Page 65 of Behind the Bars

Darker than I’d ever thought possible. The only drops of light were when Ray would call and email me over the years. Two times each week we’d FaceTime each other, and he’d ask me the same thing at the beginning and end of ourconversations.

“You have a good day, SnowWhite?”

Some days those words were enough to bring me to tears, but I never let him hear me sniffling. “Yes,” I’d always tell him. “Everything’sfine.”

I’d lie every time, and he knew it was a lie every time, too, but he never pushed it. He knew how hard I was trying to make it work forMama.

He knew how important it was for me to make her proud. He didn’t understand my need to make her proud, but he respectedit.

While my music career was coming together, everything else around me was falling apart. I hated waking up knowing I was going to go into the studio and lose myself to an industry that wasn’t shaped to love me forme.

Trevor didn’t make it easier,either.

He loved to remind me of my flaws, and then he’d order Mama to have me fixthem.

Ray was right about him—he was a snake. Everything about him made my skin crawl, from his wicked smirk to the way he sometimes touched my lower back when he introduced me topeople.

When I told Mama how uncomfortable he made me, she scoldedme.

“Everything he’s doing is for you, Jasmine. How dare you speak about him in thatway?”

It was different with Trevor than with Ray for her. I noticed it every day. She always backed him up, no matter how wrong he’d been. She looked at Trevor with admiration. To her, he was everything she’d ever wished for. He was the opposite of Ray—which was why I hated him, and Mama loved him. She loved him so much, even though his love for her was mediocre atbest.

All I wanted to do was get that same kind of attention fromher.

That’s all I everwanted.

Each day that passed, it grew easier to forget the good things, to forget the love, to forget warmth, to forget Elliott. When I was young, I thought I’d endured the hardest parts of my life. As I grew older, I would’ve given anything to return to my youth, to the days when a young, broken boy loved a young, damagedgirl.

But life didn’t work like that. The world was determined to shatter every piece of me until my body became a monument of the scars life leftbehind.

* * *

Istayedin London for six years, and it was six years toolong.

I’d given myself to pop music, even though my spirit yearned for soul. Every choice I’d ever made was for my mother. I allowed demeaning comments because she told me they were just words. I let grown men lay their hands on my shoulders, on my back, on my curves, because she said that was just part of theindustry.

“Know your place, Jasmine,” she told me one night after I cried myself to sleep because one of the producers had squeezed my ass. “You knew what you were gettinginto.”

That was a lie, but she believedit.

I wasn’t a person anymore, at least not in hermind.

Sometimes I’d catch Mama smiling at me when I performed, but I knew it wasn’t really me she saw. It was thebrand.

Mama loved the brand, yet she never really lovedme.

I often wondered if she saw the men around us and the way they looked at me. I wondered if she noticed their long embraces, their wandering hands, their low whistles. I wondered if she ignored them because she had her eyes on the prize…because she wanted success more than anything in the world…because she didn’t want to bite the hands that were feedingher.

She’d known herplace.

She’d known what she was gettinginto.

I wondered if she cared that my skin crawled and how my throat burned, that I took long showers to wash away the day and cried myself to sleep each night. I wondered if she cared about me atall.

She was a business woman who ignored the shadows behind closed doors. Her focus was on my talents and increasing them each day. More talents meant more opportunities, more opportunities meant more fame, and more fame meant Mama might be proud ofme.

Each day that passed, I stopped caring a little more about her pride. Each day that passed, I kept saying my new favoriteword.

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