When You Were Everything: List 3

I press my lips together and look away because I can’t believe how overtly he’s flirting with me, right in front of Sydney.

Her black hair is short but the cut is so haphazard that it looks a little like the start of some kind of dark fire, and her nose is pierced, though her ears aren’t.

Dom feigns shock and insult.

“Oh, yeah. Totally,” Sydney concedes.

She brandishes the lipstick.

So that first day when she didn’t sit with me in homeroom, I pulled out my phone and did a cursory search for weekend trips you could take from London proper.

I feared this musical would be another piece of Layla’s life I’d be set apart from, and I was reminded of a few lines from Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy about bearing ills we already have, rather than flying to others we know not of.

You listen to jazz-age music almost exclusively and you unironically qu-qu-quote Shakespeare. You don’t even watch TV. You’re über p-pretentious.

“Pop thinks it’s ‘too newfangled.’ Those were his actual words. But Lolly told me to work on getting my recipes right, and that we could feature one of my mini-plates as the special once a week as I work them out.”

I think about his paper, and how he was so adamant about Macbeth deciding his own fate.

“What’s on the docket tonight?”

Tonight, a particular corner in Chinatown is on the itinerary: a tiny jewelry store that is more well known for its aura readings and crystals than the necklaces and bracelets they sell, at least among believers in that kind of thing.

I’m terrified of what she’s about to say, because our new friendship is still so fresh, so... tenuous.

The kettle screamed just as Daddy walked in—a harbinger of what felt like disaster.

I put on Billie Holiday and I blasted it, letting her sultry, soulful voice fill me up.

It was unfathomable, the idea of going into that building and not speaking to my dad or Layla.

If they have a backlog of bills, an influx of cash might help.

Layla and I agreed that the only way we were going to get through this tutoring assignment was if we had a moderator—a neutral third party to basically chaperone what we hoped would be our last session for a while. We also agreed to meet at a completely innocuous location (this was my requirement), instead of Dolly’s even though it’s a Sunday.

Like, the Qur’an says men and w-w-w-women are spiritual equals—it’s people that mmake up arbitrary rules about wh-what’s right for g-g-girls versus boys.

Layla flips through the remaining pages of the essay and asks me a few more questions that I answer quickly and succinctly.

“I totally appreciate you offering to help out after school or whatever. Lolly and Pop do too. But this is our livelihood, not some part-time gig the way it is for you, and...”

I sit down slowly, forgetting about Layla and Sloane and whatever their drama might entail, feeling cautiously open, hopeful and terrified and unsure of what she’ll say next.

I made a new email address and composed a message that included everything I knew about Sloane Sorenson, Todd Wellington, and their illicit romance—everything that Layla had texted me in the bathroom after Todd showed up at Sloane’s Halloween party.

And in an instant, all those “friends” she’d made when she started dating Todd were gone, if not complicit.

The patriarchy, I typed.

So I invite them to come with me to Dolly’s after school. This isn’t a completely altruistic move.

I hope I’m not encroaching on a safe space that was his first.

...we told her to defer a year, and we’d help take care of him while she went to school.

This is pure, unadulterated rage.

I want to find out who did this to him—destroyed his reputation with a heinous lie—so I need to find out who sent that text message.

She smooths the sides of her head and tucks errant strands into the bun.

For the rest of the week, Layla brushed past me in the hallway, so close that our shoulders touched, like she wanted me to know she saw me and she was snubbing me on purpose.

I could go to my locker and not worry about being accosted.

“Are you happy?” she hissed, cutting me off. “I bet you’re ec-c-cstatic right now.”

Layla shook her head, and something about her face turned hard and apathetic.