Betrayal by Noire

and was gently drying her off with a big fluffy towel when her girl began talking again.
    With trembling lips, Juicy opened her mouth and told her friend everything that had happened. From the moment her and Gino left New York, until the day she watched her man get put in the ground.
    Through it all, Rita just couldn’t believe what she was hearing. The lost hopes and dreams…the senselessness of it all was just heartbreaking.
    “So all of this went down just because some guy was jealous and wanted to push up on you?”
    Juicy shrugged her shoulders miserably.
    “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking maybe it wasn’t just about Pit, though. Maybe it was my fault. There’s something fucked up about me, Rita. I make niggahs act crazy.”
    “That’s not true, Juicy. You can’t blame yourself for what that psycho fool did.”
    Juicy sniffed, her eyes and nose were both red. “But I do blame myself. There’s something about me that attracts bad energy. The way I look. How I dress. How I walk… Maybe some kind of vibe I be giving off. I can’t explain it, Rita, but it’s there. It’s like I have bad luck or something.”
    Rita shushed her with a hug. “Juicy, you don’t have no control over what some fool-ass niggah decides to do! All you want is the same thing every other chick like us wants. A good education, a nice dude to chill with, some friends to hang out with, and to have a little fun. It’s not your damn fault that men like G and Pit want to control a bitch’s next breath! And it ain’t bad luck when you catch a lot of fucked up breaks in life, neither. It’s just life, Juicy. Life. Pit musta been fried in the head to do what he did. That’s probably why somebody took him out.”
    Juicy wiped her eyes on her towel and sighed. “I don’t know who got to him, but I’m glad he’s gone. Renata said the cops found him hanging in his own shower. His throat was slit and somebody had chopped off his right hand.”
    “Damn…”
    “I know…Renata thinks somebody left Pit’s body like that to send a message. Two of his homeboys got took down too. Execution style.”
    Rita shuddered. “So, what happened to his girl? Your so-called friend? The chick who was doing your hair?”
    “I don’t even know,” Juicy shrugged and shook her head. “I guess she skied up. I sent Renata looking for her a few weeks ago, but she came back and said Quese’s shop was boarded up and she was nowhere to be found.”
    Rita sighed. No matter which way she looked at Juicy’s situation it looked real bad for her girl. She was out on the West Coast all alone, with no real friends or family, but she couldn’t go back to New York either. Not while niggahs were still gunning for her head.
    They spent the next two weeks just chilling and lounging around at Juicy’s crib. Rita cooked a bunch of different dishes, but Juicy barely ate anything. She was sad and she cried a lot. She went back and forth between feeling guilty about everything, to wanting to die so she wouldn’t have to feel anything at all.
    “I begged God to take me,” Juicy confessed one night as they walked on a beach. “I asked Him to either strike me dead, or give me the courage to take myself out. And you know what, Rita?” she asked, her voice full of misery. “I’m so fucked up that God doesn’t even want me.”
    There was no self-pity in Juicy’s words. Only sorrow. But instead of trying to find ways to comfort her all the time, Rita held back and let her girl just get it all out. Shit, if anybody had a right to feel sad, it was Juicy. She had suffered a whole lot to be so damn young.
    “It’s gonna get better,” was all Rita could think of to say. And in her heart, she believed it. On the real, with all the crazy shit that had happened to her girl lately, it for damn sure couldn’t get no worse.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

 
     
     
     
    CHAPTER 14
     
    “So what now?” Salvatore McCain asked his