“Well, I don’t.” She looks down. “You look at the menu yet?”
It’s the first crack in her nice facade. It ripples across her face as she picks up the heavy menu off the table. I don’t bother picking up mine because I didn’t plan to stay long enough to eat, no matter how many times Ace reminded me it was the most important thing for me to accomplish today. This isn’t that type of girls’ day out. Not when Mama was still laying in the hospital and a part of Ace was still dead inside. This needs to be quick.
“I don’t have an appetite.”
She rolls her eyes. “I make you lose your appetite or something?”
“Only when you’re not keeping shit a hundred like you claim to like.”
Cree is a lot like Brandy—confident that I’ll bend to her wants and sure enough that I won’t have the balls to confront her about the slick things she says, but something’s different with me now. It didn’t happen to me overnight, but it happened little by little, just like that bandaid I told Ace about.
She huffs and slams the menu shut. “Did one of those dumbass reporters contact you to ask questions about something that’s dead and over with? Where’s this coming from?”
I could tell her it comes from falling in love, from seeing your Mama hot and almost lifeless on her bedroom floor, from seeing the boy you wanted to crawl into torture himself every day for something he knows he didn’t do deep in his gut.
“How do you do it?” I ask as our waiter strolls up, pushing his sleeves up.
“You guys ready?”
Cree opens her mouth, holding a finger up, but I stop them both.
“No, come back. We’re still deciding.”
The waiter tilts his thin top lip up and shrugs while Cree glares at me.
“As you wish,” he says. “I’ll be back to check in on you two.”
“Really? I ain’t ate since last night.”
I shrug. “You can eat when we’re done.”
Shereallyhates that response. Her shoulders bunch up to her ears and the off the shoulder blouse she’s wearing falls down her milky shoulder.
“Done with what? You invited yourself here to ambush me about something you don’t even know nothing about.”
“You invited me.”
“I invitedAson.”
“Oh, you ain’t know we was the same?”
Sometimes I wish we exist in the same body so I can remember the things he can’t and remind him he’s still one of one, no matter who lied on him.
Cree laughs so loud the party next to us looks over the rims of their glasses at us. They eye our little round table shoved in the corner next to the kitchen.
“Please, just a month ago you were damn near convulsing at the thought of me insinuating y’all was together. Now you got an article on TMZ Sports, new clothes, and thirty thousand Twitter followers and you suddenly, Mrs. Williams. Girl, please.” She flings her limp wrist. “Clout really be having you bitches geeked up.”
Now she’s nasty. There’s no more nice left in her, but I don’t care.
I laugh too, pushing the menu as far away from me as it can go. “I’m gon' pretend like you ain’t talking out the side of your neck right now because I know how much Ace likes you.”
“Yeah,whatever.”
“Answer my question.”
“What goddamn question?
“I asked ‘how you do it?’”
