Little White Lies (22 page)

Here I had to pause. Mostly out of surprise.

Karl was dabbing at his eyes.

Amazing. I’d moved the guy. I took a deep breath and finished.

“So maybe if we all do our best to seek truth and justice while working to expose injustice and deception, and if more and more of us do that on a daily basis, then perhaps we will need fewer and fewer little white lies to get ourselves through the days. I’m Coretta White, and this has been
Takin’ U to Skool
. Thank you.”

Yeah, so that stuff all happened.

Um, any questions?

Who? What? How? When? Where? Why?

Okay, let’s start with
where
. I’m writing this final chapter from my new apartment. It’s in Fort Greene, and I own it! Alex and I made up after the whole revenge/justice scenario went down (Operation
Skools Out
), and she told me about another super-secret bank account.

Unbeknownst to me, for the past twenty years, Alex had been siphoning off twenty percent of all my AllYou earnings, placing half the money in an IRA (stands for “individual retirement account”; not being condescending—I never knew what it meant, either). She placed the other half in an investment account that’s now worth over a million bucks.

I’m not exactly set for life, but it was enough to buy a decent apartment in a nice part of Brooklyn and a tiny shack in the Catskills. I’ve been able to take some much-needed time off after deciding to embark on an indefinite leave of absence from all social media. And hopefully by the time I’m sixty, if the human race and/or the United States still exist, I might be able to retire for real.

Thank you, Alex.

In case you are wondering, Dear Reader, whether Alex and I got back together after this whole ordeal, the answer is a resounding
NO!
However, much to her elation, I did decide to retire from rapping. Good-bye, MC Expensive Meal. And after a lot of encouragement from my ex-girlfriend, former boss, and Friend For Life (FFL), I’ve finally started writing my first novel. No title yet, but it takes place in the 1990s and follows the international misadventures of an Ivy League–educated PowerPoint specialist who secretly works for the CIA* and—even more secretly—is the son of Huey P. Newton*.

I’m happy to report that I’ve also disabled my Tinder and OkCupid profiles. It’s kind of a long story, and I’m going to spare you the details, but lately I’ve been spending a lot of time enjoying the company of Chloe Delvoye, the young woman I met on the Pulse TV “limo boose.” I probably shouldn’t even be mentioning it, but there it is. (Hi, Chloe.) And to her credit, she quit Pulse TV the morning after our bus ride, disgusted with the Skools.

A few more notes on
where
along with a bit of
how
:

The Skool twins also reside in Brooklyn, where they are still being detained at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, affectionately known as “Little Gitmo” because it is said to contain a number of high-level terror suspects. (I can’t resist mentioning that Lil’ Gitmo would be a pretty sweet name for a rapper. Just not me.) Between the connections that Coretta’s and Rachel’s fathers have with federal prosecutors and which the Corneliuses have in general—and thanks in large part to Mike’s incredible hacker-sleuthing—the state department was able to quickly build a case against Anders and Karin.

The timing worked out perfectly. They served the arrest
warrant immediately after the twins’ public humiliation on Pulse TV.

I also imagine that Coretta and I were able to serve such just desserts on live television because of some political power moves by Mr. White and Mr. Cornelius. Why would they allow us to do so? Four words spring to mind: Guilt, Justice, Revenge, Redemption.

As far as I know, the other principal characters from this saga—including my trusty cadre of subcontractors, Kris and Sarah, now otherwise employed—all remain in New York City, most of us in Brooklyn and none of us incarcerated.

Coretta graduated high school and will be enrolling at Harvard in the fall. I’m not sure if her decision to forego Stanford was due to her disdain for Condoleezza Rice* or because Mike is going to MIT, but I suspect the latter. I’m a little bit sorry to see two such amazing young people leaving Brooklyn for Boston (yuck!), but I suppose those are both good schools, and I’m sure neither one of them will decide to live there after they graduate. (Sorry, Boston.)

I can’t remember where Rachel is going—probably her safety school. She and I have not stayed in touch, though not for her lack of trying.

