“True,” she says, and then scribbles something down. “You can leave if you want, but in the interest of honesty, no football is the consequence for not meeting with me twice weekly.”
Being told what to do … essentially held under thumb, by a white woman, of all people. It rankles. “I’ll be kicked off the team? You can’t mandate that I see you.”
“No, but your coach can bench you for the duration of the season.”
I throw my hands up again. Probably overdoing it with this gesture, but I’m getting a frustration-induced headache. “Great. Coach Rass would never voluntarily get involved in this,” I say, suspicious.
“I may have approached him with the idea, with permission from your parents, of course.”
Why the hell didn’t my parents talk to me about this?
“Great,” I say again.
She stacks the papers on her desk, settles in, leaning on the left arm of her chair, overly comfortable. “Let’s get started, then. I like to start out all my sessions this way: Are you angry?”
“With who?”
“Me, your teachers, your football coach, your teammates, your friends, your boyfriend, your parents, your new family, anyone? You have a right to be upset with any of them. With all of them.”
“Not Kai.”
“Kai is your boyfriend.”
“Kai is my boyfriend.”
“You’re upset with everyone but him?”
I shrug. “You’re all right.”
“Dope,” she says. “I made the cut. Why are he and I exempt?”
“Well, I don’t know you.”
“Fair. And Kai?”
He’s Kai. He touches me with magic and patience. Talks honey-soft about hard things and takes a hundred terrible pictures of me, but says he loves every. Single. One. Kai El Khoury is, like, my healing. My key to unlearning panic. It’s easy with him. But also not. And when it’s not he whispers that he won’t leave me, won’t replace me with someone else, and then begs me to trust him. There’s so much I could be saying about Kai to Dr. Lloyd, but it all amounts to “He’s the only one who knows what he’s doing right now.”
“Maybe. For you. He knows what he’s supposed to be doing for you. That’s what you’re saying?”
“That’s all I’m asking for.”
There’s that voice again, whispering that Mamma is actively trying to get it. And so far, she’s succeeding.
Dr. Lloyd nods. Scribbles. Turns another page in her Steno notebook. “Let’s make a list.”
I mutter, “Okay, Chick-Tristan.”
“What’s that?”
“Nothing. Let’s list the shit out of some stuff.”
“Good. Now, at the top, I’m writing your mom’s name and your dad’s name—Merrick’s name. What are some specific things you want from each of them? Not things you wanted that are no longer relevant—honesty from your mother regarding your birth father, for example. But in the future, what do you want?”
It’s not a bad question. It’s a question I haven’t been asked or thought of, and I hate that I didn’t consider it sooner.
“Honesty. I just want general honesty moving forward. In all things. From them all.” Because I can’t help but wonder … I mean, honesty would obviously have prevented all of this.
“And are you getting any of that from them now?”
I don’t even need to think about it. “Mostly. Yes. Yeah, I think I am.”
“Is that enough to help you consider exoneration?”
That one I can’t answer. Because the answer isn’t one I’m ready for. Pride is partially to blame, but also, I’m not ready to open up yet. I like being closed. Protected.
But still, I settle in for the next hour and Dr. Lloyd and I list a few things.
When I leave Dr. Lloyd’s office, I spot Victory hurrying down the hall, her large jacket clutched close to her body. She looks panicked as she pushes her way into the bathroom, and I don’t know what would possess me to follow her in, but I do.
I practically fall into the bathroom just as she’s dropping a pink rectangular box into the round metal garbage bin.
My stomach drops.
I pause just inside the doorway.
Her head cuts right toward me. “It’s not mine.”
“What’s not?”
Victory rolls her eyes and turns the sink knob to wash her hands.
I don’t even know how to talk about what I just saw, but Jesus, all I’ve ever wanted to do is be her friend. “If you need to talk—”
She laughs. “Can you stop pretending you’re better than me for like five minutes, please? Goddammit, Tasia. Five freaking minutes.”
