Fabulous Read Free

all the access that goes along with it.
    From GAP to Dolce & Gabbana.
    Everything changed…well, almost everything.
    She still lived in Newark…with her mom…in a two-bedroom apartment that could fit inside her father’s new living room. She loved Newark and all her Brick City friends. But the other side of the world where Starr and Marisol were her BFFs and she was one-third of the über-popular Pacesetters…well, she loved it more.
    She wished she could live in that world full-time but there were three things that would have to happen:
    1) Her mother and father, who only dated for three months, some sixteen odd years ago—would have to decide to get together again. (The way they fought…uhm, that was a definite no!) 2) Her mother would have to agree to let her only child live with her father. (The devil had a better chance of ice-skating in hell.) And 3) Her father would have to stay off the road long enough to agree to let her live with him. (Humph, Daddy loves being Lahron the Don on that stage…so who knows?)
    Dressed in a fitted turquoise Polo shirt with a metallic big pony logo, Dionne checked the MAC polish on her toenails for dryness before she removed the lime-green toe separators. She studied her toes while bopping her head to the beat of Beyoncé’s video on MTV Jams. The front door opened just as she hit a high note along with Mrs. B. “Didi, what did I tell you ’bout watchin’ all them dang-on videos?”
    Mommy’s home.
    Dionne used the remote to turn the volume down so that the bass of the music didn’t make the African sculptures on the wall bounce.
    “Thank you,” Risha Hunt called from the kitchen.
    Dionne sighed, thinking about her situation as she worked the four thin gold bangles around her left wrist. Usually the bracelets brought her out of the blues. Each of the bangles was engraved with comforting words: LOVE, FAITH, PEACE and STRENGTH . They were gifts from Starr and Marisol for her fifteenth b-day this past June.
    She smiled as she remembered the girls gushing to her about a mention in a fashion magazine that said Mariah Carey, Halle Berry and Jessica Simpson owned them. Dionne didn’t have her own Amex like the other girls—her Moms said she was way too young—so she couldn’t afford the three-thousand-dollar price tag. Heck, it took her mom two whole months to make that working at University Medical Center.
    Her bracelets helped get her through a summer of only being able to see her Pacesetter friends on her webcam or on the random weekends her dad was off the road long enough for her to spend time with him in the city. Hopefully they would help her get over not being there with her dad at his very first VMAs. Her mom vetoed the whole thing because she didn’t want her to miss school on Monday.
    Dionne climbed off the couch and made her way into the kitchen. Her mom—who at thirty-five years old looked more like her sister—turned to look over her shoulder. “Girl, school starts tomorrow and you cooped up in this house?” she asked, leaving the wooden spoonin the pot of leftover spaghetti she was warming up for dinner. “Joshia and Kim are on their stoop.”
    Dionne just shrugged. Her Moms would never understand that her friendship with her ex-BFFs was soooo finito. Either they were carrying on like groupies about her father or they were giving her the cold shoulder because they were jealous of her new designer clothes and her trips down the red carpet or her pictures in magazines…or a gazillion other things she thought were so lame of them to get mad about. At Pace, just about everybody was somebody so there was none of that “Oh, my gosh your dad is Lahron the Don” BS.
    “I am soooo ready for the first day of school,” Dionne grumbled as she reached in the front pocket of her Rock & Republic jeans for the small and flat glass container holding her favorite lip gloss in sheer peach.
    Risha’s two pairs of gold bamboo doorknockers clanged lightly against each