Losing Hope Read Online Free Page B

Dayonna is getting to you that much, talk about it with Ava tomorrow. She’s gone for the day for meetings with the bigwigs at social services. I’m sure she’ll be more than willing to help you get chopped-up sisters and cabbage stew out of your system. Oh, have mercy. Look at how fine this brother is.” Sheena had turned to a copy of Essence magazine and did not look back up at me. Whatever audience I had with her was over.
    Just as well. I had three minutes to log off and get back to my car, which was parked on the back lot. Rush hour was about to become full force on I-83 again, and I was on a mission. I had made it down the hall and was stepping onto the elevator when Sheena poked her head out of our office door.
    â€œWait, Sienna. Phone call. Your girl Dayonna just ran away.”

Chapter 5
    I met him the second week of my freshman year of college. Tall, slightly muscular, and a beautiful shade of golden brown, he had eyes the color of peridots—the pale green gem that was my mother’s birthstone—and a smile that flashed brighter than any jewel I’d ever seen. In the summer, when the sun stayed on him, hints of olive underlined his perfect complexion, revealing his Mediterranean heritage. The biracial son of a history professor from Italy and a chef from the French Caribbean nation of Saint Martin, he was fluent in four languages—English, French, Italian, and Dutch—well read, and well traveled.
    I was eighteen and fresh out of my mama’s house, thinking that the rural acreage of my eastern Pennsylvanian college was exotic enough compared to my urban Baltimore upbringing. RiChard Alain St. James was a different type of foreign to me.
    He was a visually and intellectually delicious man. And believe me, I tried my best to gobble him up.
    The first time I saw him was at an impromptu student rally. He was standing on the steps of the student union, delivering a passionate call for student action on behalf of the Rwandan people. It was 1994, and the three-month genocide that the world community had largely ignored was starting to make real headlines. Too little too late.
    But not for RiChard. He was a graduate student earning a master’s degree in public policy and international relations, and his words were so potent and powerful, few could walk away. I watched football players cry. He told us that we had the ability and responsibility to be our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, no matter what color or what country we all hailed from.
    I loved him immediately and signed up for the public policy student organization over which he presided. I changed my major from theater arts to political science and nearly melted when I discovered he was the TA, the teacher’s assistant, for my intro to political theory class.
    The day he looked directly at me and smiled, I knew I wasn’t going to make it to my sophomore year at that university.
    We were going to go change the world together. . . .
    â€œMs. St. James, are you with me?” The police officer looked bored. A half-written missing person report dangled between his thick fingers, which were connected to thick arms that led up to a thick neck. Something about his facial features reminded me of a bulldog. The name Collins was written across a badge pinned to his uniform. The two of us were standing in the Monroes’ too-yellow living room, but my mind was a decade and a half away.
    â€œOh, yes.” I shook my head out of my daydream, out of my memories of RiChard, and tried to focus again on the situation at hand. Mr. Monroe sat stoically on the sofa, his fingers entwined in his lap. Mrs. Monroe alternated between wringing her hands and rearranging a shelf full of ceramic black angels. Every now and then a muted whimper escaped from her tightly pressed lips.
    The display of nerves and angst in that room was getting to me in more ways than one. It was six thirty. I knew Roman was home. And I was