Fabulous (2 page)

She paused in the arched doorway and was surprised. The table was set for a formal meal. Large porcelain china serving bowls filled with food were laid across a
runner down the center of the huge wooden table, but no one was in the room. Starr’s hand automatically went to her pavé diamond pendant just as Mimi, their live-in maid, came bustling through the door that connected the dining room to the gourmet chef’s kitchen.

“Where’s everybody, Mimi?” Starr asked as she stepped into the room and watched the tall, thin black woman begin gathering bowls into her arms.

Mimi looked up and her eyes were instantly apologetic. Starr knew it before the words even came out of Mimi’s mouth. “Your father got a last-minute invitation to a dinner party. Your mother went with him.”

Starr didn’t want Mimi’s pity even if it was pathetic that her parents hadn’t bothered to let her know they had other plans. She held her head high and hid the pain she felt in her chest. Sometimes her parents’ absence—some might say neglect—really sucked, and most times it really hurt.

“The twins are in the kitchen eating with Justine and me. Come on and have dinner with us, too.”

Just what she wanted: another night with her four-year-old twin brothers from hell, Malcolm and Martin, the cook and the maid. “I’m not really hungry,” she said.

Before she could protest, Starr turned and hurried from the dining room. She didn’t bother with the elevator and instead ran up the marble staircase—two steps at a time—to her suite. She barely made it into her room before she flung herself onto the center of the bed and buried her head.

She didn’t want to eat. She didn’t want Justine and
Mimi to distract her with their stories or listen to the constant babble of the twins. She just wanted to be alone because at least that way she could hide her disappointment.

Dionne
September 1 @ 8:33 p.m. | Mood: Anxious

Bzzzzz…
bzzzzz…bzzzzz.

Dionne Hunt stopped singing to the video of Keyshia Cole’s song and looked up from polishing her neatly trimmed toenails. Her Sidekick sitting near the edge of the round living room table was vibrating. She flipped the soft curls of her lace weave over her shoulder before she reached to pick up her phone, trying to avoid getting cherry-red nail polish on it. She slid it open to read the text.

HASSAN: Whaddup, baby girl?

Her heart skipped a beat. Hassan Ali: football player extraordinaire. All-around heart-stopper, and her almost-boyfriend last year during her final days at South 17th Street Elementary School in Newark.

Hassan was fifteen, popular and so fine that it was absolutely shameless. She thought of his tall athletic frame, his square and handsome face and that big Kool-Aid-like grin. He was everything all rolled into one. And
all
of it made her knees weak in a big-time way. Still it took everything she had not to text him back. He didn’t fit in with her new life.

Two years ago her father, Lahron Young, aka Lahron the Don, got a record deal with Swag Hard Records. One year ago his debut CD
New Era
dropped and went double platinum within a few months—all because of his number-one single “Watch Me.” Life had changed so much since then. She began spending the weekends and holidays at her daddy’s luxury apartment in the same Park Avenue building where Diddy used to live. And she transferred from her middle school to finish the eighth grade at the ultra-exclusive and pricey Pace Academy.

Little Dionne went from walking to school and catching public transportation wherever she had to go, to the daily thirty-minute commute to Saddle River in the limo with her own driver.

She went from obscurity as just another flashy ghetto girl growing up in the Bricks, to being on the red carpet with her dad or mentioned in articles for top magazines as the child of a celebrity and all the access that goes along with it.

From GAP to Dolce & Gabbana.

Everything changed…well,
almost
everything.

She still lived in Newark…with her mom…in a two-
bedroom apartment that could fit inside her father’s new living room. She loved Newark and all her Brick City friends. But the other side of the world where Starr and Marisol were her BFFs and she was one-third of the über-popular Pacesetters…well, she loved it more.

She
wished
she could live in that world full-time but there were three things that would have to happen:

1) Her mother and father, who only dated for three months, some sixteen odd years ago—would have to decide to get together again.
(The way they fought…uhm, that was a definite no!)
2) Her mother would have to agree to let her only child live with her father.
(The devil had a better chance of ice-skating in hell.)
And 3) Her father would have to stay off the road long enough to agree to let her live with him.
(Humph, Daddy loves being Lahron the Don on that stage…so who knows?)

