Cherish Farrah, page 15
Kelly can’t escape seeing that I wasn’t ready. He knows now that I didn’t know what we were talking about, and that I didn’t see that coming.
Because Kelly’s talking about Cherish.
Cherish is what Kelly stole from Tariq.
My Cherish.
My Tariq.
Tariq who asked me to take a walk today, who hugs me like he wishes he were daring enough to do something more.
Tariq who’s never given the slightest impression that he’s interested in Cherish, at all.
Who spent all day with Cherish while I was sick in bed—and he knew I was.
Tariq who’s never kissed me, even when Cherish and Kelly were clearly doing so much more.
I thought he was shy. I thought he was reserved, that I had to take it slow with him—that he was more inexperienced than you’d expect a boy as gorgeous as him to be, that I should pretend to be, too.
I thought that made him the exception. Not that he didn’t want me in the first place.
But this is Kelly talking.
His face is the only part of his body he hasn’t had to coddle tonight. It doesn’t have a scratch or bruise on it, but now it’s wearing a smile.
“Is that news to you, Orphan Annie?” he asks, and when he starts to laugh, he has to bite it back. “You should see your face right now, you look so mad! I’m so glad you texted me.”
He lets himself laugh this time, buckles forward a little but doesn’t try to fight it, even when he audibly reacts.
He’s willing to hurt for this.
“If I’d known that’s all it took, I woulda told you a long time ago,” Kelly says through a laugh that’s gone breathy and broken, like there’s a problem with his ribs.
He’s bent over, so he doesn’t see me coming.
I don’t rush him the way Tariq might have, the way he did to get between Kelly and me in the Campbell entertainment room.
I almost want to tell him, it’s got nothing to do with anything he’s said. It’s because he came to me wounded. It’s because he’s Kelly, and I can be completely honest with him. I can strip away my mask. I can do something I’ve always wanted, and it won’t matter, because of who he is. Because someone else already hurt him first.
It’s only a few steps in the bright-white moonlight and I’m in front of him, and he doesn’t know how hot and panicked I feel. It’s a terrible kind of exhilaration knowing I’m finally going to breathe.
It’s still control when I let go, because I choose to.
Kelly doesn’t know my chest and palms are sweating because it’s my knee I bring up into his chest without restraint. I pull it up hard and fast like there’s no such thing as hesitation. Like there’s nothing but open air above my knee, instead of a body unprepared to part with the breath in his lungs.
The sound Kelly makes as he falls is like a seal barking. Like the Mediterranean monk seal, if you’ve had the great fortune to sail near enough to see them, during a Primer vacation with your best friend and both your families.
It’s a sound I’ll never forget, even though when I try to mimic it back to the fallen body before me, I know I don’t get it quite right.
I bark again, and it’s closer this time.
The air is mostly still after that, but there’s a crackling sound, like a storm is coming, like there’s electricity snapping in the air instead of short clicks that Kelly must hope will somehow turn into full breaths. Or words.
They might. So I hike up my knee the way I did before, only nothing breaks its momentum on the way up. It comes high without interruption, and then I bring my foot down hard onto Kelly’s back.
From his hands and knees, he collapses all the way down and immediately rolls on his side, but I don’t know why. His arm doesn’t shoot out to grab my leg. He doesn’t raise his hand in a silent plea for me to stop. His eyes find me but they keep roving, like they’re looking for something inside his head instead of in the brilliant night with a high, crisp moon and static-filled air.
It’s interesting, at least—the way he doesn’t even try to crawl away. And the sound he’s making, like a body that’s forgotten how to function. His mouth is gaping and there’s nothing blocking his airways, but even with an abundance of air around him and with what I’m sure are still working lungs inside him, he can’t breathe. He’s writhing on his side, but if I close my eyes I wouldn’t know for sure that it’s a person in front of me.
“That’s enough for now,” I say, but I’m only talking to myself. I make the energy sparking through my extremities coil back to the center and settle deep inside where it has always stayed.
Where it’s safe.
Control. Even when I don’t need it. Even when it’s only Kelly.
That’s the key. That’s the way to ensure there will always be a next time.
I squat down in front of him and then get comfortable on my knees. The grass is soft and the ground is like a cushion beneath me. It gives so that I sink into it just the right amount. There are no wayward stones, no hard places. Even the Whitmans’ soil is immaculate, like what they have is more powerful than money, and far less tangible. You can’t see it; you can only experience it.
“It’s nice, right?” I ask Kelly when he finally lets his head relax, the veins in his neck thick and spidery from the way he stayed so tense.
It’s like his whole body’s rebooting. His eyes aren’t swimming anymore, but they’re watering now, and he keeps squeezing them shut and then releasing them. Maybe it helps, but I don’t see how.
He can breathe now; I can tell because the rest of his body relaxes, one region at a time, and then he remembers the rest of the pain. The arm that was beneath him snakes back around his abdomen, and then the other arm joins it for added protection.
