STAYED The Friend Who Wouldn't Let Me Save Myself Alone Vol 1

THE ONES WHO STAY

STAYED The Friend Who Wouldn't Let Me Save Myself Alone Vol 1

ADEFEMI

For anyone who's kept count of who left?

Chapter One: Nobody Special I eat lunch in the stairwell on purpose. It's not sad, whatever anyone thinks looking at it, and it’s strategic. Nobody comes up here except kids skipping class, and skipping kids don't care who you are, they just want the same thing you want, which is to be left alone. I've got a system. Ranked by how long they lasted: Efe, four months, before she got tired of me canceling plans. Blessing, six weeks, before I told her something true about my house and watched her face do the thing faces do. The twins, who I liked best, actually, one bad day at mine, one time they heard something through the phone they weren't supposed to hear, and they were just gone, polite about it, waving at me in hallways like nothing happened, which was somehow worse than if they'd said something. So. Stairwell. Lunch. System working fine. Except today there's someone already sitting on my step. New girl. I clocked her this morning in assembly, the way you clock anyone new, quickly, then never again, because caring about new people is how you end up ranking them later. She's got her lunch spread out like she owns the place, one shoe off, reading something on her phone with her whole face. “You're on my step,” I say.

She looks up like this is the most interesting thing anyone's said to her all day. “Didn't see your name on it.” “It's implied.” “Nothing here is implied. It's a stairwell.” She pats the step next to her without looking, like it's already decided. “I'm Amaka.” “I know who you are. Everyone's whispering about the new girl.” “And yet you're the one who came up here to eat alone instead of whispering with them.” I don't have a comeback for that, which annoys me more than the actual sitting-on-my-step thing. “I don't really do the friend thing,” I say, because it's easier to say it now, upfront, save us both a few weeks. “Just so you know. In case you're one of those people who collects them.” Amaka considers this with the same seriousness she gave the step. “Okay,” she says. “Noted.” And then she goes back to her phone and her rice, and she doesn't move, and she doesn't leave, and she doesn't ask me a single question about why a person would say something like that out loud to a stranger. I finish my lunch in silence next to her. It is, annoyingly, the least lonely I've felt in this stairwell in over a year.

Chapter Two: The Number She's back on the step the next day. And the day after that. By the end of the first week it stops being a surprise and starts being a fact of my schedule, the way third period is a fact. Amaka is on the stairs at 12:40, and apparently so am I now. We don't exchange numbers that week. I don't offer, and she doesn't ask, and for a while it's just this: twenty minutes a day, a shared…