“I came because… I didn’t want my last memory of us before the tour to be that fight.”
My throat tightens.
“Before the tour?” I ask. “What tour, Za?—”
She holds up a hand. “Not here.”
“Yes here,” I snap before I can stop myself. “Why is it always ‘not here’ with you? We’ve done ‘not here’ for weeks. We’ve done silence. We’ve done distance. I’m tired.”
Her jaw tightens instantly. “And you think I’m not?”
The stadium erupts as Jabari takes a shot, but it barely registers. It’s just me and her and everything we didn’t say.
“You’re going on tour?” I press. “You didn’t even tell me.”
“You lost the right to be the first person I tell, Francine,” she shoots back. “Besides, I gave you your stuff back. Didn’t that let you know I was leaving?”
“No!” I get closer to her, not caring who’s toes I stepped on. “I thought you were kicking me out!”
“Tuh, does that even sound like something I’d do Frankie?”
Mrs. McKingsley leans forward from the row behind us.
“Girls,” she warns, low but firm. “People are watching.”
“I don’t care,” I say at the same time Za says, “Let them.”
Za turns back to me. “Yes. I’m going on tour. Six months. Maybe more. Manchester. Birmingham. Dublin if it goes well.”
“And you weren’t going to tell me?”
“I was,” she says, and then corrects herself. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? You don’t know if you were going to tell me you’re leaving the country?”
“You’re not my keeper,” she snaps. “You forfeited that position.”
I swallow hard.
“You think I don’t know that?” I fire back. “You think I haven’t replayed that day a hundred times? You think I don’t wake up feeling like I detonated my own house?”
“You chose him,” she says, voice trembling despite how steady she’s trying to keep it.
“I didn’t choose him over you,” I say quickly. “I just… couldn’t choose at all.”
“Oh, come on, Francine. That is choosing and you know it,” she says through clenched teeth. “You were choosing every day you stayed with him.”
The crowd roars again as Sol makes a run. People are standing. Clapping. Shouting. It feels obscene that life is continuing around us like this isn’t a breaking point.
“I love him,” I say, and my voice cracks around it.
She flinches. It’s small, almost invisible, but I see it.
“I know,” she says quietly. “That’s what makes it worse.”
Her mum leans in again, more desperate this time. “This is foolishness. You two are embarrassing yourselves.”
“You stay the fuck out of it!” Za and I say in unison.
