make no sense, brother and sister grew up in the same house with the same momma and daddy don’t even talk to each other no more.”
“I don’t have a problem with Courtney. He has a problem with me.” Camille said the same thing every time Bobby Junior broached the subject.
“Just don’t make no sense. Look like to me you ought to want to hold on to whatever family you got left, ’specially after what happened with your momma. But y’all grown. I can’t make y’all play with each other.”
“All right, well, I’ve got to get back to work.” Camille pressed the red “end call” button before her father could launch a campaign for ten dollars . . . five dollars . . . something he could pawn.
She threw the phone back into her purse and put her headset back in place for the last fifty calls of the day. Glad for the sales script, Camille plodded through the afternoon with her mind only half engaged in work. The other half was in LA. London. On stage with a microphone taped to her body. Four women standing six feet behind her.
Or should she go solo? That way she wouldn’t have to split the money. If the group’s second manager, Aaron, hadn’t convinced the record label to keep Kyra in the group despite her blatant drug problems, Camille might still have some funds left in the bank. Dividing by three instead of four makes a huge difference when millions of dollars are on the line.
When Camille really thought about it, she could almost strangle Aaron now for saving Kyra’s butt. All Kyra ever did was moan on most of the songs anyway. Granted, it was a sexy moan—one that she’d probably practiced many a night in Aaron’s hotel room. Yeah, there was a reason he wanted to keep that butt around.
And Kyra was . . . slow. Not slow like she was born with a medical problem. Slow like she’d been smoking weed since the seventh grade. She just could not process information well, let alone read people.
Camille paused the dialer and maximized the Facebook window on her screen. She searched for Kyra Copeland and scrolled down until she found the familiar face. Jealousy pinged through Camille’s chest as she explored Kyra’s open photo albums. She was obviously married, living in Phoenix with three boys in a two-story brick home with a pool. A pool! Dozens of mobile-uploaded pictures documented family gatherings and vacations. But that pool took the cake.
Not to mention the fact that Kyra looked like she hadn’t gained an ounce. In fact, she looked better than back in the day. Kyra always had that handsome beauty. She was probably one of those girls who was the spitting image of her father, which, at a young age, was a huge problem, but as she grew older and filled out (and shaved the moustache), her features actually came together well. Yep, that was Kyra.
She seemed happy. But who can really tell by Facebook? Camille checked Kyra’s info page and nearly busted out laughing. Kyra was a photographer? Seriously! Who would entrust Miss Moan-a-thon to capture precious memories on film? Camille copied and pasted Kyra’s alleged Web site address into the browser. A barrage of bridal photos and graduation shots paraded across the page. And they looked like someone who might know what they were doing staged and edited the shots.
How could this be? Kyra Copeland is better off than me? “I don’t think so,” Camille whispered to herself as she closed the extra window on her screen. No way was she going to let Kyra, of all people, have the upper hand. Tonya, Camille could understand. Her parents had money. Even Alexis might be understandable because she went back to college and finished her degree. But not Kyra. If that man-looking Kyra was making it in this world, living in a nice house, going on cruises, Camille didn’t have an excuse.
She slammed her headset on the desk. Took a look around her stupid, gray cubicle. Useless waste of the earth’s resources. She could still hear coworkers talking, still see through the cracks and smell when someone burned popcorn in the microwave. The only thing those partitions actually did for her was cover up tardiness.
But what did it matter if she was late? Who cares? As long as she came in and made her ten leads for the day to keep the manager away, what time she got there should be irrelevant. This whole job was stupid anyway.
Worse than this depressing train of thought was the fact that she actually needed this job to pay rent in an apartment she was too ashamed to have anyone visit. Maybe she shouldn’t have been ashamed of her place. I mean, at least she did have a roof over her head. Running water. Air-conditioning.
Her mother taught her to be grateful. Yet, Camille always figured the “grateful” thing was something you did on the way up. Like, if you had nothing and then, all of a sudden, you got rich, you were supposed to thank God for taking you from bad to good. She had a hard time showing gratitude after being robbed of the queen-of-pop-sopranos crown. Well, maybe that was taking it a little too far—like the time Whitney Houston said Bobby Brown was the king of R&B when, really, he wasn’t even on the radar.
Camille still remembered the day Sweet Treats’s last manager, Priscilla Longoria, called and gave her the news that Sweet Treats’s song had beat out Kelly Price, Dru Hill, and Toni Braxton for the number-one slot on the R&B charts. It was, to date, the best day of Camille’s life.
If she didn’t get something going, the best part of her life would always be in the past. What better day to start than her thirtieth birthday?
CHAPTER 3
This was probably a bad idea. Her hands shook as she waited for Kyra to answer the phone, if this was the real Kyra Copeland. Six degrees of separation had been reduced to three, thanks to a mutual Facebook friend. The whole thing was one big quirky coincidence. A coincidence that might change her life forever.
“Hello.”
“Hi, Kyra. It’s Camille.”
“Camille? How do we know each other?”
“Camille Robertson?”
“From Sweet Treats?”
Camille tried the we-go-way-back approach. “Yeah, girl, it’s me. How you been?”
“Fine. How’d you get my number?” Kyra’s cautionary pitch caught Camille by surprise.
“We have a mutual friend named . . .” Camille reviewed the screen. She didn’t realize she would have to reveal her source so soon. “Yolanda Wesley.”
“Oh.” Kyra’s voice fell. “She’s one of my husband’s cousins. She’s an author, always trying to build her fan base.”
“I ain’t mad at her,” Camille drawled.
“Well, I certainly am. What do you need or want or whatever?” she gushed with a sigh.
Apparently, Kyra had gained a few points in the thinking category. Camille couldn’t remember ever hearing Kyra string that many words together so fast without at least three takes in the studio. Camille would have to up her game.
“I was just sitting here reminiscing. Thinking about what a good thing we had going in the nineties. And yesterday, I was reading something in a magazine about Xscape, and you know we were way better than them. So—”
“Are you trying to put Sweet Treats back together again?”
Might as well cut to the chase. “Yes. That’s exactly what I’m trying to do.”
“Count
