Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
GISELLE
I looked at myself in the mirror, assessing the bruises my bitch-ass sister left me with.
We were spitting images of each other, so throwing punches at her felt trippy as hell.
From the very first day I met her, I knew I would never like the bitch.
She had this complex about her that made her feel like her shit didn’t stink and everyone was beneath her.
From the designer clothes and iced out jewelry to the foreign car, I knew she was a vain-ass bitch.
Priest seemed tolerable when he wasn’t being barked at by Jazzlyn.
She was a fucking tyrant, and if my birth mom was anything like her, I was glad I never met her.
Truthfully, I didn’t imagine getting what was owed to me being this fucking hard.
I half expected for them to pay me off and allow us to go back to our normal lives where we didn’t know each other existed.
Jazzlyn, however, had other plans. I knew she was the one who planted the seed in Priest’s ear to not give me what I was owed.
For most of the meeting, he remained stoic while she was the one giving me nasty looks from across the table.
I wished this bitch would just disappear!
I grew up in the foster care system until I was thirteen.
My social worker always told me I was dropped off at the fire station.
The shit was a typical orphan story that I heard happened to a ton of other foster kids I grew up around.
I was beginning to feel like they told us that shit just to kill our curiosity about our birth parents. It sure did kill mine.
Having been dropped off at a fire station meant my mother willingly gave up on me. She walked away despite me being defenseless and without her caring to know where I would end up. She truly didn’t give a fuck.
By the age of thirteen, I had bounced from group home to group home until I was adopted by this Indian couple who was unable to have children.
Things were smooth for the first couple of months until my adopted father, Al, thought I had to repay him for adopting me by sneaking into my room at night and forcing himself onto me.
I had a sense that his wife, Ingrid, knew what was going on because she was a light sleeper except for the nights he would tiptoe across the hall to my room to catch a nut.
This shit went on for months. I was conditioned to be quiet because he always told me how unlikely it would be for me to get adopted by any other family at my age.
Families were looking for younger children, kids they could mold and raise, not teenagers like me.
It didn’t help that I was tall and looked mature for my age.
His sick ass would always whisper in my ear how much he loved that I looked like a grown woman already.
I ended up pregnant at fourteen. I didn’t know a thing about how the woman’s body worked, so when I missed my period, I thought it was normal.
It wasn’t until I was throwing my dinner up into the toilet that Al offered to go get me some medicine from the pharmacy.
In the black bag he returned with was some Pepto Bismol and a pregnancy test that he hid from Ingrid.
She was a push over-ass bitch who listened to him and obeyed anything he said, so there wasn’t much hiding he had to do.
She stood at the kitchen sink, washing the dishes while he slipped past her to the bathroom where I was emptying my insides.
He was so fucking sick and controlling, he even watched me take the pregnancy test. Not once did Ingrid come by the bathroom to figure out why her fourteen-year-old adopted daughter and her husband were in the bathroom together for so long. She just continued washing dishes.
When the test came out positive, he took it from me and told me not to speak of it to anyone.
Two days later, he woke me up in the middle of the night, pushed me into his car, and we drove for hours until we were in Virginia.
He took me out of state for an abortion and had this long, drawn out lie about me being rebellious and ending up pregnant by one of the boys at my school.
Watching the way he lied so effortlessly and everyone just believing him was just so gut wrenching. No one ever thought to ask me the truth. They just took his word for it and never questioned it. After my abortion, he left me alone for a couple months before he went back to the same bullshit.
I got tired of being violated and used, so I ran away.
I stole $300 from his wallet and just survived the best way I knew how.
While walking the streets of Jersey, I met a man named Charles.
He was a cross dresser who did drag at night and went by the stage name Chi-Chi.
He took me into his world and looked out for me.
I was in the drag club from sunup to sundown because I couldn’t go to school since I was a runaway.
There, I learned everything I needed to know about being a woman.
