I take her hand across the table.
“Cherish.”
“What,” she says, but she’s not looking at me.
“It’s not called kidnapping when parents relocate with their own child.” I smile when she yanks her hand away. It always eases my own anxiety to see it on her. “Okay, I’m sorry. But that isn’t gonna happen, I promise. They’re going to say yes.” She’s still not looking at me, so I pull gently on her hand. “I will make sure they do.”
“You’re gonna tell them you don’t wanna go, and that’s it? You really think it’s gonna be that easy?”
“Yep. Because I don’t wanna go. And obviously that matters to them, or they wouldn’t have let me come to your house in the first place.”
“That’s temporary, Farrah. Why would they leave you here? Even if we want them to?”
“Well, first of all, if you’re going to convince someone that what you’re asking isn’t a big deal, it’s probably a good idea to believe it yourself. How many kids have left the academy because they were going to boarding school?” I ask, and Cherish nibbles on the inside of her lip. “That’s normal, right?”
But her mind’s on something else.
“What?” I ask, and tug on her hand again. “What are you really worried about?”
She takes a moment to collect herself and then puts on as brave a face as she can manage.
“You’re really gonna ask . . . right?”
“What?” I squint at her.
“It’s just. I know you haven’t been having as good a time staying with me as I thought you would,” Cherish says, looking at me from under a tented brow. Her puppy-dog expression is all the more endearing because someone like Cherish could only achieve it genuinely. “I thought it’d be fun, you and me, like one of the sleepovers we tried to make last forever.”
She smiles, her dimple puncturing her cheek in the dimly lit break room. It shouldn’t be pretty, but it is. Like a collapsing star.
“But I haven’t been as sensitive as I could’ve been,” she goes on, and I let her. “About . . . why you’re with me. I didn’t really get it until we went back to your old house.”
She finally lifts her head and for a moment we just study each other.
“I just want you to know, I’ll do better,” she says. “If you stay.”
“I know,” I tell her. “And yes. I’m really gonna ask. Okay?”
She nods and pulls my hand to her side of the table.
Cherish isn’t built like me. She isn’t resilient. She’s a masterpiece, but that also means that she’s exhaustible. A facade of a world has been built around her; the slightest exposure to the real one is depleting. I have to remember that.
I have to coddle her back to calm.
“You don’t understand how much we accomplished with those slumber parties. Before you, there was no such thing as a sleepover in the middle of the school week!”
Cherish shakes her head like she’s never heard such a thing, but she’s starting to smile.
“I couldn’t even stay the full next day; I’m serious. Sleepovers ended abruptly at noon, no matter what. Nonnegotiable. None of this all-day lounging. You woke with the birds, had breakfast, and it was time to go home.”
“My God.” She looks like she’s just watched someone stab a kitten. “Why would you do that?!”
I shrug, snorting.
“So what made them change their minds? How’d we manage to get you from serious lockdown to weeklong turns at each other’s houses?” she asks, and I pause for a moment, but not because I don’t know the answer.
You aren’t protecting me, I’d told my mom after a tear-filled plea hadn’t swayed my parents and my dad was out of the room. Black parents being overly stern and restricting? You’re not teaching me to be careful in the world; you’re teaching me that you’ll hurt me first. You always tell me no before they ever do.
I wasn’t crying anymore, but the tears were still on my face. I knew from my mother’s calm disquiet what they must have looked like, paired with a mismatched steady expression. When she answered, I knew for certain that she could tell which were real and which was fake.
I don’t say no because I’m a Black mother. I have to say no because I’m your mother.
I rewarded her honesty with a fresh sheet of tears spilling down my otherwise unaffected face.
To Cherish, I offer a smile.
“My parents love you as much as your parents love me. You know that, right?”
Cherish’s cheeks lift despite herself, and she glances back down at her ring. I don’t buy for a second that she’s sheepish or that the question wasn’t a fishing expedition, but her expression is adorable, and I need to have this at the ready anyway, in case I have to remind my parents how much our friendship means to them, too.
“They were worried about sending me here,” I say, gesturing around as though all of the academy is in this break room. My other hand still holds hers, and I pull it a bit more toward me so she has to lean in. “It’s one of the impossible paradoxes my dad’s always talking about. Knowing what to sacrifice for, and when the sacrifice will cost more than the goal is worth. They weren’t sure this education—any!—was gonna outweigh the fact of being the only Black girl here.”
I almost say that that’s never what it is, but the truth might be too complex for Cherish. Because being the only one is the part we say out loud. What happens to you when you’re the only one, because you’re the only one, the treatment you endure and the constant state of unease and hypervisibility—that’s what we mean. Being bullied in a way no one thinks is bullying, because no one on the staff looks like you, and anyway they daily barrage you with microaggressions, too.
I don’t say it, and it’s not because it’s too complicated. It’s because if I mention how Cherish is the other Black girl who made all the difference to my parents, I won’t be able to keep from saying that Cherish is always the only one. In her house, in the sanctuary everyone has with their family, she’s the only Black girl there, too. And that’s the kind of thing you only get to say once—to great effect anyway.
“My parents worry about the same thing,” she tells me. “I mean, I was allowed to have regular sleepovers before you.” And she throws me a hilarious side-eye.
“One night is regular!”
“It’s not, you were deprived, and I feel sorry for you, stop.”
“Shuttup!” I toss her hand away and she grabs mine back.