Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
niomi
A FaceTime chime interrupts my producer’s debriefing of this morning’s show. Janelle’s face and contact on the screen of my phone make me smile.
“Frank, I need to take this. Anything else?”
He closes his mouth on whatever point he was about to make and grins. “You kicking me out of your office?”
“Perceptive. Anything else before you go?”
“No.” He stands from his seat on the other side of my desk. “I’ll email notes about tomorrow’s viral Tik Tok segment. The one with the girl from Nebraska and her dog.”
“Okay, I’ll be on the lookout.” The FaceTime chime sounds again and I nod to my office door. “Close it behind you, please?”
“You were great today.” The door inches shut on his smiling face. “You always are.”
“Charmer,” I yell and accept Janelle’s FaceTime request. “Nelle, girl. Long time, no hear. What you been up to?”
“Little bit o’ this. Little bit o’ that. How you been, sis?”
“You know. Making it best I can.”
“I see you doing big things. Number-one morning show and all that.”
“We out here trying.” I chuckle, carefully propping the phone against a teetering stack of books on the desk and leaning back in my chair. “How’s higher learning treating you?”
“Still good. I’m loving my new position.”
“Oh, yeah. I did read in the alum newsletter that one of our own was running things in student affairs now. Congrats.”
“Thank you.”
“Why’d I have to read about it? I thought you were my girl.”
Her low laugh reaches across the miles. “You know how it is. I got busy.”
“Hmmm. I’ll let it slide this once. At least you’re calling now.”
“I’m calling to ask a big favor.”
“Shoulda known,” I say, keeping my tone light and wiggling my feet out of the high heels I’ve been wearing all morning. “How can I serve my alma mater?”
“Well you know we got homecoming in a few weeks.”
“Of course. Centennial.”
“You coming?”
I grimace at the small square framing Janelle’s face onscreen and glance at the pristine surface of my desk, an orderly veneer hiding the chaos of my schedule.
“Not sure. There’s a lot going on here. Getting away may be hard. I can send a little something if you raising money.”
“Girl. When are we not raising money?”
We laugh and I sit up, reaching for my coffee, long gone cold, but still essential after a four a.m. call time. Hair, makeup, and strong coffee—the three-strand twist that gets me ready for the cameras at the crack of dawn every morning.
“This time I need you, not money, though don’t tell the president I said that,” Janelle laughs.
“What can I do?”
“I need you to do a tiny interview for me homecoming weekend.”
“An interview? Who?”
“Touré Wallace.”
I set the mug down, afraid I’ll drop it since my fingers just went numb.
“Touré? He doesn’t . . .well, one—he doesn’t do interviews,” I remind her. “And two—he doesn’t do homecoming. Or at least I’ve never known him to in the twenty years since graduation. Hell, he wasn’t even at Finley our senior year, so what makes you think he’ll show up?”
“His daughter makes me think it.”
A tiny pin pricks an old wound in my heart.
I had secretly crushed on Touré Wallace off and on for three years.
I had a thousand chances to tell him how I felt.
He always seemed to be dating someone when I was free.
Or when he was free, I was taken. At a party the end of junior year, we shared one hot, perfect kiss.
I was dating someone and I shut it down before things went any further.
We’d both been drinking and never really talked about it.
By the time senior year started, I was single again and promised myself I would make my move.
I daydreamed of being his girl our last year on campus.
Everything would be different when we returned.
But he never did.
He was offered and accepted the opportunity of a lifetime working in Paris senior year. When he resurfaced, it was with a young family and early acclaim for his reporting from the frontline.
“I did hear he had a daughter,” I finally say, blinking the old memories away to focus on Janelle. “But I didn’t realize she attended Finley.”
“Yup. Super bright. Came over from Paris for high school. Finished a year early and started college at seventeen.”
“Smart like her father, huh?”
“Her mama, too. Her mother’s a fashion editor. So Celine—Touré’s daughter—is following in both their footsteps. She’s graduating this year with her degree in journalism. She was also just voted homecoming queen.”
“So Touré’s coming to see his daughter be crowned Miss Finley. What makes you think he’ll do an interview when he hasn’t much in the past?” I ask, sullying the blank notepad on my desk with a doodle.
“He just confirmed.”
My hand pauses mid-scribble.
“Oh, wow.” I lick my lips and release a steadying breath to counter my accelerating heartbeat. “Did you . . .um, did you tell him I’d be the one interviewing?”
“Yeah, he was into it.”
“Into it?”
“Well he wasn’t not into it. Two of the most successful graduates ever on the same stage in a rare interview? It’ll be huge.”
Curiosity and something akin to anticipation percolate inside of me. “And he said he’ll do it?”
“Got the text right before I called you. This would be huge for us and a coup for you. One of the most celebrated journalists of our time who’s notoriously private opening up to a former classmate who also went on to do big things? It writes itself, Ni.”
The girl from years ago with the dented heart steps aside for AM’s anchor. Frank would kill me if I didn’t ask for this. “And could I get snippets of it to air on my show?”
“Homecoming weekend, yes. You’d have to ask Touré and probably his agent or publisher or somebody about his stuff. I dunno—that sounds above my pay grade, but it’s worth a try.”
Worth a try.
We didn’t even get to try. Three years of pining.
A pile of possibilities we never got to explore.
I always wondered what we could have been.
I followed my dreams. Married. Divorced.
I can’t complain. Touré never married and has a storied career few ever achieve, but what lies behind the public facade very few have gotten to see?
When his first book Elsewhere released a few years ago, the cover so arrested me I stared at it for several minutes.
It was a shot of Touré in an Afghani desert where he’d embedded.
Framed by red hills of sand, he’d stood tall with the wind molding his clothes to the strong lines of his body, a scarf shrouding his head, leaving only his eyes and a sliver of his face exposed.
He was sun-darkened and sand-dusted, and that image embodied him.
Swathed in layers of questions, and only showing us the small part of himself he wanted us to see.
I want to know—to truly know—the man beneath those layers. I want to know the man Touré became.
“Okay, Nelle. If he’ll do it, I’ll do it .”
“For real?! You’re in?”
Scribbling HOMECOMING on the pad, I circle and underline the bold letters. I don’t have time to do this, but something tells me I’ll regret it if I don’t.
“Yeah. I’m in.”