Thieves Get Rich, Saints Get Shot - By Jodi Compton Page 0,9

that’s gonna make you sick someday in the future?”

“It wasn’t like that. The tumor raised a question of whether my judgment would be sound enough for me to serve as an officer.”

“Yeah, but what did they do to help you, after your whole life went down the drain? They gave you, what, a ride to New York City to catch the Greyhound home? Great.”

I shrugged, not wanting to argue the point anymore. Serena didn’t, either, changing the subject. “Hey, who’d have thought I’d be schooling you in Latin?”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Pretty good.”

She walked into the bathroom, and I heard the shower start running. She’d left the TV on, and now it was playing a hip-hop video, standard scenes of ghetto fabulousness, booties shaking in a packed nightclub. The logo at the bottom corner of the screen was that of a late-Friday-night video program, one that came on after the network talk shows were over.

I sat down on the bed and began unlacing my boots.

“Hey, y’all,” the host of the program said, “did you see, at the beginning, the guy coming out of the club as Nia and her girls are going in? A long drink of water with reddish hair? That’s none other than Nia’s producer, Cletus Mooney, making a cameo. I wouldn’t kick that boy outta bed, ’cept maybe to do him on the floor, know what I’m saying? Up next—”

I got up and snapped off the TV set. Then, barefoot, I opened the sliding glass door and walked out onto the little balcony. Balcony was too romantic a word; this was a boxy platform seven feet long by four feet deep, mostly for smokers to be herded onto so they could indulge their vice. Concrete dividing walls came all the way out to the railing on both sides, a security measure, so that no one could infiltrate from a neighboring deck who wasn’t ready to take a serious risk climbing over with his ass hanging out above the street.

I put one leg over the railing and straddled it, then shifted around to sit with both legs over the railing, on the outside, heels resting gently against the bars. The sidewalk, three stories below, would be hard as iron if I fell, but the breeze was cool on my face, so I leaned out a little, looking up at the night sky.

For God’s sake, I hadn’t even seen CJ’s image on-screen, I thought, exhaling. I’d only had to hear the host talking about him, and the picture had sprung immediately to my mind’s eye: my beautiful cousin, holding the door for a flirtatious pack of clubgoing girls. CJ loved women, and they loved him back. He went in for variety rather than long-term relationships, dating a steady stream of cocktail waitresses, Laker girls, and backup dancers, but his ex-girlfriends never seemed to have hard feelings after things were over. Back when I was spending more time in his circle of friends, one of them had tried to engage me in some us-girls talk, saying, “Man, Cletus just gives himself to you in bed,” before I’d managed to cut her off, feeling heat in my port-wine birthmark, the part of my face that still blushed.

The thing was, when I’d first met him, CJ had had almost none of the things women saw in him now. Or rather, everything was there, but in a raw, early form that the other kids in the halls of junior high school couldn’t recognize. His musical gifts had been pretty well hidden. He’d picked up the piano almost faster than his mother could teach him, but he’d never played in public. His hair, worn shorter than now, was almost kinky, and he couldn’t put on weight and muscle fast enough to keep up with his height. His accent, to Californian kids, was comical, the sound of backwoods unsophistication.

Those were the days when CJ and I had been each other’s closest companion. It was also in those bad days that, underneath his parents’ willow tree, we’d learned French kissing from each other, because we’d had no one else to practice with. Then we’d kept doing it long after we could no longer justify it as a learning process. We had to love each other, because we were unlovely to everyone else.

All this is a long way of explaining the resentment I felt when I saw his picture in entertainment magazines, CJ in a nightclub banquette with glittery club girls or carrying his girlfriend-of-the-month on his back