High School Diva

By LaWayne Williams and Stephen Adams

Samantha Ricks, a tomboy by heart, could easily change her social status in school and live out the dreams of most teenage girls of being popular and pretty. To do so, she will have to pay the ultimate price that many of the women in her family have done before her. Samantha tries to stay true to herself, but the pitfalls (poverty, negative peer pressure, abuse, and teen pregnancy) of inner-city life begin to take a stranglehold on her, which causes her to spin out of control. It may take her no nonsense grandmother, Momma Ricks, who seems to be at the root of Samanthas pain and sorrow, to keep Samantha focused on her goal of getting into college.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jul 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456745264

LaWayne Williams

LaWayne Williams was born and raised in Camden, NJ where he was the oldest child of five siblings. Many would say that LaWayne resisted societal beliefs that inner-city youth will be affiliated with a gang, be incarcerated, or deceased by age of twenty-five. Life for LaWayne could have been easily written for him and ended tragically, but instead, by the age of ten, he found the power of a creative mind and a mighty ballpoint pen. At the age of fifteen, LaWayne began to chart his own destiny despite the negative societal influences that threatened his future. Tours to local colleges and the medias glimpse of what college had to offer, led LaWayne to set his sights on becoming the first of his family to graduate from college. LaWayne completed his undergraduate studies at Rutgers College, New Brunswick, NJ and his graduate coursework at Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ. He has dedicated seventeen years to education and is currently an elementary school assistant principal. LaWayne resides in New Jersey with his wife and two sons. In the book, High School Diva, LaWayne uses personal experiences to cleverly create a fictional world of a young student. He gives the reader the a glimpse of an inquisitive middle school aged girl who is subjected to community and family perils that will have life threatening implications.

Book preview

High School

Diva

LaWayne Williams

Cover Illustration by Stephen Adams

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AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: [phone]

© 2011 LaWayne Williams. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 7/21/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4567-4525-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-4526-4 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-4527-1 (dj)

Printed in the United States of America

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and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

I

Ms. Lemon

II

Kenny

III

Sixth Grade

IV

My Way

V

Kenny Is Back

VI

Kendra

VII

This Little Light of Mine

VIII

The Book

IX

Cheese Steak and Cell Phone

X

Black Hope vs. Brittany

XI

Party

XII

Family Reunion

XIII

Radar

XIV

Mallory

XV

The Bet

XVI

Laugh

XVII

Enough Is Enough

XVIII

Closure

XIX

The Letter of the Day

XX

Auntie Jen Says Goodbye

XXI

Change

XXII

Two Teaspoons of Medicine

XXIII

Payback

XXIV

The Oscar Goes To …

XXV

The Secret

XXVI

Game of Life

XXVII

Snow Globe

XXVIII

Time

City of Camden

Thanks to all of the people who have devoted and continue to devote themselves to the betterment of the city as a whole. Destruction is thoughtless, but creation comes only to those with a vision and an unshakable will to refute naysayers.

In loving memory of Sylvia Charisse Bolade McCloud

I

Ms. Lemon

My name is Samantha Ricks. I was born at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Camden, New Jersey. The way Momma Ricks tells it, Baby girl, I knew you were different from all of us the day you were born. It was exactly seven in the morning when I took my first breath outside of my mother’s womb. Momma Ricks said that I came out quiet and wide-eyed like a cheating husband who just realized that his 255-pound wife was standing over him with a hot, steamy pot of Farina in her hand.

If you are wondering about who is Momma Ricks, she’s my colorful grandmother, especially if the color you’re referring to is black. She would black out on somebody in a second. Oops … by the looks of you, I’m guessing that you don’t know anything about someone blacking out.

Well, Momma Ricks is my grandmother on my mom’s side, and she is one tough cookie that not even a teething baby could make soggy. She is quick with her tongue and even faster with a lit match. People who grew up in her time still call her Smokey.

I’ll just say this—if you wrong Momma Ricks or anyone in her family who didn’t deserve it, she’ll throw caution to the wind along with ambers from your household possessions. Her fuse is so short that still today, when other adults talk to her, you’ll hear them say, Now, Momma Ricks, I don’t want to get into a fight, but … I guess they’re making sure she knows that they’re not up for any trouble.

Anyway, Momma Ricks thought that I came out enlightened, because while the other babies born on July 7 were either sleeping or busy trying to out cry each other, I was still looking around taking in all of the new splendors of my surroundings.

Not taking anything away from Momma Ricks, but I don’t think that I was born any different from anyone else in my family. I know hate is a strong word, and I was taught as a little girl to never use such an inflammatory word, but I hate to admit that it was Ms. Lemon, my seventh-grade teacher, who made me truly see the world around me.

