Mrs. Amanda took the box and squeezed my hand. “She don’t hate you,” she said. “Not really. It’s a new hurt, and I’m sure her parents not helping—don’t want that girl to grow up. She just hurt. Maybe one day that won’t be the first thing she feels when she hears your name.”
“That’s gon’ take what? Ten years?” I said, trying to joke and failing.
She smiled a little. “Hopefully less.”
That less turned into more. I finished senior year without her. Everything, every classroom, every hallway, every desk, felt wrong. At first, people talked, like they do. It was all whispers and side-eyes for a while. Then it faded into other drama. I beat Deon’s ass… twice. I didn’t put my hands on Shayla, but I made sure she understood there were some lines you didn’t cross if you wanted to keep living a pretty little life around here.
None of it changed the fact that the one person I wanted to talk to most in the world acted like I didn’t exist. I went off to college that fall like Mrs. Amanda told me to. It should have been a fresh start. New campus, new faces, new everything. But every time I saw a girl with straight hair and a red sweater, I thought about her. I would drive home from LSU on weekends, sit in my parents’ kitchen, and hope she might come home.
That Christmas the year after she left, I parked my truck outside Mrs. Amanda’s house and waited. I didn’t get out. Part of me knew if Kyleigh was inside and wanted to see me, she would have said something. Another part of me knew she was probably in some mini-mansion in Houston, pretending Emancipation didn’t exist.
Snow flurries started falling—rare for north Louisiana. They were just little white flecks that melted as soon as they hit the windshield. I sat there until I was shaking with cold, then finally turned the key and drove away. Back at my parents’ place, my mama was fussing with Zahara about her hair for the church Christmas program. My daddy had the game on. Aunt Alayna stopped by with some food and paperwork, talking about town council business and how the Grindley land made so many of the holiday decorations possible.
“You know Mrs. Amanda letting us use them trees is a blessing,” she said, piling sweet potatoes on her plate. “Not everybody with money that generous.”
It hurt to even hear Mrs. Amanda’s name. I realized I needed to put some distance between me and everything that reminded me of Kyleigh. College wasn’t doing it. I sat in classrooms full of people and felt like I was wasting time. At night, sleep didn’t come easy. When it did, it came with nightmares of her walking away from me, over and over. By spring, the recruiter’s card that had been sitting in my wallet since junior year was more and more appealing.
“You thinking about enlisting?” my dad asked when he found me sitting at the kitchen table, the card in front of me.
“I’m thinking about doing something different. I feel like I’m floating, Pops. I need… I don’t know. Structure. Purpose.”
He made a thoughtful sound. “You got purpose right here. You got a family and college paid for. You smart enough to do whatever you want. You don’t have to run off and let somebody yell at you for a living.”
I thought about Ms. Ola Kate, my great aunt, the way she told stories about my granddaddy’s service, the pride in her voice. I thought about being somewhere Kyleigh’s name wouldn’t be attached to everything
“I’m not running,” I lied. “I just… I don’t know, Pops. I need to feel like I’m moving forward. I’m tired of being stuck.”
He studied me for a long time. “You got your mind made up?” he asked.
I nodded.
“All right,” he said finally. “Then, we gon’ pray hard and support you. But understand something, son—no matter where you go, you taking yourself and everything about you, with you. You can’t outrun your mistakes or memories. You just learn how to live with them.”
He was right. I went through boot camp. Training. Service. Selection for an elite, secret team—the government wouldn’t acknowledge our existence, much less our legitimacy. Moretraining at Quantico. A world of orders and secrets and missions that didn’t make the news. I learned how to carry a weapon, how to move in silence, how to make my face blank even when my body was on fire. I learned how to do the kind of work no one would claim in public.
What I never learned how to do was forget the girl who broke up with me behind an amphitheater at Christmas.
(The Present)
I stood on my sister Zahara’s porch a second, looking at the pretty white lights wrapped around the railing. She had a wreath on the door, red bows everywhere, and plastic reindeer in the yard that I knew my cousin Loyalty had already tried to tackle at least once. Emancipation loved Christmas. Apparently, that included my little sister. She had invited me and all of our first cousins on our Pops’s side to dinner. If I hadn’t agreed to come earlier, I would’ve stayed at home, sat with my feelings about seeing Kyleigh again. Even cold as ice, she was so fucking pretty and brown and juicy in a way even those rich woman clothes couldn’t hide. I wondered if those plush lips still felt soft and smooth and silk. I wondered if she’d warm in my arms, let allthat ice melt for me. I wondered if she’d soften, let go of that attitude if I made her cream all over my dick. I wondered?—
Hell, I was wondering the wrong thing right now.
Here I was, ten years since I’d seen her, nine years since I’d set foot in this town watching Emancipation’s holiday lights blink like nothing had ever gone wrong here. I thought I was coming back just to humor Ms. Ola Kate and check on family.
Then my aunt said her name.
“The town’s having some difficulty with Ms. Grindley… her granddaughter, Kyleigh, the Grindley who stole Christmas…”
Everything in me remembered that girl.
Everything in melovedthat girl.
I had done what Mrs. Amanda told me to do. I built a life, kept moving, made something of myself. But standing there in my aunt’s office, listening to her talk about Kyleigh like she was some storybook villain, I knew one thing for sure.
I might have left Emancipation… but I had never left Kyleigh.
I shook my head to clear it. I knocked twice before entering the code Zahara had given me and walking in like family, because I was. Zahara’s house smelled like fried chicken, cinnamon, and one of those bougie candles she had always loved.
