Homecoming Weekend (15 page)

“Yes, you know my wife?” he said.

“I do know her. I haven't seen her in a long time, but we met when we were freshmen,” she said.

“So, you know she's pregnant, too?” he said.

“When is she due?” Tranise wanted to know.

“January,” he said. “About three more months to go. I'll be glad when that baby pops out. Being pregnant has turned Felicia into a, uh, a . . . ”

“I can only imagine,” Tranise threw in.

“Are you being sarcastic?” Brandon said.

“A little,” she answered.

“Why?” he wanted to know.

“Well,” she started, “your wife and I did not get along in college. In fact, we were like archrivals.”

“Oh, my God,” Brandon said. “You are the woman she was talking about with so much venom? What happened? You seem harmless to me.”

“I
am
harmless,” she said. Then she decided to flirt. “Well, I used to be harmless. Now, well, I can show out when I want to.”

“So what makes you want to show out?” Brandon said. He picked up on Tranise's flirtation.

“You're a married man,” she said. “You don't want to know.”

“That could be the reason I really
need
to know,” he said.

Tranise smiled. She was having a suggestive back-and-forth with the one man she always admired. It was hard to believe.

“We'll see, I guess,” she said. She didn't mean it. Well, she didn't
really
mean it. She abandoned her early thoughts of stepping into the land of a “bad girl” and seducing Brandon as a way of fulfilling a fantasy and earning some level of revenge against her nemesis, Felicia. But talking to Brandon reopened the door on that possibility.

“I guess we will,” Brandon said.

Their eyes met for an extended period. Tranise almost had to shake herself out of the mini-trance she could feel herself slipping into.

“Well, you'd better get away from me before someone tells your wife you were talking to me—and flirting with me,” Tranise said.

He smiled. “I'm not sure I was the one flirting, but OK,” he said. “She actually should be here any minute. She's not coming in, though; she's just picking me up out front. But before I go, you never told me what the problem was between you and her. You seem like a lovely young lady. She's a lovely young lady. I don't get it.”

“Well, you have to ask your wife about that,” she said. “I'm sure she'll be glad to share with you. I'm surprised she hasn't already.”

“It's weird because she made these general comments that led me to believe she didn't like you and you didn't like her,” he said. “But she never said what happened.”

“What are you doing tonight?” she said. Immediately, she knew it sounded too suggestive, so she cleaned it up.

“You going to the jazz concert on campus?” she added.

“I might,” he said, reaching into his pocket. “Felicia said she's not feeling so well today, so I might be out solo. Here's my card. My cell number is on there. Just text me and let me know where you'll be. Maybe we can connect.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Tranise said as Kwame returned from the bathroom. He and Brandon shook hands before Brandon headed to the exit.

“I thought about you the whole time I was gone,” Kwame said to Tranise, making her blush.

“The whole five minutes?” she responded.

“Seemed longer,” Kwame said.

“I see you have a verbal gift,” Tranise told Kwame.

“That's hard to say,” he said. “I think it's more accurate to say that when inspired, the right words come into my head to express what I'm feeling. That's the best way to put it.”

Even with that explanation, he charmed Tranise, whose ego was massaged more than she could have hoped for—and home-coming was just beginning.

“So what are you doing the rest of the weekend?” she asked Kwame. “You're so young, you're probably going to the school's homecoming concert in the gym.”

Kwame was hardly fazed by her attempt to fluster him. “I might,” he said. “I look at it as a positive that I relate to the college student and the more mature world away from school. I take that to mean I'm diverse.”

“Good attitude,” Tranise conceded. “Good attitude.”

“Positive over negative—that was the mantra that my psychology professor at Norfolk State taught me,” he said. “And I have been practicing it ever since. And it works. I read somewhere it takes seventeen muscles to smile and forty-seven muscles to frown. And I associate smiling with positive and frowning with negative. So you won't see me frowning often.”

