The schoolboy.
“Not like those other two,” they would hiss under their breath.
One brother felt the world was always conspiring against him. The other one felt he owned the world.
Me? I was here simply trying to survive in it.
“Do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband? To have and to hold? For richer . . . or for poorer? In sickness and in health? ’Til death do you part?” he dramatically asked the veiled bride, each rehearsed question and subsequent pause eliciting a chuckle from the intimate gathering, while twisting my already nervous stomach even more.
“Yes! I . . . I do,” she gasped, futilely holding her tears at bay in this moment she’d probably rehearsed a million times in front of the mirror. Sure, this wasn’t exactly how she’d planned it either, but the end result was the same: She’d be a bride. I held her hand firmly in mine, doing my best to remain strong.
It’s going to be okay. This is right. This is what you want, I thought to myself.
“And you, Lavernius,” the Reverend Johnson, happy to be presiding over his best friend’s daughter’s wedding, began. “Do you take this lovely woman to be your lawfully wedded wife? To have and to hold? For richer or for poorer? In sickness and in health? ’Til death do you part?”
As everyone turned to me, it was so quiet that you could hear a mouse fart.
“Lavernius?” the Reverend prodded as my fiancée looked into my eyes, tears now fully formed and running amok down her delicate cheeks.
I knew what I had to say. And what I had to do.
I wasn’t like my brothers.
“I—”
1975
Lavernius “LC”
I checked the simple, black Timex watch on my wrist while pretending I was playing the trumpet with my other hand. Kool and the Gang’s “Jungle Boogie” was on the radio and just getting to my favorite part. You know, where the horns first kick in. Too bad one of the speakers was damaged and crackled with static each time I tried to turn the volume knob past three. DJ Tony Mitchell was spinning the best music in town on GROOVE 770 AM. Before long, he would be out of tiny Hillcroft, Georgia and working the request lines at FM stations in the big cities like Atlanta or Birmingham. He was just that good.
“I don’t feel comfortable about this,” she said, nervously wrapping her hand around my shaft, peering over the old van’s cracked and faded dashboard. I’d parked us in the corner of the lot, away from anyone else, which gave us some privacy.
“Nah. You’re good. Keep going,” I replied to my fiancée, Donna, coaxing her to get back to business. Besides, I was still doing the air trumpet to Kool and the Gang. Get down, get down. Get down, get down.
I planned to drop Donna off at home after class, but she promised me something special if I let her tag along. I knew that the reason she wanted to come along was because she didn’t trust my brother’s influence and wanted to mark her territory and remind him that I was taken and not free to cat around like him. Not that I would have even looked at another girl, because my brother and I were cut from an entirely different cloth.
Shoot, I felt lucky that a girl like Donna had even given me a second look. She was nothing like the girls I had grown up knowing. For one, she was really classy. Donna’s father was a doctor, and she came from three generations of college-educated professionals. Her father graduated from Morehouse, and her mother from Spellman. In my family, I was the only one that had graduated from high school, and now I was in my third year of college.