“This house belongs to me,” I pant, and we stand upright. Our laughter dissipates for a moment while we tower over the burial site. Cherish lays her head on my shoulder and sighs, and it sounds so satisfied that I can’t help but smile.
Behind us, the car’s still parked halfway in the drive, its headlights still illuminating the bottom of the stake. We walk past it up the driveway, without dimming them.
“How do you even get hired by someone in a different state?” I ask.
“I don’t know.”
“That probably means they’ve been lying to me this whole time,” I say, as though the thought is new. I temper the strength of my conviction so that Cherish doesn’t think I’m being paranoid—or demanding.
“Doesn’t it?” I ask, nudging her with my words as we futilely peek through the panels on either side of the door and into the darkened entryway. “If he’s got a job offer, doesn’t it mean he’s known for longer than the two weeks I’ve been at your place? Probably, right? It seems like he had to know we were never moving back home.”
“I don’t know how any of this works . . .”
I feel my face go slack as I pretend I’m still looking through the narrow window on my side of the door. Because maybe she doesn’t mean for it to sound the way it does.
It sounds like I may be accustomed to unfortunate situations now, but they are still entirely foreign to her. But she wouldn’t act WGS right now, this very minute, unless she wanted to humiliate me.
There’s a prickle at the back of my neck, but there’s no breeze tonight. The air is completely still, but it feels like something is teasing my skin for a response. I shrug and then make a circle with my shoulders.
Gracious, I hear in my mom’s voice, before my chin ticks in a discreet refusal.
Control.
Because there’s a chance Cherish is just being honest. She should be smarter. She should think of how her words will sound to someone in my position, but she’s probably never known anyone who lost a house. I haven’t.
The night I moved in with Cherish, when we stayed up all night just holding each other and staring at the ceiling, she’d said she didn’t even know banks were involved in homeownership. I almost pinched the tender skin above her elbow then, too—but I hadn’t known it, either.
“Come on,” I say, and I take her hand before I steal around the side of my house. There’s a simple gate there, enclosing our impressive “outdoor living spaces,” but all I have to do is reach over and unlatch it to gain entry because nothing has changed.
This house is still mine, and neither the bank nor my parents nor anyone else has anything to say about it. I’ll give it up if and when I decide to. Not before.
I pull Cherish inside the gate behind me, and now there’s a little bit of electricity in the air. We’re both smiling wide, only barely holding back the resurgence of giggling and then letting some out on purpose. There’s an accelerating current inside me, like I’m somewhere I’m not supposed to be—or like I know something no one else does.
This is still my backyard.
The covered back porch is wide, as always, but it doesn’t have any lights spiraling down the posts, and the patio outside my parents’ back door is missing its charming bistro table and chairs. The brick fireplace is empty, has clearly benefited from a deeper clean than we ever gave it, and although the waterfall isn’t running, the pool lights are.
It’s like it knew I’d be coming.
The stone mosaics inside the pool and the spa are illuminated in a warm and calming glow, the way they were every night I can remember. The light dances across the small stones, waves of it undulating beneath mostly still water, making it easy to believe that everything’s still just as it was.
“How many times did we sneak out here to swim in the middle of the night after my parents went to bed?” I ask.
Cherish laughs and glances back at their door, like any minute they might wake up and catch us, even though they never did.
“So ridiculously unsafe,” I say, shaking my head as though at young Che and RahRah.
I want to see how Cherish responds. She heard what my mother said. I need to know whether she understood it. More than that, I need to know that she still belongs to me.
“Pfft,” she says with a roll of her eyes. “We knew how to swim.”
“Accidents happen,” I tell her, and then my eyes drift from the stones that only look soft because they’re under peaceful water. Because there’s brick bordering the pool, and stones that might constitute boulders separating the pool from the spa—and because skin breaks so easily. “What if we’d slipped on the way in or out of the water and cracked our skulls out here? One of us could easily have drowned before anyone knew we were out of bed.”
“O . . . kay. That wasn’t not creepy.” But she still laughs. She’s still holding my hand.
She isn’t staring or startled by all the sharp edges I mentioned. She isn’t imagining how blood might plume beautifully in the illuminated water, like I am. All she’s thinking of is the memory I’ve recalled, and the idea it’s implanted.
“Are we doing this or what?” Cherish asks, like the thought is hers.
“Are we doing what?”
When I look at her, Cherish untangles our fingers and pulls her shirt over her head. She pulls her voluminous twist out up and off her neck, binding it in a high bun and leaving her two long cornrows to frame her face.
“Che.”
She glances at me, unzipping her Bermuda shorts and sliding them down over her narrow hips.
“We can’t.” I resist again so she’ll prove her resolve.
She continues looking at me, prying one shoe off with the toe of the other. It’s a silent challenge—or so she thinks—and she does a good job maintaining the expressionless calm. She almost looks like she’s not doing anything out of the ordinary, while telling me with her eyes that I have to do the same.
I’m chewing my bottom lip again, but it’s only to fight the wide grin threatening to spread my lips and expose my teeth.
I stare back at my best friend and start undoing the three buttons on my shirtdress so that Cherish finally breaks into a smile. In a moment, we’re laughing again, and I’m so warm inside that the paler brown skin on my chest might be flushed.
Once undressed, I part my hair and start a French braid with one half, before Cherish takes the other half and does the same, binding her fingers in my hair and then freeing them to do the next crisscross. When both my braids are done, she ties their ends in a knot at the back of my head and then pulls me backward into her by the shoulders.