Cherish Farrah, page 10
“No one wants you to grow up any faster, Fair.” Dad holds my face with one hand and pulls me into his chest. “You shouldn’t have to. And you have nothing to apologize for.”
I hold him snug and nuzzle my forehead into him the way I always did when we were watching a movie that was supposed to scare me, and he rubs my back, slowly, up and down.
“None of this is your fault,” he says, and I open my eyes even though I’m too close to his shirt to keep the gingham from blurring. “We can try to take it slow. Okay?” He pulls back and looks down at me. “The least we can do is not rush you.”
“Okay,” I agree.
When my mother finally turns back toward me, she pulls me into a hug before I can get a good look at her, and hooks her chin around my shoulder.
“We’ll figure this out, honey. Dad and I will figure everything out.”
I can’t help but smile.
Dad and I . . . Just so I know, as far as Nichole Turner is concerned, nothing is up to me.
I take an arm from around my dad and put it around her waist, my fingernails scraping deep enough to reach her skin as my fingers curl into the fabric of her blouse.
VI
On my way now! I text Cherish when I’m in the car with a Tupperware container full of Dad’s pasta on the passenger’s seat.
Good! I’m with the boys and you’re my ride hoooome!
And then she sends a selfie of her and Kelly. He’s scowling, of course, and she’s straddling him, sticking her tongue out like she’s taunting me by sending a photo of him. Which she is.
As if she can see my sneer, Cherish sends a follow-up picture, and this one shows her clearly catching Tariq by surprise when she leaps onto his back. She and Kelly were in the Campbells’ TV room, separated from the terrace and pool area by a set of French doors, and Tariq is standing beneath a slowly darkening evening sky when she attacks. Whatever she and Kelly were doing was clearly not fun for the whole gang. Not that it ever is, or that they ever care.
I send back a kiss emoji and blast the music as I pull onto the highway to head back to my side of town. It doesn’t matter what music in particular; I’m cosplaying a teenage girl, reveling in an obnoxious display of self-centeredness meant to declare that I’m carefree—even though it’s safer to be constantly aware. Constantly observant, and interpreting; your outward behavior a decision based on forethought, not narcissism.
I do not believe that my mother would prefer a child like that, that she’d be less worried if I were myopic and one-dimensional. But her performance has taught me a valuable lesson. When I was very young, I thought part of self-control was adhering to the truth. Parents, after all, teach no lesson more intentionally than “Thou shalt not lie,” and if children listen to what they say more than observing what they do, it will be years before we know the value of deciding the narrative for ourselves.
But I knew better. I studied her.
I saw the real her, the one hiding behind her eyes, so when she first recoiled at my behavior, I understood that it was a lie, a strategy in the war games we play.
I tried to teach Cherish. The lie I told the day with the nails and Jerry Whitman’s renovation site didn’t just get us what we wanted, and it didn’t just keep us out of trouble, even though that was the point. It also turned into a kind of lore, a beloved origin story told at birthday parties, years and years later.
Control.
A bold, ambitious lie is a last resort, its tellings few and far between. That way it isn’t just disarming, but convincing every time.
When you tell that lie, you commit to it, even if it means doing the thing no one believes you’ll do.
If you learn to tell the lies no one else has the stomach to commit to—the brazen kind—it is amazing how well it works. The way it did when we were in fourth grade. The way it did tonight, with my parents. It can be addicting, too, but I’m not greedy.
From now, I’ll be obedient. It’s how you make sure they’ll believe you the next time. When they agree to let me stay with the Whitmans, I’ll just be doing what I was originally asked. When I was in distress, my mother goaded me with instructions to be gracious. She said to appreciate being taken in, and now I will. Now I’ll want to.
I’ll even deliver my dad’s cooking to Cherish, like she needs anything else, and I’ll put up with being around her ass of a boyfriend. Because, no matter what, I’d always rather be with her than not.
Everything is going to be okay now.
