I had a quick flashback of Bianca and me walking down the street to school in the tenth grade, laughing about what had happened on a sitcom the night before. We were both smiling at each other and lightly tapping each other on the arms during conversation. Then I realized she was there, in real time, in my presence, smiling again, but I remembered what evil she was capable of: BITCH!
“You should get going. Please be in touch with Nikki when you have a formal presentation together and she’ll fit you into my schedule.” I went from being overly gracious to strictly professional in the blink of an eye. “She’ll see you to your car, and thanks again for coming by.”
Bianca shook my hand and started to hesitantly walk away. She paused and turned around. “Um, by the way, I have a friend who is an excellent designer and stylist. You may have heard of her. Cherie Thompson?”
“No, can’t say that I have.” I sighed and started acting irritated.
“She’s great. Top-notch. In fact”—Bianca spun around like she was ripping up a runway, so I could peep the same dress that I had been looking at all damn day—“she designed this little number exclusively for me. She does practically all my clothes.”
“It’s simplistic but rather nice,” I said, trying to downplay it. “Leave her card with Nikki and I’ll consider giving her line a look-see.”
Bianca cleared her throat. “Maybe we can have lunch one day later this week, at your convenience.”
I rolled my eyes, making sure she would see the gesture. She had a lot of fucking nerve to think that she could commandeer my time like that. I was the celebrity, not her. Stupid whore!
“Or maybe not.” She paused. “You take care.”
“You as well.”
Bianca walked off, trailing Nikki.
“This is going to be like shooting fish in a barrel,” I whispered to myself. “Look at you,” I said to Bianca’s back, “with your fake hair, your fake nails, your fake smile, your fake eyes, and your fake attitude. Biotch!”
I plopped back down in the chair and drank some wine, trying to calm myself down. Daddy may have been across the globe in Australia on business, but he was far from stupid. Someone had clearly made sure he had seen the reports on CNN or had read the online articles about how Wicket, real name Ladonna Sterling, had decided to relocate to Georgia after giving a spectacular performance at Philips Arena in front of a sold-out crowd of fans. How she had instantly become enamored with Atlanta and had dropped $19 million on a crib. How she was planning to spend the majority of time between tours there, working on her next album.
At three o’clock on the dot, I would have to look happy as a pig in shit on Skype and try to convince him that I understood and totally embraced what I was doing, that I had gotten over the past, and that I was legitimately interested in residing in the same city where I had actually grown up as Caprice Tatum, daughter of a drug-induced, schizophrenic maniac of a mother who had cut the left side of my face with a paring knife when I was seven because she couldn’t stand to look at her own image.
Daddy would legitimately be worried about my welfare, and I could not fault him for that. He had done so much for me; he had paid to fix a broken doll and had rebirthed her as one of the greatest entertainers the world had ever known . . . ever would know. It was hard, but I wouldn’t let him down.
Who was I fooling? I wanted to fuck them all up for what they had done to me. For the pain, for robbing me of any chance of a normal, healthy, loving relationship with a man, and for merely being pure evil.
“Calm down, Caprice,” I tried to convince myself. “You can pull this off. Daddy can’t make you leave. You’re damn near forty years old. Just tell him that much.”
I finished off my glass of wine and went into my office to launch Skype.
* * *
The forty-minute conversation with Daddy did not go off well. He went on and on about how I needed therapy and should leave right away, even if I joined him overseas. He was concerned that I might have some kind of mental break if I ran across any of the people from my past, even though they would never recognize me. I started to say that one had just finished doing a walk-through of my new house to do a mock-up design proposal and that I had played it off without a hitch. But being braggadocious would have only backfired, with Daddy personally flying his private jet to Atlanta by the break of the next dawn.
Nikki had gone out to run errands. She was loving Atlanta. I needed some kind of release, so I called Kagiso into my bedroom for a little afternoon playtime. I was not lying when I said that I had never fucked any of my bodyguards. But the reason that I knew they all needed lap bands on their dicks is because I had definitely seen them.