Boss Lady (32 page)

I said, “But I don't mind that. Use this trip the way you want to. That's my whole point. Tracy's not stopping any of us from making our own contacts and things while we're here. She only asked for us to be safe and to stick together when we can. But they turned that into some kind of control thing.”

“Maddy always thinks somebody's trying to control her. That's just how she is. Like she always has to break the rules or something,” Jasmine stated.

I said, “But let's all look at it. Maybe you do irk people by talking too much, Jasmine. Tracy had to tell you that several times.”

“But that's no reason to want to fight me.”

“If anything, I should be the one beefing with Alexandria about your cousin,” Sasha reminded me. “But I'm not even like that. I only like him as a friend. But you know they've been sneaking around together.”

“Everybody knew that but me, hunh?” I asked them.

“Because you kept going out with Tracy every night,” Jasmine told me. “And that made us feel like we had babysitters or something after hanging out with Robin.”

I smiled. “What, she wasn't cool?”

“Yeah, she was cool, but we wanted to meet some of the people you were getting to meet with Tracy,” Sasha told me. “We wanted to meet some of the people in the book, too.”

“So, you all felt like I was getting special privileges then?”

“I didn't sweat it, myself. I mean, you're her cousin. What do you expect?” Jasmine reasoned.

“But do you think I act extra because of that?”

“I think you would be that way regardless,” Sasha answered. “That's just your personality. You like for things to be in order. And I don't see anything wrong with that. But when you're dealing with people who don't like order, you're bound to have a problem.”

She said, “So, if we would have had Petula and Tonya out here with us instead of Maddy and Alexandria, everything would have been fine.”

I nodded to myself and thought about it.

She said, “Every team has to be organized for a specific task. But we all came together for this because we were friends. And sometimes friends are not the best people to go into business with.”

Well said. I agreed with her.

“So, no matter what you say or do, some people are just not going to see your point,” Sasha summed up.

“That's life, man,” Jasmine agreed. “I have sisters and cousins, too, and they don't see anything that I'm trying to do. I mean, they get it, but they don't get it, you know. They all feel like things are supposed to come to you instead of you going to get them.”

I nodded to her. I said, “You're exactly right. Some people just don't get the work that you have to put in, so they look at you as if you're crazy, until they can see the end result.”

“Yeah, and then they all want to share in the results,” Sasha added.

“So, if you had a bad apple like that, then you can't change them, you just have to weed them out?” I philosophized.

“Yeah,” Jasmine agreed. “That's always.”

Sasha was more analytical about it. She said, “I wouldn't look at it as all apples. Sometimes you have oranges, bananas, peaches, pears, and you just have to figure out the best way to use each fruit. Because all people are not alike.”

“Yeah, that's a good way to put it,” Jasmine said.

I felt better about myself after talking to Jasmine and Sasha. So I retired to my room to call Petula and Tonya out in California. I hadn't talked to them at all that week. It was close to eleven o'clock in Philly, which meant that it was close to eight o'clock in L.A.

Petula answered her cell phone on the first ring. “Hey, Vanessa. How's everything going?” she asked me. “You're the only one I haven't talked to this week.”

I said, “Have you talked to anyone today?”

I was wondering if anyone had told her about our catfight in the hallway that morning.

She said, “Last night, but not today. Not until you called.”

“Well, let me ask you something, Petula. What do you think about the professional skills and personalities of each one of us?”

“You mean our girl clique?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, okay. In all honesty?”

“Yeah, in all honesty,” I told her, “starting with me.”

“Okay, well, you're definitely the leader. You always come up with new ideas. You have plans of execution. And you definitely know how to push your point to make sure things get done. But that doesn't leave you much room for a personality. So you get talked about in the positive and negative all the time, with not much balance in between.”

I said, “Okay. All good points. But do you think that I'm big-headed?”

Petula chuckled at it. She answered, “Well, I'm sorry, but that comes with the territory of being a leader. Big-headedness is the reality for ninety percent of the leaders around the world, some of them just know how to hide it a little better than others. And you're not one who hides it well.”

“And do you think I use my cousin to boost myself up?”

“Hmm, that's a hard one. I would say that you would be the way you are anyway, but the famous cousin factor will blur the line
between how much is really you, and how much can be attributed to being Tracy's cousin.”

She said, “But knowing you like I do, and being bluntly honest about it, I would say that if you didn't have a famous cousin, you would probably create one.”

“I would create one?”

“Most leaders need a focus point for their vision. And Tracy is yours. So, until you're able to move past her, which won't be anytime soon with all of us working on
Flyy Girl,
she'll be what everybody thinks about when they mention your name.”

She said, “It's kind of like Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre. Snoop Dogg is finally getting recognition on his own now, but for a long time, whenever someone said Snoop Dogg, you thought about Dr. Dre, too. But not the other way around. You could say Dr. Dre by itself, because he already had his name. I used to talk about that with my brothers all the time, because they were big rap fans, and my parents would hate it.”

Petula could go on a tangent if you let her, so I had to reel her back to the subject.

“Okay, now, what about the rest of us?”

“Ah, Sasha's a good, around-the-way girl who wants to be down. She's a lot like me. We just like being there and a part of the clique. So she'll help out and be unselfish, just like I will.

“Man, I wanted to go to Philadelphia with you guys,” she stopped and told me. “But I'll play my part and stay out here with Charmaine and Tonya, and do what we have to do until you guys get back.

“Sasha would have done the same thing,” she stated. “But she does like to be included. And sometimes I think she holds back her true feelings a lot more than the rest of us because she's Asian, and either that's part of her culture, or she just doesn't want to jump out and be too noticeable while she's trying so hard to be down.

