LITMIR.BIZ

       The Detective’s Daughter

      Layla is late for her Sunday rehearsal. Blame her mother, shaking her awake at four in the morning because she has to go out to a scene and ‘don’t forget the code to the gun safe, beanie, just-in-case’. When she had two parents working different shifts, there was always someone home, and she didn’t need a just-in-case, and there was always someone to drive her to where she needed to be, like rehearsals on a Sunday, because she has a scene of her own to get to, thanks Mom. Instead she has to wait for an hour at the bus stop, bundled up against the cold and doodling in her notebook, resisting the temptation to scribble on the bench like so many others before her. She plans to leave her mark on the world in other ways.

      Doing extramurals is supposed to help bring Layla out of her shell. Like she doesn’t know it’s cheap babysitting so her mom doesn’t have to feel guilty all the time. But she should feel guilty. It’s her fault they moved downtown after the divorce, her fault all Layla’s real friends live in Pleasant Ridge, which is only on the other side of Eight Mile, but might as well be a world away when you don’t have a car.

      She shoves through the double doors of the Masque Theater School and gallops up two flights of stairs to the main stage area. She’s relieved to hear from the chanting – all echoey and strange in the stairwell – that they’re still doing warm-up exercises. She dumps her bag by the door and looks for Cas – not hard in a room full of black kids. She slips in beside her, and falls in with the chorus of tongue-twisting vowel sounds that rise and fall. Mrs. Westcott raises her eyebrows, half-hello, half-friendly warning.

      Shawnia leads the circle, raising her fist in the air to indicate that they’re switching up the exercise. Black power, the speaking stick, all the rituals that count. They all stop dead and watch for their cue.

      Shawnia starts flopping her body around, like she’s having a seizure, and they all follow suit, trying to let go of their bones, making their limbs limp as tentacles. Layla flops her body forward so that her unruly curls brush the ground. (Which are not a weave, thank you for asking. She got them the old-fashioned way, from her mom, and yeah, that means she’s a mixie and no, you can’t fucking touch my hair, what do you think this is, a human petting zoo?)

      ‘Couldn’t get a ride?’ Cassandra whispers. ‘Bet Dorian could have given you one.’

      Layla accidentally on purpose tries to smack her. But Cas ducks, making it look like part of her movement.

      ‘Oh no, too slow!’ she whisper-mocks, both of them grinning.

      ‘Focus, please!’ Mrs. Westcott yells. She says drama came straight out of human sacrifice rituals. Some ancient prehistoric tribes used to kill their chieftain every winter solstice as an offering to the gods to ensure that the spring would return, until they figured out that killing off their smartest and brightest maybe wasn’t the best way to run a society. They started re-enacting the sacrifices wearing masks to fool the gods, to allow the chieftain to return as a new man, or close as.

      You can inhabit a role, Layla thinks, you can reinvent yourself. She thought she could get away with it. Whole new school year, whole new school on the other side of the city, whole new Layla.

      She played the divorce card on her dad to get him to buy her new clothes to fit in with the cool kids. But it was tough to keep up the act. Like dying your hair blonde, according to Cas. ‘Trust me. The maintenance is a nightmare.’

      Besides, it turns out it’s harder to fool teenagers than old gods. Clothes maketh not the mean girl. Eventually you’re going to slip up and say something colossally dorky, like you read Shakespeare for fun.

      It took a week before she decided it was too much effort and blew her cover on purpose so she could go back to wearing her usual uniform of jeans and geeky T-shirts. Hard enough being the in-between Afro-Latina, who can fit in with the white kids or the black kids, but not both at the same time. But it sucked being back where she started, on the outside, eating lunch alone in the gymnateria or cafenasium, whatever you want to call it, because like all well-intentioned charter schools, Hines High was short on funds.

      That was before she made friends with Cassandra, or more likely the other way round, because, let’s face it, Cas is so out of her league. She’s super-hot, even though she never wears makeup, with her fine sandy-brown hair, big gray-blue eyes and freckles, and breasts that make boys do double-takes. And she doesn’t give a fuck about anything.

      It’s how they became friends, when Cas called Ms. Combrink a bitch to her face and Layla covered for her, clumsily, yelling out, yeah, she had an itch too. It landed them both in detention, but they got to talking and she persuaded Cas to come along to audition at the theater school. She aced it without trying, even though she sings like a frog with emphysema. Life lesson: looks plus don’t-give-a-fuck confidence mean you can have anything you want – any guy, any friends. But Cas chose her. Which makes Layla infinitely grateful and paranoid. She’s told Cas she’s waiting for the day she dumps a bucket of pig’s blood on her head – Carrie-style.

      ‘Gross. I would never do that.’ Cas was dismissive. ‘If I was going to humiliate you in public, I’d be much more subtle and vicious.’

      But it means she doesn’t push too hard when Cas changes the subject every time personal stuff comes up. It’s part of what she admires about her – that Cas is unknowable. Like Oz. But unlike that huckster wizard, you can’t just pull back the curtain on Cas, because all you’ll find are curtains behind curtains. It’s part of her ineffable cool. But Layla can’t tell her that because she’ll get a big head, and she already has big boobs to contend with. It would definitely throw her off balance.

      Shawnia raises her fist again for the final exercise before they launch into rehearsals proper, the cycle of gratitude. Double-clap-stamp, round the circle. ‘I’m happy today,’ she starts, ‘because … I got an acceptance letter from U of M!’ Clap-clap-stamp. Everyone whoops.

      Layla has her sights set further than that. When she graduates in three years’ time, she’s getting out of Michigan. She’s not naïve enough to think she’ll make NYU or Los Angeles, but there are other cities with great theater schools. Chicago, Austin, Pittsburgh.

      ‘I’m happy today because I got a date for prom,’ Jessie says. Clap-clap-stamp.

      ‘Did she pay him?’ Cas whispers and Layla tries to keep a straight face. Maybe because Jessie’s the only other white kid in theater group, it’s easier for Cas to pick on her. ‘By the way …’ Cas flashes her screen at her, to show her a tweet from Dorian. ‘Hitting the ramp l8r. Anyone up for a skate?’

      The claps continue round the circle.

      ‘You stalker!’ Layla whispers, trying to hide her delight, already calculating who she can bum a ride with to get there.

      ‘I’m doing it for you, baby girl. For looo-ve.’

      ‘No phones, girls!’

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