Framed

Nine.

"She told Dinah."

"What? What did she tell Dinah?" Lauren questioned, hoping that the answer was not the one that she had in her mind at that moment.

"That she liked her."

"And?" Camila asked.

"Based on the way she sobbed on the phone? It didn't go well."

-

"Is the pizza here yet?" Camila whispered to Lauren as she left Mani's bedroom and went to the kitchen for a glass of water.

Lauren shook her head. She had been texting Dinah trying to get her to talk about what happened, which Mani hadn't even talked about yet.

Dinah hadn't answered.

However, Lauren had some success in getting some friends over to help cheer Mani up. Ally, Harry, Liam and Louis - considered the most compassionate ones among them all - were on their way.

"I don't fucking get it," Lauren said to Camila in a whisper. She didn't want Mani to hear her in the other room. "When I messaged Harry he freaked the hell out - he told me Dinah confessed to liking Mani a few weeks ago. What the fuck happened in such a short period of time?"

"The heart is like a sailboat, Lo." Camila elaborated, a sad look glazing her eyes. "It just goes wherever the wind guides it to."

"Yes but that's the thing. If she liked someone else, there is no proof or mention of her doing so, or her feelings shifting in any way."

Camila sighed as Lauren continued to fume. "If that was the case she should have fucking well said something!"

"Lauren. You can't always count on people to tell you everything. We don't know what happened. That's between them until one or both of them decide to tell us. Only they know what happened in the room."

-

"You have any food in the fridge, Mani?" Dinah said as she dropped her backpack, letting it hit to the floor with a thud.

"There should be pizza, D. You see it in there?" Mani replied, placing her stuff down by the dining room table, where she and Dinah were supposed to work on homework together. She took her textbooks and notebooks out of her backpack and dropped them onto the table.

The table wood was mahogany, it could handle it.

Eventually the rustling that Mani could hear by the fridge stopped. Dinah came over to the table, hands filled with various kinds od snacks.

"So the fridge had jack shit, but in the pantry, you had chips and cookies and all that good shit."

Dinah put all the snacks on the table and pulled out her Math book.

"Let's get crack-a-lackin." Dinah declared, smiling as Mani giggled due to her strange sense of word choice.

A few minutes pass. The girls work in relative silence, Kehlani's 'Faking It' murmuring softly in the background like crickets do in a nighttime forest. For the moments that existed before Dinah reached for the book, Mani actually felt peaceful.

But of course, peace is only a temporary abstract in the world. The Earth, after all, is nothing close to a utopia.

Dinah says, "Hey Mani, what answer did you have to that problem he put on the class notes?"

Mani pauses in thought. "Oh, I don't know. Just check what I put in my notes."

Dinah reached for the notebook, and as she grasped it, a piece of paper fell out of the spiral book.