“Humaira,” she says, reaching forward and pulling me indoors. “I didn’t know you were coming over today.” She throws her arms around me, like she always does when we see each other. I can feel my anger slowly dissipate. Suddenly, all I can think of is the fact that I’ve known Aisling since I was a little kid. We’ve sat next to each other all the way from junior infants to now. Am I really going to throw all that away?
“Aisling and Deirdre are upstairs,” Mrs. Mahoney says.
I climb up the stairs slowly, listening to the hum of Aisling and Dee’s voices coming from behind her closed bedroom door and to the sound of my heart beating way too loud in my chest.
When I finally knock on the door, Dee throws it open.
“Oh, you’re here,” she says, like she’s been expecting me this whole time. She steps aside and I step into the bedroom.
Aisling is sitting cross-legged on her bed with her phone in her hand. “Maira, finally,” she says as if I’ve kept her waiting. “If we hadn’t seen you this weekend, Dee and I would have had to send out a search party or something.”
I cross my arms over my chest. There are still a million things I want to say to Aisling—to both her and Dee—but the words somehow get stuck in my throat, refusing to come out.
“Dee and I were just talking about how Ishita humiliated me. We’re going to come up with a way to do the same to her.” Aisling barely glances at me as she says all of this. Instead, she springs out of bed and begins pacing around the room. “I’m going to make sure she is never Head Girl. By the time I’m done with her, nobody’s going to want to sit next to Ishita in class.”
“Nobody wants to sit next to Ishita in class now,” I say.
Aisling looks at me, her eyebrows scrunched together like she’s having a difficult time placing me. “What?”
“Ishita won’t care about that,” I say. “She doesn’t want people to sit next to her in class. She doesn’t care about what other people think of her. She never has.”
“Ishita pretends not to care. Everybody cares.”
I shake my head. “She doesn’t. And how … how exactly did she humiliate you?”
Aisling exchanges a glance with Dee that makes me wonder if the next words out of her lips will be the truth or something she’s made up. “So she hasn’t told you yet …”
“We haven’t spoken … in a few days.” It feels like it’s been an eternity, but I don’t tell Aisling that.
The smile that spreads across Aisling’s lips at my words makes my stomach twist. But of course—this is what she’s wanted all along, isn’t it? She was always trying to keep me away from Ishu.
“Well, you should know that Ishita and her sister dragged me into the principal’s office the other day, and now Ms. Gallagher thinks I’m the one who cheated. Which isn’t even true. It was horrible, and now we’re going to get back at her. Even better now that you’re broken up and—”
“If Principal Gallagher thinks you cheated from Ishita’s test … what’s she going to do?”
“Mum spoke to her.” Aisling shrugs. “I promised I wouldn’t do it again so she just let me off with a little warning. No issue there. Just—”
“The humiliation,” I finish for her.
“She made a spectacle of me in front of Ms. Gallagher, and if it gets out to the whole school—”
“Everybody thinks that it was Ishita,” I interrupt. “Because you haven’t bothered to tell anyone the truth.”
“The truth is that this was all Ishita’s doing. It’s her fault, so why would I tell anyone anything?”
But I can barely hear her words anymore. Even if her voice is steadily rising with every single thing she says.
“Why did you do it?”
“What are you even talking about, Maira?” Aisling finally turns to look at me properly. I finally see anger in her eyes. But she’s not angry about being falsely accused. She’s not upset in the heartbreaking way that Ishu was outside my house last week, convinced that nobody would believe her, convinced that she had lost everything she had worked so hard to achieve. Aisling is angry because I’m not wordlessly believing her side of the story, not offering her sympathy for her plight, not offering her help on how she can take Ishu down further.
For a moment, all I can see is the Aisling I knew when I was younger. The one who sat next to me in junior infants, and shared her Friday treat with me every week. The one who stood up for me when my first-ever boyfriend turned out to be an asshole. Suddenly it’s all too clear to me that the Aisling I knew then and the one I know now aren’t the same person. They haven’t been the same person for a while. And I’ve just chosen not to notice that.