Evidently Rachel is one of those people who’s slow in warming up to others, but she doesn’t hold tightly to first impressions. Since we’d gotten off on such hostile footing when we first met, Rachel Bernstein was the last member of our “Skools Out” squad I expected to hear from. But not only did she send me a handwritten card (as I imagine all of us got), Rachel also texted me several times with questions about recipes, shoe storage, shower curtain rings, Ohio, and other seemingly random subjects.

Typically her texts would come in bursts of five. Initially
I responded to all of them, but then I gradually reduced my number of replies to zero. Maybe it’s society’s pernicious influence, but there was something about being text buddies with a teenage girl that was starting to make me feel creepy. I mean, it’s one thing if it’s work related, but this kid is definitely
not
Oprah.

Alex is still ensconced in her Chelsea mega-loft, but even she is considering a move to Brooklyn as of late. (I’m not holding my breath.) Business is booming again at AllYou™. In typical Melrose fashion, Alex spun the negative impact from her association with the Skools into good fortune. She was able to warn a few of her clients who sat on the boards of SKOOLS 4 ALL and Pulse TV about the evil twins before the shit hit the fan.

So she not only scored some valuable brownie points, she also helped facilitate the secret board meetings that led to the ouster of the Skools from both Pulse TV and their SKOOLS 4 ALL foundation, which coincided with their dramatic arrest. There was some talk among the Corneliuses, the Whites, and the Bernsteins about installing a new board of directors that would take the foundation in a new direction.

Initially the Corneliuses even considered buying Pulse TV outright. But the intermingled finances between the network, the foundation, and the Skools’ various other “nonprofits” and corporations are so cryptic, convoluted, and riddled with fraud that it will take months, if not years, to decipher (never mind assess) the largely illegal assets and accounts.

Also, dark pools.

Oh, and Mr. Cornelius has made a pledge to help find jobs for any SKOOLS 4 ALL or Pulse TV employees not implicated in illegal or unethical activity.

Are we still on
where
? Because speaking of pools, I’m happy to report that immediately after our triumphant trampling of those twisted siblings, Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius welcomed our entire crew—Alex and me, Coretta and her parents, Rachel (who for some reason brought her bubbi), and of course Mike—to fly on their private jet to their vacation home in Bermuda.

They call it a “vacation home,” but it felt more like a private resort.

Ironically their spread is situated in between Bloomberg’s and Oprah’s. Yes,
real
Oprah. No, we didn’t see her.

Let me say if you’ve never been to Bermuda and stayed at a billionaire’s house, I highly suggest you do so.

The highlight of our stay came while Alex and I were sunbathing on their private beach, drinking tropical cocktails out of blown-glass coconuts. We looked up to see Coretta and Mike on the deck of his parents’ sailboat, drinking what I have to assume was a nonalcoholic sparkling beverage.

We raised our glasses. The four of us, without missing a beat, reenacted the “Looking good, feeling good!” scene from
Trading Places
*.

Unfortunately Coretta and Mike hadn’t even heard of the movie (they still might not have), so they didn’t get the reference, much less recognize the roles they were unwittingly playing. And that is very sad—for them.

So there was that.

Why did all of this happen? Well, we hope it was for a good reason. The Universe works in mysterious ways, and by the time you’re reading this epilogue, there will no doubt be countless effects and side effects felt from the remarkable space in time that we have attempted to recount within these pages.

I could delve into the motives of the Skool siblings in targeting a seventeen-year-old girl and a hapless middle-aged man for destruction at the expense of their own odious empire. But since they are psychopathic freaks descended from evil incarnate, anything I write would be mere conjecture.

Having trolled through Mike’s collection of hacked emails (thank you, Mike), it’s clear why the Skools viewed Coretta as a perfect pawn/cloak for their insidious enterprises. It’s because their own racism got in the way. They underestimated both her brilliance and moral backbone. They believed they could control her through their carefully cultivated relationship with the Corneliuses, and by the bounds of her restrictive Pulse TV contract.

But when Coretta sent them her heartfelt confession and they glimpsed her depth of character through her genuine struggle with this ethical dilemma, they must have realized that 1) they did not control her, and 2) they did not even know who she was. They had taken the words of her underpaid surrogate—a man old enough to be her father!—as the true gospel of Coretta and then found themselves duped. They feared Coretta’s power, which they had helped to create, and were also butt-sore over her violation of their so-called trust.

