Just Wanna Testify (14 page)

“I grew up in southeast, but we knew about West End.”

“Good,” Blue responded, knowing that meant Jerome had likely told the rest who he was and that making a request for his assistance was not a matter to be taken lightly. This saved everybody a lot of time and confusion as things moved ahead. “So who wants to tell me why you’ve come to see me this morning?”

Four heads turned to the boy who had taken the middle seat, Jackson Stevens from Detroit.

“Mr. Hamilton, first of all, I want you to know how much we appreciate you taking the time to talk with us.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Blue said.

The boy took a deep breath. “Four years ago, when we were all freshmen, we made a deal, Mr. Hamilton. A bad deal.”

“Collectively?”

They looked at one another, then back to Jackson like he was on his own.

“Well,” he said slowly, “it was the same deal, but each of us made it individually. And now the people have come to collect. They’re only giving us a week and we don’t want to go.”

“Go where?”

Jackson turned to Stan Hodges, sitting on the far left. “They came to Stan first. Maybe he should start.”

Stan swallowed hard. “They contacted me through my Facebook page. I had been complaining about needing some money for school, and they said they had a unique postgraduate program for bright students like me that would pay all of my expenses for four years at Morehouse, starting that same day.”

The other four guys were nodding in affirmation like a row of bobblehead dolls.

“That’s what they told all of us,” Jerome said.

“Do you boys have anything in common besides this deal?”

“No,” Stan said. “We’re not from the same hometowns. We have different majors.”

“Ever play on the same team? Marching band? Anyplace where they might have seen you all together and chosen the five of you specifically?”

“Well, there is one thing,” Jackson Andrews said. “We’re all real smart.”

Blue raised his eyebrows slightly as if none of the evidence pointed him to this conclusion.

“We were all valedictorians of our high school classes,” Hayward Jones said. “And we all scored really high on our SATs.”

Clearly not an exam that tests for life
, Blue thought.

He wondered if they had been duped in some elaborate Internet scheme. Whatever it was, he wished they would just spit it out so he could do what needed to be done and focus his mind on the vamps. Until Peachy got here, it was still all largely conjecture, but he was distracted and these kids were taking too long to get to the point.

“Go on.”

“So it sounded like a good deal, you know,” Stan said, sounding miserable. “Cost of college these days is ridiculous, Mr. Hamilton. HBCUs cost as much as the Ivy League.”

“And in proportion to income, a lot more,” Lance Johnson III spoke up for the first time.

Blue wondered briefly if it strengthened a man’s resolve to be able to count back three generations every time he signed his name.

“In complex personal matters,” Blue interrupted smoothly, “there are always a lot of details that can in some way broaden an outsider’s understanding of the issue under discussion. So when I say this, I don’t mean to imply that I don’t value the specificity of your story.”

He looked at each of them as they blinked or coughed or glanced sideways at the man next to them.

“But right now, all I need to know are three things: what was promised, what was delivered, and what was expected in exchange.”

Sitting directly behind the guys near the door, Henry nodded slightly as if he could not agree more.

Blue held up one finger. “You’ve told me what was promised.” A second finger. “And was it delivered?”

The five nodded reluctantly, unsure how to tell him exactly what was really going on.

“They paid all your expenses for four years?”

Another collective nod.

“And a stipend,” Hayward Jones said, as if in the interest of full disclosure. “So we wouldn’t have to get jobs.”

“So we could focus on the books,” Stan added, as if to justify the money.

“And did you?” Blue said.

They hadn’t anticipated the question but they knew the answer did not present them in the best light. Not one of them had held a job during their four years of college and not one of them had maintained an above C average.

“Did we what, sir?” Jerome said, hedging.

“Did you focus on the books?”

The guilty way they evaded Blue’s eyes let him know the answer to the question was
Hell, no
. They had enjoyed the free ride but they hadn’t upheld their end of the deal. He wondered what piper they would have to pay for their inattention to a small detail like good grades.

Jackson cleared his throat. “We could have done better, Mr. Hamilton. I think I speak for all of us when I admit that we could have done better, but is that any reason to …”

His voice trailed off and he glanced at the others, who seemed equally lost for words.

“Good grades? Is that what was expected in return for the support?”

“Not exactly,” Stan said, searching for the right word. “We were supposed to
enlist
with them for four years after graduation.”

“Like the Peace Corps?”

“Almost like that, Mr. Hamilton,” Hayward Jones said, nodding as if he was really relieved that Blue understood. “See, they live on this beautiful, undeveloped island, and we had to promise to live there with them for four years.”

“Are there any other men on this island?”

“No, sir. We would be the only ones.”

That was when Blue knew what Serena and her tribe were doing in his backyard. These arrogant young fools had signed on as indentured servants to the vamps.

“What did they want you to do on their island?” he said, still trying to get to the heart of the matter. “Manual labor? Clearing the land? Building infrastructure?”

All their heads once again turned to Stan, who took a deep breath and leaned forward, his hands on his knees as much to stop their shaking as anything else. “Look, Mr. Hamilton, I’m going to level with you. We were a bunch of young, dumb guys, okay? They told us all we had to do was”—he cleared his throat nervously—“was to move to their island for a few years and, well, have sex with them twice a day, six days a week.”