Hands up, like I’m being held at gunpoint, I say, “I don’t have any idea what you’re—”
“Oh, you don’t?”
I shake my head.
“Okay. Go fuck yourself,” she says.
And I make the mistake of muttering, “Are these pregnancy hormones?” I mean it as a joke, but …
“I’m not pregnant, you asshole! But good thing, though, right? Just another Black girl statistic? Sorry to disappoint you. Sorry I couldn’t be your punch line.”
“I wouldn’t use you as … You’re not my punch line, Victory. I just got awkward for a second. I’m sorry. But … I mean, I saw the box and I know what a pregnancy test kit looks like—”
“Yeah? Then you also know what a false alarm is. You also probably know that it’s possible to take a pregnancy test and not be pregnant. Jesus.”
Even I’m relieved, to tell you the truth. “I don’t think I’m better than you.”
“Well, good, because you’re not better than me.”
“Okay,” I say, like a dismissal. Like I’m humoring little old her. Like I’m looking down on her, just the way she accused me of doing.
“God,” she mutters. “You don’t even get it.”
I get chills hearing her say exactly the thing I’ve been saying to and about my family for months.
Victory shakes her head. “Everything with you is ‘North this’ and ‘Beverly Hills that’ and ‘My BFF is better than your BFF’ and everyone on the entire planet is inclined to think you’re so great on principle, just because you’re this light-skinned Black girl with blond hair who plays football, like you’re some kind of eighth wonder. News flash, Tasia. You’re not. Your family’s fucked up too. You came here and tried to be just another Black girl, but you’re not. You’re white, too, Tasia.”
I flinch. But she doesn’t notice. She’s still got blows to throw. “And you know what else? Literally eighty percent of the school knows your boyfriend better than you do, and you’re so busy chasing Dahlia around trying to be her friend that you don’t even realize when real friendship, like, actual solidarity, is staring you right in the face. Like, I got over your BS fast, and now I’m just waiting for everyone else to see that you’ve lost your shiny new-girl appeal.”
Seismic energy rumbles underneath my glass house. “‘Real’ friendship? You mean you? Because, Vic, I gotta say, it doesn’t seem like you’ve tried to be real with me on any level. I’ve been trying so hard to be your friend and to get you to just like me, so much that it’s practically killing me. And you’ve been kicking the shit out of me while I’m down this whole time. And you know what? If Dahlia had dated your boyfriend, you’d be trying to keep her close, too! You just have this awesome way of making me feel like shit, and I’m so tired of brushing that off.”
“You’re saying I hurt your feelings. Often.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I kind of am. I feel like you’re constantly calling me out and reading me—”
“Not bad for a dyslexic, huh?” Her sad smile is like cold honey dripping off a spoon back in on a pile of itself.
And I am a vase that’s shattered against the marble.
As Victory pushes her way out of the door, I realize this is what it’s like to be left for dead.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
GAME 7 – EL CAMINO REAL VS. RESEDA RE
GENTS
The night of our last game is epic. It’s a satisfying 42–20 win over the Reseda Regents. I’m not saying we snatch up a spot in the playoffs because of me, but that is exactly what I’m saying.
I play at full speed all night and I feel like I’m the one guy our defense can look up to every time. Cole and I do excellent on field together. I somehow finish with just two pass breakups. But I manage to stay consistently physical and in the face of Reseda’s receivers, affecting receptions even without actually nailing down the ball. By the second half, it’s obvious just how much of me is in the other team’s heads.
That weekend it’s a brisk, just-chilly-enough-to-inconvenience-Angelenos sort of cold. Tristan and I walk around an outdoor mall to Christmas shop, which is dumb, because Halloween barely had time to squeeze it’s ass out the door before Santa shimmied his own down every retailer’s chimney.
But Tristan likes to get a head start because he’s predictable and enjoys beating his own schedule into submission. I agree to tag along because I’m still reliving yesterday’s game, and that basically puts all Trist’s planning and lists in technicolor.
