“Sounds like my parents,” says Britt. “Took us to fucking Harry Potter World for the third year in a row. I’m sick of Butter Beer and corny family photos with wands.”
Holy shit. Who the fuck complains about going to Harry Potter World? Or Butter Beer? Or wands?
I hope none of them ask about my spring break. They went to Taipei, the Bahamas, Harry Potter World. I stayed in the hood and saw a cop kill my friend.
“I guess the Bahamas wasn’t so bad,” Hailey says. “They wanted us to do family stuff, but we ended up doing our own thing the entire time.”
“You mean you texted me the entire time,” Maya says.
“It was still my own thing.”
“All day, every day,” Maya adds. “Ignoring the time difference.”
“Whatever, Shorty. You know you liked talking to me.”
“Oh,” I say. “That’s cool.”
Really though, it’s not. Hailey never texted me during spring break. She barely texts me at all lately. Maybe once a week now, and it used to be every day. Something’s changed between us, and neither one of us acknowledges it. We’re normal when we’re at Williamson, like now. Beyond here though, we’re no longer best friends, just . . . I don’t know.
Plus she unfollowed my Tumblr.
She has no clue that I know. I once posted a picture of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black boy who was murdered for whistling at a white woman in 1955. His mutilated body didn’t look human. Hailey texted me immediately after, freaking out. I thought it was because she couldn’t believe someone would do that to a kid. No. She couldn’t believe I would reblog such an awful picture.
Not long after that, she stopped liking and reblogging my other posts. I looked through my followers list. Aww, Hails was no longer following me. With me living forty-five minutes away, Tumblr is supposed to be sacred ground where our friendship is cemented. Unfollowing me is the same as saying “I don’t like you anymore.”
Maybe I’m being sensitive. Or maybe things have changed, maybe I’ve changed. For now I guess we’ll keep pretending everything is fine.
The first bell rings. On Mondays AP English is first for me, Hailey, and Maya. On the way they get into this big discussion-turned-argument about NCAA brackets and the Final Four. Hailey was born a Notre Dame fan. Maya hates them almost unhealthily. I stay out that discussion. The NBA is more my thing anyway.
We turn down the hall, and Chris is standing in the doorway of our class, his hands stuffed in pockets and a pair of headphones draped around his neck. He looks straight at me and stretches his arm across the doorway.
Hailey glances from him to me. Back and forth, back and forth. “Did something happen with you guys?”
My pursed lips probably give me away. “Yeah. Sort of.”
“That douche,” Hailey says, reminding me why we’re friends—she doesn’t need details. If someone hurts me in any way, they’re automatically on her shit list. It started in fifth grade, two years before Maya came along. We were those “crybaby” kids who bust out crying at the smallest shit. Me because of Natasha, and Hailey because she lost her mom to cancer. We rode the waves of grief together.
That’s why this weirdness between us doesn’t make sense. “What do you want to do, Starr?” she asks.
I don’t know. Before Khalil, I planned to cold-shoulder Chris with a sting more powerful than a nineties R&B breakup song. But after Khalil I’m more like a Taylor Swift song. (No shade, I fucks with Tay-Tay, but she doesn’t serve like nineties R&B on the angry-girlfriend scale.) I’m not happy with Chris, yet I miss him. I miss us. I need him so much that I’m willing to forget what he did. That’s scary as fuck too. Someone I’ve only been with for a year means that much to me? But Chris . . . he’s different.
You know what? I’ll Beyoncé him. Not as powerful as a nineties R&B breakup song, but stronger than a Taylor Swift. Yeah. That’ll work. I tell Hailey and Maya, “I’ll handle him.”
They move so I’m between them like they’re my bodyguards, and we go to the door together.
Chris bows to us. “Ladies.”
“Move!” Maya orders. Funny considering how much Chris towers over her.
He looks at me with those baby blues. He got a tan over break. I used to tell him he was so pale he looked like a marshmallow. He hated that I compared him to food. I told him that’s what he got for calling me caramel. It shut him up.
Dammit though. He’s wearing the Space Jam Elevens too. I forgot we decided to wear them the first day back. They look good on him. Jordans are my weakness. Can’t help it.
“I just wanna talk to my girl,” he claims.
“I don’t know who that is,” I say, Beyoncé’ing him like a pro.
He sighs through his nose. “Please, Starr? Can we at least talk about it?”
I’m back to Taylor Swift because the please does it. I nod at Hailey and Maya.
“You hurt her, and I’ll kill you,” Hailey warns, and she and Maya go in to class without me.
Chris and I move away from the door. I lean against a locker and fold my arms. “I’m listening,” I say.
A bass-heavy instrumental plays in his headphones. Probably one of his beats. “I’m sorry for what happened. I should’ve talked to you first.”
I cock my head. “We did talk about it. A week before. Remember?”
“I know, I know. And I heard you. I just wanted to be prepared in case—”
“You could push the right buttons and convince me to change my mind?”
“No!” His hands go up in surrender. “Starr, you know I wouldn’t—that’s not—I’m sorry, okay? I took it too far.”
Understatement. The day before Big D’s party, Chris and I were in Chris’s ridiculously large room. The third floor of his parents’ mansion is a suite for him, a perk of being the last born to empty-nesters. I try to forget that he has an entire floor as big as my house and hired help that looks like me.
Fooling around isn’t new for us, and when Chris slipped his hand in my shorts, I didn’t think anything of it. Then he got me going, and I really wasn’t thinking. At all. For real, my thought process went out the door. And right as I was at that moment, he stopped, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a condom. He raised his eyebrows at me, silently asking for an invitation to go all the way.
All I could think about was those girls I see walking around Garden Heights, babies propped on their hips. Condom or no condom, shit happens.
I went off on Chris. He knew I wasn’t ready for that, we already talked about it, and yet he had a condom? He said he wanted to be responsible, but if I said I’m not ready, I’m not ready.
I left his house pissed and horny, the absolute worst way to leave.
My mom may have been right though. She once said that after you go there with a guy, it activates all these feelings, and you wanna do it all the time. Chris and I went far enough that I notice every single detail about his body now. His cute nostrils that flare when he sighs. His soft brown hair that my fingers love to explore. His gentle lips, and his tongue that wets them every so often. The five freckles on his neck that are in the perfect spots for kissing.
More than that, I remember the guy who spends almost every night on the phone with me talking about nothing and everything. The one who loves to make me smile. Yeah, he pisses me off sometimes, and I’m sure I piss him off, but we mean something. We actually mean a lot.
Fuckity fuck, fuck, fuck. I’m crumbling. “Chris . . .”
He goes for a low blow and beatboxes an all-too-familiar, “Boomp . . . boomp, boomp, boomp.”
I point at him. “Don’t you dare!”
“‘Now, this is a story all about how, my life got flipped—turned upside down. And I’d like to take a minute, just sit right there, I’ll tell you how I became the prince of a town called Bel-Air.’”
He beatboxes the instrumental and pops his chest and booty to the rhythm. People pass by us, laughing. A guy whistles suggestively. Someone shouts, “Shake that ass, Bryant!”