Dressed in a fitted turquoise Polo shirt with a metallic big pony logo, Dionne checked the MAC polish on her toenails for dryness before she removed the lime-green toe separators. She studied her toes while bopping her head to the beat of Beyoncé’s video on MTV Jams. The front door opened just as she hit a high note along with Mrs. B. “Didi, what did I tell you ’bout watchin’ all them dang-on videos?”

Mommy’s home.

Dionne used the remote to turn the volume down so that the bass of the music didn’t make the African sculptures on the wall bounce.

“Thank you,” Risha Hunt called from the kitchen.

Dionne sighed, thinking about her situation as she worked the four thin gold bangles around her left wrist. Usually the bracelets brought her out of the blues. Each of the bangles was engraved with comforting words:
LOVE, FAITH, PEACE
and
STRENGTH
. They were gifts from Starr and Marisol for her fifteenth b-day this past June.

She smiled as she remembered the girls gushing to her about a mention in a fashion magazine that said Mariah Carey, Halle Berry and Jessica Simpson owned them. Dionne didn’t have her own Amex like the other girls—her Moms said she was way too young—so she couldn’t afford the three-thousand-dollar price tag. Heck, it took her mom two whole months to make that working at University Medical Center.

Her bracelets helped get her through a summer of only being able to see her Pacesetter friends on her webcam or on the random weekends her dad was off the road long enough for her to spend time with him in the city. Hopefully they would help her get over not being there with her dad at his very first VMAs. Her mom vetoed the whole thing because she didn’t want her to miss school on Monday.

Dionne climbed off the couch and made her way into the kitchen. Her mom—who at thirty-five years old looked more like her sister—turned to look over her shoulder. “Girl, school starts tomorrow and you cooped up in this house?” she asked, leaving the wooden spoon
in the pot of leftover spaghetti she was warming up for dinner. “Joshia and Kim are on their stoop.”

Dionne just shrugged. Her Moms would never understand that her friendship with her ex-BFFs was soooo
finito.
Either they were carrying on like groupies about her father or they were giving her the cold shoulder because they were jealous of her new designer clothes and her trips down the red carpet or her pictures in magazines…or a gazillion other things she thought were so lame of them to get mad about. At Pace, just about
everybody
was somebody so there was none of that
“Oh, my gosh your dad is Lahron the Don”
BS.

“I am soooo ready for the first day of school,” Dionne grumbled as she reached in the front pocket of her Rock & Republic jeans for the small and flat glass container holding her favorite lip gloss in sheer peach.

Risha’s two pairs of gold bamboo doorknockers clanged lightly against each other as she walked over to her daughter. “Let me holla at you for a sec. Sit.”

Dionne dropped down into one of the chairs surrounding the kitchen table. She wished her nails were long enough—or that she had acrylic tips—so that she could drum them against the table as she sat through what she anticipated was going to be another “Remember Where You Came From” lecture.

“Look here, girl. I’m still young enough to remember being fifteen and tryin’ to be fly and all that. But don’t forget where you come from…because it might be a place you have to come back to. The last thing you want
waitin’ for you on these here streets is haters and enemies.”

Dionne began nervously twisting her bangles again as she looked dead in her mother’s eyes. “We’ve talked about this before.”

“We sure have because I don’t want you to base
your
life on what your father has. If the money goes—and Lord knows that’s possible with the way he spending it—then the clothes and the thirty-grand-a-year private school and all the other bling-things you didn’t have a year ago will go, too.”

Dionne had to fight not to roll her eyes. “Don’t be a hater, Ma.”

Risha laughed and it wasn’t an angry laugh or a sad laugh or even a hater laugh. Just a knowing, amused laugh, like when she heard Martin Lawrence doing stand-up. A laugh like she thought her daughter was adorable. “Honey, I
never
thought I would be able to buy Cisco for a quarter.”

Dionne frowned. “Who?”

“Exactly,” Risha said, rising to her feet as she reached down to stroke Dionne’s cheek. “I wish your daddy the best. I really do, Didi. I just don’t want
you
to get hurt if
his
career doesn’t work out.”

Dionne nodded but deep down she was scared. What her Moms said made sense. She excused herself and walked down the long and narrow hall filled with her baby pictures until she reached her bedroom. The dark denim decor with lime-green accents did nothing to comfort her.