Every year he pretends he didn’t get me anything and last year was the first where I finally stopped believing him. This year he doesn’t pretend, but he does go out of his way to hide my present from me.
“You’ve had enough lies for the year, I think,” he says.
It’s true. I’ve had enough for a lifetime.
The mall we’re at is large, as are all SoCal malls, but this one happens to be an outdoor sort of monstrosity.
Both Trist and I have been seeing people we know from school all afternoon, so I don’t know why I’m shocked when we come up on Dahlia and a woman who looks nothing like her. The woman is average height. Square-bodied, of some obviously European decent.
And she’s awful. Shrill in voice and demeanor, which I would have known even had I not heard her just insult Dahlia for her “comical attempts at originality.”
Her hair. She’s talking about D’s hair. Or the fact that she doesn’t have any.
“I don’t have any control over that—”
The woman spares only the briefest moment to give Dahlia a withering look of exasperation. “Lupus would not have robbed you blind and left you with no hair, no eyebrows, no nothing, Dahlia. You didn’t have to remove it all. I’m not going to keep having this argument with you—you did this to yourself.”
Tristan wanders into the Apple store and all I can do is stand and stare. I’ve always been taught not to stare, but somehow all my “lessons” about how rude that is have made themselves scarce.
“Dahlia,” I say. I say it like I didn’t just stand here and watch this woman insult her on her looks alone for five straight minutes.
“Tasia,” she says. “Hey.”
I glance at the woman. I expect her to judge me but she doesn’t. Not that I can tell. She also doesn’t look like she’s going to ask me for my autograph, but I can probably live my life without that.
“Zia, this is my friend Tasia. She’s Kai’s girlfriend. Tasia, this is my zia, Celine. My aunt.”
We shake hands and the woman laughs. “At least you’ve got something in common.”
The woman, with her inky, wispy hair, wasn’t hideous until right this second. She’s like tea that’s sat and steeped too long, or a stagnant glass of water with hair in it. You only know it if you’re that close.
The woman walks away and I wait all of six and a half milliseconds before I stage-whisper, “Oh my God, why is she awful?”
Dahlia laughs, “My mom used to say that God doesn’t—”
“Give with both hands. My mamma says that too.”
“Maybe we do have something in common.”
I shrug. “Your mom here too?”
She shakes her head. “My mom, she … no. Celine raised me. It’s just her and me, as usual.”
“I’m here with my brother.” I gesture over my shoulder. “If you want to come hang out with us.”
Dahlia peers behind me and then lifts both brows. “Nah. It’s okay. Your brother’s ridiculously good-looking and I don’t want you to hate me for making him fall in love with me.”
I shove her. “Oh my God, you’re disgusting. You and Slim.”
We’re quiet. The crowd of shoppers isn’t as heavy as it will be in another week or so, but it’s bad enough.
“About your hair, though—”
She waves me off. “Stop. I don’t care about Celine or her opinion. Every night, 1999 tries to sext her and ask for its style back, and the bitch won’t answer. Seriously, don’t worry about it. And, like, it’s not a big secret or anything. The lupus. I can get falsies and pencil in my brows when I have a flare-up, and I keep my head shaved so that you’d never know baldness wasn’t my first choice. Guys still think I’m pretty, and you’re the only straight girl I haven’t gotten to kiss me, so I think I’m doing okay. But, like, all the same, if you could just not—”
“Your secret’s safe with me, bitch. But hold on. Rewind. Pause. Replay. You’ve made out with Victory?”
“It is literally my greatest achievement in life. But, like, Scott bet me a hundred dollars last year that I couldn’t get her to kiss me for seven seconds, so I told Victory about the bet and we went halfsies on it when we won.”
“Best fifty bones ever.”
“Ever,” she says, holding on to the “r” long.
As Tristan arrives at my side, he holds up a slip of paper and says, “The Apple watch is literally the dumbest invention. I made a list of reasons why.”
