Playing Hard To Get

“We all wear costumes,” Bancroft said, removing his hat and revealing a nude, red head, “but when we remove them, we see who we really are.”

After riding to the courthouse, Tamia was standing in the bathroom, looking at herself in the mirror as she prepared for an exit. For the astute and determined player, who began this stage in her life pretending to be something she wasn’t, realized she simply couldn’t pretend anymore. In the car, she kept thinking about what Bancroft had said about costumes and remembered all of the people she’d known who’d been wearing them—by force, familiarity, fear, even fierce desire. Charleston, Malik, Phaedra, Naudia, Ayodele, even her. They were all caught up in these images of playing who the world wanted to see, when the world wanted to see it. The only way out was to stop playing. “I did what they said I did…And I’ll do it again,” she remembered hearing Malik say the day they met. And he was right. For that minute, he’d stopped being innocent, accepted his guilt, and took off his costume to do one thing he thought was right, even if it meant losing his role. And now she was making him play by the rules again. Now she was playing by the rules again. But there was something about moving forward that makes turning back impossible, she thought. While she was back in her role and playing by the rules, she couldn’t unchange, unlearn, or unaccept the things she thought about her old world now. Seeing things for what they were was the ugliest thing she’d ever done and the only way she could make her world pretty again was to walk away from those things and embrace a new reality. She didn’t know where that reality was or if she would ever even find it. She might even need to die again and be reborn a million times just to get closer to it. She didn’t care what it took but she knew she had to do it and she’d never be able to do any of that, or embrace her newer self when she found her, if she was busy holding on to who and what she used to be. This was the last day of her old life. She pulled off the wig and stashed it into the attaché case. She looked at herself in the mirror and didn’t smile a bit. She just looked. Really looked. And saw herself.

“I need to give you something,” Naudia said, coming up beside Tamia as she made her way into the courtroom, unsure if Malik would even show up.

“What is it?” Tamia asked peacefully.

“Wait, what are you doing? Where’s your wig?” Naudia whispered so the other people in the courtroom couldn’t hear her. “I thought you were going to—”

“It’s in my bag. What did you need to give me?”

“It’s from Charleston. He dropped it off at the office this—”

Tamia put her hands up.

“I don’t want—”

“I think you should look at it,” Naudia said.

“Not right now. I’m in a place—and I can’t handle his—”

“You need to look,” Naudia insisted, and handed Tamia an envelope.

Tamia held the envelope but couldn’t bring herself to open it. The last thing she needed was more bad news.

“Open it,” Naudia said. “Just trust me.”

Tamia looked at Naudia.

“Trust me.”

There was a note on one of Charleston’s desk cards:

I’ll never say I was wrong. But I can show you that you were right. 2X as right. Use this however you please.

—Charleston

“What is this?” Tamia pulled the note from a clip that fastened it to another piece of paper.

“It’s a check,” Naudia said excitedly.

“A what?”

“$60k,” she said. “A check. The money…!”

Tamia looked at the figures on the bank note and shook her head.

“Charleston,” she said lightly as more people came into the courtroom. “That man…”

“You can use it to pay your mortgage…to get yourself back together and—”

As Naudia considered how the money might change her boss’s life, Tamia thought of how it couldn’t.

“You take it,” Tamia said.

“…you could use it to—What?” Naudia said. “What did you say?”

“Yeah…you take it,” Tamia repeated, handing the check to Naudia’s already shaking hand. “You take the money.”