Should Have Known Better

“Did he ever admit to having dated Sasha? Sleeping with her?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s the small fries. My yellow stretch pants get big fries. He said he did have a little friendship with her—that’s nasty-speak for an affair—but he broke it off when she refused to let him wear a condom and said she wanted a baby.”

I nearly fell to the floor. “He said that?” I shouted. “A baby?”

“What baby?” My mother woke up from having the television watching her sleep.

“Nothing, Mama,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”

“He said she has fibroids and she has to have her uterus removed within a year. She’s hot for a baby daddy.”

“She did say something about getting pregnant!”

“Well, that’s all I got,” Sharika went on. “After I let him massage my ankles, he said the day he broke it off with her, she refused to leave the hotel and completely spazzed out. She stayed there for days, ran up a bunch of bills, and the next time he saw her, she showed up in his office with some black couple begging for work. He was sure she was just doing it to flaunt her next victim in front of him.”

“That must’ve been us,” I said. “That must’ve been Reginald and me.”

“Yeah, and there’s the bad news. Landon has no intentions of giving Reginald that contract. He said he was just trying to get Sasha out of his office. Sorry.”

“I knew something was wrong. That whole setup seemed too good to be true. And the look on Landon’s face . . . Reginald’s going to be so disappointed when he realizes it was a scam,” I said. “But why would she have done that if she knew he’d only fake the contract to get us out of there?”

“So she could seem like Jesus walking on water and turning water into wine. She was just trying to upstage you and scare the crap out of Landon. The rest is none of your business. I know you probably feel bad about Reginald not getting the contract, but he was the mouse who ate that cheese. He’ll have to realize who Ms. Thang is on his own.”

“I can’t believe this.”

“Believe it. Old girl is scandalous. A real-life black widow—well, she hasn’t killed yet, but it’s only a matter of time,” Sharika said dramatically. “There’s no telling what she might do. Landon said she’s one of those people who wants to get her way no matter what. And she’s desperate right now. You better watch your back.”

“Watch my back? What more could she do to me?” I scoffed.

“Trust me. There’s plenty she can do. She’ll hurt you if she thinks you’re in her way. I’m surprised she didn’t try to hurt you already.”

Something in me clicked. I heard Sasha’s voice telling me to drink the last of the wine, holding the cup to my mouth even when I said I’d had enough. I told her I was dizzy. She said I needed to loosen up.

“I need to call you right back, Sharika,” I said as this sudden suspicion washed over me.

“But I wasn’t done,” she protested.

“It’ll only take a minute. I swear.”

“Fine.”

I hung up and looked over at my mother sleeping.

It couldn’t be true. There was no way. I got up. I needed to think. To remember.

I remembered the white chalk in the bottom of my glass every night. “It’s red wine, silly,” Sasha had said. “That’s just sediment from when they made it. It happens with expensive bottles.”

I paced around the room. My thoughts sounded ridiculous, but nothing else made sense. There was no other way for ecstasy to get into my body.

My mother didn’t have a computer so I had to look up what I was thinking on the Internet on my cell phone. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before. I searched: the effects of MDMA—emotional warmth, decreased anxiety, enhanced sensory perception, recklessness. I moved from link to link. They all said the same thing. One noted that when taken with alcohol the effects were even more pronounced. Users experienced chills, sweating, blurred vision, faintness, a loss of consciousness.

I remembered the night in the backyard. How the whole ocean seemed to be coming into me. I’d put my tongue into Sasha’s mouth.

I nearly dropped the phone.

“I knew she was crazy! I knew she was chicken-coop crazy!” Sharika screamed into the phone after I called her back.

I went into the kitchen so my mother couldn’t hear the conversation.