I curse my parents for not having a peephole, switch off the alarm, keep one hand on the panic button. I open the door a tiny crack. No worst-case scenarios, only best. A vision manifested.
Shola.
“You’re here,” I say, my eyes filling with tears. What I think but don’t say, because I realize it’s not fair, is: What took you so long?
“I’m here,” she echoes, and follows me inside.
* * *
—
We end up in the kitchen, on the high stools, where we’ve spent countless hours together. This is the first time we don’t know what to say to each other.
“I thought you’d be at Giving Day,” I say, and then mentally kick myself for wasting time. What I want to say and on repeat, forever and ever: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. You have to forgive me. And also: Please don’t leave me behind.
“I went, and then, I don’t know, I left. I knew your mom had her thing today, so I thought I might catch you alone,” she says.
“You did,” I say.
“How’s it going?” she asks.
“Shitty,” I say, though that’s the understatement of the year. Shitty is the word I’d use when I blew a test or had bad cramps. Surely, there must be a better way to describe how I feel. What’s the word for shitty on steroids? What’s the word for realizing even your own mom and dad think you are too stupid to function? What’s the word for wondering if you deserve to live? I should ask Linda to make “synonyms for ‘shitty on steroids’ ” flash cards.
“My parents wouldn’t let me call or text or come over. They don’t know I’m here,” she says. “It’s funny—I mean, not funny ha-ha, but ironic—because they used to be so excited that we were friends. These are the kind of people you should be mingling with.” Shola drops her voice low and does her best Nigerian accent, the one she always uses when she’s imitating her father, and I feel a pang of hurt. Even Mr. Balogun, who stuffs me silly with jollof rice when I go to Shola’s apartment and sent me a virtual congratulations card with dancing hedgehogs when I got into SCC, has abandoned me.
I get it, sort of. My exile. We are judged by the company we keep. Their job is to protect Shola, just as my parents’ job is to protect me. But it’s not a zero-sum game, parenthood. That’s what we keep forgetting.
“They’re not the only ones who don’t want me around. Mrs. Oh doesn’t want me to come back to school. She gave me a packet of work to finish at home so I can graduate.”
“Lucky,” Shola whines, half joking. “School has been…weird without you.”
“Yeah?” I ask, not fishing exactly, but I need acknowledgment that our friendship was real, that I have not made up the last six years. Maybe I was never as important to Shola as she was to me; maybe I was simply a placeholder at school until she got to go home to her real friends. Shola shakes her head, like she doesn’t want to talk about it, or maybe to say, That’s not why I’m here. She’s harder to read suddenly, or maybe it’s that I suddenly trust myself—or us—less.
“I can’t stop thinking about the fact that all I used to want was to switch families with you. In seventh grade I’d have this recurring dream that you and I Freaky Friday’d. No Sunday church. No having to watch out for the Littles. No doing my homework before I could turn on a screen. In the dream, I’d walk into your mother’s closet and borrow everything, and I’d be the one who got to ride horses. I mean, you had a literal pony! Do you remember that? Who has a pony?”
“He died,” I say inanely, because I don’t know what else to say. I did have a pony. Well, actually, a horse. I liked the petting him part way more than the riding.
“I outgrew that in the last year or two. Even before this all happened, I knew to be ashamed of those feelings. Just because you were so rich and had everything, you guys weren’t better. Or even happier actually. I knew that,” Shola says, her eyes watery, but tears do not fall. Shola will not let them.
“Remember that day you and Levi told me you both had private college admissions counselors?” Shola asks.
“You were astride your favorite unicorn float. You can have it, you know.” I don’t tell her that recently, on one of my insomniac zombie strolls, I went outside and deflated it in the middle of the night. I was tired of looking at its jaunty horn, tired of thinking how sad it must be without Shola around to ride it. I don’t tell her this, because I realize it’s both insane and embarrassing.
“To put where, Chlo?” Her voice holds that slow simmer, and I feel like an idiot all over again, forever and always. Shola doesn’t have a pool.
I am the monster, I think.
“I went home that day and I cried. I hadn’t let myself think about it before you said it, but I must have known that you had a private counselor even if you didn’t talk about it. I mean, of course you did. You paid for everything else,” Shola says, and then sees my stricken face, and despite everything, she tries to spare my feelings. “No offense.”
“None taken,” I say. There’s no point in being offended by the truth. She’s right. I had tutors and specialists and advisors, long before I ever met Dr. Wilson. My mom once took me with her to see a special alternative doctor to make sure we were both pooping in the optimal position. At the time, it seemed like a totally valid use of our time and energy; now, I wonder if too much money renders you helpless. Leaves you feeling like you can’t even take a crap on your own without consultation with an “expert.”
Guilt fills me; I’m saturated with it, because I really see us from the outside looking in. Our brazen entitlement. How we thought the normal rules didn’t apply. How we thought we had earned all of our own good fortune and manipulations.
“You always used to say that my family was weird, and I used to laugh, because we are weird, but I think what you really meant was your family is gross and self-indulgent. I realize we are that too,” I say.
I examine us from Shola’s vantage point.
