her. I was very excited about the money, don’t get me wrong, but I kept thanking God that I had gotten away. I wasn’t all that excited about going into another bank anytime soon. I mean, how many times can a person get away before that
person is actually caught?
This was twenty-thousand dollars, and was a good number. I was
cool with that, but Phaedra was greedy. She always had to have more. She
wanted it all, and if I didn’t get it all then I wouldn’t be paid. The job had to
be completed. I had Apollo and Phae on my team, and we were winning! I
was ready to get it!
The next stop was the Bank of America on Piedmont Street. I walked
inside the bank, again pushing any fear to the back of my mind. I walked back out of the bank with seven-thousand dollars cash. I gave Apollo the money to put with the other twenty-thousand dollars. He immediately called Phae and we met up at the Checker’s restaurant downtown on 10 th and Spring St. Then I called my baby’s father and told him to meet me. He was already behind us anyway, but they didn’t know that. Phaedra pulled up and hopped in the car with us. She gave me four grand. She and Apollo kept the rest of the money.
I eventually recognized that the four-thousand dollars was low pay
for the high risk of my freedom. Being young and naïve, four-thousand dollars seemed like a lot of money to me at that particular time. Besides it was a little too late to start complaining about the money. I had agreed to the pay-
ment for my service beforehand.
We were at the office one day having one of our girl talks when I
brought up Apollo’s name. Phaedra seldom talked to me about Apollo. At the time, he was not her love interest and she told me often that he was nothing more than a worker and a plaything to her. When Phaedra told me that Apollo never satisfied her sexually, I knew then that their relationship was nothing more than a game for her. I didn’t ask, she just decided one day, to blurt out
that Apollo had only one testicle.
“What the hell? Phae girl, you crazy as hell!” I laughed at the time.
After working with Apollo, he and I became cool. He was my part-
ner. While Apollo and I ran the streets, Phaedra was able to sit hidden away behind her desk. Apollo was never disrespectful, and was always about his
business. I respected that!
I was being a sh**-starter. So I told Apollo about the conversation
me and Phae had about him. Phaedra had not mentioned to m e that she was serious about him or that she had any intentions on being with him. I felt like she didn’t give a damn, so I didn’t either. I also wanted him to know that I knew his business. I wanted to see his reaction, it may not have been right,
but it was really hilarious at the time
I thought he was going to be cool, calm, and collective about it. Turned out, he wasn’t. He called Phae right there on the spot and, oh Lord, did it go down behind her disclosure about his private parts. That was very personal for him. I could tell by the way he handled the situation that it had hurt him deeply. He explained that it was caused from a motorcycle accident. Wow, he really did have one testicle. Phae laughed like hell about it. She even
called me on a three-way call a day later to let me hear his ranting and raving.
She wanted to go out of her way to show me that she could care less
about his feelings, and she didn’t give a damn about me telling him what she said. It was a joke to her. She laughed, I laughed and we both really laughed
after hearing how he snapped on Phaedra. He was crying like a baby.
Apollo was absolutely livid. That was so crazy. I knew then never
to tell him anything. He had gotten too emotional. I figured that he had to be raised by women. Most of the males I knew who were raised by women
tended to be very emotional.
Children learn what they see. If every time something goes wrong
and the reaction they experience were tears and screaming, then they
Lori Wilde, Wendy Etherington, Jillian Burns
Craig Halloran
Lilah
Jasper Fforde
Kathleen Gilles Seidel
Lynsay Sands
Julie Hyzy
Anya Nowlan
Sean O'Kane
Kinnary Jangla