Still Waters

Chapter 22

The thing was, it did seem to be transforming Drama into a whole new person. I mean, he didn't drink anymore, didn't smoke. Don't get me wrong, he was still Drama, always trying to drop knowledge about the upliftment of somebody, always down for a good fight if he needed to get in it, but now he was more likely to try to stop a fight rather than start one. He stopped cussing so much, too, which I attributed more to his being around Shayna than church. I think we all started watching our mouths a little more around her after she started getting all religified on us. Well, after she reclaimed her religious upbringing, I should say, since her father was an Army chaplain.

Kenney, on the other hand, hadn't changed since the day I met him. He had always been like one of those holograms. If you looked at him straight on, he appeared to be this no drinking, no smoking, rarely cussing guy, extra serious all the time, always going over to his aunt's house and taking her to church. Super faithful to his girlfriend. Well...maybe that part had changed. He went from trying to hump everything with a round butt, hips and boobs to only wanting her.

I could appreciate that, though. Before we broke up, I could only hope that Collin was the same way.

The thing about Kenney, though, was that if you looked at him long enough from a different angle, you could tell that there was someone else just beneath the surface of all that tranquility. Someone moody and volatile that I couldn't ever quite figure out. Either side could flash out at you at any given moment, but that dark side was the side of him that I had always wanted to get to know. Truth be told, that was probably the side that fueled my inexplicable attraction to him. I was, after all, that chick.

And I knew it.

Kenney didn't really seem to be trying to hide anything, he just appeared to be keeping his dark side in serious check. He was the complete opposite of most other guys our age. Most guys usually walked around flaunting their roughneck side...or faking it - whichever shoe fit - and hiding their inner nerd. But Kenney never really flaunted or hid either side. That was just him. He never volunteered any information about anything. And the more I got to know Kenney, the harder it was for me to tell which side had the greatest pull on him.

Of course just when I started getting used to having Kenney around again, Collin came slithering back into my life like an unseen fog. I don't know where he came from, but the next thing I knew, he was back. It started out with his whole little "I miss you" act, which I didn't buy for a minute...this time. Then came the phone calls, then the flowers, and then he just started showing up places that he knew I was going to be.

One afternoon, Kenney, Shayna and I went to go see Drama perform a kind of spoken word/ one man show that he was trying to put together for a BET audition tape. For some reason, he figured he could sell them on this idea of having a whole thirty minute segment dedicated to nothing but spoken word. Of course, that was back when - thanks to Love Jones - poetry was just making a comeback with black folks, so none of us really believed that it would ever happen. Well, Shayna did. She was always down for Drama, no matter what his scheme of the week was. Who knew a few years later Russell Simons would not only carry out the very idea that Drama was proposing, but also have a hit Broadway show about it? At the time, though, the idea seemed as farfetched as his whole "microchips in the vaccinations" theory.

Again, who knew?

Drama was amazing that night. I knew, as sure as I sat out in the audience, just as enthralled as the next person that he was going to be powerful and influential...in whatever he ended up doing. He was so talented, he could do just about everything. But his true love had always been hip-hop. He used to tell us that he was going to be a "hip hop historian" when he graduated. Kenney and I used to laugh our ass off and ask where the hell they did that at, but Shayna never laughed. She always believed in everything he set out to do.