Wow! It has been six years since the incident in her class, yet I remember it like it happened just a minute ago. I can still smell the cheap, old-lady perfume that she wore. It had a pungent odor that only a dirty trash can full of scavenging maggots could love.

The middle school that I attended was and still is a predominantly black school. However, you wouldn’t have known that by looking into Ms. Lemon’s classroom. As soon as you walked into the canary-yellow room, you’d see a row of white kids sitting in the front. The second row was the same except for one Asian student. I was the only black student among a group of Hispanic kids in the third row, and the remaining three rows were filled with the rest of the black students.

Including me, there were about twenty-five students in the class. Every available space was filled. The room that was meant to only accommodate fifteen students comfortably was jam-packed with ten more fidgety students, large metal desks and chairs, and Ms. Lemon’s so-called antique tables and accessories. The only things that her classroom had over the others in the building were those great-smelling potted flowers that Ms. Lemon brought in to spruce up the room. But even those lovely aromas couldn’t overpower the underhanded comments that she made from time to time.

Sometimes, when she went about watering those plants, she’d say, Some of you are like these flowers. You can blossom no matter what weed-infested city you live in. I know that it was a blanket statement, but her eyes were always directed toward the first row of students.

Ms. Lemon was a highly respected teacher in the school, but for all of the wrong reasons. Instead of being admired because her students typically did better on state-mandated tests than other students, she was put on a pedestal because she was a white teacher who serviced poor, black, inner-city kids for over fifteen years. Also, she was the one to put on the black history program every year.

Ms. Lemon probably would’ve been able to retire without any complications if it hadn’t been for Mr. Jones. He was our newly hired vice principal. Although most of the teaching staff was African American, the entire administration was white until Mr. Jones was hired in the middle of the school year. The former vice principal took on a similar job in another area—one where there were a lot fewer poor kids in it. That happened a lot at my school. White and African American teachers and administrators alike would leave whenever they were given the opportunity to escape an impoverished city like Camden. Sometimes, it was good to get rid of teachers who didn’t care about the students they taught. Then there were times when we lost some great teachers regardless of race.

Anyway, the hiring of Mr. Jones was good for the school and the students as a whole. He was in his fifties, bald, medium build and height for a man, and he wore taps on the bottoms of his shoes. You could hear him coming from one end of the school to the other. He wasn’t ugly, but none of us girls ran around saying, Hey, did you see Mr. Jones today? He might not have stood out in a crowd for his looks, but his genuine concern for all of his students made him look handsome to me.

He might’ve worn those tight, 1960-style suits and always started off one of his fabricated stories with, Back in the day, we used to … but he was still able to relate to us. He was the first administrator that listened to both sides of the story. He didn’t just agree with what the teacher had to say. Actually, there were times when he took the side of the student. I should know because it was my run-in with Ms. Lemon and his continued pursuit to expose her biased ways that ultimately had him transferred to the black hole.

The black hole was any school in Camden that had no choice but to accept rejects. Since Mr. Jones didn’t make the cut at my school, he was sent packing to a school with other misfits. Typically, schools that were labeled as black holes were filled with inadequate, tenured teachers, and of course, the discipline and test results were a joke. Mr. Jones was a great vice principal who loved and cared for his students. He didn’t deserve to suffer, especially for the likes of Ms. Lemon.

Anyway, it all started about a month after Mr. Jones was hired. He had made it a point to walk to every class in the morning and greet the students as well as the teachers. Tap, tap, tap. We’d hear his shoes as he walked down the hallways. He had just left the class before us and in a matter of seconds was standing in our doorway. As seventh graders, we didn’t get excited about too much, but we enjoyed our morning dialogues with Mr. Jones.

He would start off by saying, Let’s have a good day. Like military soldiers, we responded in unison, To have a good day, we must put forth great effort to achieve!

You know how it is—when in Rome, do as the Romans do. Since we were in school, the only thing that could be attributed to a good day was for us to have some kind of an educational success. Let me tell you, I thought to myself on many mornings about the good days I had without learning something from a math book.

So, after barking out our line, he’d say, To achieve, you must believe, and if you truly believe, there’s only one way to prove it. Like lit firecrackers, we would explode with, Do it! Do it! Do it!

Strangely, I can’t remember rehearsing or memorizing anything. It was something that just came to be. It was something that came to be, but Ms. Lemon clearly despised it. I knew that she hated the way we performed for Mr. Jones. Gratefully, she couldn’t do anything to stop it. The other teachers in the building were in acceptance, as was Mrs. Brookstone, who was the building principal.

