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CHAPTER 15

Tasha rushes in the room just as I hang up the phone, her expression alarmed like she's overheard something awful.

"What on Earth was that?"

I guess she was in earshot the whole time.

"I don't even know," I say honestly and rub my temples. I didn't know, I didn't want to know, I didn't have to know, and wasn't going to know. I wanted to stay in the dark so badly.

"Was that a scream?" She pesters, grabs my phone from the pillow and scrutinises it.

"I – I don't know," I repeat with less confidence.

"Well can you check? Call it back?" She jabs at the phone to revive it.

"No," I snatch it from her grasp. "And why would I?"

Damn white people and their overzealous curiosity for the unknown. Not every day investigate, sometimes stay in your deep, dark, black lane of ignorance.

"To see who it is, duh?" She says in her know-it-all tone. "It obviously wasn't Konni."

"The number is withheld."

"Hmm," she checks her phone and scrawls through purposefully.

I creep to her. "Tasha, what are you doing?"

"I'm checking if Konni replied, duh?"

My stomach lurches. I don't want anything to do with him. I don't want anything to do with this call. I don't want anything to do with this life that has come to be my own. She looks at me in horror when I snatch her own phone from her hand and back away.

"Enough."

"Karma, stop being silly."

She reaches for the phone but I am too quick with ducking and moving around the room in efforts to keep it from her. She could be so vivaciously stubborn sometimes and I didn't like it. I didn't need her in my business, pushing me into relationships against my will and then complaining about the outcome. She wasn't my mother or my father or any relative of that matter. She was a friend, a best one, but alas, she had no jurisdiction over what or whom I pursued relationships with. Technically, nobody did.

I stand on the coffee table barefoot and scroll through her many Snapchat contacts with my arm raised high above my head to keep it out her reach. Midway through her contacts I find Konstantinos and proceed to block and delete him before returning her phone to her. Unless she had some other form of contact with him, I know there is no way she will add him back. Her reputation wouldn't allow for her to broadcast that she was in need of Konstantinos Stanis' Snapchat username so she can add him back when none of our secondary school friends recognised his existence in the first place.

"You blocked and deleted him?"

I nod in affirmation as I step down to the plush carpet and back into my slippers. "That's what you get for trying to set me up."

"Karma, you're so –" she trails off in frustration and unclenches her fists. "You know what, I need a cigarette."

She disappears from the room into the back garden and I am left standing alone, wallowing in the déjà vu of that resounding scream. It was like a horror movie without the fiction, all elements included: from the mystery and drama to the black folk dying first. It was real in some ways. I would be fickle to downplay that.

Tasha returns, summoning with her the smell of smoke. She watches me idly at the door before beckoning to me with a rotary wrist.

"You're sleeping with me tonight come on," she extends her arm and drags me from the living room to the master bedroom she shares with Reece. Dotted around are portraits of the two in different embraces – some staged photographs, others abstract paintings, framed and positioned either on the walls or on flat surfaces. I've seen them all thousands of times but I admire them all for umpteenth time as Tasha excuses herself to the en-suite to shampoo her hair and shower.