Cherish Farrah, page 24
I force myself to speak. I respond without releasing the rage igniting inside me.
“She always acts so confused,” I say.
“My dad’s right; they’ve made a complete mess of it. They’re just lucky they chose you. You want what’s best for Cherish.” He looks into my eyes like this is romantic. Like I should be pleased at his acknowledgment, that it means I am worthy in his sight.
“Not like Kelly.”
“Man,” Tariq scoffs. “He just wanted to stay out of juvie. He doesn’t care about me.” He wears a disgusted grimace, and the hand that massages my hip grows rougher. “He doesn’t care how generous I am, how willing I’ve been to share what’s mine. All I asked is that he handle my things respectfully, and he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t help pawing her right in front of me.”
It’s quiet except for the sound of Tariq roughly kneading my body. He’s reliving the night of the fight, and I wait for him to speak again.
“And he had the nerve to hit me back. After everything I’ve given him. He knew the rules.”
My side will look like Kelly’s soon, the way Tariq is handling me.
“So he was the other guy,” I say, leaving my tongue between my teeth teasingly. I could tell Tariq I’ve seen what he’s done, that the bull’s-eye he made on Kelly’s body allowed me to do damage of my own, but I won’t.
“Well,” he says, smiling through a shrug. “Dad said it was time for boxing lessons, since Kelly wants to hit back.”
“Who needs a punching bag when you’ve got a whipping boy,” I say, and then I attach a smile to it.
“That’s right, whipping girl,” he whispers as he leans close enough for his hair to brush my forehead.
Now I know. I am the whipping girl. That’s what someone thinks. That’s what they have made of me.
What’s the point if she never sees what she’s done?
A whipping girl’s abuse must be witnessed by the chosen child.
That’s why. Why Cherish had to dress my wound. Why Cherish had to wash my hair. Why Cherish had to clean up my vomit.
We didn’t do the kinds of things she and Kelly did . . .
I told Jerry that. That’s why my wound at all.
Not because I offended his daughter. Because of what I told him his daughter had done.
I am Cherish’s whipping girl. That’s why they want me here. That’s why they lied to my parents, why their help to my parents came too late.
I was willing to stay. When my parents left the state, when my dad began his new job—that better opportunity that happened to come from far away—I was going to bury my heels in the ground and stay with the Whitmans. I was going to choose the world that Jerry and Brianne made.
They only want one.
My fingers tighten, sink into Tariq’s shoulders and back, because Kelly isn’t on the ground between us anymore. He’s standing behind Tariq.
He wasn’t right because he understands Cherish and me. Kelly isn’t smart or clever—or he wasn’t before he set the trap for Tariq tonight. He has been privy to privileged information. He knows there is such a thing as a whipping boy.
Nichole Turner was right, too.
She knew I wasn’t in control and she left me with them.
She left me with the Whitmans because she knows her daughter. She has warred with me long enough to know how this will end. She left me here so that I would end it.
She tried to warn Brianne, and then she warned me.
Brianne and Jerry Whitman were in control, all this time, not me.
The sky continues to tear above the gazebo, and from inside the dark, I hear the fire approach.
She should have told them that it would’ve been wiser to play this whipping-girl game with an opponent who is weakened by defeat. She could have told them that I wouldn’t be.
She could’ve told them that I would be unleashed.
“It isn’t fair,” I say, eyes anchored on the inferno that will soon spill out over the sky, onto the version of the Whitmans’ property that awaited me after yesterday’s events.
“What?” Tariq asks against my neck, where his lips are still caressing, his tongue still sometimes gliding over me before his mouth closes around my skin. “What isn’t fair, Fair?”
He’s amused himself, but I don’t have to play along. He’s too distracted by his own pursuit.
“You and I.” I draw my fingernails across his shoulder blades, elongate my neck so that there’s more to taste. “We didn’t even properly kiss. You were so chaste with me—even when Kelly and Cherish were doing whatever.”
There’s an unmistakable pause in his fondling, and then he starts to draw back.
If he looks suspicious of me, I’ll press into sulking, lose interest in his touch because of my personal displeasure with what happened between our friends.
If he’s anything else, I’ll proceed.
His eyes reflect all the light they’ve trapped inside, and his hair interrupts his mischievous gaze.
“That isn’t fair,” he says. “I wish I’d known you better; I would’ve done everything to you.”
“I don’t need everything, now that you belong to Cherish,” I tell him. “Just the kiss I’m owed.”
He’s doing me a favor. I can tell by the way his lids sink to the middle of his beautiful eyes before he lets his head droop toward me. He’s leading with his forehead again, making me wait. Expecting that I am impatient for his lips to return to me. He’s taking pleasure in teasing me, so I raise my chin, search his lips with my eyes. He turns his face slightly, so that his mouth is just out of reach, and I let my brow buckle.