They watched as Blue’s famous eyes darkened as he gazed at them, his face impassive except for a slight ripple in his jaw muscle.

“And when we weren’t doing that,” Stan continued in a rush, “all we had to do was eat and workout and watch all the sports and porn we wanted.”

Blue stood up and walked over to the bar. The boys were desperately hoping for a drink, but he didn’t reach for anything. That’s why the vamps were here, Blue thought. They had found some genes they thought were worth mixing with their own more rarified DNA
and they had come to Atlanta to pick up their order. He turned back to the young men slowly.

“So let me get this straight,” he said. “You sold yourselves as stud animals to a group of women you met on the Internet in exchange for a college education?”

They nodded, ashamed, but relieved to get it all on the table.

“We did get to meet them in person, though,” Jerome said. “They came down here after we had agreed in principle so we could work out the details and sign the contracts. They rented a house out in Buckhead, one of those big old mansions, and they had us all out to dinner, and, Mr. Hamilton, I don’t mean that it was right, but we were only eighteen.”

Jackson picked up the story in a whisper. “The things those women did to us that night, Mr. Hamilton. None of us had ever had sex like that before.”

“Two of us were still virgins,” Stan said. “There was no way really we could have told them no, you know what I mean?”

Blue found it amazing that they thought youthful inexperience could explain such foolish behavior. “Did part of your contract with these women require you to raise any of the babies you’d be making, twice a day, six days a week, for four years?”

“No, sir!” Jerome shook his head quickly. “They told us we didn’t have to take any responsibility for the kids.”

Blue was saddened by how easily the words rolled off the boy’s tongue. Like that was a point in their favor.

“And this didn’t strike you boys as strange? That a group of fine women would have to put that much effort and money into finding somebody like you to have sex with?”

Lance III shrugged his shoulders apologetically. “It sounded a little strange, but with all the diseases out there now and how hard it is for women to find a man at all, we just sort of figured they wanted to cut through the bullshit and get the job done. No offense, Mr. Hamilton.”

As far as he could see, these guys had willingly signed away four years of their lives as sperm donors. He didn’t appreciate Serena not being straight with him, but from where he was sitting, he had no horse in the race.

“So why come to me now when it’s time for you to hold up your end of the bargain?”

Stan looked at Jerome, who nodded. “Go on, man. Tell him.”

“Mr. Hamilton,” Stan said slowly, “are you familiar with the mating rituals of the black widow spider?”

Aretha was beside herself. In the cramped space of the professor’s tiny office, she was pacing and crying and threatening to stop taking photographs altogether and go back to being a painter. This was her right, of course, but not such a great idea when a gaggle of sushi-eating supermodels would soon be awaiting instructions for the afternoon and
Essence
magazine was waiting for its next cover shot.

“Tell me what’s wrong,” Regina said calmly. “Whatever it is, I can fix it.”

Aretha stopped in front of Regina and wiped her damp cheeks with an angry swipe of her hand, almost as if she wanted to slap her own face.

“Fix it? You can’t fix it, don’t you see? I agreed to do something I don’t believe in just for the money. I sold out!” She started pacing again. “I don’t have the right to call myself an artist. I’m a money-grubbing hack, just like all the others. Sucking up to these
space
creatures
so I can buy my daughter all the princess dresses Target can stuff into the Disney aisle. What does that make me, Gina? What the hell does that make me?”

Aretha’s meltdown seemed to center on artistic integrity, selling out, and inflicting great harm on Joyce Ann and Sweetie and every other little girl who thought she had to grow tall and stay thin to be considered beautiful.

“How could I even consider such a thing?”

Aretha actually wrung her hands. Regina reached out and stopped the frantic motion.

“Slow down and listen to me.” Regina’s voice was low and soothing. “Come on now.
Inhale.
”

Aretha did as she was told and drew in a big, shuddering breath. Regina hoped this level of intensity would be reflected in the photographs. If drama was truly part of the process, they should get a museum show out of this one.

“And
exhale
.”

Aretha did, with a
whoosh
. “Okay, I’m listening,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

Aretha nodded.

“If you don’t want to do it,” Regina said slowly, “don’t do it.”

Aretha blinked like somebody just waking up from a bad dream. “What?”

“Don’t do it,” Regina said again, releasing Aretha’s hands, which had stopped twisting and tugging at each other. “You should never do anything that makes you feel like this.”

Aretha offered a shaky smile. “You make it sound so easy.”

“There is no it,” Regina said. “There’s just you and me figuring out what you want to do next.”

“I worried about this all night! I went home after we took the kids for ice cream and looked at some of the shots from yesterday and they’re so beautiful, Gina, but they’re just so
wrong
. I don’t want any part of foisting this stuff on the public just so I can pay my rent.”

“And you don’t have to,” Regina said. “Finish up what you’ve got
scheduled for today and call it a wrap. I’ll tell Ms. Mayflower you’re not available to do the portfolio. Period.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. You haven’t even signed a contract yet. Remember, so far we’ve just been shootin’ the breeze.”

Aretha fished a tissue that had seen better days out of her pocket and blew her nose loudly. “I guess I’m just not ready for the big time.”

“You
are
the big time.”

“You don’t think they’ll get mad, do you?”

“I don’t care if they do,” Regina said. “I think we can take ’em.”