He frowned. “Of course, Ky. I?—”
I shook my head. “No. Not like this. Not in front of everybody. Not when you already feel like you don’t belong in a place. My parents shipped me here because they thought it would be good for me. I worked so hard to fit in just enough so people would stop looking at me like I was strange. And the first time I let somebody all the way in, the first time I do something that big, I get turned into a joke on a microphone. Nah, Jabali. You ain’t been embarrassed before.”
“You not a joke,” he denied.
“Yeah? Then why I feel like the punchline?” I asked.
He reached out, hesitated, then dropped his hand. “Tell me what to do,” he said softly. “You want me to get on that stage and tell everybody it’s not like that? I will. You want me to fuck Deon up for even running his mouth? I will. I already planned to. Whatever you need, Ky. I’m here. I’m not leaving.”
“And Donique?” I asked.
“What about her? Ain’t nobody tryna be with that girl,” he said with a scowl.
“But you were with her before…”
“You knew that, Ky. I never hid that I knocked her down. That’s why her ass hating. She?—”
“In August?” I asked suddenly.
He flinched. And I knew. I wiped my face with the back of my hand. “I need you to leave me alone.”
“It was August, but it was before you, before school even started?—”
“I’m serious, Jabali.’
His eyes narrowed. “Kyleigh?—”
“I can’t do this. You expect me to stay here and watch…” I stopped, shook my head.
“So, what, you breaking up with me?” he asked, voice hoarse
.
“I’m ending whatever this was. Let me go. Don’t come to my grandmother’s house looking for me. Don’t call me. Don’t text me,” I listed.
He stared at me like he couldn’t believe what I was saying. He reached out and finally touched me. My face. My tears. My shaking hands.
“We got six more months of school. Then you can go back to Houston and never see me again if that’s what you really want. But don’t throw everything away over how something started. Judge me on what I did after, not on the first step, Kyleigh,” he said, making my name sound like a plea.
“I’m judging you on all of it, because everything was built on a lie!”
Then I turned and walked away before my legs gave out. I didn’t go back to the amphitheater. Taniyah would be okay. She always was. I ran from the parking lot, cut through a pretty little tree garden, climbed the hill to my grandmother’s house, and stumbled up the front steps with my vision blurry from tears. The door opened before I could find my key, like someone had been on the other side waiting.
“Baby?”
My mother’s voice shocked me. She stood there, looking concerned, my father right next to her.
“Kyleigh, what you doing here? Mama Amanda said you’d done so much for this play… we wanted to surprise you. What’s wrong?”
I fell into her arms and cried like my heart was broken, because it was. By Monday, I was with them on a plane to Houston. By Wednesday, my resourceful parents, who worried that I’d make the young-girl-in-love mistake of forgiving him too easily, had come into my room with evidence I didn’t even want to know how they’d gotten. Text messages, pictures, proof of his entertaining Donique, of my being the butt of some vicious joke. By the end of that week, Jabali Christopher was blocked on my phone, on every app, on every single way a person could access my world.
I cut him out of my life, excised him like something poisonous because he was.
Then, I did my best to forget him.
(BackThen)
I knew something was wrong the second the crowd got quiet for the wrong reason.
