Read Seen It All and Done the Rest for Free Online

there were many people I didn’t recognize. I wondered if that was because I’d been away so long or just that so many of these “celebrities” looked barely old enough to vote, much less to be called stars. Most of them seemed to come from the world of very recent pop culture with an emphasis on reality television and rap music.
    I was beginning to wonder if Zora had gotten my message, when I turned the page, and there she was, splashed across the cover feature on “Looking Good While Being Bad.” They got that right. In every photograph of her, Zora looked absolutely beautiful. There she was, dancing with an attractive young man in a crowded nightclub. There she was, having drinks with him the same night, smiling seductively. She obviously had no idea she was being photographed. There were also several of her entering or leaving the campus at Spelman, wearing huge sunglasses and shielding her face with her hands. One photographer even secretly snapped her leaving the West End News. In that shot, she looked drawn and tense.
    MacArthur brought over my pie and coffee and I smiled my thanks, but I couldn’t stop staring at Zora. She hadn’t even looked that unhappy at her father’s funeral, but I guess that was a moment for which she had time to prepare. This was a violent disruption of her life that she didn’t see coming until she crashed into the middle of it and found herself surrounded by enough paparazzi to be a Hollywood starlet out with Paris Hilton for a night on the town. Poor baby. She didn’t even know that the worst thing you can do is try to hide your face. It just makes them more determined to get the shot of you hiding.
    The copy read: “Even in the middle of one of the most scandalous moments in Atlanta’s recent history, Zora Evans, the mystery coed of last year’s biggest, sexiest murder mystery, managed to look good enough to eat!”
    “Mafeenie, I can’t believe you’re reading that trash!”
    Zora’s voice sounded indignant and embarrassed just above my head. I looked up to find her standing behind me, frowning like she had caught me performing a very unnatural act in a very public place. She was alarmingly thin and her hair was pulled back tightly from her face.
    “My darling girl,” I said, tossing the offending tabloid aside and rising to embrace her. “You’re here at last!”
    She felt like skin and bones.
How much weight had she lost?
    “And not a minute too soon,” she said, hugging me tightly in spite of my choice of reading material.
    I leaned back and looked at her without breaking the circle of my embrace. “How are you, darlin’?”
    “I’m fine,” she said, squirming a little under my unrelenting scrutiny.
    She had lost fifteen or twenty pounds easily and her usually creamy smooth complexion looked sallow and muddy. With no hair to soften her newly narrow face, her cheekbones jutted out, sharp and heartless.
    “How much weight have you lost?”
    “Can I order a drink before you begin your interrogation?” she said, wriggling free and flopping into the seat across from mine.
    “Of course you can,” I said. “Jet lag has ruined my manners! Are you starving? Order something to eat!”
    “I’m not hungry,” she said as MacArthur hurried over with a menu. She barely glanced at him. “Stoli on the rocks.”
    “Coming right up,” he said.
    Zora ordering vodka was even more of a surprise than her weight. I had never seen her drink anything stronger than a glass of opening-night champagne. The copy of
Dig It!
I’d tossed on the table had fallen open to the editor’s column, which ran beside a photograph of a handsome young man with big brown eyes and very white teeth. Zora tapped the picture with her fingertip.
    “I threw a drink in that guy’s face once.”
    “You did?” I was impressed. Drink throwing is a dying art in the modern world.
    She nodded. “I walked in here one day and there he was sitting at the bar watching the Braves game and drinking a