“Thanks,” I say before she squeezes my hand and we part ways to search.
You’d think there was going to be a rescue, the way my heart is galloping, and the way my best friend has adopted my anticipation. There’s no reason for her to be as excitable as me at my mother’s arrival, except that Cherish thinks I miss her.
I pause a moment to watch my best friend dash and dip between people. She politely smiles at a party guest wishing her a happy birthday, and then slips away before they can launch a full-on conversation, and I smile.
I wish I’d chosen this. My mother was right—this is where I’d prefer to be, given a choice between a rental home and staying near Cherish. If I’d chosen it, it would’ve made all the difference. I wouldn’t have been sick to my stomach, fixated on what it feels like when someone else decides. I wouldn’t have had to reject it, and make myself miserable. Because Cherish is the most important thing to me. Even when I’m imagining tiny tortures to inflict upon her, I never go through with them, not the ones that couldn’t be explained away—and being near her is how I learned which are which.
Cherish is why I’m not burning everything down.
We go together. We still will when my parents have set everything right and I choose to stay here anyway.
I’ve zigzagged through the tiers of the Whitmans’ backyard, among the guests still milling around even though the catering staff has obviously begun deconstruction and the property is being restored to its former, unstaged glory. I still haven’t found my mother, so I give up and pull out my phone.
Where are you? I text, and then take a deep, painful breath.
I’m finished with the heart palpitations, the insistent acid reflux, and the way it feels like my blood is lava sometimes. I’m finished with the symptoms of a Farrah who is completely at someone else’s mercy. Who doesn’t know what’s coming next.
Enough.
I force myself to take another breath, this one just as deep. When it still pinches, I take a third. Because this will not continue, and I will not wait to hear my mother say the words to know that this nightmare state of being is over. I will not allow her voice to relieve the pressure.
My parents have done what I asked.
I am getting my home back.
I am in control and I am keeping Cherish. I will bask in the Whitmans’ adoration without distraction.
I take a fourth breath, and it’s full and easy.
I’m already heading back up to the house when my phone buzzes.
It isn’t Nichole Turner.
Found her. Come to my room—QUIETLY.
I bunch my eyebrows, but when I get inside, I don’t bound up the stairs like a reverse Christmas morning scene. I see Cherish standing outside her slightly open double doors, holding a finger in front of her lips, and I widen my eyes to let her know I get it. This isn’t my first time eavesdropping.
She both motions and mouths that my mom is inside, and I nod before quietly taking my place opposite her to listen to whatever’s happening on the other side of the bedroom doors.
Immediately I wish I hadn’t. Or I wish I were at least hearing this alone.
“I don’t know how I’m going to tell her.” It’s supposed to be my mother, but she’s speaking in a voice I’m not used to. Nichole Turner is sure of every word that escapes her lips. Whoever is speaking right now sounds wounded, and it doesn’t make sense.
This can’t be my mother—unless this is a mask I’ve never seen.
“I’ve been racking my brain the entire drive, but I—” She gives up then, and I recoil like I’ve been hit. “Brianne.”
Something about the way she says her friend’s name draws my guts into a knot. The Whitman house is a comfortable temperature, as always, even with the constant in and out of the guests today, but I feel sweat pricking my upper lip. Because she seems . . . genuine. Which makes me pay attention to what she’s saying.
I don’t know how I’m going to tell her.
Because apparently what’s happened so far hasn’t been the worst thing. Someone else deciding what I lose and what I keep is somehow going to be outdone.
Maybe I haven’t been giving myself enough credit. Maybe the sick anxiety that’s plagued me hasn’t been a kind of self-flagellation; maybe it’s been knowing. An internal alarm system, warning me that this is not rock bottom. Because now my mother has something new to tell me and it can’t just be losing the same house twice. It’s making her sound like someone else.
“Farrah won’t understand.”
“What do you mean?” Brianne Whitman asks. “Of course she will. She’ll be upset, Nicki, but—”
“Brianne,” she says, and something in her tone alters again. There’s one thing she’s afraid to tell me, but there’s something else she’s considering telling her friend. Something she hasn’t even tried to tell my dad.
I won’t burst into the room. I’m not going to stop her, even though I can already hear her in my head. I can replay the times Nichole Turner has tried to ease into the subject with me, even though I never acknowledged it. Because part of maintaining her own mask has always entailed criticizing mine, and I’ve never understood why.
“Farrah’s,” she begins, and then she stops. She falters immediately—or else she wants Brianne Whitman to pry it out of her. She knows it isn’t the kind of thing that can be believed without evidence. And I haven’t given the Whitmans any, despite my funk.
In the hallway, I smile.
Control.
“Farrah can be demanding. Difficult.”
“I don’t think I know a teenager who isn’t,” Brianne answers easily.
“I know. Of course.” There’s a heavy sigh.
“Nichole. What’s the matter?”
There it is. The invitation my mother was hoping would make this easier to say. Brianne is curious. Now I wait to see how far she’ll go.
Even if she says it in plain English, Cherish won’t understand. At least there’s that. I can tend to the dark smoke curling out of Cherish’s open door, pouring out of my mother’s mouth and crawling along the floor as though it will spill all the way down the stairs and soil the whole house. I can stop the murky cloud before it passes our feet and I can cover Cherish with it. Just for now. While Cherish doesn’t matter, while nothing I learned from her is of any use because it’s the real me my mother is trying to describe. I can blot Cherish out because she isn’t even the one my mother is telling, not on purpose.
Brianne is the one sitting across from my mother on my best friend’s bed; Brianne, who recently told me in front of a garden full of people that I complete her family. That I am welcome here. That’s who my mother is trying to poison—but she’s hesitating.