A man with a rosy outlook on life . . . Tranise became even more intrigued. And she was intrigued by Brandon, her teenage crush.

“Girl, this is so crazy,” she told Mary when they finally left the
party. “I haven't been this popular since I ran for homecoming queen.”

“Well, you're not up for Homecoming Slut,” Mary said, and she and Tranise laughed long and hard, so much so that Charlene felt left out when she rejoined her crew.

When told of Mary's comment, Charlene bumped into a passer-by as she fell back laughing.

“I could see from the dance floor that she was getting a lot of attention,” Charlene said. “I guess that's what happens when you come back to school after five years with some titties and ass for the first time in your life.”

And the three friends again laughed.

Catherine and Earl

T
he morning after they made love for the first time, Catherine and Earl did it again before Catherine left the hotel to go home and then to work. It was another passionate experience that further strengthened their bond.

When he walked her to her car, they embraced and kissed deeply. Earl had not been moved to be so outwardly affectionate. But Catherine touched parts of his heart that no one else had.

It was no wonder that he was floating as she drove off. He showered quickly and got dressed in his golf gear so he could be ready when old classmate, Warren Jones, picked him up. They had competed in the Norfolk State Alumni Golf Outing the year before. This time, they and a group of friends decided to play a round at The Signature in Virginia Beach.

They all graduated around the time Earl did and were friends of varying degrees; nice guys that settled into their lives but remained lively and playful. All of them knew Catherine; none of them knew she and Earl was a couple. He was itching to let them know because he was so proud of what they had built over the summer. But he also liked surprises, and all those guys would be at homecoming's biggest and best event, the Best of Friends party Saturday night. That would be their coming-out party.

In the meantime, Earl kept in his exciting news and played golf
all day with a smile on his face and in his heart. Never before had he reacted to a bad shot with a grin, but because he loved Catherine, his wayward golf shots mattered less. Even in the breezy and cool morning air, Earl carried a warm feeling.

“What you smiling about?” Bob White, one of his playing partners, said after the first hole. “You just took a double bogey.”

“I'm good,” Earl said. “We're just getting started.”

That attitude helped him hold it together when he usually lacked patience. Instead of sharing the news, he engineered lighthearted banter that started the group to reminisce.

“Jack,” he said to the fourth member of his group, “whatever happened to Alana Steele?”

Alana and Jack had comprised one of those always-together couples in college. Some students wondered if they ever went to class. They always seemed to be walking the vast campus, hand-in-hand.

“It's funny you ask about her because I haven't seen her in about twelve, thirteen years,” Jack said. Jack was a notorious womanizer, a super-confident former baseball player of significant charisma and humor. “She called me out of the blue about a week or two ago. I told her straight up: Let's get a room at homecoming and do it like it was old times.”

“She was like, ‘Some things never change.' And I told her, ‘You know the deal. Why did you call me if that's not what you wanted?' Man, I have to say what I believe. She goes into this whole ‘we could be friends' thing. Then she starts talking about I cheated on her in college.

“I said, ‘Alana, I'm sorry. But I was a nineteen-year-old kid on a campus full of good-looking women. You can't hold me accountable for that.' She said, ‘Yeah, but it still hurt at the time.' You know me. I said, ‘That's long over. But we can go back in time if we spend a night together.'

“She said she wasn't going for it, but I don't believe her. She's here. I will get that before I leave this weekend. You can believe that.”

They went on to the No. 3 hole—Earl rebounded from the opening hole to make par on the second—and Jack kept going. “Ah, man, let me tell you this crazy story about Alana,” he said. “So, back in the day, she tells me she's pregnant. I'm a sophomore without a pot to piss in or a window . . . you know the saying. So I told her to get the money for an abortion because I didn't have any money.