It was crazy how I learned it all from them when society wouldn’t consider them women, but Chi-Chi and her girls were nothing but graceful and poised.
Chi-Chi ended up getting married to some artist, Kwame, who was well-off from the paintings he sold.
He moved us from the slums of Jersey to the suburbs, which forced Chi-Chi to stop doing drag.
I was used to sudden changes due to my upbringing, but taking me from the hood to the suburbs to be around rich white people was a fucking culture shock.
I tried my best to fit in for years. Even morphed myself into the token black girl friend in a group full of white girls, but deep down inside, that wasn’t who I wanted to be.
I never really knew how to be my authentic self because I feared that if I didn’t meet the standards of whoever I was around, I would be rejected. There was a lot of shit I needed to work out from my childhood.
Chi-Chi and Kwame were who I considered family.
They treated me like I was their own flesh and blood.
I didn’t realize how good I had it until Chi-Chi and Kwame had to send me on my way.
Despite them taking me in and loving me, I couldn’t shake the rebellious phase I insisted on having.
Each time I did some fucked-up shit to them, they would forgive me, and I would get back in their good graces.
I crossed the line when Kwame found out I was stealing from him.
I cracked his cards and stole his checkbook.
I was caught, and there wasn’t anything Chi-Chi could tell his husband to save me.
Two weeks before my eighteenth birthday, Chi-Chi told me I had to leave.
I didn’t have anyone besides him, but I had to understand that he couldn’t allow me to keep disobeying him.
I was an adult, and he did all he could do for me from the age of fourteen to eighteen.
I disappointed him, and he was hurt that I actually stole from him and Kwame when they had been nothing but good to me.
I never really had a reason why I did what I did.
I was sure if I asked Chi-Chi and Kwame for the money, they would have given it to me, but greed had me doing fucked-up shit to the people who cared for me the most.
I stayed in a shelter for a while and was assigned a caseworker who helped me get some assistance from the state.
Through my caseworker, Lisa, I was able to obtain my birth records and find my original birth certificate.
My story had always begun at the fire station where Sylvia dropped me off.
Once I obtained my original birth certificate, I found out it went way further than that, and I actually had two parents and siblings.
When I did my deep dive into my biological parents and siblings, I was devastated to find out they were murdered in their apartment in Harlem.
I thought I would finally be able to get some sort of closure from them, but that was snatched away from me.
I watched the news plaster Priest’s face all over the media as he made his shocking return from the dead.
The story was everywhere, and I couldn’t get away from it.
I ended up cleaning out my parents’ apartment after showing the building’s super my birth certificate.
I thought I would be able to find something that would connect me to Priest and Jazzlyn.
I came up empty, but I did come up on some paperwork that let me know that Sylvia had a life insurance policy that I deserved a fucking cut from.
Truth was, I was looking for some fast money. I wanted to do better for myself and finally get some stability. If it wasn’t for Jazzlyn being such a bitch and Priest being a pussy, I would have gotten what I deserved and gone on my way.
“What did Silas say?” I came out of the bathroom after assessing my face.
Bryant was on the run-down couch that decorated the filthy living room.
He was scrolling through Jazzlyn’s phone.
“Your sister is fucking loaded, son.” He flipped the phone so I could see.
It was a photo she took boarding a jet. She had recently posted it on her Instagram.
Why he was going through her photos instead of focusing on what the fuck we needed to do was beyond me.
I slapped him upside his head, reeling him back in. “What did Silas say?” I asked again.
“He’s trying to make his way back to the city. What Ahkeem and his pussy-ass crew did to him in Miami fucked him up a little bit.”
“I don’t give a fuck about that. What did he say about me getting my money?”
“You mean our fucking money?” He hiked his brow up at me.
“Same thing. What did he say?”
“Once he touch down, he’ll drop the paper off.”
I took a seat across from him, before leaning my head back against the couch so I could look up at the ceiling. “You think he gonna kill her?”
“Why do you give a fuck? She just got done beating your ass.”