Wifey: Part 1

“Nah, you good. I’m just busy.”

“I really appreciate this. I didn’t mean to catch you off guard and just call you out the blue,” I added.

“No, it’s OK,” Jasmine said to me, not looking me square in my face. She rolled down the passenger side window and stuck her head out of the window and she looked into the side view mirror and began examining her eyebrows.

I discretely sent Nico a text message and told him to call me in five minutes.

“This your truck?” Jasmine asked, a hint of stankness in her voice.

I looked at her and nodded my head yes. Jasmine didn’t say anything else after that.

“So, you were saying it’s a full-time program?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Jasmine said, sounding totally uninterested, looking at her cell phone and chuckling before sending someone a text message.

“Listen, I got my next class in twenty minutes, but you don’t really need me. All you have to do is go into this building right there. Find a legal place to park first, of course, and then go into this building and ask the security guard where the admissions office is at and then get a brochure of the program and an application,” Jasmine stated.

“Oh, OK,” I replied, trying my hardest to figure out why Jasmine’s mood had changed.

Right then my cell phone rang and it was Nico and I picked up on the second ring.

“Hey, honey,” I said into the phone.

“Everything good?” Nico asked.

“I’m good. I’m here at SUNY Downstate in Brooklyn with Jasmine.”

“I’m not on speaker phone, am I?” Nico asked.

“No, but listen, let me run in here and get this stuff, and I’ll call you back when I’m heading back out.”

“You straight?”

“Yes, babe,” I replied.

“You can’t really talk right now?”

“No.”

“A’ight, so h

it me back.”

“OK, I will,” I said before hanging up.

“Nico told me to tell you what’s up,” I said to Jasmine as soon as I hung up the phone.

Jasmine quickly asked me, “So you good?” totally ignoring what I had just said, preoccupied with her cell phone.

“Jasmine, are you OK?” I asked.

Jasmine nodded her head and looked at me. She had her hand on the door handle as if she was ready to bounce.

“Hold on, Jas.” I reached over and grabbed hold of her arm. “Everything good with you and Shabazz?”

Jasmine paused in her tracks. She looked at me as if she was now trying to figure me out. “It is what it is. Why you ask?”

“I asked because I haven’t seen him around, Nico hasn’t seen him or heard from him, and I’m just sensing that you and him might be going through something, that’s all.”