When yes isn't good enough

"Alright Dontrell," I mutter with a shrug of my shoulders as I try and back out of the dark web boiler room. "Whatever you say." Unfortunately my black bully knows me well enough not to be satisfied with that equivocal reply.

"Where do you think you're going?" he demands before I can make my escape, and I whine that I'll be late for school if I don't make my way there now. His short dreadlocks rustle around his ears as he shakes his head. "Nah, if Imma get Lexi blacked today you gotta go home and try the software patch on yo momma phone right now."

I started to object but, though his posture and tone of voice was calm, it was clear to me there was no room for discussion let alone refusal. I check the time and reluctantly agree, asking exactly how I go about giving them the power to track my unsuspecting mother.

At this point Dontrell, apparently a junior member of this conspiracy, looked to the older negroes in the room. The ugliest of them, overweight, unkempt and looking years older than my mother, says I can't be trusted on my own and I should just bring her phone back to him. "This mission is too important to let this whiteboi fuck it up," is how he explains the decision.

I'm offended by the insult and frustrated to be treated like a pawn, but I see my opportunity to get away by agreeing to perform their bidding. In no time I'm finally back out in the sunshine and walking out of the alley and onto the main road. I'm tempted to just ignore their instructions and push on to school, but I know Dontrell and his gang have the means to track me and I worry what might happen to me between here and there.

Ultimately I do walk back through the park and along the quiet residential street back to our house. I unlock the door and let myself back inside, feeling I've struck a spot of luck when I can hear my mom is in the shower. 'She doesn't know anyone else is here,' you reassure yourself. She tends to make her way to work around lunchtime now that she's in the evening anchor chair, recording any field pieces in the afternoon and leaving her mornings for workouts or (as seemingly with today) a leisurely shower and time applying her makeup. All that means I should have plenty of time to bring the awful black strangers to find my former beauty queen mother wherever she's at her most ****.

I sneak into her bedroom and take her mobile phone, feeling the humidity and seeing the whisps of steam from the shower she's enjoying just around the corner in her master bathroom before I make my escape. My gaze is focused on her phone as I walk to and through the front door, confirming that the sweet and trusting woman upstairs has, true to form, used the same numerical code as she did on our house alarm system and granted a bunch of negro perverts access to her privacy through me.