Malakai sat further up. “First of all, that sounds really, really fucking cool, second of all . . . so?”
I chewed on a torn piece of croissant. “So, what?”
“So, why can’t you go?”
I stared at him. “Malakai. Going to a romance convention is corny enough without going alone. Look, can we just drop it? It doesn’t matter. I returned the tickets, and it’s probably sold out now.” I tinkered on my tablet. “See? Gone from the calendar. Moving on! We break up shortly after the AfroWinter Ball in December and then we’re done. What do you think?”
Malakai nodded in agreement. “The ball’s a great place to get material for my film too.”
“Great!” I snapped the cover of my tablet shut and slipped it into my bag, happy to be moving on from the fact that I enjoyed cosplay and romantic fantasy novels. I couldn’t believe I left that in there.
Malakai lifted his fist over the table. His gaze jumped from my eyes to my hand pointedly. I raised my own fist so it grazed his knuckles in a kiss, a formal establishment of our treaty, our diplomatic framework confirmed. We were officially a team, for better for worse, with mutual goals at stake. Sealed with a spud.
“Shall I walk you to class, bae?” Malakai’s grin was an oblique tease.
I mock shuddered as we got up from the table. “No pet names.”
Malakai threw a look at me from the corner of his eye. “So, no more Scotch?”
I slowed down as I hitched the strap of my bag onto my shoulder. I shrugged and schooled my voice to be casual. “Scotch is different. It’s fine.” I cleared my throat. “I like Scotch.”
Malakai tucked in a smile and crooked his arm to allow mine to link through as we walked out of the coffee shop.
“Me, too.”
Chapter 13
Lysha’s mouth was moving. I was pretty sure it was moving. Okay, yeah, it was moving, but instead of her sharp-tongued quick-paced East London patois I heard The Internet, Syd’s smooth, satin voice pouring out, out of sync with the movements of Lysha’s lips. Then Lysha’s mouth stopped moving abruptly—Syd kept crooning, crystalline. Lysha’s eyes narrowed in focus on me and before I had time to react to what I knew was coming, my girl had leaned forward to abruptly pull Syd’s voice from my ears and me out of my silken cocoon and into the cacophonic din of the sixth form common room. I rolled my eyes and Lysha clapped in front of my ears.
“Yo, Kiki, you listening to me? What you wearing on Saturday? Jason’s eighteenth?”
I blinked. My knees were curled up on the seat beneath me—my usual meditative position. I was zoned out before our last period of the day and we were tucked in our corner of the common room, closest to the double glass fire-escape doors that led out to the field. We had chosen it because it gave us an excellent view of the boys playing football at lunch, without us needing to go outside, a great matinee show from a royal box seat. The Usual Suspects were in their usual positions. Lysha sat on the sofa opposite me flanked by Yinda, who periodically blew pink gummy bubbles that matched the lacquer she was coating her nails with. Her bio textbook was balanced on her knees, doubling as a mat to catch any drips and spills.
To my right, my best friend Rianne Tucker sat on Nile’s lap, Wood Grove High School’s power couple, our king and queen, a decree made by the two tenets of High School Aristocracy: they were both the most good-looking people in our school and both happened to be fair. In those days, that space, the two were interchangeable, synonymous. Coronation by way of caramel skin. They attained the tricky balance of enough detentions to make them edgy without getting excluded. They did alright in school. They weren’t delinquents but were in trouble enough to give them an air of fearless cool. That’s really harder to do than it would seem, in a school with mostly white teachers.
At one point—maybe year 11 or 12—Nile had made moves toward me （comments on my Facebook pictures, a few “You look nice today you know, Keeks”）; it was around the same time that boys were starting to get intrigued by my smart tongue, curious as to whether they could be the ones to soften it, if they could make it malleable enough to curve around theirs. But before I could test the curiosity, pick it up, look it over, and think maybe, my mum got sick. I started to turn inward. I skipped out of parties that I used to be the beating heart of （for a while my nickname was Koffee, due to the amount of living room coffee tables that were transformed into podiums when my song came on） and Ri didn’t hesitate to take up the mantle. Rianne was my right hand, my ride or die, my partner in crime, and I was grateful for her and grateful for her taking up space for the both of us. There was less pressure on me to return to the person I was before—which worked out great because I had no idea who that person even was anymore. When my mum got ill I forgot what the point of it all was, and it all seemed so flavorless, so stupid. Rebellion lost its allure, because what was I even rebelling against? It sped up the epiphany that most people have when they’re in their first year of uni—when you’re away from home and you’re no longer living against parents you feel you need to resist in order to find yourself. I had a new respect for my ma, quick-witted, raucous laugh, could haggle light from a star, the seventeen-year-old who came from Nigeria on her own and cleaned toilets to put herself through a polytechnic and then university, before becoming a social worker and constructing a life from dust, work, faith, and hope, and who fell in love with a fellow newly come Nigerian boy who really liked to cook and dreamed of opening a Nigerian restaurant, but who drove taxis because nobody would give him a job. Met at a wedding, introduced by friends. I wanted to be like the woman who put her dust, work, faith, and hope with his and built some kind of life. I wanted to be just like her. And now I was facing losing her. What was I rebelling against? Adolescent risk wasn’t tasty when my whole life felt like it was tipping on the edge.