So they engineered revenge.

As far as I’m concerned, they belong in Lil’ Gitmo.

So what now?

The good news, of course: I’m not broke.

Coretta and Mike (and yes, Rachel) are going to college. And as much as my feelings are mixed about the University Industrial Complex, I recognize the value of a good education at a prestigious school. And seeing these bright youngsters
on the road to continued success—as cheesy as that sounds, especially when read in the junior high vice-principal voice that’s playing in my head right now—it honestly gives me hope for the future. And when I say “honestly” that is not to suggest that I am being in any way disingenuous.

I’m not sure if I’ll keep in touch with Coretta, or if I’ll even see her again.

It was weird enough working for a seventeen-year-old—now I’m going to be friends with her? Not that I have anything against young people; I just don’t think I want to be that old dude hanging out at the college parties. But who knows? Maybe we’ll get coffee together sometime. Maybe she and Mike will invite me to their wedding. If so, I hope it’s in Bermuda! Or maybe this book will be a big hit, and Coretta and Karl will get their own TV show after all.

The bad news? You don’t wanna hear the bad news. The bad news is that stop-and-frisk still exists. And so does Boko Haram. And now, apparently, something horrible called ISIS (not to be confused with Isis, the Egyptian goddess). The “War in Afghanistan” is soon coming to an “end.” But not really. Meanwhile the “Iraq War” came to an “end” three years ago, and that country has never been more fucked up than it is now. Want to see something scary? Read the Iraq War page on Wikipedia. (I just did, and I’d like to throw up.)

But the bad news does bring to mind a conversation I had in Bermuda with my personal link to the top point-oh-one percent, Ms. Alex Rose, and my new favorite venture capitalists—Esther and Douglas Cornelius.

It took place a few hours after our
Trading Places
moment. I imagined Mike and Coretta were still happily sailing in the sunset. Coretta’s parents were off taking a romantic walk on the beach, or so I also imagined. Rachel was swimming laps
in the pool as her bubbi snoozed on a deck chair beneath a bright pink umbrella. Alex and I sat at one of the outdoor dining tables with Douglas and Esther—which was how they insisted we address them—enjoying fresh cocktails and snacking on tangy ceviche prepared by their housekeeper/driver/chef.

I sensed that our hosts were straining to make sense of two forty-somethings who for whatever reasons had never procreated.

Meanwhile, I struggled to imagine what it must be like to be raising a teenager. I figured it had to be some kind of nightmare—even if you are rich enough to have a house in Bermuda next to Oprah’s. So I looked out across the turquoise water and said, “Man, life sucks, doesn’t it?”

Esther let out a squeak of amusement.

Douglas played along. “Yeah, this is pretty horrible. Sorry to drag you guys out here.”

Alex allowed herself to chuckle. “If I have to sit through one more of these crummy sunsets …”

“Ha. I know. And that gross water! Please don’t make us go in there again.” I slurped down a mouthful of ceviche, then self-consciously dabbed at my chin with my napkin. “Seriously, though, I can definitely see why Bloomberg spent every single weekend out here while he was mayor.”

Esther leaned slightly toward Alex and me. “In case you were wondering, no, we did not name our son after Michael Bloomberg.”

Oddly, I just had been wondering exactly that. I stopped myself from expressing relief at sparing their kid the specter of the Undisputed King of Stop-and-Frisk. Also, Alex was reading my mind; she hit me with a glare before I could open my mouth.

“It must be weird going back and forth between here and the city, especially with Mike—your Mike, I mean,” I said. I was riding a nice rum-and-ceviche buzz and was thinking aloud. “Out here, it’s like paradise. You know your kid is safe. I mean, aside from the Bermuda Triangle*. But otherwise you’ve got literally nothing to worry about.”

“Except property taxes,” Alex muttered.

Esther nodded thoughtfully. “We do worry. Of course our son is a very sensible young man, but we’ve also taught him the differences between the system and the individuals who are charged with enforcing the system. Between the government and those who represent it.”

“Oh, yeah?” I smirked. “And what are those differences?”