“She wants to get a second opinion. So we set up an appointment with a doctor. The nurse tells her to bring a urine sample. So, we go and Alana is carrying this big-ass black purse. At the front counter, she pulls out this huge pickle jar full of piss. I stepped back. The nurse was like, “What's that?' Alana says, ‘I was told to bring a urine sample.' The nurse says, ‘Honey, a sample is a little. You had to pee three or four times to bring this much.'

“I was totally embarrassed. There were people in the waiting area snickering. But the reality is that she didn't know. She was a country girl and to her, a sample meant a whole jar. It was crazy.”

Earl and their playing partners fell out laughing. They all had myriad stories and used the five hours on the golf course to share them.

“What about this?” Bob said. “I saw this girl on campus at the bookstore yesterday. I couldn't place her but I knew she went to school with us. Then it hit me. I remembered her very clearly.

“One night my senior year, after a Norfolk State-North Carolina Central game, we were hanging out at my boy, Rick's house over there off of Brambleton. Rick's girl was over there. I think her name was Tasha. We were playing backgammon and drinking and talking shit. Suddenly, Tasha and Rick get in an argument over something silly.

“But Rick was drunk so he smushed her in the face and told her
to get out. He went in the kitchen to get another beer and she went in behind him. So, we're just playing the game—I think Mo Mo was playing against me; you remember Mo Mo, Morris Montey, the fool who got arrested for robbing a professor that time? Anyway, Mo Mo and I hear all this commotion in the kitchen. Finally, Rick comes out with his hand over his stomach.

“He says, ‘She stabbed me' and moved his hand. There was blood gushing out of this dude's stomach. We're like, ‘Damn. What the fuck?' We rush him to Norfolk General Hospital.”

‘What?” Jack said. “Get the fuck outta here. I remember when he was out of school for a while. But he played football. I thought it was a football injury.”

“Nah, dude, Tasha, sliced him,” Bob went on. “It took more than a hundred staples to close the wound.”

“Damn,” Earl said. “She didn't go to jail?”

“No, because Rick wouldn't tell them who did it,” Bob answered. “He kept saying he fell. They knew he was lying. But they couldn't prove it . . . Man, I was scared as shit. I knew he was gonna die. Blood was everywhere.”

Earl said, “The sad part was that—what?—six years later Rick died of a heart attack.”

“Hold up,” Jack said.

“Yep,” Earl continued. “He collapsed playing basketball in New York one day. Apparently he had an undetected heart condition.”

“Damn, that is sad,” Jack said.

Jack said something else, but Earl did not hear him. His cell phone chimed, meaning he had received a text message. Earlier, he had texted Catherine to tell her how much he had enjoyed their time together and how relieved he was to finally tell her how much he loved her. He was awaiting her reply, and that was it.

“Baby, I love you, too. I really do. Last night—and this morning—were amazing. I'm here at work but I'm not getting much accomplished. All I can think about is you. I look forward to dinner tonight. I hope you are kicking butt on the golf course.”

Earl smiled as he read it. For more than four months, they sent each other an average of a dozen or so text messages a day. It was their primary source of communication. Their phone conversations were in-depth and critical. But they used text messaging to re-affirm their interest, attraction and to get to know each other.

“What you smiling about?” Jack asked Earl.

“Oh, man, just a text message from my girl,” he said. “She's the text messaging queen.”

“And that makes you the king then,” Bob said. “I don't get the texting thing. Just pick up the phone and call me.”

“I was like that too, at first,” Earl said. “But if you use it the right way, it can be effective.”

“What's the right way?” Warren asked.

“Well, I'm talking about using it to communicate or express your feelings to a woman,” he said.

“Express your feelings?” Jack said. “That sounds like some gay stuff to me.”

The men laughed.

“You'd better get with the times,” Earl said. “If you think you're supposed to go about your business and not express yourself to a woman, then you're a loser. Women need to hear complimentary stuff, too. Or hear that you are thinking about them. I'm telling you, a properly timed text can make a big difference.”

“What is ‘properly timed'?” Warren wanted to know.