When I get to the Campbells’, which is almost a compound, with a guard’s office right before the very imposing-looking gate, I’m welcomed. The housekeeper does the same when she lets me in and tells me the kids are all still in the entertainment room off the pool. I’m almost there when I hear something crash. It’s followed by an eruption of loud voices.
“You really think I care, Tariq? You think I’m scared of you?”
I walk a little faster, and when I’m in the doorway, I find Cherish, Tariq, and Kelly sprinkled throughout the space. They’re standing far enough apart that, at first, I can’t make sense of what’s already happened.
Cherish is in the middle of the room, on the same side of the long, wide sectional sofa as Tariq, and she ducks when Kelly makes a throwing motion, even though whatever he grabbed from the floor-to-ceiling bookcase behind him wasn’t headed anywhere near her. It bursts against the wall a good five feet from Tariq, too, but that’s when I notice something’s not right.
Tariq’s got what looks like road rash across his forehead, and one of his eyes is surrounded by bloody and broken skin, like a purple doughnut is growing underneath. It looks like he crashed into something with his face—or something crashed into him.
I lift my hands as though to pause the scene, but Kelly goes right on yelling about not being afraid of Tariq when it looks like he’s finally proven he’s the one they should be afraid of.
“Cherish,” I say, when the trio fails to take notice of my arrival, and as I expected, the sight of me sends Kelly into a lather.
“Are you kidding me? I thought you were going home, little hobo!”
“Kelly, calm down,” Cherish says, and there’s a wobble in her voice like she’s been crying, or since she clearly hasn’t, like she’s about to. “You’re scaring me.” It’s a whimper, and it’s supposed to explain why she’s standing closer to Tariq than she is to her boyfriend when the two boys have obviously been fighting.
He pays her no mind.
“You cannot be this stupid, man,” Kelly is saying to me, and it isn’t that he doesn’t look disgusted the way he always seems to when I’m around; it’s that he looks . . . something else, too. He has a similar rash of red across his face, like maybe the boys started scuffling somewhere outside, around the pool. Where the skin is broken, it’s beaded with red and accented with dirt, but there are also little spots of paler pigment where the skin has been scraped away. One of his eyes is running so it looks at first like he’s crying, but only from the one, and maybe he thinks with all that, no one can tell that he doesn’t look angry. Not at me.
I’ve just arrived, and while Tariq looks worse for wear, either boy could’ve started the fight. There could be a reason for this confrontation that’s got nothing to do with Kelly being a thorn in my side; there could be some relevance to Cherish’s presence, and where she chose to stand.
It might not be Kelly’s fault.
I don’t care. I don’t have to, since neither Cherish nor Tariq is capable of seeing past his explosive behavior. The destruction he’s causing.
I don’t have to worry that they’ll see what I see.
I can use that. If Kelly persists, if his rampage isn’t interrupted by my presence, if he makes me witness to it, it won’t be an intrusion when I speak.
“You need to take a walk,” Tariq advises his friend.
Kelly doesn’t take the out. His jaw clenches, and at first it seems like they’re going to have a staring match. Then Kelly reaches back to the bookcase and whips something against the far wall, defiantly.
A smile flickers across my lips. If I’d tried to carve Kelly out of our lives before, it would have seemed like a petty little feud. Two orphans sniping at each other like there aren’t enough spoils to go around, because of Kelly’s constant antagonization.
Neither Tariq nor Cherish moves a muscle or says a word. Kelly is intentionally terrorizing us, and although I’m the person everyone will expect to fear him, I’m the only one not on the verge of tears—which means the moment has finally come.
While Tariq stands with his fists clenched and his chest heaving but his mouth closed, and while Kelly takes his time hand-selecting the next item he’ll destroy, I decide.
This needs escalating if it’s going to be the end, and the reason Kelly thinks I can’t be the one to call him out is exactly why it’s going to work. It’s going to look like an act of courage to Cherish and Tariq, after long suffering his unnecessary abuses. Kelly will be his horrible self, and our friends will finally see that it’s reckless to care indiscriminately. That sometimes you have to choose.