I reach for the hem of his shirt and he doesn’t shrink away. I pull it up, pushing his elbows out of the way. He grimaces but I hardly hear the groan, and when I see his skin, it’s a kaleidoscope. Around his torso and across his ribs and around to his back, what should be consistent brown skin is covered in orbs that have gone purple and something that’s more orange than red around the rim, sometimes even a green that I rub to make sure it isn’t painted on.
With his shirt pulled up, I can see how much he’s still struggling, either to breathe or with the pain.
“Tariq.” He barely gets the word out, and it’s broken up into too many syllables when he does.
I delicately return his shirt to its proper position and sit back.
“What about him?” I ask.
Kelly just looks up at me, curled on his side on the Whitmans’ lawn, with wet streaks down his face. He doesn’t bother saying anything else, choosing instead to breathe. I blink and look away.
“You should probably get going soon,” I say through a deep exhale. “I have to get back to bed. Cherish will miss me. Brianne might come to check on us, and she’ll be terrified if I’m not there.”
There’s a strange sound again, and I look back at the crumpled boy on the grass in front of me.
Kelly’s chuckling—or trying to. He’s turning his forehead into the soft grass and letting his shoulders quake to make up for the air he can’t spare on real laughter.
“You’re so dumb,” he tells me. When he gasps, it’s involuntary, and then he coughs, and he pulls his whole body into his core, like there’s a string tied around his waist and someone in heaven is trying to hoist him up.
I wait until the fit is finished, and then I trace one of the streaks on his cheek while he watches me with one eye.
“They love Cherish.” His voice is low and hoarse. “Not you.”
“Cherish and I go together,” I say, and I don’t let myself breathe for a beat or two so that my chest doesn’t rise or fall. So there’s nothing for Kelly to notice. Because I can be completely honest with him but that doesn’t mean I will.
“Not”—he starts and then closes his eyes—“the way you think.”
My neck tenses, and I exhale through my nose, as slowly as I can manage.
If he’d said we didn’t go together, I would’ve known what else to say. Or I’d at least imagine bringing my fist down on the bull’s-eye the colors on his side have made and watch the aftermath.
If he’d said we didn’t go together, it would mean he doesn’t know us, that nothing he says matters, because he’s outside writhing on the grass and we’re on the inside, and we are something he can’t understand.
But he didn’t dispute that Cherish and I go together. He said not the way I think.
“You don’t know what I think.”
He groans, squeezing his eyes shut and nodding like he’s talking to the grass.
“There can be two exceptions,” he says, but he gestures at me with his chin, like he means that’s what I think. And then he shakes his head. Slow. “One.”
I don’t respond.
It’s my eyes that roam now, even though I shouldn’t let them. Kelly’s regaining his composure. He’ll be able to stand up again soon, to walk around, to focus on something other than the poor state of his beaten and bruised body. He’ll read whatever I leave on my face.
“They only want one.”
“You don’t know the Whitmans,” I tell him. The words come shooting out at their defense, even though I want to dam them up and hold my tongue. I don’t want to say anything to Kelly that I didn’t already decide. I don’t want to lose control, only fold it primly and set it aside when I decide I can. He isn’t even worth it, but I can’t stop. “They want me here. Brianne wants me to stay, whether my parents move or not. She keeps secrets with me.”
I manage to stop myself before I say that there’s something even Cherish doesn’t know. In the drawer on my side of the bed, there’s a gift that has nothing to do with the daughter they already have. And I trust them because of her. Because of how they’ve always been with her, of how they use their privilege to shelter her in the only way Brianne says white privilege must be used until it’s dismantled for good.
“You don’t trust them because they’re white, and normally that would make a lot of sense—but you don’t know them. You don’t even know Judge Campbell, after everything he’s done. He had an exceptional son, and he still took you in.”
“For something else.” He forces the words out, as though no matter how much air he’s taken in, it isn’t enough.
I don’t wait for the words to sink in, the way too much of what Kelly’s said has tonight. I stand up so that I’m looking down at him.
“It’s probably gonna take a while to get back,” I tell him. “You shouldn’t lie there much longer.”
I turn on my heel without waiting for his reply, for some ridiculous request for assistance that I wouldn’t honor in a million years, and I head back to the house. I go home to my bedroom, and to the bed I share with Cherish.
X
I t’s the rain that wakes me up. At least I think it is.
There’s the sound of torrential rainfall, the kind that doesn’t come for days, and when it does, it’s because something snaps. Lightning, at last, when the air has gotten so still that it feels like the whole world is coming to a dangerous pause. Just when you think you’ll never breathe again, when you’re Kelly on the soft ground writhing while his eyes roved like they were searching for the air that wasn’t in his lungs—the world cracks with light and the roll of a timpani drum the size of the sky.
When relief comes, it’s unrelenting. It can’t be stopped. It can’t be sated.
The rain will fall until the world drowns. But it doesn’t matter if you’re already underwater.
I know it’s a dream because I can hear the raindrops smacking the surface of the pool. Cherish and I are both below the surface, in a dual baptism without need of a priest, and when I finally open my eyes, I’m looking toward the turbulence, the way the rain attacks the water and causes waves.
