Page 39 of The Prettiest Outlaw

“Emerald Espinoza.”

Her face fell, her voice dropped, and she picked up the menu again.

“I’m familiar with the family.”

“With that reaction, you know you have to talk to me,” I told her. “What’s up? The Outlaws have bad blood with the Espinozas? What’s up?”

“Something like that.”

I placed my hand on her menu to get her attention for the second time.

“Aye, don’t do that. Talk to me. Did you know Emerald?”

“No. I grew up with her younger brother, Santana.”

“The little asshole? He was a young teenager when I met Emerald, and he was already entitled and obnoxious. The parents wanted a boy. They tried for years to get a boy. When Santana was born, they ruined him. What happened between the two of you?”

“Ugh! That’s a long story.”

Before I could press her, the waitress came to our table. After a greeting and a brief conversation, we gave her our orders, and she walked away.

“Tell me your long story, lil bit.”

She sighed. “Ugh. In retrospect, it’s all so stupid and unnecessary.”

“You can’t judge yourself for choices you made in the past. You were working with limited knowledge and an even more limited perspective.”

“When I was younger, I had the biggest crush on Santana. Needless to say, he never noticed me. Why would he? He’s like four or five years older than me. But right after my fifteenth birthday, he all of a sudden notices me, starts paying attention to me. I was so dumb. I thought that, somehow, I got fine overnight, and now, I was the woman he couldn’t live without.

“Anyway, the children of men in our fathers’ little ‘social circle’ used to hang out and have house parties all the time. My father forbid us from going to those parties. I mean, Jia went a few times, but Langston was always with her. Jianna and I were not allowed to go. Jianna didn’t want to go anyway. She was too busy somewhere reading a book, or acquiring untold knowledge. But for me, the fact that my daddy made the parties forbidden made me want to go even more.

“Santana invited me to one of the parties. I will never forget. It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and they were all home from college and sick of being cooped up with family.” She took a breath. “To make a long story short, I had no business being there. Santana was in college and I was fifteen. I also wasn’t aware that at the time, Santana had started to dibble and dabble in recreational drug usage. He gave me a joint. Since I was trying to be a big girl, I smoked it. I didn’t know what it was, what was in it, or anything. I smoked it off the strength of him being somebody I’d known forever.

He took me in a bedroom at the party, and I apparently passed out. All I know is that I woke up thrown over your brother’s shoulder with my top on haphazardly and my itty bitty mini skirt riding up my ass.”

“Which brother? Dominic?”

“Dorien. Of course, somebody spilled the tea to Gianni…or Langston that I had my face in the place at that house party. One of them sent Dorien on a search and rescue mission. I was so high and so paranoid. I was scared to go home. All I could do was cling to Dorien like a parasite. I begged him to take me wherever he was going. He took me to Mrs. Hill…Natalya.

She and Dorien kept asking me if I’d been sexually assaulted or if anybody had touched me. I couldn’t even answer the question. I didn’t know. I was that out of it. Mrs. Hill took care of me. She cleaned me up, and put some appropriate clothes on me. She held me and treated me like a baby doll. I stayed with her all night, and in the morning, she drove me home.

All these years later, she has never brought it up once, never treated me differently, or anything. Every time I see her, she gives me a big hug and kisses my cheek. Dorien, too. He’s never brought up the fact that he found me however he found me. He did admit that he had to redress me, which was traumatizing for him.” She chuckled. “Just my top. He assured me that my panties were still on.”

“So, Santana didn’t rape you while you were high out of your head?”

I shook my head. “The party was at Keenan Garfield’s house. You probably know the house since you worked for his father.”

I nodded.

“There were cameras everywhere in that house. Gianni asked Mr. Garfield to let him see the tapes. There weren’t any cameras in the bedroom, but there were cameras outside of the bedroom. My daddy got some details from the cameras and the rest from Dorien.

“Apparently, Santana decided to get even higher before he took the coochie. I heard that when Dorien came through, Santana was sitting on the edge of the bed, smoking nonchalantly with me passed out shirtless next to him. I was told that Dorien whooped his ass, grabbed me, and left. I thank God that Dorien came through. He couldn’t save me from everything, though. Santana took pictures of me passed out and topless. For years, those pictures made their way through the friend circle. I mean, shit, they made their way to me. You can’t really see my face because my head was turned to the side, but the people who were in that house know it’s me.

“The people who were at that party helped Santana spread the rumor about me that I was a pass-around. They spread it around that they ran trains on me, even though the cameras showed that nobody entered that bedroom, except for Santana and me. I was a fifteen-year-old virgin. The pictures of my titties floating around, the rumors, the lies…all of that got to me. I sank into a deep depression. While I fought my way out of a black hole, my daddy planned his revenge. I think he wanted to kill Santana, but the family had already lost Emerald, so he opted to let him live…as a drug addict.”

“Oh shit. So, that time that Santana was found in that alley overdosed, that was Gianni?”

“He gave Santana something that messed him completely up. He’s never been able to get clean since. I heard he’s been to rehab about ten times. His family just keeps trying to get him sober, and so far, nothing has worked. I feel really bad for him. He started the rumors, and he did the shit that he did to me, but I don’t think he deserved the type of retribution my father took.”

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