It takes self-control to be intentional with compassion, to focus it so that the object of your affection feels its intensity.
Now Cherish and Tariq will understand, and Kelly will disappear.
“Kelly!” Cherish pleads after the next crash, because she doesn’t understand that her distress is the point.
“Why are you breaking his dad’s stuff?” My voice wobbles, and even though I stepped forward, I immediately step back. They’re all watching me now. “After everything Judge Campbell’s done for you, this is how you thank him? By destroying his house and attacking his son?” I demand, even though I didn’t see the fight.
My interjection breaks the dam, and a fresh wave of anxious tears overtakes Cherish. Tariq is less accustomed to my salvation and his face is blank when he looks at me. Maybe he’s exhausted, or maybe until now—until I spoke for him—he didn’t realize I was here. He didn’t realize he needed me to be.
Kelly’s eyes are trained on me, as I expected. It’s interesting. He isn’t huffing; there’s no snarl carved into his lips, no wildness coursing through his eyes like I’m prey. Tonight he just looks at me like I’m intruding, but I trust the others not to notice. Their own distress will overshadow it.
If he were literally anyone else, I would make note of this unexpected dispassion; it would be cause for further study. But I have no use for Kelly.
“I hope he lets you rot next time,” I say, and then I add, “Because there will be a next time,” so that the focus stays on him. I don’t want my friends to mistake this for retribution. What I want is for Kelly to react. “It’s inevitable with ingrates like you.”
When Kelly starts toward me, Tariq finally jolts into action. He heads him off, coming between the two of us just in time and knocking me back. The boys struggle, and Tariq throws a punch, half his knuckles connecting with the corner of Kelly’s forehead. It doesn’t look like a solid hit—in fact it looks like the kind of pathetic attempt that results in a full-body cast for the unfortunate soul who threw it—but it stops Kelly. Inexplicably.
A punch that couldn’t have stopped a fly stops Kelly.
It’s inconsistent with having instigated the scuffle they must have had to produce the abrasions on their faces.
I let my breath catch. I trigger concern that if Tariq had taken one second more to get between us, there’s no telling what Kelly was going to do.
He wipes the site of impact with the heel of his palm and then examines it briefly, just so Tariq knows he didn’t do any physical damage. When Kelly nods, both his eyes are glassy now.
“ ’Cause I gotta be a monster, too, huh?” His eyes are locked with Tariq’s, but he’s so close to me that I can’t smell the subtle difference between Tariq’s sweat and his.
“You are the monster,” I say, my voice a bit stronger now that someone finally got between us. I can take a shuddering breath and say what I’ve been holding in, know that now they’ll hear it. Tariq’s action won’t be heroic now; my words will serve the double purpose of shredding Kelly and being an indictment that anybody let him get this far. They should’ve known his cruelty toward me would escalate. “Who else would bully someone for doing the exact same thing you’ve done for years? I take that back; it’s not the same. I was only in danger of being uncomfortable; you were going to jail, Kelly. Who the hell are you to say anything to me? Or to be here in the first place? You’re the one who refuses to go back where you clearly belong.”
He’s staring at me with wet eyes, one of them bloodshot in the corner.
“Maybe now you’ll get what you deserve,” I tell him, and that part is just for me. It’s an acceptable risk to take, given the night’s events. Because I can’t imagine he comes back from this. After tonight, everyone will have to see him for what he is.
Not charming; not edgy. Dangerous. He’s entitled, like he wasn’t rescued. Like Judge Campbell didn’t take mercy on him in that courtroom when he was thirteen and on his way to a long stay in juvie. Because thank God, Judge Campbell, a man who looks exactly the way you’d expect a white man named Leslie to look, had a Black son Kelly’s age. He gave him the kind of sentence a white boy would’ve gotten for stealing and destroying property, which meant community service and anger-management courses, and he said in the courtroom, in front of everyone, that there are consequences to poverty and they shouldn’t be borne by the children of people who are given few options.
