bags underneath her hard eyes and she looked to be down quite a few pounds from the last time he’d seen her.
Xavier kept his eyes focused on her face. He wanted to see if her new way of life existed there. But he couldn’t really tell because his mother looked to be anxious, shifting around in her seat and avoiding eye contact. It was wrong to judge her primarily on her emotions. This behavior could stem from shame. After all, the last time Xavier had laid eyes on her was when she and her knucklehead boyfriend Nate had tried to get all crazy with it and kidnap Samantha. Xavier surmised that if he’d pulled something so desperate, lowdown, and despicable, he’d be ashamed to look someone in the eyes, too.
Xavier picked up the telephone and waited until she did the same. When he spoke, his voice seemed to be a little harsh. “You know you didn’t have a soul back then. The letters you keep sending to the house. How can I believe any of it?”
His mother kept her eyes cast downward. “I didn’t know God the way I do now, son.”
“Excuse me for not really buying it, but when convicts go to prison a lot of them always come out claiming to be holier than thou, you feel me?”
Ne Ne’s eyes kept darting side to side like she was watching a tennis match when she tried to look at him. “You have a right to be angry. I put you and your brother through a lot with my own selfishness. All I can say is I’m sorry.”
He had come to see her with the intention of burying the hatchet, per his father’s request. But when he finally caught her eyes, something inside of him snapped and he went nuclear. “Are you sorry about hiding my father’s letters from us? Trying to kidnap my girlfriend—you doggone right you put us through a lot. Then you had that bum that you called a boyfriend. And don’t let me get started on how you threatened to throw me out of the house if I didn’t sell drugs to help you—what kind of mother would say such things to her son?”
Ne Ne couldn’t answer. The only sign of remorse were the tears sliding from both eyes leaving trails along her cheeks.
Xavier dug deeper. “When I was getting money, you didn’t even have the decency, the concern about where it was coming from. All you knew was that you were lining your pockets. You didn’t care”—he stopped and looked around—“if I ended up in a place like this, just as long as I kept breaking you off with the ends.”
Ne Ne still held the phone to her ear with her left hand as she covered her face, chest heaving and crying into the other.
Xavier knew it was wrong but he felt nothing for her. “But that’s okay. You see, even with everything you put me through I still managed to make it through to my senior year of high school. And I’m going to graduate, too. Do something that you never believed in. Despite you telling me that education was useless. ’Member you told me the only way that a black boy could make it out of the ghetto was by selling dope, going to prison, or dying?”
Ne Ne finally looked up, and through tears, said to him, “I’ve made terrible mistakes and all I ask for is a chance to let me make good.”
Xavier was on the blink. He didn’t have any sympathy for her. As far as he was concerned, his mother was someone who had profited off the love he had inside of his heart for his family and then busted up and stripped away the one decent thing that was any good in his life. Samantha was gone, and it was all Ne Ne’s fault.
“Ne Ne—”
His mother interrupted by saying, “Please, son—I’m your mother, it’s okay to call me mom.”
Xavier sarcastically chuckled while shaking his head. “You can’t be serious, Ne Ne, tell me this is a joke?”—with both hands he flared out his ears—“I’m listening. Is this a joke?”
Tears continued streaming down Ne Ne’s face as she tightly held on to the phone.
“Mom—that’s rich. Whatever happened to ‘Don’t y’all ever call me Mama. It makes me sound old.’” Xavier ruthlessly laughed at her as if her tears were a joke.
“Son, that’s not fair. You forgave your dad.”
Xavier blazed. “Pop wasn’t the one who withheld the letters from me and Alfonso, was he?”
Ne Ne wiped her eyes with the right sleeve of her orange jumpsuit. “How’s my baby?”
“You have some nerve.”
“Why ain’t Alfonso with you?”
“I’m not gonna let you play with his head. Alfonso is doing well. I came here today to see if you were on the level, and I don’t know. I don’t trust you. Do you know how you affected that boy with your foolishness?”
Ne Ne’s eyes were red and puffy. She sniffled. “So now I’m on trial here, is that it? You brought your behind up here knowing you weren’t gonna forgive me!” she yelled at him.
Xavier’s face broke into a smirk. “Now that’s the old Ne Ne I know.”
Ne Ne let loose on him, “Look at you sitting there looking like your daddy. How dare you look down your nose at me, you little car thief. Here I am trying to tell you that I changed, but all you care about is losing your little rich girlfriend. You think those rich people in her world were going to accept you? Let me tell you one thing: the only thing all those old snobbish people were going to do for you was put a chauffeur’s cap on your head and a broom in your hand.”
Xavier looked away and wiped his mouth. When he returned his gaze, there were tears welling up in his eyes. “My dad told me that anybody can change. But in your case, I don’t think it’s true. I did come to visit you with the hopes that you had changed.” He tightened his grip on the phone handle. “But all you are, and always will be . . . is b
itter.” With that Xavier got up and walked out.
HAVEN’T HAD ENOUGH? CHECK OUT THESE GREAT SERIES FROM DAFINA BOOKS!
DRAMA HIGH
by L. Divine
Follow the adventures of a young sistah who’s learning that life
in the hood is nothing compared to life in high school.
THE FIGHT
ISBN: 0-7582-1633-5
FRENEMIES
ISBN: 0-7582-2532-6
HUSTLIN’
ISBN: 0-7582-3105-9
CULTURE CLASH
ISBN: 0-7582-3111-3
SECOND CHANCE
ISBN: 0-7582-1635-1
LADY J
ISBN: 0-7582-2534-2
KEEP IT MOVIN’
ISBN: 0-7582-3107-5
COLD AS ICE
ISBN: 0-7582-3113-X
JAYD’S LEGACY
ISBN: 0-7582-1637-8
COURTIN’ JAYD
ISBN: 0-7582-2536-9
HOLIDAZE
ISBN: 0-7582-3109-1
PUSHIN’
ISBN: 0-7582-3115-6
THE MELTDOWN
ISBN: 0-7582-3117-2
SO, SO HOOD
ISBN: 0-7582-3119-9
BOY SHOPPING
by Nia Stephens
An exciting “you pick the ending” series
that lets the reader pick Mr. Right.
BOY SHOPPING
ISBN: 0-7582-1929-6
LIKE THIS AND LIKE THAT
ISBN: 0-7582-1931-8
GET MORE
ISBN: 0-7582-1933-4
DEL RIO BAY
Hold Me Down Page 24