Lovers & Haters (19 page)

 

Xavier didn't leave Brenda's crib until one forty-five in the morning. She'd had her cell phone alarm set for 1
A.M.
But for some reason the thing didn't go off. Brenda's mother always arrived home at two. Luck was riding on Brenda's side as she'd gotten up to pee and noticed the time, which left the girl scrambling, trying to get Xavier out the door before her mother came back. He didn't even have the luxury of waiting around inside of her spot for a cab.

Xavier couldn't believe the dumb stuff he was doing, like walking down the street in the dead of night, on his cell phone trying to get a cabbie to come into this war-zone of a neighborhood and pick him up. Cell phone reception wasn't the best over in this area. Xavier's Metro PCS kept dropping the call.

He was walking up the sidewalk and holding his cell phone up against the darkened sky, trying to get a decent signal. The whole time he'd been chilling with Brenda, he'd felt like the biggest cheater on the face of the earth. His conscience was putting him on blast like he and Samantha had made their relationship official. Xavier was trying hard to convince himself that he hadn't done anything wrong. After all, he and Samantha were just friends. He was free to holler at any girl he wanted to.

Three houses down, Xavier was battling paranoia when he heard a crunching sound, like somebody stepping on a frozen branch. The noise seemed like it had come from across the street, behind an old Ford cargo van parked against the curb. He dismissed it as just being the wind. That was until he heard a loud
bang,
and a bullet whizzing eerily close to the right side of his head, convincing him differently. With a metallic
clank
the hot lead embedded into the trunk of a car sitting in a driveway that he'd just walked by
.
Another shot was fired directly behind him, but wildly missed. There were two shooters and they both popped up at the same time, wearing ski masks. The fight-or-flight response kicked in super quick and Xavier took off running in a zigzag pattern, making it hard for the assailants to hit him.

More shots were fired. His adrenaline was pumping. The two behind him shot at Xavier for almost an entire block, never coming close to hitting him. There was no time to think. Xavier didn't fear death, but he couldn't die right now. His little brother needed him, and plus, he had some unfinished business to attend to at Coleman. Xavier ran between two houses and jumped two fences to shake the hitters. He was out of breath, but he just kept telling himself that he would breathe deeply once he was somewhere safe. Three blocks later and all was quiet again, but he kept on running. Xavier ran onto a main street. He was fortunate because a city bus had just pulled up to the stop and was letting off a passenger. Xavier jumped on and paid the fare. He didn't even know where the bus was headed. It really didn't matter just as long as it put distance between him and the shooters. The last thing on his mind was that he had forgotten to use a condom with Brenda.

X
avier was sitting in his history class when there was a knock on the door. Doug, head of security, walked in and had a second with the teacher. The teacher then turned to Xavier and asked him to step outside.

More trouble,
Xavier thought.

Two days had passed since his mother had appeared at that fiasco of a dinner and he almost got his head blown off by the bumbling pair of ski-masked stooges. Truthfully, Xavier didn't know how much more of this he could take. God had indeed blessed him with the gift of serving others. But Xavier sometimes looked at the gift as both a blessing and a curse. He had enough stamina to go the distance, but it was rapidly deteriorating behind all of the garbage that he was enduring. The only silver lining was the fifteen Gs he had stashed away. He could take it and grab Alfonso and go start a new life somewhere. For the past seven months, it felt like he'd been living on his own anyway.

“Mr. Hunter, we have some things to talk about,” Doug said, closing the classroom door behind both of them.

“What I do this time?” Xavier said in a voice that sounded defeated.

“I don't know if you did this, but I know that you are responsible.” Doug looked toward the staircase. “Follow me.”

“So what is it this time, Doug?” Xavier asked. “What, you want some dancing tips for the dance at the end of May?”

Doug said nothing, just kept on walking.

Xavier trailed the security guard, wondering what the heck this was about. Since getting in the building this morning, Xavier had noticed a change in a lot of his fellow classmates. They seemed to be standoffish. He had walked up to a couple of them and they turned their backs on him before he could say hi. What in the hell was that about?

Xavier thought they were going to Doug's office. After they passed his office, Xavier was clueless. He still had no idea when they reached the first floor and heard loud screaming coming from outside. Doug pushed open one of the heavy doors and the bitter, cold wind almost froze Xavier's eyebrows and nose hair. The scene outside was chaotic. Police cruisers and an ambulance, their red lights flashing, were all parked on the school's front lawn off the main street; the ambulance with the back doors open was sitting closer to the walkway.

