Priceless Inspirations Read Online Free PDF Page A

cool.
    I wanted the guy that all of the other girls wanted because I thought if I had the popular boy, I would be popular, too. Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it . I dated pretty boys and popular boys, and dating those boys ended up being just a crazy mess for me all through school.
    Keith was pretty. He was tall and handsome. He was also a year older than me and one of the most popular guys at my high school. When he played basketball on the courts near my Aunt Grace’s house, which is where I was living at that moment, I’d talk with him a bit after his games. Nothing serious, but he definitely knew who I was.
    We had one class together in the period just before lunch. I was only a freshman, but I used to skip out on the cafeteria and go to lunch outside the school with the seniors. One day we started talking after class, and the next thing I knew, we had left the school and gone to one of his friend’s house. Almost as soon as we were alone, he started talking about sex.
    I don’t remember exactly what he said , but it was clear what he wanted to do . He started going on about how beautiful I was, and how much he cared about me and all that. He was kissing me and rubbing me and I was getting into it. Clothes started coming off and things got really heated.
    At the last moment, and I mean the last moment, I called it off. It was happening too fast, and I guess I still didn’t feel ready. I had an idea in my mind about how it should be, and fooling around at his friend’s house wasn’t in the plan. I didn’t want to just give it up during the lunch break and go on back to school. Having sex with his friends right there in the next room made it seem like I was some kind of freak. I wanted better than that.
    Keith didn’t force me to have sex with him like some dudes would have done. At the same time, he wasn’t happy about my saying “no.” I learned later that, for him, sex was all I was about. He wasn’t really that interested in me at all. I was just another girl he could brag to his crew that he’d had.
    I still really liked Keith when I met this kid that everyone called “Dream.” He performed in shows around town in a group. I met him for the first time right after my high school talent show. He and his group had performed, and after the show, me and some of my friends were in a nearby convenience store getting some snacks. Dream was there with his boys.
    “Hey, hand me them doughnuts!”
    Those were the first words he ever said to me.
    I didn’t know him yet. Like I said, I still liked Keith and Dream wasn’t really my type. I thought he might be trying to talk to me, and I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know him like that. I snatched up a pack of doughnuts and threw them at him.
    “Damn,” Dream smiled and shook his head at me. “If you gonna come at me like that, you ought to at least get to know me first. Let me give you my number.” He scribbled his phone number on the back of a piece of brown paper bag and handed it to me.
    I found out later that he was a rapper, though he wasn’t anything near as successful as he is now, and people all around New Orleans knew him. His thing was that he’d leave these raps on his voicemail and people would call him up just to listen to them. If you hit him on his pager, you’d hear his latest rap and there were new ones all the time. People would call his pager all the time just to hear the raps. He’d already been with Cash Money Records for six years when I met him in 1997.
    People always think I knew about Dream’s record deal when I first met him, and that I had some plan to hook up with a bailer or a rapper. I really didn’t know who he was or what he did. Sure, I thought it might be cool to hook up with a guy like that, but I wasn’t really going out searching for that. Besides, I was 13 years old, still just a kid. Like most 13 year olds, my life was high school. I was thinking about dating the guys on the basketball team.