I crunch my brow at her in an unspoken question, and she blinks and turns to Tariq.
“You want something to drink?” she asks him, like she didn’t just punch me in the gut, and when the two of them turn back toward the house without her even glancing back, the deep gut sensation Tariq gave me a moment ago turns into a stone.
My heartbeat picks up immediately, and my neck is hot, but I keep my composure. Jerry and Brianne Whitman haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary. They seem oblivious to the way Cherish has snubbed me, so I wait a beat and choke down an inhale before I let myself casually walk back into the house after her.
“Che,” I say, while she’s still standing before the open refrigerator with her back to me.
It’s like I don’t exist. Her shoulders don’t tighten; there’s no slight tick in her neck like she almost turned to acknowledge me and then decided against it.
I spoke not five feet from her, and it’s like Cherish didn’t even hear me.
She closes the refrigerator door and coolly walks out of the kitchen, leaving Tariq and me alone.
I’m on the verge of hyperventilating at this point, the palms of my hands clammy against the island counter, which is miraculously clean. The detritus from Brianne’s “little salad” has been cleared away, the cutting board cleaned, and the blood of sliced fruit mopped up. If I hadn’t witnessed the carnage myself, I might not believe this counter had ever been used. But it isn’t unwelcoming and sterile like my parents’ place. Instead it’s easy to believe that food just magically appears, fully prepared, in this kitchen. In this house, everything you need simply appears, without cost or consequence, and—aside from Cherish—there’s never any mess to reckon with.
“Che,” I call when it’s much too late. She’s been out of the room for several beats and is probably halfway up the front staircase by now, but maybe the illness isn’t totally out of my system, because it took all that time to process this.
Or maybe being in my right mind isn’t enough to keep Cherish’s behavior from destabilizing me.
My Cherish. The Cherish I’ve chosen as my home. The one person I love even when I hate her. Even when the thought of her name makes me think of nails pointed skyward and blood pluming underwater. The one person I chose, the one I trust, who trusts me, even when I hold her down in the pool.
It sounds like I’m there right now, water packed against my eardrums so that if there is any sound in the kitchen I can’t hear it.
My hands are pressing too hard into the countertop, because my arms are starting to shake.
Cherish doesn’t walk away from me. She doesn’t act like I don’t exist.
My eyes roll up toward the ceiling as though I can see through it. I can’t hear her, either, but I know she’s in our bedroom, standing in the dead space where I’m not, because she didn’t plan anything past the intentional assault of refusing to acknowledge me.
She isn’t prepared for this. Not really.
She won’t know what to do next, whether to force a confrontation or broker a reconciliation.
She needs me to react.
My breathing starts to calm, and sound returns. Sensation, too, because I can feel Tariq’s hand against my back now, and I had no idea he’d come so close.
“Are you still kinda sick?” he’s asking me.
Because Cherish must’ve told him. My parents don’t know I’ve been deliriously ill, but my crush does.
“Do you need to sit down?”
His palm is warm, the heat bleeding through the brushed cotton of my summer-thin shirt and into my skin. Beneath his touch, I let myself buckle, just a little. Just enough for him to notice.
He holds me more securely now, his hand sliding across my back so his arm is against the whole of it, and his other one around my front, like I’m not already leaning on the counter.
“I think I just need some water,” I say, rationing my breath so that the words sound flimsy.
He’s hesitant to leave me, but after a moment of pause, he moves quickly to get a bottle from the fridge before supporting my weight while I climb onto a barstool.
“Better?” he asks, and puts the hand that was across my torso on the counter in front of me when he bends his knees slightly so he can look me over.
I was right about his hands. The knuckles are raised with thin scabs and it’s why it looked like he was wearing something over them. His skin is a handsome berry brown, but they’re dark purple, and then bright red where the scabs are cracked, and the healing is clearly coming slow.
“What happened?” I ask, my fingertips hovering over the skin I don’t dare touch.
“Oh.” He makes a fist with the hand on display, and then as though he’d mistakenly thought the gesture would hide the damage, he pulls it off the counter. There’s a smile on his lips that he keeps trying to pull down, and I pick it up without meaning to. “Nothing. You should see the other guy.” And he gives a kind of grunt laugh and pushes his dreads out of his eyes, only to have them fall right back across his line of sight.
“Oh, I see how it is,” I say, abandoning my previous weakness to convince Tariq I’m impressed. He smiles big and tilts his head back a little as though feeding on the attention.
Except I’ve seen him throw a punch. And if he was in another fight, why doesn’t it look like he took any?
“So who was he? This other guy?” I ask, my eyes still wide and doe-like, my lip still curling up on one side. I casually extract lint from his shirt and then brush the material like it hasn’t occurred to me that his chest is just beneath.
It doesn’t work. Instead of being taken in by my nonchalant inquiry and physical contact, Tariq flicks his eyes to mine, and then somewhere else. After that, he shrugs and gives a kind of smirk I don’t think I’ve seen on him before.
“It’s just an expression, Farrah,” he tells me, a grill gleaming on his bottom teeth.
I feel myself go rigid.
None of that was right.
“You should see the other guy” might be an expression, but bruised and scabbing knuckles are most definitely real. Something was on the receiving end of them. I’m not being silly—so why is he trying to make me feel like I am? And since when does Tariq wear his best friend’s grill?
Who is standing in this kitchen with me? Because it isn’t the eternally mellow, sometimes painfully reserved, and always adorably gentle Tariq. It isn’t the respectful and respectable Jekyll to Kelly’s Hyde, and it isn’t just the residue of delirium that’s making me suspicious. In fact, if I thought there was any possible way for Kelly to have stepped into Tariq’s skin, that’s what I would swear happened. I’d think there was some kind of astral possession at work, that Kelly was somewhere else, controlling Tariq like a drone.