Free Hotlanta by Mitzi Miller

water…Just wait till she caught up with Lauren’s backstabbing behind!
    Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Marcus again completely switched gears. “Look, babe, if you don’t want me studying with her I won’t. I don’t want you to ever question my behavior. It’s nothing…”
    Sydney was quiet as she considered his words. On one hand Marcus had never given Sydney any reason to worry about him liking another girl, let alone cheating on her. What had Rhea called them? The Black Ken and Barbie…On the other hand, he had blatantly lied about how many times he and Dara had been together. If it was really “nothing,” then why lie? But then again, everyone knew that Dara was a total hoochie, just like her notorious mom, who’d tricked that poor Atlanta Falcon into getting her pregnant and now lived the high life off his generous child-support payments. Marcus was such a stickler for keeping up appearances, would he really risk it all for Dara ?
    Marcus walked over and softly fingered Sydney’s shirt. “You know I don’t like it when you get mad at me.”
    Every rational bone in her body told her to march through the door and not look back, but her heart desperately wanted to believe his words. Breathing became physically painful as she remembered Carmen and Rhea’s stinging accusations from the other night. Was her strong-black-woman stance nothing but talk? “I just don’t like the secrets, Marcus,” she started, struggling for the words to express how she felt without seeming like she was some paranoid, insecure girlfriend.
    â€œI would never purposely keep anything from you, Syd,” he quickly assured her with soft kisses to her lips. “It won’t happen again. Promise.”
    Even though she heard Marcus’s apologetic words and saw the look of remorse on his face, something deep in Sydney’s gut told her differently. And Sydney Duke’s gut was rarely wrong.

8
LAUREN
    â€œU-G-L-Y / You ain’t got no alibi, you ugly / Yeah, yeah, you ugly!”
    Lauren tossed her ponytail extra hard in the direction of the opposing dance team’s bench and then put a little twist in her hips for good measure. Their football team was for crap on this warm Monday night—the scoreboard said they were down by fourteen points—but that was no reason to slouch on the field. Halftime was game time, and the hundred-member marching band had just tore up Luda’s “Pimpin’ All Over the World,” putting the stale-ass St. John’s All Saints Catholic High School band, with their wack traditional marching-band ditties, to absolute shame. And since all eyes were on Lauren Duke, she was making every effort to make bitches—and their boyfriends, of course—remember exactly who she was.
    â€œDamn, girl—if you shook it any harder, it might have fallen off,” Marvin Joyce yelled out to Lauren as she passed by him. When she looked him in the face, he winked.
    â€œAnd you’d be right there to pick it up, wouldn’t you, Marvin?” Lauren shot back. “Too bad I read on YRT that Pam says you wouldn’t know what to do with it, though.”
    Everyone on his bleacher and several more surrounding it fell out in hysterics. “Ooh, she got you,” one guy shouted. “Pick up that lip, bruh,” said another.
    Lauren smiled and bounced back to the dance-squad seats. The actual game bored her to tears, but she loved the spirit of it—how everyone dressed in the school colors and chanted alongside the squad when the girls were performing. The dance squad was God at Brookhaven Prep, even if the football team made a point of embarrassing the mess out of them by losing every other game, today’s included.
    â€œWell, despite the loss, it’s still good to be the queen,” Lauren announced to her squad. “Don’t forget, JV is having a bake sale tomorrow to raise money for