I can protect you from one . . .
Whatever I ask Cherish, my mother will hear.
I don’t speak. I don’t ask my best friend when I have hurt her. I don’t ask her whether she has erased a tally for every time I could have hurt her but didn’t. I don’t ask whether this is all a lie, whether she is as proficient at deception as Tariq was trained to be.
You can’t see anything but the story you’re telling.
Nichole Turner’s voice is always in my head—and then my mother speaks audibly. From behind me, she says what she has always meant. I hear her in stereo, and I know that Cherish can’t help but hear her, too.
“Farrah, you are not in control.”
I don’t reply. I’ve already admitted it. That I’ve been too close to the Whitmans; that believing I was in control kept me from suspecting them no matter how many times they hurt me. But Nichole Turner won’t let it go.
You can’t see—
I slam my hands over my ears, except that they are in fists, and I am stunned. In front of me, Cherish vibrates and I close my eyes to give my vision a chance to restore. In the dark, I search for the fire that became lava that spilled out across the sky so that Nichole Turner can see what I control now that I am completely uncoiled.
This is not my failing; I could not have known the extent.
I didn’t understand what they were doing to me—and it wasn’t because it was a secret. I was not bested because I cannot see what isn’t on the surface. It took my whole life overturning. They required me dysphoric, destabilized. They waited years.
“They’re ahead of you,” Nichole Turner tells me in front of Cherish, whose eyes I find watching me in bewilderment when I open mine. She doesn’t see the lava pouring down the wall behind the headboard, she is so surprised to find my mother here.
“They aren’t ahead. They don’t even know what they’ve done,” I tell Nichole Turner, my breath coming more quickly at the sight.
Their success at this is accidental.
Cherish had to love me the way only someone missing something crucial could.
They had to love Cherish enough to do all the right things, all without ever considering divesting from the world that endangered her. They didn’t want to change the world, so they changed Cherish.
Jerry and Brianne Whitman had to build the void I’ve filled.
Cherish didn’t know. She couldn’t have. If Cherish isn’t white girl spoiled, if she isn’t naïve, if she doesn’t have a hollow place carved into the entitlement and selfishness that are her birthright, then I am the imposter. Nothing I have ever said or known can be believed.
“I was trying to make it small,” Cherish interrupts. “If it was just tally marks in a book, then maybe it wasn’t as awful as it felt. I didn’t want to think any more about it than that.”
“He’s going to make it home eventually,” Nichole Turner tells me, speaking over my best friend.
“Do you think I’m a monster, Cherish?” I ask, ready with an ultimatum—except that no one is following a script anymore.
“Yes.”
The lava scaling the wall behind the bed pauses—but only for a moment. I only have to alter my plan slightly.
“Then so are they.”
A new wave of silent tears swells from her eyes and down her face, the way the lava resurges, thick and hot.
“But I can’t be the one to convince you. I’m not the villain, Che. I won’t let them make me into one. You have to prove it to yourself.”
She won’t know how. I am counting on it.
I kneel down in front of Cherish, take her hands, and then lay my head over them as though our knuckles don’t jut into my cheek.
“Your mom will tell you,” I say, and nod against our clasped hands. “She’ll tell you the truth, if she thinks you’re the one getting hurt by all this. They never wanted that.”
“I am getting hurt,” she tells me, and I lift my head from her lap to look Cherish in the eye.
“I know, Che.”
* * *
—
I’VE RUN AWAY in the middle of the night. That’s what Cherish tells Brianne Whitman when she goes into her parents’ bedroom and only wakes her mother.
I am in the back of the car when Brianne and Cherish take off to find me at the only place my best friend can imagine I’d go.
“Did anything happen?” Brianne is asking her daughter. She’s been woken up abruptly and hustled into the night before she could gather her thoughts or alert her husband, but now, as she buckles her seat belt and simultaneously backs out of the garage, her blond hair in a messy bun at the nape of her neck, Brianne only looks like an actress portraying frenzy.
“She left!” Cherish whines, and when she lurches away from her mother’s consoling hand, it doesn’t give us away. She’s white girl spoiled, allowed to return annoyance and mild violence for doting affection. “I told you something was wrong!”
“Calm down, sweetheart.” Brianne Whitman cannot accept her daughter’s rejection for more than a moment, and she lays her hand on Cherish’s leg to rub and then pat her brown skin. “She just went back to the house, I’m sure.”
“What if she doesn’t want to come back? What if she runs away for good, like Kelly did?”
It’s a gambit, assuming information from very limited intel and then testing it. It wouldn’t work for me, but Cherish is the one asking where Kelly has gone and why Tariq had access to his phone—despite the fact that I’m the one with something to give him. There’s a trophy in the white box nestled inside the circle of Eloise Whitman’s heirloom bracelet, and I have decided to gift it to Kelly. For exposing Tariq to me, or for at least placing Tariq like a sacrifice before me at the gazebo if he couldn’t have known how well I’d excavate the truth. Kelly wouldn’t have known what I can do if I hadn’t sealed his judgment in the Campbell house the night I went to find Cherish. He couldn’t have known if I hadn’t brought him to his side on the lawn outside the gazebo. But he knew Tariq, and I didn’t. I have more than repaid any debt I might have to Kelly, but I will give him the tip of something more when Brianne tells Cherish where he went.
I know Brianne will answer by the way she glances away from the road at her daughter and then can’t help but glance again.
“What?” Cherish presses, a hint of concern in her voice. “What is it?”
“Kelly didn’t run away, baby,” Brianne tells her, and when the car slows to a quiet and creeping stop at the next sign, I know she is going to idle here. It is the wee hours, and there will be no cars pulling up behind us, forcing us to move. “Cherish. Kelly didn’t run away, but—he isn’t going to come back.”