Some of the students who were gathered in a cluster noticed Xavier right away and stared hatefully at him, like whatever was going on was totally his fault. Not too long after, a team of paramedics carefully rolled out a stretcher to loud, eardrum-bursting screaming and crying. Xavier couldn't quite see who was on the stretcher because the person was covered up with white blankets. There was no telling if that person was alive or dead. And if it wasn't for the paramedics rolling a stretcher right by a news crew, Xavier probably wouldn't have noticed a couple of news vans—antennas raised high in the air—at all.

The news reporter was a tall, dark-skinned brother, dressed in expensive clothes that probably cost more than some of the teachers' biweekly salaries.

“I think you've seen enough,” Doug said to Xavier in a haunting voice. “Follow me.”

Back inside the building, Doug opened up his office door with a key. “Take a seat, Mr. Hunter,” he said.

His office was tiny—nothing to write home about. Just a couple of black and white pictures hanging on the walls, featuring athletes with inspirational captions underneath, a couple of bowling trophies sitting on an itty-bitty shelf by the window, a tattered desk that held a huge, outdated computer monitor, keyboard, and hard drive.

“Doug, what's all this about?”

“You have no clue?”

“Not one.”

Before sitting down, Doug went over to the coffeemaker that was sitting on an end table and poured a cup of steaming, hot black coffee. He took it straight.

Doug sat down and after a few sips, he said, “The person on the stretcher out there was our award-winning, record-breaking, soon-to-be Heisman-winning quarterback, Harvey Wellington.”

Xavier got up enough courage to ask, “Is he alive?”

Doug took another sip and shook his head. “Barely. It was an overdose of Ecstasy.”

Xavier could feel the knife twisting in his back. He didn't have to ask who was responsible. He already knew the dirty rat bastard behind it.

“Overdose? I thought Harvey only drank liquor.”

“Word has it that liquor wasn't doing it for him anymore. He graduated to other stuff.”

Xavier just shook his head. He'd known for a while it was coming.

“Mr. Hunter, judging from the look on your face, I'll say you know who sold the pills to Harvey.”

Romello might've been a snake, and Harvey was definitely an unfortunate statistic, but those two facts of life weren't going to turn Xavier into a snitch. He felt like such a hypocrite. When Mitchell Green had gotten blasted, he practically remembered pleading with Fathead and his crew to snitch if they knew who had been responsible. But here he was staring down the throat of the same situation. To Xavier, convincing somebody to snitch was easier said than done.

“I'm not snitching.”

“Have it your way, but I bet you didn't know that your BFF tried to have you killed.”

“Stop sweating me. You don't even know what you're talking about.”

“Oh yeah? Where were you Friday night?”

“It seems that you're the man with all the answers. You tell me.”

Doug took a couple more sips of coffee. “Ooweee—that's good stuff. I would fix you a cup, but it would go against school policy.”

“You wanna make your point?” Xavier said, getting a little heated.

“What if I was to say that I know, for a fact, who tried to shoot you after you left Brenda Sanders's house?”

Curiosity held Xavier's growing anger in check.

“An hour before Harvey overdosed, we found your friend Alex in the third-floor lavatory almost beaten to death.”

“Straight Eight?” Xavier asked. The rage and anger was back.

“You're almost right. Alex was still conscious when the paramedics carried him out of school. It seems that he was present when Romello paid Dylan Dallas and Dutch Westwood to go after you. The word is out that Romello wanted you out of the way, so that he could flood the school with drugs. Said that he used you to help get rid of the competition. And once the school was wide open, he would set up shop.”

Xavier grinded his teeth together so hard that he was almost sure that he heard a molar go snap, crackle, and pop.

“The police picked up Brenda Sanders. She claims that she's not party to what went on outside her house. The police went to Romello's gym class and he wasn't there. He's nowhere in the building.”

“It seems that you have enough to put Romello away for good. What do you need with me?”

“Romello knows that he's wanted for questioning. Somehow, he got wind of what was going down and split. What we want from you is addresses where he might be located.”

Xavier calculated everything. Slick Eddie was the dude holding all the cards. If Romello was gonna start running, it would be Eddie who would finance his escape. But rolling on Eddie would be like Xavier wearing raw meat around his neck and sitting in a cage with a hungry lion. The man had flat-out warned Xavier about snitching and bringing heat to his door. The penalty would be death.

“What if I don't?”

Doug's smile was nothing nice. “You don't really want to find out, do you? I mean, your father and I go back a long way. Besides, we know about your little stolen car operation. You're gonna need immunity when Romello gets inside that courtroom and starts running off at the mouth. And if you testify, and cooperate with police, all the bad stuff will go away.”

