What Kelly said back is of no consequence at all. How could it be? It makes no sense. Kelly isn’t a Campbell. He may be as good as adopted, but he’s not adopted adopted like Tariq is. Judge Campbell’s his guardian, and he’s Tariq’s best friend—though that’s sometimes hard to tell—but they’re not actually brothers. They have matching chains and they match in height, but that’s by choice and lucky coincidence. Kelly has lived with the Campbells, off and on, for literal years, but he still always finds some way to imply I’m materially benefiting from my friendship with Cherish. Materially, because his remedial thinking could only ever factor in the tangible. Still, he flaunts every privilege he gets for being a child in the Campbell court, flagrantly without gratitude or self-control, but it’s supposed to matter that he has a problem with me.
If their silence is any indication, no one seems to notice the hypocrisy. Worse, Cherish has fallen for him despite his behavior. When I confessed I wanted Tariq, she immediately matched it with a confession about his best friend. It must satisfy some basic teenage drama for her, the coupling off and the copycat declarations—but Kelly and I do not get along.
Or we wouldn’t, if I didn’t go along. If I didn’t drop my eyes and let my silence suggest that Kelly’s bullying actually hurt my feelings, my meticulously crafted mask would slip free. Because if I responded to Kelly, I could easily find another outlet for my recent lapse in control. I could transmute this frustratingly foreign stress sickness into something useful, like immutable rage. I could let it rush out of me and over him.
It would be so easy. As simple as starting with the truth. I could tell him how disposable he is in a world like the Campbell court—in any world, really. I’d catalog his flaws and estimate his fears, and do it without embellishment or exaggeration, in the way most people don’t or can’t. It would eat his flesh down to the bone like a shoal of piranha.
Not projection. It wouldn’t be more about me than him, and it wouldn’t be an emotional outburst, tapering off as regret seeped in. There would be none.
I never regret. I don’t have to, because unlike Kelly, I think ahead. I mentally play through the scenario, all the way, not just up to the moment of satisfaction, but beyond. I make sure it’s worth it—or that I can make it.
That’s what I did the day a young Farrah and Cherish disobeyed her dad. Because whether Jerry Whitman remembers it or not, we’d been warned about playing with the materials on the side of the house he was renovating. We’d been cautioned about the nails, which of course is how we knew they were there in the first place, and when he took exponentially longer than he said he would, we went to find them.
It’s like a little ritual when you’re impatient, I told Cherish, when she was hesitant at first: do something you’ve been told not to do, and the parent who’s kept you waiting for what feels like an eternity will magically appear. And Cherish and I wanted to go for ice cream after ballet, as we’d been promised. So we laid out the molding, nails pointed skyward, and decided to try our balance and skill by standing nearly en pointe between them. We weren’t that far in ballet, of course, so it was inevitable that our little exercise would result in someone’s foot falling backward onto a nail. I just assumed Cherish knew that, too.
The first time that happened, the nail was crushed to the side without incident. That became the new game, laying the nails down, one by one, by stepping on them just right. Knowing that one false step would end in pain.
“You just have to step down really hard,” I instructed Cherish, and showed her as though I hadn’t just learned by accident the moment before.
“That’s easy,” she replied, and broke one of the nail’s necks with merciless force.
It was easy for a while. The nails were crippled one by one, and the threat of pain seemed more and more distant. Maybe they weren’t made of metal at all. They seemed so much more malleable, and the warning we’d been given was easily chalked up to parental paranoia. Until Cherish brought her foot down hard and went still and rigid.
“Che?” I said, tipping my head to the side to try to catch her gaze, but she was staring off at nothing, and her eyes were welling with tears. I knew the cries were coming, and when her mouth gaped, I leapt.
I grabbed her, one hand on the back of her head and the other clamped over her mouth.
“Shh!” I shook my head, my eyes as wide as hers then, or wider. “Don’t cry!”
It’s been years, but I still remember what I thought. That we were nine years old and she was the only friend I had. She was the reason I’d begun to understand what children were supposed to be like. What I wasn’t—only she didn’t seem to notice. She was teaching me what I was expected to be without even trying. Clarifying the kinds of things other children didn’t see—like her mother’s golden halo when she laughed. When I’d described it to her, Cherish thought I meant it was a feeling; she didn’t know that it was real, there, in the air, and that I could see it. So little by little, I stopped.
Control.
Cherish is how I knew what I should pretend not to know or see. She was useful to me.
The Whitmans were already lovely to me, but there were other things Cherish didn’t seem to understand. Like what it meant that her parents didn’t look like mine. That they could change their minds about me without even knowing what was beneath the mask I was fashioning after Cherish. I couldn’t be myself, but that was with anyone besides my mother. How exceptional did I have to be to stay in the Whitmans’ favor? I wasn’t sure. What I knew for certain was that I could not be responsible for hurting their child.
But I was hurting Cherish, I could tell. She was trying to claw my hand off her face because I’d covered the bottom of her nose, too, but she was afraid to move too much and jostle her impaled foot, so she whimpered and cried beneath my hand.
I didn’t let go. I looked down and found an uncurved nail.
“Look,” I whispered to her, but she didn’t. I had to grip her tighter, shake her hard, and command her again. When she finally glanced down, her tears running into the tight seal my hand was making, and her snot wetting the palm of my hand, I did it.
I slammed my foot down on the upright nail, and I barely winced.
“See? It’s okay.”
At first, Cherish’s brows ribboned above her eyes.
“See?” I loosened my grip on her just enough to show that if she was quiet, I could let go. “See, Che? Just like you.”
I had to make it easy, but after a moment she understood, and she only sniffled calmly when I released her.
“Just like at the academy,” I told her, because by then I’d already overheard her parents’ relief. “It’s me and you. Okay?”
Cherish just nodded. She can’t help it that I have to explain everything, feeding her only as much information as she can process, in the simplest of terms. It’s part of being white girl spoiled, so even when it makes my life more difficult, I don’t hold it against her. I remember that it’s why she means so much to me.