She opened her cramped closet and looked at the dozens of new outfits and school uniforms her father bought for her to start school with. Two years ago, her mom and dad had spent a couple hundred dollars on Macy’s, Old Navy and H&M to get her clothes for the start of the school year. Now her dad paid that for one pair of designer jeans or her Marc Jacobs tie-front pointelle blouse in that to-die-for shade of madras red or seven times that for her new “don’t touch it or you will pull back a nub” monogrammed Louis Vuitton Galliera tote. And
that
was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to her new wardrobe.

She thought of their shopping spree two weeks ago and the huge wad of money her father kept pulling out of his pocket, peeling off…and off…and off hundred-dollar bills at every cash register. He denied her nothing. The fleeting thought of him winding up broke passed through her mind. She scrunched up her face like she’d smelled fresh dog poo when she imagined Lahron the Don going broke blasted all over Internet blog sites—just like the scandalous news that one of the hottest stars’ SUV got repo’ed a while back.

That was bad.
Big-time
bad.

Marisol
September 1 @ 9:33 p.m. | Mood: Energetic

Marisol
Rivera let out a deep breath through pursed lips as she used one slender finger to tap the button to increase her treadmill speed. With Rihanna blaring through the earphones of her iPod and MTV’s
My Super Sweet 16
on the small flat-screen monitor attached to the handlebars of her treadmill, Marisol closed her eyes and made sure to breathe in and out through her lip-gloss-covered mouth.
A lady should always wear makeup,
she thought.

She wanted to get in one last workout before school tomorrow. Unlike Starr and Dionne, Marisol felt like her butt was just one Twinkie away from being filled with dimples and bumps and lumps—okay maybe not
that
bad…but close. She knew Latinas—ahem, J-Lo—were well-known and envied for their derrieres…she just didn’t
want it to get out of hand before it was too late.
Madre de Dios,
like her
Tia
Maria.

Marisol shuddered at the thought as she finished up the last mile and then turned the treadmill off. She walked across the state-of-the-art exercise room and checked out her appearance in the mirrored wall. She liked the way the white velour Juicy Couture tracksuit fit her frame, but she wished her almost-nonexistent chest would’ve sprouted like her hips and her thighs. Of course, her parents wouldn’t want her looking like a Coca-Cola bottle but she wasn’t happy with a future as a pear, either.

“Maybe I’ll ask for a personal trainer like Starr,” she said aloud to herself, in her heavily Spanish-accented voice.

With a final shrug, Marisol surveyed the huge expanse of her father’s exercise room. As the star pitcher for one of New York’s Major League Baseball teams, Alex Rivera trained hard to stay in shape to maintain his physique
and
his celebrity. New York definitely loved her father. With his strikeout record, his good looks and his ability to charm, he always got invites to parties, appearances on late-night TV, a paparazzi following, making
People
magazine’s “100 Most Beautiful” and endorsements that were beginning to rival Tiger Woods.

Next week ESPN was doing one of those day-in-the-life-of documentaries following her dad around for a whole week. Wherever he went, they went. All access, all Alex Rivera, all the time.

Papi was
muy
popular and paid.

Marisol drew on her eight years of dance training and “walked it out” across the polished wooden floors, down the hall to the staircase leading upstairs to the bedrooms. Her stomach growled and she thought about buzzing the chef to make her a sundae, but she passed. “No, Marisol,” she admonished herself with a shake of her head.
“Un momento en los labios, toda una vida en mi cadera.”
(Translation: A moment on the lips, a lifetime on my hips.)

She glanced down at her diamond Rolex watch—a gift from her mother. It was just a little past nine-thirty in the evening.

Marisol was glad that she didn’t have a curfew like Dionne. She couldn’t imagine going to bed at 10:00 p.m., especially since she was hardly sleepy then. What was there to do? Stare at the ceiling?
That
was big-time crazy.

Right about now she wanted to lounge in a hot bubble bath while she read the latest issues of her celebrity and fashion magazines. She was hoping to get some inspiration for a gift for Starr’s birthday. What do you get someone who has everything?

Marisol thought of Starr’s birthday wish list.

Her parents had definitely vetoed her buying Starr the dog she wanted.

She loved Starr to death, but she was not going to have to explain to her parents why she spent nearly twenty grand on the Ricky bag Starr wanted. Her parents were very generous, but she was smart enough not to push it.

And of course the Rolex was a definite no. Plus,
Marisol knew that Starr only really wanted the watch because she had one. And that gave her a bit of smug satisfaction knowing that she had
something
that
the
Starr Lester wanted.

