I’ll even deliver my dad’s cooking to Cherish, like she needs anything else, and I’ll put up with being around her ass of a boyfriend. Because, no matter what, I’d always rather be with her than not.
Everything is going to be okay now.
When I get to the Campbells’, which is almost a compound, with a guard’s office right before the very imposing-looking gate, I’m welcomed. The housekeeper does the same when she lets me in and tells me the kids are all still in the entertainment room off the pool. I’m almost there when I hear something crash. It’s followed by an eruption of loud voices.
“You really think I care, Tariq? You think I’m scared of you?”
I walk a little faster, and when I’m in the doorway, I find Cherish, Tariq, and Kelly sprinkled throughout the space. They’re standing far enough apart that, at first, I can’t make sense of what’s already happened.
Cherish is in the middle of the room, on the same side of the long, wide sectional sofa as Tariq, and she ducks when Kelly makes a throwing motion, even though whatever he grabbed from the floor-to-ceiling bookcase behind him wasn’t headed anywhere near her. It bursts against the wall a good five feet from Tariq, too, but that’s when I notice something’s not right.
Tariq’s got what looks like road rash across his forehead, and one of his eyes is surrounded by bloody and broken skin, like a purple doughnut is growing underneath. It looks like he crashed into something with his face—or something crashed into him.
I lift my hands as though to pause the scene, but Kelly goes right on yelling about not being afraid of Tariq when it looks like he’s finally proven he’s the one they should be afraid of.
“Cherish,” I say, when the trio fails to take notice of my arrival, and as I expected, the sight of me sends Kelly into a lather.
“Are you kidding me? I thought you were going home, little hobo!”
“Kelly, calm down,” Cherish says, and there’s a wobble in her voice like she’s been crying, or since she clearly hasn’t, like she’s about to. “You’re scaring me.” It’s a whimper, and it’s supposed to explain why she’s standing closer to Tariq than she is to her boyfriend when the two boys have obviously been fighting.
He pays her no mind.
“You cannot be this stupid, man,” Kelly is saying to me, and it isn’t that he doesn’t look disgusted the way he always seems to when I’m around; it’s that he looks . . . something else, too. He has a similar rash of red across his face, like maybe the boys started scuffling somewhere outside, around the pool. Where the skin is broken, it’s beaded with red and accented with dirt, but there are also little spots of paler pigment where the skin has been scraped away. One of his eyes is running so it looks at first like he’s crying, but only from the one, and maybe he thinks with all that, no one can tell that he doesn’t look angry. Not at me.
I’ve just arrived, and while Tariq looks worse for wear, either boy could’ve started the fight. There could be a reason for this confrontation that’s got nothing to do with Kelly being a thorn in my side; there could be some relevance to Cherish’s presence, and where she chose to stand.
It might not be Kelly’s fault.
I don’t care. I don’t have to, since neither Cherish nor Tariq is capable of seeing past his explosive behavior. The destruction he’s causing.
I don’t have to worry that they’ll see what I see.
I can use that. If Kelly persists, if his rampage isn’t interrupted by my presence, if he makes me witness to it, it won’t be an intrusion when I speak.
“You need to take a walk,” Tariq advises his friend.
Kelly doesn’t take the out. His jaw clenches, and at first it seems like they’re going to have a staring match. Then Kelly reaches back to the bookcase and whips something against the far wall, defiantly.
A smile flickers across my lips. If I’d tried to carve Kelly out of our lives before, it would have seemed like a petty little feud. Two orphans sniping at each other like there aren’t enough spoils to go around, because of Kelly’s constant antagonization.
Neither Tariq nor Cherish moves a muscle or says a word. Kelly is intentionally terrorizing us, and although I’m the person everyone will expect to fear him, I’m the only one not on the verge of tears—which means the moment has finally come.
While Tariq stands with his fists clenched and his chest heaving but his mouth closed, and while Kelly takes his time hand-selecting the next item he’ll destroy, I decide.
This needs escalating if it’s going to be the end, and the reason Kelly thinks I can’t be the one to call him out is exactly why it’s going to work. It’s going to look like an act of courage to Cherish and Tariq, after long suffering his unnecessary abuses. Kelly will be his horrible self, and our friends will finally see that it’s reckless to care indiscriminately. That sometimes you have to choose.
It takes self-control to be intentional with compassion, to focus it so that the object of your affection feels its intensity.
Now Cherish and Tariq will understand, and Kelly will disappear.
“Kelly!” Cherish pleads after the next crash, because she doesn’t understand that her distress is the point.
“Why are you breaking his dad’s stuff?” My voice wobbles, and even though I stepped forward, I immediately step back. They’re all watching me now. “After everything Judge Campbell’s done for you, this is how you thank him? By destroying his house and attacking his son?” I demand, even though I didn’t see the fight.
My interjection breaks the dam, and a fresh wave of anxious tears overtakes Cherish. Tariq is less accustomed to my salvation and his face is blank when he looks at me. Maybe he’s exhausted, or maybe until now—until I spoke for him—he didn’t realize I was here. He didn’t realize he needed me to be.
Kelly’s eyes are trained on me, as I expected. It’s interesting. He isn’t huffing; there’s no snarl carved into his lips, no wildness coursing through his eyes like I’m prey. Tonight he just looks at me like I’m intruding, but I trust the others not to notice. Their own distress will overshadow it.
If he were literally anyone else, I would make note of this unexpected dispassion; it would be cause for further study. But I have no use for Kelly.
“I hope he lets you rot next time,” I say, and then I add, “Because there will be a next time,” so that the focus stays on him. I don’t want my friends to mistake this for retribution. What I want is for Kelly to react. “It’s inevitable with ingrates like you.”
When Kelly starts toward me, Tariq finally jolts into action. He heads him off, coming between the two of us just in time and knocking me back. The boys struggle, and Tariq throws a punch, half his knuckles connecting with the corner of Kelly’s forehead. It doesn’t look like a solid hit—in fact it looks like the kind of pathetic attempt that results in a full-body cast for the unfortunate soul who threw it—but it stops Kelly. Inexplicably.