The next half hour saw Xavier spilling his guts. The street code for snitching was one thing, but Romello had lost that privilege when he sent Dylan Dallas and Dutch Westwood to whack him outside Brenda's crib. Junk had just gotten real.

Alfonso had been convinced that Apollo was watching him. So Xavier picked up Alfonso from school. On the way back from Alfonso's school, Xavier said nothing. He couldn't believe that Romello had the balls to try and get him knocked out of the box. The cat was trying to make Xavier a memory with no voice. And after all the loyalty Xavier had shown.

Rage ripped through Xavier's face. Romello almost succeeded in getting him killed. Snitching, for any reason, was never justified. Disputes were handled on the streets and not in the court of law. Only cowards snitched. Romello was a rat and Xavier hoped that five-o caught up to all of them. Starting with Romello and ending with Slick Eddie.

Ne Ne wasn't at home when the two boys entered the house. Xavier figured she must've been at work. Doing as he was told, Alfonso retreated directly to his room to complete his homework assignment.

Xavier was going to purchase a bulletproof vest. Some dude named Fly Jimmy could get it for him for three hundred and fifty dollars. If Xavier couldn't purchase a weapon, the least he could do was try to protect himself.

In the basement, he clicked on the lights of the storage room and started removing bags until the top of a sneaker box was exposed. He lifted the lid and stared into the crypt of dead presidents. Not one of the neatly folded, rubber-banded stack of hundred-dollar bills had been touched. Months of hard work and risk had gone into the accumulation of this much cash, so he was careful how he went about spending it. Xavier picked up a bundle, rolled off the rubber band, and peeled off five crispy hundreds. This would be more than enough to buy the bulletproof vest. He hadn't dealt with the cat named Fly Jimmy before. Jimmy was also a student at Coleman. Xavier didn't know the boy that well, but he knew that Jimmy had connections and could get you anything.

Xavier was careful placing the black garbage bags back neatly. He was about to put the last one back when it slipped out of his hands and busted open on contact with the cement floor.

His mind was so heavily involved in other things that he didn't pay any attention to the spilled content. Dozens of unopened business envelopes lay at his feet. As he kneeled to one knee and started shoveling them back inside the bag, he noticed that they'd all been addressed to the old crib. The sender's name and address shook his world up:

He didn't even feel the hard impact that his butt made when it smacked against the floor. A deathly silence had invaded his space. His body went numb, mouth ran dry, fingers moistened, and hands nervously trembled as he reached down to pick one up. The only other thing he could hear besides him ripping open the envelope was his heart savagely thumping inside his ears, like African tribal war drums.

While he read, Xavier tried to hold them back as long as he could, but the tears refused to obey. Salty drops cascaded down both cheeks, dripping onto the notebook paper and smearing the ink of his father's words. He couldn't believe it! He just couldn't believe it! He wouldn't be surprised to be stabbed in the back by any random guy on the street, but never, in his wildest imagination, did he expect the hand on the handle of the knife would belong to his mother. As he tore through envelope after envelope, the letters poured out his father's soul. Some were pretty disturbing for Xavier to read. Like his father asking why Ne Ne had denied him his right to see his kids. Xavier could actually hear the sorrow inside the voice of a broken man who had practically dropped to his knees and begged Ne Ne to bring the kids up to see him. In one letter, he expressed raw, uncensored anger and frustration at Ne Ne for not checking her boyfriend for answering the phone and not accepting his collect phone call one time. Another one pleaded with Ne Ne to remove the block from the telephone, so that he could talk to his kids. Another painfully expressed that he didn't know how he would get through his sentence without the support of his family.

The lies that his mother had told on his father were unforgivable. Not a day had gone by without her mentioning how trifling Noah was for not staying in touch with the family. She had planted the seeds of hatred inside her kids and fertilized those seeds with bull crap, all to alienate father and sons.

Once Xavier's tears dried, hatred set up shop. He had to restrain himself. The thought of going out to Ne Ne's job and nutting up wouldn't be a good look. Xavier needed somebody—another levelheaded person at home with him. Somebody had to act as referee, because he planned on confronting Ne Ne with the letters when she got off work and there was no telling how ugly things would get. Xavier was beyond belief that his mother could stoop so low. And after everything he'd done for her. The tears started to fall again. He needed somebody to talk to and Xavier knew just who to call.

He swallowed hard as the phone rang for a second and third time.