“You know what I mean?”

I knew exactly what she meant. Had Sasha been black, or even mixed, she would have fought for my cousin, at least in principle, instead of just giving him up to Alexandria without a fight. Then again, Sasha had held out on Jason where Alexandria obviously did not.

“Yeah,” I agreed with Petula. “What about Maddy?” I asked her.

“Oh, now, Maddy has whatever social disease is plaguing a lot of black American girls who live in the inner city. She trusts nobody. She has a foul mouth. She's cynical about everything. She rarely applies herself. But at the same time, she's a stabilizing factor for the group. And she'll be the first one to tell you that your head is getting too big. She'll also be the first one to fight you. Fighting for her is a way of life. It says that she's alive, and that she has feelings. And it says that she has something to say that won't be ignored anymore.”

Wow! Petula was downright scary with her accuracy. Was it because she was African? Anyway, she really needed to be a psych major, because she was the queen of analyzation.

“Okay, and Jasmine?”

“I like Jasmine a lot,” Petula admitted. “She has a different part of me, the part that says ‘express yourself.' Jasmine can embarrass all of us because we try so hard to suppress that excited little girl in us that I talked about before. But Jasmine doesn't suppress it. She lets it be. But as silly as she may seem sometimes, she's really not. She knows as much as we all know, and maybe more, but she hates being bored, so she'll say something just to get a rise out of you. And sometimes that can get on people's nerves. But I don't mind that, because I have a big family and I understand it. It's just her way of getting attention.”

I said, “Yeah, I have a baby sister who's the same way. She just makes jokes all the time. Now what about Alexandria?”

Petula said it dramatically, “Alexandria is the exact opposite of Jasmine, and you should never leave the two of them in the same room alone.”

I broke up laughing. I said, “Wow, you are really good at this. I mean
really
good. You get another A from me.”

Petula laughed with me. She said, “Thank you. You want me to finish?”

Petula was more of a show-off than I was with her smarts. I used my intelligence mostly for plotting and planning, but Petula used more of hers in general conversation.

I said, “Of course I want you to finish. I know how you are once you get started. You want to complete the whole term paper.”

She said, “Thank you, my sister. You know me well. So . . . where were we?” she asked me with a laugh. “I lost my train of thought.”

I said, “Alexandria.”

“Oh, yeah. Alexandria hides herself like nobody's business. She doesn't want anybody to know what she's up to. Why? Because she hates the fact that she's not perfect.

“She's typical of a privileged daughter,” Petula added. “She's been told since she was young not to act in certain ways because she's supposed to be better than everyone else. And she'll get most of the attention, and still want more. In the meantime, she'll do what she wants to behind closed doors.”

She said, “Every culture has these privileged daughters. And they're always talked about as closet sluts. So the first time I looked at Alex, and she didn't speak, I knew what kind of girl she was. Her type feel that they don't have to speak to you unless they have a reason. And most of those reasons have to do with their own personal gain.”

She said, “So, Alexandria would be the one who would do everything with us as a group, just so she could find something extra to break off and hide for herself. And then she wouldn't have anything else to do with us.”

Like she was doing with my cousin Jason,
I thought to myself. Alexandria had broken him off in secret, while claiming to be sick.

I told Petula, “You're downright spooky, man.”

She laughed and said, “But these are just my opinions. Africans can be very opinionated, you know.”

“You don't say,” I joked to her. “Well, let me do you.”

“Oh, no, don't do me. I don't want to be a part of this,” she whined.

I read her anyway, because she wanted me to.

I said, “You're the outside leader. You'll let me lead from the inside, and all the while, you're just taking things in so you can redirect us later. You're like the off-the-field coach, while you allow me to be the team captain on the field.”

Petula laughed hard at it. She said, “You got me. I wait for you to make your mistakes, then I speak. Like now, you're calling me because something happened, right? Now you want to know about all of us. So, you call me to explain.”

I laughed hard with her. I said, “Girl, we got into a big fight this
morning because of everything you just said.” I stopped and told her in lowered tones, “And this is between me and you.”

“You know I'll never tell,” she promised. And she wouldn't. Petula loved having inside information. She would share only pieces of it when she wanted to. I had already witnessed her in action.

I said, “Well, here it is: Alexandria is doing my cousin Jason, and they think I don't know about it.”

“Oh, no, she really went there,” Petula squealed. She had never met Jason, but she heard about him, read about him, and knew about him.

I said, “Yes she did. And then Madison got upset with me over this camera guy from New York that she liked, when he liked me, and I didn't pay the boy no mind. And then she got upset with me and Tracy for busting her groove with my cousin's friend when they were on their way up to their room with them last night. So me and Maddy got into a fight this morning.”

“No-o-o.”

“Yes. But that was after Alexandria told Jasmine to shut her mouth, and they got into a fight.”

“Oh my God! And all of this happened this morning?”

“That's what I'm telling you. So I'm calling you to stop myself from going crazy.”

“Yeah, don't do it. Keep your sanity. I need you in the game to make everything happen,” Petula told me. “Then I can be proud of playing my part in it.

“So what did Tracy say about all of this?” she asked me.

“Oh, Tracy called us all fools and went back to work. She just put us in separate orbits until we all cooled off.”

Petula screamed laughing. She said, “She's the queen, she's the queen! Tracy has no time for that nonsense. Let's fix the broken wheel and get the show back on the road.”

I loved Petula's little notes of wisdom.

I said, “That's what she did, too.”

“But let me tell you something else,” Petula told me.

I was all ears. I said, “Spit it out.”

“All right, here we go. You know who I think is going to play the most important part in this whole
Flyy Girl
thing?”