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By lunchtime, I found myself hiding in the custodial closet, crying my eyes out from embarrassment. It didn’t take long for Hailee to track me down. Even when I didn’t tell her where I was, she always kind of knew. I guessed that was what best friends were—people who knew where you’d be and showed up on your worst days.
She came into the closet and closed the door behind her. She didn’t talk to me for a while. She just sat beside me and let me cry. I’d be embarrassed to cry in front of most people, but whenever I did with Hailee, she didn’t say nothin’ about it. Plus, I’d seen her shed a fair number of tears.
After a while, she turned to me and put a hand on my shoulder. “Do you know what my dad says about the critics when they talk about my mama’s baking?”
“What?” I murmured, using my sleeve to wipe my snotty nose.
“Fuck them,” she stated matter-of-factly.
My eyes widened. “You’re not supposed to say that word.”
“I didn’t say it. My dad said it,” she corrected as if that meant the words didn’t come from her own mouth.
“But you said it when you were saying that he said it!”
She shrugged, unbothered. “My dad also said words are just words. It’s how people use them that makes them good or bad. I wasn’t using it in a bad way. I was using it in the way to make you feel better.”
“Oh,” I muttered.
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Did it work?”
“Did what work?”
“Do you feel better?”
“Oh.” I shook my head. “No.”
She frowned and scratched at her tight curly hair sitting high in two afro puffs. Sometimes, she complained because she didn’t have straight hair like the other girls in our class, but that was because she had the best hair. She kind of had the best of everything, from her smile and curly hair like her mom’s to her round nose and freckles like her dad. Hailee had the kind of looks that made it easy to look at her. Sometimes I’d find myself looking even when she didn’t know I’d been.
She sighed from the realization that I still didn’t feel better. “Well, do you want to know what my mama said?”
“Does it use the word fuck?”
She gasped. “You’re not supposed to say that word!”
“But you just said—!”
“Mama says that first people laugh at you ’cuz they don’t understand what you’re doing. Then later, they’ll be asking you how you did it, so you can’t be mad that people don’t get it yet. They’re just slow.”
“What if they don’t ever get it?”
“Who cares? We don’t like them anyway.”
Fair point.
We sat quietly for a while, then she said, “I thought you were the best taco.”
It turned out Hailee’s opinion of me was the only one that mattered.
4
Hailee
Sixteen Years Old