Maybe she could convince her driver to take the three of them and a couple of PWs—Pacesetter wannabes—out for a birthday dinner at some fabulous restaurant in the city and maybe go to a club.

Marisol began to worry as she thought of all the things that could possibly go wrong with that plan: How exactly was she going to convince her driver to take her and a bunch of teenage girls to the city for a night on the town without her parents’ okay? Besides, Starr was so picky about her circle of friends—meaning she and Dionne were definite BFFs, but other stylish, hip, popular girls she merely tolerated. Everyone else was a no-no.

Okay, scratch the whole multiracial version of
NYC Prep, Marisol thought as she reached up to twist her highlighted hair into a loose topknot.

She paused as another thought popped into her head. She snatched her cell and quickly texted Starr.

MARIMARI: R U Having a B-Day Bash? 4 Words: MTVs Super Sweet 16.

She hit send and waited a few seconds to see if Starr would answer. When she didn’t get a response she logged that topic of conversation on to their TBD (To Be Discussed) list for tomorrow.

Marisol was halfway up the stairs when she heard loud voices coming from her parents’ suite at the end of the hall.

“I am sick of
your
career intruding on
my
life, Alexandro!”

Marisol winced at the anger she heard in her mother’s voice. She knew that her mother didn’t agree with her father’s lifestyle since he became a superstar athlete. The celebrity parties, the paparazzi, the showboating—none of it suited the family-oriented, laid-back Yasmine Rivera one bit.

“As long as it pays for every aspect of your luxury lifestyle, right, Yasmine?” her father shouted in rapid-fire Spanish.

Marisol crept up the stairs on the tips of her sequined Juicy Couture sneakers—of course. They weren’t really suited for exercise or any athletic activity. But when she first saw them, she fell in love with them. By the time she reached their carved wooden double doors her attention was focused back on her parents. She pulled loose strands of her hair behind her ear and then leaned in closer.

“I am tired of this, Alexandro,” she heard her mother say in a low voice that scared her way more than her mother’s screaming. She couldn’t explain why. It just did.

Suddenly she didn’t feel like eavesdropping anymore. Marisol turned and crept away from their door.

“Marisol?”

Her foot froze poised in the air at the sound of her father’s deep voice.
Shoot.
She plastered a huge and
bright “daddy’s girl” smile on her face as she turned. Her eyes were level with his charcoal-gray silk shirt so she tilted her head back to look him in the face. His six-foot-three-inch height made her five-foot-six frame feel petite. “How was the game?” she asked.

“We won.” He tilted his boyishly handsome face to the side as he slid his hands inside his dark and stylish denims. “Were you eavesdropping?” he asked.

“Definitely not,” Marisol lied in a voice as if she was insulted at the very idea.

“Why don’t you make sure Carlos is in bed for your mother? And don’t stay up too late, Mari.” Alex tugged her ponytail before walking past her to jog down the stairs.

“Daddy, are you going out?” she called out as she turned to watch him.

Alex paused on the steps. Marisol thought her father looked so handsome as the light from the chandelier illuminated the soft black curls of his hair and bronzed tint of the complexion she inherited. Her heart swelled with love for him because she was a daddy’s girl and she knew she had him in the palm of her hand.

He nodded. “I have a sports-bar opening to attend.”

She thought of her parents’ argument. “Is Mami going?”

He shook his head. “No, you know it’s not her kind of thing. I won’t be out long.”

Marisol wanted to say a dozen different things. Her mouth opened but nothing came out except, “’Kay.”

She flicked her thumbnail against the gold band of the chunky turquoise ring she wore on her index finger. Just as the sound of the front door closing behind him echoed throughout the house, Marisol looked over her shoulder. Her mother switched off the lights in their bedroom.

She sighed as she made her way to her brother’s room.

She was having a great day and pretty good night and now family drama just sucked up all her joy. On top of that she found herself sinking into a real funky mood. Before she opened the door to her eleven-year-old brother’s room, she took a deep breath to keep from smelling the odor of feet, moldy plates and only God knows what else.

Marisol took a quick peek inside her brother’s room, which was designed entirely around sports paraphernalia. The lights were out and there was a lump under the covers on the bed. Good enough for her.

She eased his door closed to keep him from waking up and working her nerves. Right now the soaking tub in her bathroom had her name written
all
over it.