Tariq Campbell is a monster. Whatever he was playing at during our stilted, tedious courtship, the game has changed. The fact that I’m a whipping girl has restored the power to which he is accustomed. This clandestine order his father partakes in is not a casual worldview. Tariq’s metamorphosis is too startling for that. His previous performance is too impressive. He is a boy taught from a young age the necessity of it—of maintaining the mask. Of perfecting so mild and ordinary a character that no one would think it robust enough to hide anything beneath.
He is the one uncoiled before me. When his tongue glides across my lips before parting them for entry, it is because this is a safe place to reveal himself.
I am not a threat.
I am the Farrah who’s lost my place. The Farrah sick with dysphoria, whose reality and world no longer look the same.
I am the Farrah who finally knows; I am Cherish Whitman’s whipping girl.
This is my first kiss. The soft but sensual probing Tariq’s tongue is performing in my mouth is the first of its kind, so I close my eyes.
It feels pink. Sickly sweet. Tame, given the way his hands were roaming and kneading before. As though he knows he is my first and part of the favor he is showing me is delicate restraint.
But this Tariq is a threat.
This Tariq wore a thick scab across his knuckles, and his best friend’s grill inside his mouth. This Tariq convinced me in a way no one else did. I did not suspect him before the barbecue. Not once.
I did not expect that he wanted to come between Cherish and me.
When Tariq’s kiss becomes more soft lips and electricity in the hollow of our cheeks, I let my tongue slip forward—and then retract it as though stung. As though I’m unaccustomed to being the aggressor, unfamiliar with how to show him that I want more.
My tongue is a baited hook, and he returns his to me, his hands slipping around my neck and down into the small of my back—and then lower. He’s been invited, and he will unfurl his greed completely.
I test Tariq’s tip with my teeth, just enough to take hold, my lips spreading into a grin as though to show him what I’ve done. He responds with an aroused grunt, amused.
I release him, and he barges back in. He swims past my row of teeth of his own volition, because I am not a threat.
I hold him with my lips this time, and Tariq leans in, one hand tightening with the back of my shirt inside. I slowly pull back, so that his tongue is incrementally exposed, and he presses back into my mouth.
His eyes are closed when I open mine.
I bite.
Hard, because this is not a test. I clamp my teeth and force the two rows toward each other as though what’s between them is food.
Tariq’s eyes are wild, bypassing shock and confusion to hurtle toward pain. He wants to get free, but trying will inevitably worsen this.
When he jerks, as though to tear a layer of cellophane away, I do not release. What he succeeds in freeing from my hold is forced to escape between my teeth. It is the bit that I exposed a moment ago, and nothing more. I know by the sounds he makes—the sounds that do not resemble any I have heard before, even from a monk seal or a fallen boy in this very spot—that it is an unpleasant experience. I taste that even what gets released is not entirely intact. Whatever the top layer of his tongue looked like before this kiss, it is painted on the back of my teeth. The glossy underside has nothing to shed and—if he can distinguish between the two sensations, if he has the presence of mind to contrast them—it must be the more sensitive of the two.
I still hold a good portion of Tariq’s tongue between my teeth.
He’s trying to say my name. He’s pleading.
The saliva that runs from both sides of his mouth spills into mine, some cascading down his face. The light makes it easy to see, a thick fluid glazing us both.
The texture is unique. The deeper I bite, the tougher the meat becomes—if it can be considered meat. Whatever it is, the tongue of many beasts is deemed appropriate for eating, though I’ve never had it. I don’t know how it should taste, when properly prepared, but with it wriggling in my mouth, I imagine Tariq’s tongue is something like a stale gumdrop. Inside, it will be smooth and sticky. I only have to slice through it.
Tariq is hurting himself. He is writhing and wagging his head in desperation, his hands on my shoulders because he doesn’t know whether to hold me close or try to shove me away.
It’s too late when he understands that I will not let all of him go. He has exhausted the range of agonized, openmouthed whimpers, wails, and cries. He has pleaded in garbled words, spit drowning out what my teeth don’t render incoherent.
He can’t see the fire in the sky behind him. He doesn’t know when it explodes through and what were flames flow like lava down the night sky to remind me what I said to Cherish.
Everything can burn but us.
I cull everything I’ve uncoiled in my belly, all the power I’ve unleashed, and I sink it into Tariq.
The wetness isn’t all saliva anymore, but it feels the same. Metal has swarmed the inside of my mouth before I reopen my eyes. Tariq is locked in my gaze when I complete my bite. My teeth rest together, my face and chest soaked—and there is something resting quietly inside my closed mouth.
Tariq collapses to the grass below me as soon as it’s done. His hands are trembling over the lower half of his face, and he turns to look up at me, his dreaded fringe in his beautiful eyes. He’s shaking his head as though he’s incredulous—as though there’s any use in it.
I want him to show me. I want to see the smooth cross section I have made of his tongue, though what bubbles out between his fingers is thick and red so that I know his whole mouth must be full.