Ironically, Ms. Lemon was right for wanting the morning chant terminated. If any of them would’ve given it some thought, they would’ve realized that a class full of students with hormones bouncing off the walls would get a kick out of saying the words do it to an adult and get away with it. It was too stimulating to pass up.

The boys loved it more than the girls. About a million times a day, my girls and I would get approached by some stupid boy who thought that we needed a good day, so we should do it with him. It was funny the first couple of times, but it got to be annoying to sit in the lunchroom trying to keep down my free lunch while a boy pumped his fists in the air and awkwardly did some gesture with his hips as he lipped, Do it. Do it. Do it.

I didn’t blame the boys for trying so hard, because there were a few girls in school that didn’t mind having a good day from time to time. Again, a good day for me didn’t involve school or boys.

Anyway, as I was telling you before, Mr. Jones was standing in the doorway. Like lab mice, we went right into the whole effort-and-achieve thing just by the mere sight of him. It took us a minute to realize that he hadn’t said a word. Well, his mouth didn’t utter anything audible, but his eyes said, You guys betrayed me.

We all truly liked Mr. Jones. We weren’t making fun of him. We were just being silly seventh graders. By no means were we trying to make a fool of him so that Ms. Lemon could stick her old, curly-fried finger out and say, I told you so.

Unfortunately, it was obvious that he found out why we were so eager to rapid-fire off those two words. I think I was asking myself the same questions as everyone else in the class. How did he find out? Who told him? What was he going to do to us? Luckily for us, his cold stare wasn’t directed toward any of us. His target was Ms. Lemon and her seating arrangement for the class.

The story has it that later on that day; he cornered Ms. Lemon in the teachers’ lounge, which alone was taboo, because the sacred room was off limits to students and especially to stiff shirt administrators. Openly, he reprimanded Ms. Lemon in front of her colleagues, and in a way, he insinuated that she might be racist. After that, he was a helium balloon that was slowly falling back to a ground covered with razor-sharp needles and thorns.

The teachers’ union provided Ms. Lemon with their best lawyer. It really wasn’t necessary, because it was an open-and-shut case. Mr. Jones reacted with his heart instead of his mind. Apparently, somewhere written in the teachers’ contract, it was an absolute no-no for an administrator to openly ridicule a teacher. And to add rubbing alcohol to a fresh wound, Ms. Lemon wanted to sue him for defamation of character.

Mr. Jones knew that he’d lose, but he didn’t give in to any of their demands. Everyone, including Mrs. Brookstone, wanted him to resign or face suspension without pay until the case was brought up in court. Neither happened because Mr. Jones wasn’t going down without a fight, and he knew that the superintendent owed him a favor.

During the tumultuous weeks that followed, except for the smirk Ms. Lemon would give whenever Mr. Jones stopped in for our morning pep talk, things seemed unchanged. But we all knew that Mr. Jones had about a month to go before Ms. Lemon would get her revenge.

II

Kenny

It was first period—reading. I think it was Ms. Lemon’s favorite time of the day, because there were a number of students in the class who couldn’t read. Well, they could read, but not fluently. I never could understand how the boys in the class could spit out a rhyme with smooth precision, yet chop up a sentence like a dull butter knife.

Ms. Lemon got excited whenever we were about to finish a book. That day was no different. She was in a jovial mood as she passed out the worn and tattered novels to the kids in the back of the room … and the scarce few that managed to remain in pristine condition over the years to the students who occupied the seats in the first two rows.

All right, class, as you get your reading book, please turn to page 62. I’m just so excited that we’re about to finish another novel.

Exciting … hardly. It had some umph to it two weeks earlier when I’d first finished reading the book. I loved to read, so I would want to finish a book as quickly as possible, but Ms. Lemon would take her sweet time. It was like listening to your best friend try to tell you a funny joke, but it would take her an eternity before getting to the punch line.

To me, books were jokes. If I read a book but didn’t have a clue about what the author was trying to say, it was a bad joke. If I read one where it was clear to me what the theme or message was, it was a good joke. But the ones I enjoyed most of all were the books that made me think. Those are the jokes that may not be foot-stamping or knee-smacking funny, yet they have a way of tantalizing the senses.

The book was called Tangerine by Edward Bloor. It definitely fit the old adage of not judging a book by its cover. On the cover, there was a boy dressed in a soccer uniform. I think he was holding a soccer ball. But that wasn’t what sparked my curiosity. It was the strange-looking glasses that he wore that had me believe that it was going to be another boring book about an unrealistic character with the perfect life, but he must undergo some kind of tragedy before appreciating what his wealthy parents