Homeless by Ms. Michel Moore Page A

transferred overseas for the next year and wanted Kevin to housesit. After explaining that he had to pay absolutely no rent, no utilities, and the upscale neighborhood home had an inside heated pool and a high-tech game room, Lonnie was all in. After the year he’d been having, he felt like it might be like having a small vacation from the cruelness of the city.
    Kevin informed Lonnie his dad’s business partner had already given him the green light to have one of his college classmates stay there with him as well. So, in Kevin’s mind, it was a no-brainer. He knew the rest of his buddies were knuckleheads and didn’t deserve any breaks or come ups. For the most part, they, or their parents, were like him and his family; financially stable. However, Lonnie was different in his eyes. Not because he was less fortunate. And not because he was often the voice of reason when they were getting too high and needed to slow up, but the brutal honest fact, Lonnie was black. Crazy as it seemed, their other get-high counterparts were intimidated by Lonnie’s mere presence. Kevin wasn’t prejudiced by a long shot, but wasn’t a fool either. He understood Lonnie’s being there could make others not get so wild and out of hand when they were partying.
    After a few more minutes of Kevin laying out the details of the arrangement, the two friends celebrated with popping a few pills and downing a few shots of rotgut cheap gin as chasers. Lonnie may have been avoiding contact with Kevin and didn’t miss him, but his urges for the pills his boy always was holding was something else. He’d become almost dependent on them to stop the reoccurring dreams and nightmares of his mother’s death.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
    It had been less than four months since Lonnie left his low-income apartment and temporarily located to the suburbs. Smart enough to keep his grades up and the small sum of thirty dollars a month paid up for his rent, Lonnie took the time he was granted right outside the city as a privilege. The house he and Kevin were chilling in was exactly everything Kevin said it would be, and more. And just like Kevin claimed when he first gave Lonnie the good news of their change of address, the parties they had grew and grew. It seemed as if they had more and more classmates, friends, bitches, hoes, and just random motherfuckers somehow finding themselves stopping by.
    Growing up in the hood, Lonnie was exposed to just about a little of everything. In the ghetto, there was no-holds-barred. The gloves were off in just about every aspect of life you could imagine; good, bad, and ugly—but for the most part, bad. He’d seen no-morals heroin addicts standing on the corner in their gravity-defying lean, delusional crackheads floor surfing, searching the carpet for a small sliver of rock that wasn’t even there, and young girls barely out of junior high pregnant by old men that promised them the world if they could just get some pussy.
    However, this life Lonnie was caught up in living in the white world of privilege was something else altogether. He’d never experienced folk who openly lived like this with no shame. These people he was hanging with had no off buttons or pause. They felt the world owed them something; a sense of entitlement. The drinking, the drugs, the pills, and all the promiscuous sex was like it was nothing. In Kevin’s world, this bullshit was apparently second nature. Yet, as much as Lonnie had grown to love popping pills and drinking, he not once had an urge to venture over to the stairway to the next level: hardcore drugs. He knew how he was living was next to foul, and his mother would be disappointed, but he reasoned with himself that she was gone and he was still here on earth to fight the good fight; even if that meant he had to pop a few Xanax or Norcos to help him wage the battle.
    * * *
    Late for class, Lonnie waited for the bus as he did every morning. Not blessed