It made the news. A year later, the judge was granted guardianship of Kelly by his mother, who has three younger kids who do not have a wealthy, benevolent judge taking an interest in shepherding them down the right path. She said Judge Campbell saved Kelly’s life, and it’s very observably true, even though right now I assume he’d regret it. Being like brothers with his son was supposed to be a good influence on Kelly, not a trauma for Tariq.
When Judge Campbell appears in the hall behind us, no one hears him until he speaks.
“I think it’s time to say good night to your friends, guys,” he says, like he doesn’t see the scene before him. Like there isn’t a mound of broken pieces that used to be his awards. “I think you’ve both upset the girls enough.”
And just like that, the tension breaks. The electricity snapping in the air between the two dissipates, and both Kelly and Tariq are standing with their chins down, avoiding Judge Campbell’s gaze despite the fact that he sounds completely and illogically calm.
What’s funny is that at least one of them was raised by a Black woman, and there’s no way this subdued disappointment should be even remotely chastising. As for Tariq, all it would take is him saying he hasn’t done anything wrong. Cherish and I would vouch for him, even though I wasn’t here for the entire fight. Even if it weren’t true. But Tariq doesn’t say anything in his own defense, and it only upsets me more.
I am done with Kelly, and Cherish better be, too.
We slink out of the house in silence, and she doesn’t say a word until I’m driving the two of us home.
“RahRah, it was awful.”
“What happened?” I ask, now that interrogating the situation won’t muddle the outcome. Still, I need to couch it in a warning. Anything related to Kelly from this point on needs to remind her how unsafe she’s feeling. “What set Kelly off like that? Has that happened before? Cherish, you have to tell me.”
“I’ve never seen him like that,” she says, like she’s coming out of a trance. Her voice sounds almost far away, and she’s got the same uncharacteristic, stunned look she had in the entertainment room.
“What happened?” This time I mean it. Kelly is over; it’s only natural for my attention to turn to understanding Cherish’s role in the evening. How the three progressed from the two photos she sent me, from she and Kelly groping each other and Tariq being pushed poolside to the scene I entered.
Instead of answering, she suddenly becomes aware of the Tupperware at her feet, and picks it up.
“Oh, that’s for you, from my dad,” I say, so we can get back to the matter at hand.
That is clearly not going to happen when, holding the plastic container as though to study it or its contents, Cherish starts crying.
“Che,” I whimper, and I reach over to stroke her arm before taking her hand. “Babe, what’s the matter?”
And I pivot. Because I have to be gentle with Cherish. She isn’t like my mom and me. And because, after tonight, she has to know for sure: we’re all we have.
“You don’t have to answer that, Che. I’m being insensitive. Of course I know what’s the matter. You liked Kelly. And I’m really sorry all of this happened. I’m sorry you had to see that side of him.”
Cherish nods, weakly, at that, and keeps hold of my hand when she adjusts in the passenger seat, holding the Tupperware protectively against her lap with her free hand. When she turns her head toward the window, I take a deep breath.
“Everything’s okay, Che. I’m here.”
VII
It’s going to be a nice change of pace—Cherish being teary and tired, and me taking care of her and feeling well. Not only am I myself again after dinner with my parents, but when Cherish and I hold hands the whole way home from Judge Campbell’s place, I feel better.
I’m prepared for the obligatory days spent in heartsore hibernation as my Cherish cries Kelly out of her system. Staying in bed, in the room we share, and listening to her try to make sense of the person she tricked herself into thinking he was, saying nothing or very little while she expresses shock and confusion over the person he’s revealed himself to be.
I’m even ready for the limited contact I’ll have to have with Tariq. It’ll be temporary, while knowing he and I can still be together might be too much for Cherish to bear.
