Dangerous Games Read Free

left Seattle for Boston instead of coming straight back to Los Angeles in the first place after school ended for the summer. This was all my fault and no one could tell me any different.

 
     
     
     

 
     

     
    “H ave you started your paper for Abnormal Psychology yet?”
    It just occurred to me perhaps I had smoked a bit too much marijuana at Kyle’s apartment. He was cool and not really boyfriend material but he lived off-campus and sometimes we got together for old time’s sake in exchange for getting high together on the excellent chronic connection he had. The boy knew how to get the good stuff with no seeds and just sent you into a haze of smoke and endless feelings of euphoria and joy.
    “Shit.” I wiped my eyes and hoped they weren’t too red before I stared at my roommate, Amaani. “When’s it due?”
    She was a studious young woman from the Netherlands by way of Somalia. Her English was impeccable and she actually took school seriously. She was also unbelievably gorgeous with her perfect bone structure, mocha colored skin, model-tall height and matching slim figure.
    We were also lovers as well and though we had a very solid relationship, I didn’t want her to know about Kyle. I was still a cheater even if I was just using him for drugs and occasional sex. I had someone special in my life and to cheapen that with casual sex with someone else I barely liked let alone knew didn’t particularly ease my conscience.
    “Two days from now,” Amaani replied before she set a stack of papers in front of me. “I took very detailed notes. Everything is there for you to write a decent paper.”
    I yawned out loud. “I have a better idea. Why don’t I write you a five hundred dollar check and you do the paper for me? Make a few mistakes so Professor Asshole thinks it’s me and I can finally get some rest.”
    I knew she needed the money; her mother had called the other day begging her to send two hundred dollars for something or other regarding her little sister. She had a full ride scholarship. Of course that didn’t absolve the money problems her family constantly suffered back in suburb of Haarlem—the original place as opposed to the tough neighborhood in New York City—where her family resided.
    “This is the fifth paper I have done for you this semester,” Amaani remarked in anger before she said something under her breath in perfect, fluent Dutch. “Fine. You know I need the money so I’ll do it. But really, you should get more serious about school. Is that how all rich kids get their degrees? Someone else—preferably a smart, impoverished foreign student—does all their work for them? And you wonder why you have so many imbeciles in your government.”
    “Are you calling me stupid?”
    “No, Elvira, but I wish you would  apply  yourself.”
    “Thanks, sweetie, but I have a mom, and I don’t need another.”
    “Even if you have one?”
    “Artemis is not my mother. She’s just my dad’s trophy wife. There is a difference you know.”
    Amaani laughed and threw a copy of  Society Magazine  my way before she remarked, “Looks like your mother is working on a trophy Daddy for you too.”
    I grabbed the magazine and quickly searched the contents to find the main story which was about my mother and her new boyfriend. Well, not exactly new as I had known about her dating some French model for a while. My father had mocked her as if he had any room to talk.
    His wife was only twenty-seven though she had a birthday coming up in August; men, even my father, were sexist as usual. It was okay for him to date a British pop star in her twenties but if my mother found a guy who happened to be thirty then she had committed some kind of cardinal sin.
    My mother had been incredibly famous and still was but in her heyday, she’d been in the same sentences as Demi Moore, Michelle Pfeiffer, Meg Ryan, Nicole Kidman and Halle Berry. She was in her forties—forty-five, according to her agent and