“Oh my God, Trist. No one cares about this list or the Apple watch.”
“I care,” Dahlia says.
Tristan smiles with half of his mouth—his stare-at-my-perfect-teeth smile—and I punch him in the stomach because I hate this smile on account of all the girls who love it that aren’t me, including Mamma and Tammy.
“We’re leaving,” I say, and grab Tristan’s hand. “Bye, D!”
Just quietly enough that I can only kind of hear it, she says, “See you later, T-Dot.”
It’s then that I realize I’m seeing a different side of Dahlia. It scares me a little.
Kai, my soft, sweet boy, isn’t the only person who is a patiently scrambled Rubik’s cube. Kai has sides that only I get, sides that only Merrick or V get. Slim and Josiah have sides that belong only to each other. Mamma has a side that is her own secret thing—or, rather, she did. That side that belonged to Merrick, and he, her.
But I think this is a good thing, that people have sides and I’m really not entitled to know any of them unless they say so. Their lives have felt very solid to me, and I’m realizing now they are anything but.
I leave that mall feeling like I learned something big and important.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
PLAYOFF GAME – EL CAMINO REAL VS. NOTRE DAME KNIGHTS
We win our first playoff game against the Notre Dame Knights. Their team’s coach called it “a hell of a win.” And, God, I have to agree with him. Notre Dame had a nineteen-point lead at the end of the first quarter and I thought for sure they were on their way to a blowout.
The entire game my coverage assignment can’t gain more than a few steps on me, and I feel like it sets the tone for how I play the rest of the night. We take it 27–19.
Afterward, a bunch of people from ECR have decided to head up to the Third Street Promenade to celebrate.
Kai decrees, with all the power in his bones, that we gotta go to Santa Monica Pier instead. No group Third Street hangout for us—which, let’s be honest, I’m okay with. Even when Kai tells me his plan. He wants to “beautify trash” and I tell him not to talk about Emily like that.
Still, he tells me we have to swing by his place to grab supplies—literally any paint, glitter, wire, or twine we can find in his room.
“Are you going to just starfish on my bed or are you actually going to help me look for shit? This is all for you, you know.”
He pulls chalkboard paint out of his closet and I sit up, bouncing on the bed. I’m like a kid in a fricking candy store. I love chalkboard paint.
“Oh, she rises.”
The yawn and stretch that moves through me is long. Hurts a little, because although postgame soreness feels ridiculously good after a win, it also kinda burns to do basic things, like stretch or walk or help Kai dig around his room.
“Fine, Warden,” I say. “What do you want me to do?”
He shrugs, reaching up to the top of his closet for who knows what. He keeps finding things and throwing them into the box of junk we’re taking with us to the pier. “You could check in my file cabinet. Sometimes I keep candles in there. We can do some stuff with the wax.”
My head turns sharply in his direction, but he still isn’t looking at me. Just chuckles while he reaches up higher on the shelf.
In the file cabinet, I find a few very good things. I kneel down to the sound of my knee popping and pull out a ton of tiny pastel candles, marbles that’ve been cracked in half, Pogs, a half-inch binder full of pressed flowers. I take all of it, seeing the way Kai’s mind moves when it comes to art. He sees potential in everything.
“I’ll be back,” Kai says.
“Wait! Where are you going?”
“To the garage. I have some stuff in there that’d look stellar on your ceiling.”
His footsteps grow softer as he makes his way down the hall, and I’m so exhausted in the best way, I’m tempted to just lie on his bed again and wait for him to come back and do all the rest of the work. I’m too impatient for art.
I’m wondering if I can convince Kai to stay here with me and forget going out in favor of making out, but it hits me that he is doing this all for me. He is creating for me. So I get to my hands and knees and start searching under his bed.
I don’t find any dirty mags or peen rings. I don’t even find any dirty socks or boxers. Kai is one of the cleanest people I know.
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