Perhaps it was all of the above.
“How’s the leg?” Perdita asked after a few quiet moments.
He could feel the ship beneath them rattle as it sailed farther away from the shore.
Bilal looked up at the bruising sky, not wanting her to see the truth in his eyes. “Better,” he lied. “How was your trip? Paris, was it?” he continued quickly, before she could ask any follow-up questions.
“Prague,” she corrected.
“Oh yeah, how was that?”
“Cold,” she replied with a shrug. “Not much better than the weather here,” she finished, shivering a little as the cold air wrapped around the yacht.
“What were you there for again?” Despite messaging all the time, they never really spoke about their work lives. It always felt so corporate and cold when they did, too much like their childhood, so instead they stuck to nicer,safertopics, such as the latest trashy reality television series they were both watching.
“Went to meet with some art vendors, did some research… Same old. I’m honestly exhausted, but you know how it gets with the constant travel,” she replied.
He nodded, pretending to know. He didn’t travel nearly as much as his siblings did. Octavius was always off performing somewhere in the world, Fola was always traveling to give keynote speeches and lectures, and Perdita was always abroad looking for inspiration for her art pieces. It sounded like an incredible life, one he was envious of. His siblings were actually out in the real worldliving, while Bilal was stuck inside the same gym in Brooklyn, training day in, day out. Competitions were the only time he really got to travel and he wasn’t sure that even counted for much, seeing as he never left the training centers or the gym whenever he was abroad.
He would trade all of his medals to live like his siblings. In fact, he would trade the entire world.
Silence crept up on them again, and Bilal found his focus drifting away from the sea, and back to the devil over his shoulder.
“Anwar is here,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant about it. He glanced at his sister, trying to see if she was buying his lack of chalant-ness.
“Anwar, as in your asshole ex-boyfriend, Anwar?” she asked, an eyebrow raised as she turned to rest her back against the railing.
Bilal wasn’t sure that was a fair assessment of Anwar. Anwar was decidedlynota bad person, but Perdita only knew him as the guy who’d broken Bilal’s heart back in March, so he was an asshole in her eyes.
“The very same,” he replied.
Perdita surveyed the deck through narrowed eyes, as if trying to hunt the boy down. Bilal followed suit but avoided looking at the spot he’d last seen Anwar. The last thing he wanted was another deadly dose of eye contact. He people-watched instead, taking notice of the semi-famous faces around him. He recognized Sullivan Spencer, a fellow sportsman and a basketball prodigy from North Philly, who’d become one of the youngest players ever drafted into the NBA at just age seventeen. Sullivan was surrounded byeager-eyed donors in black suits, all of them wanting a piece of him. Bilal did not envy him one bit. Usually Bilal was the athlete the donors would be surrounding all night, shoving business cards in his face and promising big sponsorships. Tonight, though, he’d hardly been approached. That’s the thing about being young and brilliant. It was always going to be temporary. There will always be someone younger, someone with more to give. And he was okay with that. He’d given enough. Besides, his injury had made him undesirable, a soon-to-be has-been before he was even eighteen.
“That sucks,” Perdita said as if she could read his mind. But he knew she couldn’t. She was most likely responding to his ex-boyfriend being here and not the fact that he was no longer worth his weight in gold. “I’m sorry, Billy. I know you really liked him,” she continued.
Bilal didn’t justreally likeAnwar. He more than liked him and maybe that was his problem.
“Yeah, it’s whatever,” he said, the surface of his voice cracking.
“Speaking of sucking…,” Perdita muttered. She nodded toward the small grinning man sporting a bright yellow press lanyard who was steadily approaching them. “Good luck. I was never here,” she said, hurrying away before Bilal could stop her.
He didn’t have time to figure out his own exit strategy before the journalist was in front of him.
“Bilal! So great to bump into you here,” the journalist said, in that faux-polite way they always did before they ruined lives.
“At my father’s event? On my father’s yacht?” Bilal asked, blinking down at the man, who seemed elated by his response. Probably because it was a response at all. Bilal imagined that he wasn’t the first of his siblings that the man had tried to pin down tonight.
“Yes! And what an event this is. A celebration of prodigies from all over—you know I was one of the first people your dad told about his prodigy project, many,manyyears before your birth,” the journalist said as though this would somehow endear Bilal to him.
“Are you my father’s friend or something?” Bilal asked, confused.
The journalist burst out laughing like this was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “No, not at all. What we are, your father and I, extends beyond friendship.”
Bilal raised an eyebrow at that, now questioning whether his father had been in some sort of secret love affair. He didn’t think his dad even had the time for that sort of thing.
The journalist seemed to realize the suggestive nature of his words and cleared his throat. “What I mean is… we are, in simple terms, lifelong colleagues. You know, I was something of a prodigy too back in the day, as you can probably tell. I ammuchyounger than your father, but our paths did cross for a brief time when we attended business school together and shared a few journalism classes—before your father dropped out, that is… But anyway, I’ve known old Leontes for many, many,manyyears. In one of his articles back in the day, he even called me his greatest enemy,” the journalist continued with a look of absolute pride.
Bilal just stared blankly at the strange man before him, unsure of how to process any of what he’d just heard.
