“We’ll be there,” I say, super casual, and I’m impressed with my play-it-cool delivery. Maybe Xander’s party will be the thing that helps us cross over that delicate line, and we’ll start flirting for real, and become more than friends, and kiss, and then go to prom in the spring and then Levi, my first real crush, could transform into my first real everything else.

“Cool,” he says, and double taps my shoulder with his fist, the same hand he uses to rub his eyes, and I feel that zing that always happens whenever he touches me. “Later.”

After he walks away, Shola puts her hands on her hips like Wonder Woman.

“He’s either into you or he’s a jerk,” she declares, and I ready myself for what Shola calls “real talk,” which I’ve learned is a euphemism for brutal honesty. “He knows you like him. He flirts with you all the time. He’s either toying with you, which would make him a jerk, or he actually likes you. And I don’t think he’s a jerk.”

She holds out her palms to me, like a shrug emoji, as if to say I rest my case. Shola’s life goal is to be this country’s first black woman chief justice of the Supreme Court, a double first, and because she is Shola, I have no doubt she’ll make that sort of herstory. I look forward to my mother one day playing a lawyer in the biopic of Shola’s rise to fame.

My life goal, on the other hand, is way more modest, like an inversion of those people who say if they had a genie they’d wish for more wishes. My life goal is to have an actual life goal, to feel about something the sort of excitement and passion Shola seems to feel about the law, because I realize partying on a yacht with Rihanna shouldn’t count.

“I get that I’m not everyone’s cup of tea,” I say. Shola looks me up and down, a steady sweep of evaluation, as if running a tally in her head of my pros and cons. Like we haven’t spent every day together for the last five years.

“We really need to work on your self-esteem,” she says.

CHAPTER FIVE

Now

I stare in the mirror, as if I can find answers on my face, but there are none. I crawl back to my spot on the couch and lie there wide-awake even though it’s 5:30 a.m. Thanks to CNN, I’ve been able to track my parents, so I know they’re finally on their way home. My dad met a lawyer at the courthouse yesterday afternoon, and a judge granted my mother’s release contingent on her posting $250,000 in bail. That number rolls around in my head, familiar, an echo: a quarter of a million dollars.