The Hate U Give(20)

I don’t know. Before Khalil, I planned to cold-shoulder Chris with a sting more powerful than a nineties R&B breakup song. But after Khalil I’m more like a Taylor Swift song. (No shade, I fucks with Tay-Tay, but she doesn’t serve like nineties R&B on the angry-girlfriend scale.) I’m not happy with Chris, yet I miss him. I miss us. I need him so much that I’m willing to forget what he did. That’s scary as fuck too. Someone I’ve only been with for a year means that much to me? But Chris . . . he’s different.

You know what? I’ll Beyoncé him. Not as powerful as a nineties R&B breakup song, but stronger than a Taylor Swift. Yeah. That’ll work. I tell Hailey and Maya, “I’ll handle him.”

They move so I’m between them like they’re my bodyguards, and we go to the door together.

Chris bows to us. “Ladies.”

“Move!” Maya orders. Funny considering how much Chris towers over her.

He looks at me with those baby blues. He got a tan over break. I used to tell him he was so pale he looked like a marshmallow. He hated that I compared him to food. I told him that’s what he got for calling me caramel. It shut him up.

Dammit though. He’s wearing the Space Jam Elevens too. I forgot we decided to wear them the first day back. They look good on him. Jordans are my weakness. Can’t help it.

“I just wanna talk to my girl,” he claims.

“I don’t know who that is,” I say, Beyoncé’ing him like a pro.

He sighs through his nose. “Please, Starr? Can we at least talk about it?”

I’m back to Taylor Swift because the please does it. I nod at Hailey and Maya.

“You hurt her, and I’ll kill you,” Hailey warns, and she and Maya go in to class without me.

Chris and I move away from the door. I lean against a locker and fold my arms. “I’m listening,” I say.

A bass-heavy instrumental plays in his headphones. Probably one of his beats. “I’m sorry for what happened. I should’ve talked to you first.”

I cock my head. “We did talk about it. A week before. Remember?”

“I know, I know. And I heard you. I just wanted to be prepared in case—”

“You could push the right buttons and convince me to change my mind?”

“No!” His hands go up in surrender. “Starr, you know I wouldn’t—that’s not—I’m sorry, okay? I took it too far.”

Understatement. The day before Big D’s party, Chris and I were in Chris’s ridiculously large room. The third floor of his parents’ mansion is a suite for him, a perk of being the last born to empty-nesters. I try to forget that he has an entire floor as big as my house and hired help that looks like me.

Fooling around isn’t new for us, and when Chris slipped his hand in my shorts, I didn’t think anything of it. Then he got me going, and I really wasn’t thinking. At all. For real, my thought process went out the door. And right as I was at that moment, he stopped, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a condom. He raised his eyebrows at me, silently asking for an invitation to go all the way.

All I could think about was those girls I see walking around Garden Heights, babies propped on their hips. Condom or no condom, shit happens.

I went off on Chris. He knew I wasn’t ready for that, we already talked about it, and yet he had a condom? He said he wanted to be responsible, but if I said I’m not ready, I’m not ready.

I left his house pissed and horny, the absolute worst way to leave.

My mom may have been right though. She once said that after you go there with a guy, it activates all these feelings, and you wanna do it all the time. Chris and I went far enough that I notice every single detail about his body now. His cute nostrils that flare when he sighs. His soft brown hair that my fingers love to explore. His gentle lips, and his tongue that wets them every so often. The five freckles on his neck that are in the perfect spots for kissing.

More than that, I remember the guy who spends almost every night on the phone with me talking about nothing and everything. The one who loves to make me smile. Yeah, he pisses me off sometimes, and I’m sure I piss him off, but we mean something. We actually mean a lot.

Fuckity fuck, fuck, fuck. I’m crumbling. “Chris . . .”

He goes for a low blow and beatboxes an all-too-familiar, “Boomp . . . boomp, boomp, boomp.”

I point at him. “Don’t you dare!”

“‘Now, this is a story all about how, my life got flipped—turned upside down. And I’d like to take a minute, just sit right there, I’ll tell you how I became the prince of a town called Bel-Air.’”

He beatboxes the instrumental and pops his chest and booty to the rhythm. People pass by us, laughing. A guy whistles suggestively. Someone shouts, “Shake that ass, Bryant!”

My smile grows before I can stop it.

The Fresh Prince isn’t just my show, it’s our show. Sophomore year he followed my Tumblr, and I followed him back. We knew of each other from school, but we didn’t know each other. One Saturday, I reblogged a bunch of Fresh Prince GIFs and clips. He liked and reblogged every single one. That Monday morning in the cafeteria, he paid for my Pop Tarts and grape juice and said, “The first Aunt Viv was the best Aunt Viv.”

It was the beginning of us.

Chris gets The Fresh Prince, which helps him get me. We once talked about how cool it was that Will remained himself in his new world. I slipped up and said I wish I could be like that at school. Chris said, “Why can’t you, Fresh Princess?”