He isn’t thinking straight. He seems more confused by the second, so I open wide. I present my trophy on the tip of my tongue so that he understands. The sight of his dissected tissue is like an anchor. He abandons the hysterical sounds he’s been making and meets my eyes. His sanity is short-lived. Even though I have remained calm—though I was willing to give him as much time as he needs to reconcile himself with what just transpired—he scuttles backward as though there’s a ghost or a boogeyman standing in my place. He manages to fall back against his shoulders before tumbling backward like a barrel being rolled.
I watch him escape, one hand always at his mouth so that there’s only one free to push himself up when he loses balance for some reason and the toes of his shoes make drags and divots in the lawn and on the golf course when he gets that far.
When he’s a wounded silhouette stumbling along because he can’t remember the way he came, I don’t know why he calls back over his shoulder, or what—until I turn back toward the Whitmans’ house.
“RahRah,” is all Cherish can manage, and she watches me take Tariq’s tongue out of my mouth.
XV
She didn’t know.
She doesn’t believe.
She has only ever seen the monster in me.
“Where did you get this?” she asks when I show her the book.
The Whipping Boy.
“Cherish, it’s an antique.” It’s all I say before her face collapses into tears.
“What does it mean?”
“It means you are too precious to harm, so you let them hurt me instead.”
“I don’t know what Tariq means, I don’t know what Judge Campbell’s done, but you know them. You know who my parents are—”
“And I know you keep a log of all the times you’ve ever hurt me, Cherish. One two three four five.”
We’re standing on my side of the bed. Tariq’s blood is still painted across the lower half of my face, and the book is in Cherish’s hands. She drops to the mattress, and her head and shoulders fall as though she is a star collapsing into itself.
“RahRah,” she says, and my name sounds like despair. “The tallies are all the times you hurt me.”
Nichole Turner is here. I feel her eyes burrow into the back of me and know that if I turn right now, I’ll find her there. She is flickering in and out of the bedroom, as though she is the flame, returned.
I can protect you from one . . .
Whatever I ask Cherish, my mother will hear.
I don’t speak. I don’t ask my best friend when I have hurt her. I don’t ask her whether she has erased a tally for every time I could have hurt her but didn’t. I don’t ask whether this is all a lie, whether she is as proficient at deception as Tariq was trained to be.
You can’t see anything but the story you’re telling.
Nichole Turner’s voice is always in my head—and then my mother speaks audibly. From behind me, she says what she has always meant. I hear her in stereo, and I know that Cherish can’t help but hear her, too.
“Farrah, you are not in control.”
I don’t reply. I’ve already admitted it. That I’ve been too close to the Whitmans; that believing I was in control kept me from suspecting them no matter how many times they hurt me. But Nichole Turner won’t let it go.
You can’t see—
I slam my hands over my ears, except that they are in fists, and I am stunned. In front of me, Cherish vibrates and I close my eyes to give my vision a chance to restore. In the dark, I search for the fire that became lava that spilled out across the sky so that Nichole Turner can see what I control now that I am completely uncoiled.
This is not my failing; I could not have known the extent.
I didn’t understand what they were doing to me—and it wasn’t because it was a secret. I was not bested because I cannot see what isn’t on the surface. It took my whole life overturning. They required me dysphoric, destabilized. They waited years.
“They’re ahead of you,” Nichole Turner tells me in front of Cherish, whose eyes I find watching me in bewilderment when I open mine. She doesn’t see the lava pouring down the wall behind the headboard, she is so surprised to find my mother here.
“They aren’t ahead. They don’t even know what they’ve done,” I tell Nichole Turner, my breath coming more quickly at the sight.
Their success at this is accidental.
Cherish had to love me the way only someone missing something crucial could.
They had to love Cherish enough to do all the right things, all without ever considering divesting from the world that endangered her. They didn’t want to change the world, so they changed Cherish.
Jerry and Brianne Whitman had to build the void I’ve filled.
Cherish didn’t know. She couldn’t have. If Cherish isn’t white girl spoiled, if she isn’t naïve, if she doesn’t have a hollow place carved into the entitlement and selfishness that are her birthright, then I am the imposter. Nothing I have ever said or known can be believed.
“I was trying to make it small,” Cherish interrupts. “If it was just tally marks in a book, then maybe it wasn’t as awful as it felt. I didn’t want to think any more about it than that.”
“He’s going to make it home eventually,” Nichole Turner tells me, speaking over my best friend.
“Do you think I’m a monster, Cherish?” I ask, ready with an ultimatum—except that no one is following a script anymore.
“Yes.”
The lava scaling the wall behind the bed pauses—but only for a moment. I only have to alter my plan slightly.
“Then so are they.”
A new wave of silent tears swells from her eyes and down her face, the way the lava resurges, thick and hot.
“But I can’t be the one to convince you. I’m not the villain, Che. I won’t let them make me into one. You have to prove it to yourself.”
She won’t know how. I am counting on it.
I kneel down in front of Cherish, take her hands, and then lay my head over them as though our knuckles don’t jut into my cheek.
“Your mom will tell you,” I say, and nod against our clasped hands. “She’ll tell you the truth, if she thinks you’re the one getting hurt by all this. They never wanted that.”
