“That girl has trouble enough staying in class. Don’t even think about it,” Ashanti said.
They returned to the hotel to scoop up the dogs, then headed to JFK for their late-evening flight. That unsettling sensation from earlier began crawling over Ashanti once more, an awareness that their time in New York was coming to an end and they were returning to reality.
“You’re doing it again,” Thad said as they waited at the gate. “Stop freaking out.”
She wasn’t going to deny it. Instead, she didn’t say anything. Just sat in her increasingly uncomfortable seat at thegate, bouncing her knee up and down until her boarding group was called.
Once again, she and Thad were seated in different rows. Ashanti put her head back and closed her eyes as soon as the plane began to taxi the runway.
About twenty minutes into their flight, she felt the man in the middle seat get up. She’d heard him asking the flight attendant about using the restroom before they took off. He returned moments later, wedging himself back in the seat. Then he took her hand.
Ashanti jerked her hand away, her eyes popping open.
“You can go back to sleep,” Thad said, recapturing her hand.
“Did you switch seats with that guy?”
He nodded.
“You gave up the aisle for a middle seat? To be closer to me?”
He nodded again, then looked over at her. “This means we’re going steady.”
She couldn’t help but laugh at his cute, antiquated term and the seriousness in how he said it.
“Is that how this works?” she asked.
“As far as I’m concerned.”
He entwined their fingers and put his head back. They sat that way for the remainder of the flight, her anxiety flowing away like the clouds they passed in the sky.
But the tension returned the moment Ashanti took her phone out of Airplane Mode after touching down at Louis Armstrong International. There was a string of text messages from Kara.
Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!
Ken has locked herself in her room.
Don’t think she’s coming out.
She followed it with a meme of a woman muttering “drama, drama, drama.”
It was followed by another string of texts:
Real emergency this time. You’re getting your a$$ kicked. Raw Beauty brought out the big guns.
Ashanti frowned. What did that even mean?
She recognized Raw Beauty as one of the contestants in the Black Woman Entrepreneur contest, but what did Kara mean by big guns? And why was Ashanti getting her butt kicked? She was winning by 18 percent when she checked the polls before leaving the hotel.
“Something wrong?” Thad asked.
“Everything is wrong, according to Kara. I’m not sure exactly what’s going on, except for Kendra having a meltdown.”
“It was nice being off big-sister duty for a few days, wasn’t it?”
He had no idea.
The pilot announced that another plane was at their gate so they would have to hang back for a few minutes.
