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Chapter 16
The Usual Suspects had been successful in their campaign to get me out. Or at least, they’d felt successful in their campaign to get me out. The truth was I’d been all or nothing, and when I decided I wasn’t nothing I was determined to be all: wearing a push-up bra under my strappy top, whining on Lysha and Yinda, and then becoming the protein in a whine sandwich while Mavado told us that we were so special, so special so special, so special. And Ifeltspecial, braids swinging, vodka pouring. Koffee was back, on the tables, the heartbeat of the party racing to forget—doing the most to forget—the fragility of everything, especially the person who usually wore the gold-star pendant around my neck.
Clear hair-shop lip-gloss had been slicked on, a touch of mascara and my mum’s too-light-for-me powder pressed haphazardly on my face. I’d gone into my parents’ room to retrieve it. Her vanity was a little dusty. I ran my fingers across her perfumes, her creams. I sniffed them, remembering the time her neck didn’t smell like clinical sterility, of sweat and hot tears that fell from my eyes on to the hollows of her collarbone. Her neck had always been elegant, her body soft and curvy, but there had always been a stately dip in the connect between her throat and chest, queenly, an elegant deck for a gold star pendant. Now, it was emaciated with tubes coming out of it. I tried to move as much as I could, as if everyhip swish and waist twist was a prayer of vitality, as if the more alive I forced myself to be, the more alive she would be. I found that alcohol lubricated my body and made this easier, made the hard edges in my mind soft, the bristles buck.
While I was stood breathless against a wall, taking a break, dizzy head spinning delightfully, Nile came over and took my hand. “Come on. I promised I’d look after you.”
I smiled woozily and followed him to the kitchen, where he refilled my cup. I leaned back against a counter as people squeezed past, to and from the fridge.
“Yeah? Looking after me means giving me more drink?”
Nile shrugged as he passed me the cup. “It’s good to see you have fun, K. Relaxed, like this. Felt like I lost you for a while.”
I held still, the cup hovering by my mouth. An alcoholic heat rush and hormonal heat rush combined to make me feel like I was aflame. I swayed and held tighter on to the counter. The room was pleasantly soupy.
“Bro.Bruh.Did you ever even have me to lose me?”
Nile let out a slow, sexy smile. “I nearly did. Year 11. You were crushing on me like brazy.”
I rolled my eyes. “Brazy?Why do you talk like that? Such a beg. You’re corny! And it’s exactly for that reason that it was the other way round.”
“Just admit that you wanted me.”
“You wish.”
Nile’s smile faded slightly, eyes giving off a metal-edged glint as he gazed lazily at me. There were a few other people in the kitchen, but they were busy, not paying attention, music too loud to focus. Nile glanced around quickly, then stepped closer to me, whispered in my ear.
“Yeah? What if I do?”
I opened and shut my mouth, my heart pounding against my chest, his heavy, masculine heat and Christmas-present-first-grown colognenew to me, this whole thing new to me. My mum getting sick had suspended milestones for me and, as mouthy as I was, my mouth was yet to make contact with a boy’s. This was wrong, I knew it. He was Rianne’s man, but everything, everything in my body wanted to be against his body, in pursuit of forgetting, in losing myself in the heat.
“Don’t say that, Nile. You shouldn’t be saying that.” I pushed him off slightly.
Nile stepped back but his eyes remained fastened to me. “Let’s talk. Somewhere private.”
“Nile—”
“Just talk. Come on, K. We used to talk.”
So, with Nile propping up my stumbles, I swayed to an upstairs bedroom that smelled foreign, something I would later recognize as boy. We were sat on the bed and Nile seemed unable to tell me how much he missed me without rubbing the small of my back and it felt good, so good, and it was like he couldn’t tell me how sorry he was for what I was going through without pushing my braids behind my neck and whispering it against my throat, and it felt delicious, so delicious. Lips moving until they were so close to my skin that he was enunciating against it. He told me through low growls how much I deserved to feel good for once, because I’d been going through it, and when he said it, it felt like the truth, it felt right, even though something felt wrong.
He said he was sorry Rianne had been distant with me lately and he attempted to make up for the distance by proxy with his hand slipping ever so slightly up my top to rub against my waist, slowly and then quickly. He said, between too-hot neck kisses, as he began to push me down on the bed, body on mine, that she was jealous, because she knew he’d liked me first and she couldn’t handle it.
At the mention of Rianne’s name, I’d frozen; it pulled me back to dispassionate reality, yanked me out of the fantasy of forgetting.
“No. Nah, nah, Nile.”
I pushed him off. My hand was waving sloppily, reflexes weakened by cheap vodka. “We need to stop. We aren’t doing this. I’m not doing this. She’s my mate. That’s my girl.”
Nile’s molten eyes hardened to a blade, his smile stiffening, mask slipping. “But is she yours? You should hear the shit she says about you. Like how she thinks it’s mad that someone as blick as you could ever think you had a chance with me.”
My vision was blurry and I couldn’t tell if it was the alcohol or the tears, or if maybe at this point my tears were pure ethanol, stinging their way out of my clumsily lined eyes.
“Shut up. You’re lying.... Stop chatting shit.”
“I’m the only one not lying to you, babe. You think Lysha and Yinda ain’t in on it? They talk behind your back, K. I’m the only one that’s real with you.”
I was at the edge of the bed panting, everything I had tried to forget rushing to the fore, my mum being sick now mingling with being called blick, like being dark-skinned was as pathological as what was happening to my mum’s cells, but even worse, a scourge, somehow, a sin. A sickness and a sin.
