“Mom,” I blurt out at the sight of her, and for some reason I leap to my feet.
She’s wearing a smile, but it’s made up of politeness. I can always tell. When she looks at me, it doesn’t change. And when her eyes find me, they just hold. All the laughter and ease in Cherish’s and my bubble deflates, and my mother and I just stare.
There you are, she says, without speaking at all.
So you do exist.
And the longer she watches me, in this moment that seems to drag on beyond the normal rules of time—I see you.
“What are you doing here?” I finally ask, but even I barely hear it.
Cherish, on the other hand, squeals like my mother’s arrival is a happy surprise.
“Mrs. Turner!” Despite how time stalled in my mother’s gaze, it skips now. Cherish is on the other side of the room before I untangle my feet from the mound of pillows and the sheet.
At her welcome, my mother comes fully into the bedroom and gives Cherish a hug.
“You girls aren’t up yet?” she asks, before she kisses my head and pulls me into her arms.
“Not all the way,” Cherish says, and plops back down on the pallet we made beneath the window, like she’s inviting Nichole Turner to join. Like she doesn’t know that Black parents who don’t believe in proper sleepovers for sure don’t see the whimsy in sleeping in.
“I didn’t know you were coming,” I say, and hold my mother’s gaze for a moment before lowering back down beside my best friend so she remembers where we are.
“I haven’t heard from you in quite a few days, so I thought I’d better come crash the party.”
“I told her to call you,” Cherish says, like they’re on the same side, and she looks at me with a raised eyebrow that’s playful but still serious.
“No, you didn’t,” I say, and she starts.
“Yes,” she says, her eyes drifting and then returning like I’m the one lying. “I did. When you got sick.”
The inside of my chest goes cold. It’s bad enough what she just dim-wittedly confessed to my mother, but now I don’t even know if she’s lying. I have no idea if Cherish is being malicious right now or not, because I can’t say for sure what she did or didn’t say to me when I was ill. I have no idea what she’s doing, or why, so I can’t stop it. Just like last night in the pool before a very uncharacteristic baptism, I am at my best friend’s mercy.
“When were you sick?” my mother asks, and she’s subtly more alert. Her brow ticks up, but slightly. I could swear her pupils expand, just a little. Nichole Turner is just as gifted as I am at deciding what to wear on her face, but I know that just below the surface, there is rage.
And Cherish keeps talking because she doesn’t know any better.
“The last couple days of school,” she says, opening one of the yogurts she’d buried beneath a pillow to keep them away from me. “That’s why we didn’t go—I mean, not that I cared. Everybody was already gone. What I did care about was that she basically destroyed my bathroom. No, Mrs. Turner. I’m serious. Like, vomit, everywhere. And my mom made me clean most of it up. It was bad.”
My jaw is starting to hurt, but I can’t relax it. I am watching Cherish with an intensity that should burn through her. Her skin should swell with dozens of inflamed boils and then pop, leaving holes like Swiss cheese up and down her arms. Amber-colored blood and puss should ooze from each one so that it looks like Cherish is melting in a searing, painful mess. But my gaze can’t even get her to shut up.
Now she’s done, and eating like she didn’t pull a pin and my mother isn’t a grenade preparing to detonate. Cherish won’t know when that happens, either. She doesn’t know that it’s happening now, quietly.
I know my mom better than my best friend does, so I know what the silence means. I know all the restraint that goes into what she says next.
“I didn’t hear about any of that.”
When she looks at me, there’s an entire conversation passing in the taut space between our eyes. A tug-of-war. She is already pulling, the way only my mother and I can. She’s issuing a silent command, compelling me to move, to give in. It’s how I know she and I are alike, that Nichole Turner is just like me, even though she doesn’t show it. Even though I’ve never seen her hand down a worthy consequence when her compelling is refused, I never doubt her. I never take her inaction to be inability, because I know it’s much worse than that.
Nichole Turner refuses to prove herself to me. She has mastered self-control, and I am shrewd enough to see it. It’s almost bright, the way it makes me want to squint, to seek some respite from the apparent calm of her gaze—but I won’t.
Control.
Cherish is too far away to pinch, so I dig my nails into the palm of my hand and keep my mother’s gaze until a tight smile breaks on her face.
“Your dad’s downstairs, too, Farrah,” she says, and Cherish just keeps eating like she’s only now discovering how hungry she’s been all morning. She has no reason to find my father’s presence interesting—and on his own, neither do I. Except I know what it means that my mother brought him. It means she is setting things right, the way she does for him. She has brought him so that all the pieces are present, and she can put us back in line.
When she’s certain she’s made herself clear, her smile loosens. It looks natural now, even to me.
“You girls get dressed and come down, okay?”
She waits until I nod my agreement and then she stands up, and when she looks down at me before leaving, she clenches her jaw.
“I need to talk to Bri and Jerry,” she says, but it’s like she’s telling me in particular. There’s a threat in her innocuous words, and I hear it the way she wants me to.
When she’s gone, I want to leap on Cherish. I want to slap the small container out of her hands, to shake her, to bury her in the pillows the way she buried the food.
My mother is here, so I won’t. The freedom from the gazebo and the baptism and the haphazard, false attempts at cleaning up last night—the attempts meant to demonstrate that we knew we didn’t have to succeed, that we could be brazen about our adventures in the middle of the night and no one would discipline us—are gone. Everything I’ve let uncoil is painfully rewinding itself. I thought I’d already put away the slivers of myself I set free in front of Kelly, but in my mother’s presence, I see that I’ve been too lax. Now the rest of me curls too quickly and too tight. It’s receding deep, back where it came from, and I don’t know when I’ll ever get to let it back out.
“She’s here to take me home,” I tell Cherish, and I don’t hide the way I’m biting down on my teeth.