“What?”
“That’s your line, if you wanted to make sure I didn’t believe you. ‘Tariq is like a brother to me, Farrah.’ ”
She doesn’t move when I stand.
“And—if you were telling the truth—something like, ‘I would never betray you like that.’ Honestly, either one of those would’ve been more convincing.”
I’m supposed to have the last word. I’m supposed to turn on my heel and rush back to the house, past our parents, and into the shelter of our bedroom. I’m supposed to fling myself across our bed because I’m devastated over what my best friend has done. Cherish has no reason to think I won’t, but she says something to my back, before I get the chance—and it sounds more like Nichole Turner than her.
“You want too much, RahRah.”
I halt, but I don’t turn back around. I don’t show Cherish my face. I’m stunned, like someone’s knee has careened into my rib cage without hesitation, and I didn’t expect it.
Cherish doesn’t sound like herself. It’s her voice, but there’s not enough naïveté. Her characteristic simplicity is missing.
Onetwothreefourfiiiive, onetwothreefourfiiiive.
Just like with the tally marks, Cherish sounds like she knows something I don’t—but that can’t be. Just like those tallies can’t mean what I think they mean.
Cherish hasn’t struck a deal with my mother to push me out of the Whitmans’ home, like she hasn’t made a game out of hurting me. There’s a journal filled with scratches, but that doesn’t mean all these years she’s kept a record of her score.
“Stop,” I bark, and it sounds like a Mediterranean monk seal. Or like a wounded boy getting the wind knocked out of him in the middle of the night.
I’m bent over the way he was, curled forward with my back to Cherish, but she can still see the way I pant. I’m breathing fast and heavy, making outbursts to quiet things that only I can hear.
Cherish is still behind me. I have to make it stop.
I swallow air and hold it, and make the count to five my own.
One two three four five.
I am in control.
I’ve let Kelly inside my head, and he’s confusing things. He’s making me see a conspiracy where there can’t be one; I’m hearing derision from the one person incapable of it.
She called me RahRah; that’s how I know it’s still her. It’s my Cherish, and I’m overcomplicating her shallow remark.
She doesn’t mean I want too much, the way someone would say you want more than your share. More than you are owed, or deserve, like you’re of a lower station than them.
The day I smiled at Cherish Whitman, she knew what it felt like to be seen.
Cherish was invisible until me.
Cherish was a spoiled white girl who also happened to be Black, and it meant that the consequence of coddling, the incompetence it breeds, was dangerous. It meant that there was a void inside her, but because she was a Black girl, too, it meant that I could fill it.
I could make her whole.
That is what I did.
When I turn back, I find her there. Just my Cherish. A breath of relief escapes involuntarily, and my face falls into a smile.
She even looks confused when I come back to her. Her eyes dart when I cup her face with my hands, but she lets me.
“You meant I want too much from you,” I say out loud. “I expect too much.”
Her brow furrows and she turns her chin, but not enough to escape me.
“I’m sorry, Che. You’re right.” I hug her and breathe deep. “I’m sorry. You’re right.”
* * *
—
MY PARENTS DIDN’T stay to let the meal settle. They didn’t wander out beneath the darkened evening sky with Brianne and Jerry and full glasses of wine the way they normally would.
My mother said she wanted to go organize some things at the storage unit, and she studied my face before kissing my forehead in a nonverbal goodbye. I hoped she could read the twinkle in my eye, that she’d noticed the way I held Cherish’s hand through dinner, just in case she had tried to turn my best friend against me.
My dad gave me a bear hug and whispered, “Have fun,” before following his wife out.
At the end of the day, everyone was on my side.
The Whitman house quieted down after that, with Jerry disappearing into one of his offices, and Brianne filling the dishwasher so that whoever appears to perfect the home won’t find a messy kitchen first thing in the morning.
All that time—ever since my mother interrupted Cherish and me in our bedroom—I’d been wearing the Whitman heirloom bracelet, and no one noticed. If my mother did, she didn’t know why it mattered. She didn’t know it meant I was claiming the Whitmans—but I did.
After everyone went their separate ways, I replaced it in my backpack and changed my clothes.
“I’m gonna go for a swim,” I’d said to Cherish, and then I’d waited.
She was sitting on the bed with her knees drawn up in front of her, staring into one of the books off our assigned summer reading lists like she didn’t have anything better to do. At my statement, her feet shimmied on the made bed, as though to demonstrate she was comfortably—and permanently—settled.
“Okay,” she said.
“Tell Tariq I said hi.” I only said it to watch her tense, and she did, her eyes staring over the rim of her book, but not high enough to look at me. “I’m kidding, Che! Don’t be mad.” And I climbed up the length of the bed to plant an intentionally sloppy kiss on her cheek.
“Freak,” she muttered, wiping her cheek while I licked her forehead. “RahRah!”
“Be back in a bit!”
I didn’t say anything about the phone tucked almost underneath her. It doesn’t matter; a phone is good for plenty of things beside calling or texting her childhood friend.
All of which it keeps a record of.
I find myself thinking of it the entire time I’m in the pool. How it feels weird to be down here by myself. How it’s weird that Cherish didn’t join me. We both love to be in the water, but together, not swimming laps like an athlete. I’m bored almost immediately, but I refuse to come back to the bedroom too soon, so I glide back and forth, turn on my back and watch the sky, and do it all again, five times.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.