Our deck was stacked, even before we stacked it some more.
The bright line of well-off and super-rich we drew between us and Aunt Candy would be meaningless to her.
I’ve spent the last six years feeling, if not envious of Shola, something closely related to it, believing that things came so much more easily to her. Not money, of course, but everything else: talent, brains, joy, likeability. All the things nobody could buy for me. I bet Shola’s never once sat over a toilet and thought, Am I doing this right?
“That’s not fair. I loved your family. But you betrayed me. Do you even get that? Why I’d feel that way? Personally betrayed?” Shola asks, but it’s not a question. It’s a rebuke. And so I don’t say, Yes, yes, I get that, even though I do.
I listen, which is what Shola tried to teach me to do years ago when she told me I needed to examine my white privilege. To be an ally you need to be a better listener, she’d said. I had been too shy to say I don’t even know what an ally is. Later, I looked it up on Google.
“Like didn’t you guys realize that you were obviously screwing over people like me who worked so much harder and had so much further to go and who had earned our spots? I think you did realize that but you didn’t care. You thought, I deserve this. I deserve everything. I deserve the whole world even at everyone else’s expense. But here’s the thing, Chloe: You don’t. You don’t deserve everything.”
The feelings of shame that I’ve been riding for weeks overtake me again. I start to shake with it.
“I don’t know what you knew or didn’t know, and this is the tip of the iceberg, but it’s clear you knew this part: ADHD and extra time on the SAT? Seriously, Chloe? We once played Xbox for ten hours straight. You do not have ADHD.” Shola slaps her hands on the counter, and the sound reverberates through the house.
“I know.” I keep my voice small, because I am small. I should be folded up and recycled. Come back as something more useful.
“I know.” I hold her eye contact, even though I’m crying openly and want nothing more than to disappear, to run away, to leave the rest of her words unheard.
I will stand here and hear her. I do not need to make this easy on myself.
Easy, it turns out, gets you nowhere.
Easy, it turns out, gets you facing a felony charge.
“At some point, you could have said, No. I’m not doing this. We’ve finally gone too far. This is wrong. And you didn’t do that, did you?” Shola asks, and she looks at me almost hopefully. Like maybe she thinks it’s possible I did try to stop it and my efforts failed. Shola wishing the best about me.
I cannot lie to my best friend.
“No, I didn’t. I did nothing.”
“I thought so,” she says, and her face crumbles. I want to reach out my hand to touch her, I want to explain myself, and yet, I don’t know how to do that. I consider saying, I aggressively chose not to know, which isn’t the same as knowing, but maybe it is; maybe it’s the same thing after all.
“I’m sorry,” I say, more empty words. Useless nonsense. “For everything.”
“I don’t even want your apology. You know what’s a horrible feeling? Realizing your best friend isn’t the person you thought she was.” Shola’s eyes flash, and my insides tremble. I’ve always suspected a time would come, when her world got bigger and she had access to other, cooler people beyond Wood Valley. When she finally had more choices, no doubt she’d ask herself: Wait, why am I friends with her again? But not so soon, and definitely not like this.
“I’ve lost everything. Please, you have to forgive me. I don’t know who I am—”
Shola pointedly looks around. At the oversized house, the backyard pool, the fact that I’ve poured her a glass of water in a thick crystal goblet. She points to our two refrigerators, one whose sole purpose is to store sparkling water in glass bottles for my mother.
“You’ve lost everything?” she asks incredulously.
“If you’re not my friend anymore, then yeah. I’ve lost everything,” I say, and hold her stare. She must understand that all of this is only stuff. But then I realize I’m the one who doesn’t understand. It’s not about the stuff—those are markers, signals, the million and one ways we let the world know where we stand. They are the flex but they are also the muscle.
After all, my mother was able to hire a literal army of lawyers to protect her.
“I’m not going to SCC, obviously. My mom’s probably going to jail. Levi’s whatever. Other than Isla, all that I have left that I care about is you.”
“Levi’s going to prom with Sophie.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know this and yet of course I did. Levi and Sophie again, confirmed. I let this sink in. It hurts way less than I’d thought it would. A press on a minor bruise. Another recent revelation born out of this whole mess: Levi was a fun distraction, never the real thing.
The loss of Shola, though, would be a septic wound. She is my person.
Who knew first loves could be platonic? How did I not see that?
I allow myself to picture it, for a moment. An alternative future. One day making new friends, maybe not at SCC or even at college, but somewhere, a future me telling the story of me and Shola, my first real friend, my first true partner. I hope it ends better than I fear. I hope it doesn’t end at all. That it’s the story I tell before she comes to visit me in my new, wholly theoretical one day grown-up life so I can say to my new friends, I can’t wait for you to meet her.
“I miss you,” I say, the tears falling again, because I already know where this is going. I am being broken up with. I can tell by the way her eyes keep slipping to the floor. I can tell by the way my heart feels sliced right down the middle, a clean incision.
“Chloe, you pretended to be half Latina on your application.” I close my eyes because I can no longer look at her face. It’s too painful.
