“But when you came along, they were relieved,” she says. “Just like your folks.”
Just like my folks.
Like she could hear what I didn’t say. Like maybe, despite saying not everyone’s out to get me, when it comes to her parents, she can misinterpret harmless statements as a challenge.
Maybe she’s asserting that she’s loved just the same. She’s protected, and considered, and guarded just like I am, and her parents being white doesn’t change that. She’s saying it doesn’t matter who they are, as long as they know who she is.
A series of muted xylophone notes play over the intercom, signaling the end of the period, and doors calmly open, footfalls spilling out into the hall. Pretty soon, someone will come in and undo the pleasant emptiness I’ve been enjoying.
“You’ll still come home tonight?” Cherish asks me, because there is a room for me in the smaller house on the other side of town. Even if they’ve betrayed me, my parents didn’t go somewhere where there wasn’t room for me, too. Which makes it a wonder they let me stay at the Whitmans’ at all.
I hate anyone knowing I’m surprised. When someone throws open the door of the break room and loud voices spill inside, it covers the little gasp I make. Cherish doesn’t hear me; I’m glad she’s looking over her shoulder at the intruders, so she doesn’t see the way a realization carves into my face.
Of course I know why my parents let me go to the Whitmans’. Why they arranged it before even asking me whether or not I’d want to.
It was jarring before I overheard our mothers talking. I was getting whiplash going back and forth between conflicted thoughts. One moment, it made perfect sense in a selfless, considerate, parental way that hoped I could be distracted from the drama, and the next moment it was confusing and excessive.
It makes sense now. Now that I know they’ve been faking it and my dad has been traveling, and all along, I’ve known nothing about it . . . it makes sense.
It was easier to keep me in the dark if I wasn’t there to know there was a secret in the first place. It was easier to hide that they didn’t want to save the house if I wasn’t there to question why they weren’t.
Control is why I don’t send the empty apple juice glass careening to the ground.
Control is why I don’t take it in both my hands, raise them above my head, and crash them into the table so the container can shatter in my palms.
My blood doesn’t rush between my fingers in thick red currents because I am in control.
“I need your car,” I say instead, and Cherish whirls back around to face me.
“After school? Or you mean now?” One of her eyebrows curled high. “Your parents aren’t expecting you until this evening.”
“I know.” I smile as I slide the key ring from her finger.
* * *
—
I SQUEAL OUT of the parking lot in Cherish’s pearlescent bauble of a car a bit more aggressively than I intend to, but it’s more determination than reckless abandon. There are no other hallmarks of carefree teendom on display. The sunroof isn’t open, and the wind isn’t whipping through my hair. I’m not filling the late morning air with the percussive chillstep I’ve forced Cherish to love.
I need quiet. I didn’t use to; I could strategize on my feet, in the moment, but these past few weeks have taken their toll and finally knowing the truth doesn’t change that. Not yet. It still takes concentration to decide exactly how this information must be wielded to produce the desired result. It even takes a moment to process the fact that this weakened state was my mother’s intention. My parents’ lies and betrayal have been a sinister kind, destabilizing me enough that realizing them has taken effort—not to mention retaliating.
I say “my parents,” but something so sinister and perfect could only have been Nichole Turner’s work. My dad’s just a person, easy to ignore. He would realistically think all the stress and trauma of losing my home could be mitigated by letting me cocoon with my best friend. Only someone like my mother—someone like me—would know the torment it would cause, appearing to give me what I want, when all I ever really need is control. From her, this would be a precision attack. Only she could’ve devised this plot to buy them time.
I didn’t grow up on this side of town where the boulevards are wider and the street signs are bigger, like they’re advertising the fact that, by contrast, the homes are small. The yards are, too, and it means the houses are sometimes so close it looks like you can hear everything that happens at your neighbor’s place. It’s claustrophobic, not cozy.
I’m sure homes are made of relatively similar stuff, no matter which neighborhood, and there are trees here, too, even if they aren’t white birch. It isn’t as manicured and precise as when the residents pay a fee to keep it that way, and that means that there will be the inevitable eyesores.
It isn’t lost on me that there are immediately more people who look like me. I’m still in the suburbs, of course, and there are still plenty of white people, but there is so much more. Which is supposed to make it feel like home. It’s supposed to mean I’m rejecting them if I say I deserve better than this.
But I do. This is a downgrade. This isn’t where I was raised. I didn’t get the internal chip that makes me gravitate to our assigned seats. It isn’t because I don’t recognize the brutal terrors that necessitated that self-preservation. It’s just that I am confident I could do worse. That if I uncoiled myself, if control ever began to mean something other than strictly maintaining a mask for the rest of the world—I am capable of terrorizing them back.
I turn onto the street where my parents live, and even though I tore out of school like I wanted to confront them, a wave of relief passes over me. I want to flip a switch and be over it now that I know it was my mother’s orchestrated attack. I want to go back to being quiet and quietly underestimated in that way that also lets me go unsuspected, but I still need a few minutes more than I used to.
There aren’t any cars in the driveways, and that includes theirs. It’s the middle of the morning, but I don’t actually know that my mother’s been supplementing with her notary license, like she said. For that matter, I don’t know that their cars being gone means they’re working at all. I am choosing to believe something is as it should be because it serves me. Whether I like it or not, it’s stabilizing, being able to trust my parents. I need that if I’m going to be sane enough to spar with them. With her.
I park at the curb because this sad excuse for a house has a one-car garage and a car-length driveway, which means there’s only enough designated space for my parents’ cars—and I want them to notice the way I keep out of it.
I can’t get to the front door. Halfway up the path running parallel to the driveway and cutting even farther into what was already a modest lawn, I stop and just . . . stare.