Harper Apple
I get a call from Willow Heights the next day saying the admission committee will hear me out if I want to present my case on Monday. I thought they’d given me a hard no, and I’d started to accept that I wouldn’t be going back, but I’m not going to miss the chance if they’re giving me one. I hope to hell it’s a coincidence and Royal isn’t behind this, because the last thing I want is to owe him.
Either way, I stay home from school on Friday and work on what I’m going to say. I’m so wrung out from the encounter with Royal that it’s hard to focus, though. He insisted on following me home before he’d leave yesterday. The irony is not lost on me. What does he think can happen to a girl that’s worse than what he already let happen? What he caused?
I don’t bring the truck back, though. I like having a vehicle that Mom can’t sell. I like having a way out, an escape. It makes me feel safe. I text Preston and tell him he can come get it, but I know he won’t show his face. I tell him why I need it through Monday and explain the admission board hearing. He doesn’t respond. Once, maybe I would have been upset that he was pissed. But that’s the thing about not caring. It’s freeing.
On Saturday evening, I’m still in bed when Mom comes stomping in.
“Get your ass up,” she yells, dragging the dusty blinds up.
I throw my arm over my eyes. “What do you need?”
“I need my daughter to get her ass up and come to my retirement party,” she says. “Get some of them fancy clothes on and come out and help. I got friends on their way now.”
“Retirement party?” I ask, sitting up.
“Yeah,” she says with a grin. “It’s your party, too, baby. You made it happen.”
I just gape at her until she laughs and perches her ass on the windowsill like she’s settling in to chat. She takes out a pack of smokes from her back pocket and lights up, blowing a cloud of tobacco fumes toward my bed.
“Can you not?” I ask, waving it away. I hate when she smokes in my room. It makes my clothes stink.
“See, your sugar daddy paid all our rent and our bills for the year, and since the electric company wouldn’t give the money back, and the landlord’s a piece of shit and would probably take it for himself if I tried to get it back, I figured hey, instead of spending the money, why not just… Retire?”
“Because you’re thirty-five?” I offer.
“The bills arepaid,” she crows. “That’s the reason I bust my ass all day and night, trying to find something that’ll keep the hot water on. But I ain’t gotta do that anymore. We’re set for the whole year!”
I don’t bother pointing out all the fucked up logic in her comments. I definitely don’t bring up the fact that she parties more than she busts her ass, and that’s why she keeps losing her jobs, or that the hot water was only on half the time before Preston came along. She’s the parent who stayed. I can’t exactly be picky.
“And what happens next year?” I ask. “It’s September. That’s only three months away.”
“Don’t you dare lose that man,” she warns, jabbing her cigarette at me like an accusatory finger. “Only took eighteen years, but having a baby’s finally paying off.”
“Glad I could be of service,” I mutter.
“I mean it, Harp,” she says. “Don’t fuck this up for us. Girls like us, we get one chance. It won’t come along again.”
“I’ll try not to fuck it up,” I agree with a sigh.
“He won’t want you forever,” she says. “The thing you gotta do is, when he starts to get tired of you—and you’ll know it, a woman can always tell, can’t she?—you gotta look around at his friends. Those rich men, they don’t mind passing around a little thing like you for a while. Get everything you can from him, do anything he wants, even the weird shit, and then move on to the next one.”
I throw off the sheet and swing my legs off the bed, rubbing my eyes. “Are you seriously telling me to do kinky sex stuff with old men right now?”
“They ain’t all old,” she argues, waving my comment away with some smoke. “They’re all married, sure, but they see their wives different. Once they give them kids, they can’t be pulling their hair and choking them and shit. They respect them and shit. That’s where girls like us can help, give them what they’ve been missing.”
“That’s not what this is,” I say stiffly. “He’s not married, and he’s not into any of that. He respects me.”
My mother cackles with laughter.
I get up and go to the closet, looking at all the designer clothes Preston put me in. My last words echo back in my head, doubt gnawing at the edges of my mind. Preston cares about me, but it’s going a little far to say he respects me. He treated me well, but he used me. I was his whore, exactly as Mom is describing, minus the wife and kinky stuff.
The hair pulling kind of relationship is what I had with Royal, but he doesn’t respect me, either, and I didn’t get any of the things Mom wants from him. He didn’t take care of me. He did the opposite.
Mom finishes her fit of laughter and taps the ash from her cigarette onto my carpet. “Those rich guys, they’re used to women throwing themselves at them,” she explains. “They got their wives for regular maintenance, but they can get a side piece any time, too. You gotta set yourself apart. You’re the… Spice. Oh, and tell them you’re still seventeen. They like that.”
“Mom, no. Just no.”