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From that evening on, they spent nearly every day together, burning CDs, swapping playlists, and creating future lives with different actresses: he was a renowned physician with two kids with Janet Jackson. Khalid and Sandra Bullock didn’t have kids but traveled the world together in their private jet.
Eventually, they changed how they talked and dressed and wouldn’t be caught dead listening to what they’d referred to as “old people, parent music.” They erased their accents, their folks became “Mom” and “Dad,” and they even started referring to their respective home countries as “that place where myparentswere born.”
Khalid’s family emigrated from Uganda and had been in the States for nearly the same amount of time, to the day, as his family. Like him, Khalid also had four siblings, one of whom turned out to be his crush—Khalid’s twin sister, Khadijah. Then he learned that Khalid had a crush on his sister, Marianne, who was a little under a year younger than them.
As his parents had always aspired to move to the States, he and his siblings had names like Lucas, Marianne, Jennifer, Jonathan, and Brittany. Khalid’s siblings were Khadijah, Aafiyah, Damilola, and Olabisi. However, the five of them eventually started going by Kyle, Kady, Fae, Lola, and Abbie everywhere except at home.
The plan had been for him to go to senior prom with “Kady” and for Khalid to go with Marianne. Then, they would attend the same university, open a medical practice and biotech firm, and become brothers through marriage.
Things didn’t exactly go as planned.
Like Khalid, Delilah knew what boundaries to push, though not because she was trying to be disrespectful. She basically could sense how hard it could sometimes be for him to open up.
He placed the recorder in a drawer in his desk. “Daniels, what’s the ‘tea’ since you’re being persistent?”
“Do you remember the friend I told you about?” she asked. “Oliver?”
Oliver Samson attended medical school at George Washington and was one year ahead of Delilah. For a while, Oliver was Delilah’s only friend in the area during her first year in Baltimore. They initially met while she was on vacation in Mexico the summer after she graduated from Duke, and then they ran into each other again at a club in D.C. called Insight, where Oliver worked as a bouncer.
“Of course, I don’t,” he said.
“Well, I heard from him.”
“I’m not sure why I should care.”
Except he did.
When he found out that Oliver broke Delilah’s heart, he wanted to take a scalpel to Oliver’s spinal cord.
“Remember I told you he asked that one girl, Yasmine, out?” she continued. “Yasmine Kohler?”
He never forgot her telling him Oliver had claimed that Miguel and Yasmine getting together would have made more sense than her and Miguel. As Oliver had put it, Yasmine was a “fifteen out of ten,” and Miguel was too good-looking to be genuinely interested in a “cute nerd” like Delilah.
“At what point will you get to the point, Daniels?” he asked. “You must realize I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She grabbed a mini package of Skittles from the candy dish he started keeping on his desk, even though he didn’t like candy.
“Well, Yasmine and Oliver did end up dating for a little while, for about five months. But then get this…Yasmine left him for hissister.”
He frowned. “Isn’t his sister in a relationship? With a man?”
Delilah’s eyes lit up. “You do listen to me!”
“Barely.”
“Yes, his sister is.”
“How bad of a boyfriend was he that Yas—that the girl left him to join an already established relationship?”
“Yasmine has a boyfriend now.”
“So, she lied to get away from him?”
Good for Yasmine. Oliver deserved to be alone—or six feet under.
“Okay, so I have a theory.” Delilah popped a couple of Skittles into her mouth, pointing at him as she chewed. “Knowing Oliver, I think he was probably so scared about messing up with Yasmine, his ‘goodness’ made him a terrible boyfriend. The way he explained it to me was if Yasmine said she wanted A, he would get her A-squared. Whenever she complained, he’d remind her she was ‘too beautiful’ to truly need to worry about anything. And she had severe anxiety about clinical rotations, but he told her it didn’t matter because he would do great, graduate medical school, and then make a lot of money to take care of her. Textbook minimization.”
Served the asshole right.