This, it turns out, is the only thing we’ve been accused of that is technically not illegal. Immoral, grounds for rescinding my acceptance, disgusting, wrong, shameful—all of these things, yes, despite my father’s belief that he’s part Argentinian. But it’s not the charge that will put my mother or me in prison. The bribery will.
But with Shola standing here, I realize it will be the charge that makes me lose my best friend.
I don’t blame her.
There’s no bouncing back from the dirty truth, no way to spin my way out of this one. I cannot morph back into the person Shola thought I was. Who she’d hoped I’d be. The one who laughed but understood when she wouldn’t let me copy her homework before class.
I refuse to say I didn’t know. I will not keep beating that meaningless drum.
“I can’t do this to myself anymore. Can’t keep doing this. Being friends with you, it’s not…it’s not okay for me.”
“Shol,” I say, my eyes still closed.
I hear but don’t see her get off the stool and walk away from me.
“Shol!” I call again, but she keeps walking.
All the way out the front door, which she closes behind her, gently.
I picture her on the other side, resting her back against it.
Instead of keeping out the zombies, though, Shola’s keeping them in.
And then I think about sneaky side doors, how the zombies will always get out anyway.
With the soft click of the latch, it’s official.
I have lost my best friend.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Then
Dr. Wilson sends final confirmation that all my applications have been filed. His email is short and to the point. In.
That’s all it says: In.
It’s official. I’ve applied to college.
My mother takes that as permission to treat my acceptance at SCC as inevitable, as if applying is synonymous with being admitted. The last thing she was this sure of was that Brad Pitt movie that fell through.
I refuse to get my hopes up, though I secretly share her dream. I loved SCC when we visited, I love LA, and though I’d never admit this out loud to my family, I love the idea of sticking close to home.
Maybe my life doesn’t have to change all that dramatically next year. Unlike Shola, who at night likes to text about all the things she’s looking forward to next year—no longer sharing a room with the Littles, taking an Intro to Philosophy class, no more Wood Valley jerks giving her looks about her clothes—I still can’t quite wrap my head around graduation and what comes next for me. I feel overwhelmed when I think about all the new responsibility that will be mine alone to bear—figuring out freshman requirements and dining hall cards and the social hierarchy. How do you know what books you need? What if I’m randomly assigned a roommate with questionable hygiene and a clashing color scheme?
Levi, like Shola, has already graduated in his mind. He’s taken to wearing a disturbing amount of Harvard gear, and on the increasingly rare occasion when we spend time together, all he can talk about is the fall. There’s no mention of us or of me visiting or even of the two of us keeping in touch when he monologues about the classes he’s going to take, the famous professors he’ll meet, where he’ll do his year abroad, all while he has one hand up my shirt.
I get the hint. We are temporary.
Admittedly, I understand this desire to fast-forward—when a big change is coming, it’s human nature to want to get there already—but lately, I find myself out of step with my friends. I want to slow down time and savor the months we have left together. Our lives up to now have been full of firsts, and suddenly, almost without warning, they seem packed with lasts.
I want to float in the pool with Shola and play beer pong at Xander’s and kick back at the Koffee Kart, because soon
we won’t get to do any of that. These inexorable leaps forward give me whiplash. It’s winter break, which means I’ll blink and soon it’ll be my own acceptances and rejections, prom and graduation, and then, of course, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
Tonight, though, I put these thoughts aside, because it’s me and Levi and Shola and Axl and Simon and Mateo, that guy from Brentwood Country Day, in lounge chairs in my backyard, making one more memory while my parents are away for the weekend at that Aunt Candy fund-raiser in San Francisco my dad was so annoyed about.
We’re all still here.
We drink the lukewarm beers someone nicked from their parents’ fridge, and Shola puts on Oville and hooks her phone up to the speakers. Axl keeps threatening to jump into the pool.
“Let’s make a pact to do this again next year. Let’s all get together over winter break,” I say. I’m sitting between Levi’s legs, and he trails his fingers up and down the sides of my arms. This, I think. Hold on to this while you can.
“No way,” Axl says, and I notice he’s had both of his ears pierced with large diamond studs, a weird choice considering the rest of his style is uber-preppy, and I wonder if he did this to distinguish himself from Simon. “Once I leave, I’m leaving for good. Not coming home for break. Not coming home ever.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Have you never met my mom? Once I graduate, it will be peace out, bitches.” I picture Axl’s mom. She has one of those generic Real Housewives faces you see on women around here—duck lips and taut skin and lush fake lashes as thick as brush bristles. A conscious choice to look a little weird, instead of the far more terrifying option, to God forbid look old. She also has that amateur cage fighter body that advertises its restlessness: I don’t work—I work out. Thick, cut shoulders and tightly wound. Minus that rumor about her calling Mrs. Oh’s office to report Simon, she’s always seemed perfectly nice, if a little sad.
“I may not be home for break,” Shola says, and I see Mateo dart a glance at her, and I wonder if he likes Shola for real, not in a hook-up-every-couple-of-weeks-at-Xander’s-parties way. I wonder if he feels about Shola like I do about Levi—that we’ll take what we can get while we can get it. The thought makes me depressed for both of us.
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