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She was going to give everyone in our neighborhood quality care.
“What? You don’t think I’m going to?” she’d asked one night as we sat on the roof. She had a pile of her books at her side, anatomy ones and medical journals, shit that made my head spin if I tried to scan over a page. I had a wad of cash in my pocket that I hadn’t come by legally, and that I was planning to use toward her going away party when the time came. I’d been saving up for it.
“I think you can do anything you set your mind to, Ama.”
“That’s not what I asked, though. You don’t think I’m going to run the clinic one day?”
“If that is what you really want to do, I believe you will do it.”
“You don’t think it’s what I really want? Seriously? After all I’ve been through the past few years?”
She was always quick to rile. A quick temper wasn’t a good thing in our area. But she existed under the canopy of my protection. So she never learned to bite her tongue or run what she was about to say through a filter.
I liked that, though.
That I hadn’t let the neighborhood break her.
That she got to be wholly herself.
Even if that meant I got to be on the receiving end of her anger more than a time or two.
“I think that if you have a chance to get out of here for good, Ama, that you should jump on it. You deserve better than this.”
“I think everyone here deserves better than what they are getting. Except maybe your parents,” she said, eyes going stormy, like they always did when she talked about my parents. “Especially your dad,” she added.
And there was just… something in her tone.
I knew her too well.
She couldn’t slip in a false note into her voice without me hearing it.
“Ama,” I called, waiting until she looked in my direction. “What did my dad do to you?”
“I never said he did anything,” she said, but that slight tremble of her lower lip? Yeah, it was a dead giveaway.
“Ama,” I repeated, keeping my voice soft and calm, coaxing, even though my blood had reached a full boil in my veins at the possibilities.
“It’s nothing,” she insisted, shaking her head.
“It’s not nothing, or you would have told me,” I reasoned.
Hell, this was the girl who told me she was on her period and how bad her cramps were. The girl who reported back every tiny detail of her day to me and my eager ears.
“Really, Seeley, it’s not worth mentioning.”
“Ama, I am going to need you to tell me what my father did,” I said, my jaw so fucking tight that all my teeth hurt.
“I just… I thought you were home. And I wanted to see if you wanted to go to the beach. So I went to your apartment.”
We had an agreement about my apartment since we were little kids.
Namely, she didn’t go there. Ever. Because not only were my parents bad news, but so were their friends. She’d only broken that agreement a handful of times over the years, and I was always the one who answered the door.
“What happened?” I asked, my guts feeling like someone had tied them all together and was tightening them by the second.
“Really, it wasn’t that big of a deal,” she insisted.
That in and of itself was telling.
