Chapter Eight What Renee Wanted
Three months in, Mika stopped calling Renee back as quick.
It wasn’t a decision so much as a drift — the space that used to be filled with late-night vent sessions about nothing was filling instead with study sessions at Nina’s kitchen table, Sunday dinners at Pop’s sister’s house that Mika had somehow, without applying for the position, become a permanent fixture at.
Renee noticed. Renee always noticed the things that threatened her supply.
“You think you’re better than us now,” Renee said one Tuesday, arms crossed over the front desk, no preamble at all.
“I don’t think that.”
“You do. Ever since boxer boy came through, you been too good for movie night, too good to answer your phone.” Renee’s voice had an edge Mika recognized from years of small cuts she’d learned to absorb without flinching. “Must be nice. Must be nice to not need your real friends no more.”
“You’re still my friend, Renee.”
“Am I? ’Cause you ain’t invited me to none of his stuff. Not the fight, not nothing. I had to hear about it from Deja’s cousin.”
Mika opened her mouth to apologize — the old reflex, fifteen years deep, the one that always made her responsible for other people’s feelings before her own — and then, for the first time, she caught herself.
“You’ve never once asked me about school,” Mika said quietly. “Not the LSAT, not finals, not any of it. Three years and you’ve never asked how I did on a single exam. But you know exactly how much Amir made on his last fight.”
Renee’s face did something complicated, caught between shame and anger, and anger won. “So what, I’m supposed to care about Evidence or whatever? I’m being real with you. That’s what real friends do.”
“No,” Mika said, and it came out steadier than she felt. “Real friends ask questions because they care about the answer. Not because they want something from it.”
Renee left without another word, and Mika sat at her desk with her heart pounding, feeling like she’d just set down a bag she’d been carrying so long she’d forgotten it had weight.
It wasn’t the end of things with Renee and Deja — not yet, not all at once — but it was the first crack in a wall she’d been too scared to touch for years.
She texted Nina: rough day.
Nina texted back in ninety seconds: dinner. 7. Pop’s making the short ribs. don’t argue.
Mika didn’t argue.
Deja called that same week, annoyed on Renee’s behalf, relaying secondhand grievances like a courier for a war Mika hadn’t agreed to fight. “Renee said you basically called her a user,” Deja said. “That’s cold, Mika. After everything.”
“I didn’t call her anything. I told her the truth.”
“Well it hurt her feelings. You used to be sweet, you know. Ever since you started at that school you got all — I don’t know. Judgy.”
Mika almost apologized out of habit, the way she always had, and then thought of Tre’s easy follow-up questions, of Pop’s blunt, protective honesty, of Nina showing up with dinner instead of demands, and found, for once, that the old guilt didn’t have quite the grip on her it used to.
“I’m not judging anybody,” she said. “I’m just done being the only one who has to explain myself in this friendship.”
Deja didn’t have an answer for that. Mika let the silence sit instead of rushing to fill it, and hung up feeling lighter than the conversation should have left her.