It should join the rest, droplets being absorbed by more of their kind, but it slaps instead, little pellets that strike like bombs and then explode, or else prove themselves impotent and somersault away.
I want the dream to stay this way. I want this world where there’s only Cherish and me, in a place no one ever thought to look for us no matter how many times we came. I can sense the rest of the house where I used to live, the way you can in dreams, and I can feel the white birch trees, but all I can see is the rain breaking the surface and Cherish’s arms or legs as they churn slowly beside me so that we stay at the bottom of the pool.
We’re holding our breath and we’re somehow breathing deep.
It doesn’t matter.
We belong together.
Not the way you think.
Kelly’s still writhing on the grass outside the gazebo, and I try to bring my foot down hard on the bull’s-eye across his ribs, but the water slows me down. The effort is frustrating, the way I can lift my leg with ease, but it grinds to a slow motion so that there’s no force left by the time it strikes him. It doesn’t matter that I’m still in the pool at my house, and Kelly’s far away; I should be able to reach him.
Instead I try to take hold of Cherish, but her arms and legs are gone now, and neither of us is at the bottom of the pool.
I must’ve heard the rain outside the bedroom window, the difference in the sound it makes against the roof, or else the glass, or else the drainpipe, or else the grass down below. I’m in bed, where I should be, and I remember climbing in beside Cherish and nestling against her back so that I could hear her breathe, and for a moment I think I’ve woken up.
That’s the best part of sharing a room. No matter what she’s like during the day, no matter how she looks at me—even that expression she gave me that seemed to wonder what was wrong with me—at night, we’re at peace. If I use a phrase I know will burrow under her skin, if she spends the day away from me when I’m delirious and ill, when we sleep, all is forgiven. I make sure to sync our breathing, and she wraps herself around me when I come close, no questions asked.
But Cherish isn’t in the bed. She’s standing over it.
She’s standing over me, even though this isn’t the pool.
I can’t see her face, but I know it’s my Cherish by the shape of her hair.
One two three four fiiiiiive, she whisper-counts, one two three four fiiiive.
The numbers come one after the other, immediate and brief except for the last. The last one she draws out like she’s dragging it across the others.
Like she’s making tally marks, the way she does in the journal I found.
What are you counting? I ask her, but her shadow face doesn’t change. She doesn’t lean closer or turn away; she just recites the numbers again.
One two three four fiiiive.
This time I feel them, four fast, one slow. Five is deeper than the rest, because it has to reach farther. It has to be sustained.
I’ve been feeling something all along, tiny, sharp pinpricks that don’t connect. They accumulate now, the sensation taking on weight once I know what they are. They become distinct when they join with Cherish’s count.
I can look down now, at the naked side Cherish hovers over.
At first it’s ugly and bruised like a bull’s-eye, and then just as suddenly, it’s not. It’s my side, not Kelly’s. It’s my unblemished skin, and Cherish is carving into it.
One two three four fiiiive . . .
One two three four fiiiive, I say as well.
One two three four fiiiive.
She isn’t surprised when I count along; she just keeps carving with the short golf pencil. Four short sticks that streak thin and red around my torso until it reaches the bedsheet, and then one diagonal and deep that cuts across them all and makes sharp jags of my skin.
It’s all right, I think while Cherish and I count. It’ll be my turn after.
I am calm and patient, the way Cherish will be next.
Until the echo separates into other voices.
One two three four fiiiive.
Brianne is nearby. Her wrist sends her hand swaying through the air like she’s conducting our chorus, her thin index finger counting out the beats between the tallies.
I recoil a little, knowing she is seeing this exercise that is meant just for Cherish and me—but I shouldn’t. It’s Brianne, who is like home now, too. She has kept a secret with me.
I decide that she is welcome here, while the thin red streaks run, and for once Cherish doesn’t seem to mind.
One two three four fiiiive.
But there are more, even though I can’t see them. I hear Jerry’s voice, and Tariq’s, and in the distance, I think that I can hear Judge Campbell’s.
There are too many people watching, too many witnesses who are uninvited, but their voices are tangling with Cherish’s and there’s nothing I can do to pry them apart.
Now the tallies hurt. The blood pulls as it leaves the inside of me, and Cherish doesn’t notice or else she doesn’t care.
I don’t want this anymore, but my limbs still move weighted, like they’re struggling underwater, and the numbers come faster until they’re too close.
Onetwothreefourfiiiive.
* * *
—
WHEN I WAKE UP, it’s still raining.
One of the bedroom windows is open, and a breeze too cold for a summer night has swept in to chill the beads of sweat across my chest.
The nightshirt tangled beneath me feels slightly damp, too, and I twist in the moonlight, to see whether the wetness is clear. Whether the side of my abdomen is a scoresheet, and there are rows of tally marks, and streaks of red running toward the bedsheet.
My skin is untouched. The marks that Cherish made are gone, like the chorus of intruders that hovered somewhere around our bed.
