The Memory Of Us

Chapter 12

"How'd your visit with your mother go?"

Just as Mina had expected, her grandma called out to her as soon as the sound of the front door squeaking open permeated the empty air.

Mina shot a cautionary glance backwards towards Sahil's and Noah's figures. A warning, as she led them towards the small kitchen near the back of the house where the sound of her grandma's voice had boomed from.

She was sat at the small antique wooden table on the left-most side of the room. Her legs crossed at the ankle, her hands interlocked and resting idly on her thighs. Her mouth was set in a pout, her eyes soft and unsuspecting, her eyebrows pinched together ever so slightly.

You wouldn't know she was seething with anger by just looking at her.

"Fine." Mina responded, doing her best to appear as nonchalant as physically possible, though she could tell her grandmother wasn't buying it, her eyes seemingly growing narrower and narrower as they darted over her in her entirety.

Her eyes roamed her from the top of her hair to the bottoms of the heeled platform boots on her feet before she asked, "Did she talk to you about-"

"Of course she did." Mina nodded firmly, cutting her grandma off mid-sentence, more so in anger than a desire to be rude.

"-and just like I told you-" Mina pushed on. "I'm not testifying against her." She said defiantly.

Her grandmother's reaction was a visceral one that forced her to feet, one hand slamming a flat palm against the small dining room table. Her friends' presence behind her doing nothing to deter her, and Mina could hear both Sahil and Noah take a sharp inhalation of breath on either side of her.

"You won't help your mother stay out of jail, but you'll go skating with the boy who's responsible for her incarceration?"

Mina chewed her lip as she listened to the sound of skin connecting with wood once more.

"We all saw the news, Mina Joyce." She exclaimed. "Do you want to explain what you were doing with him?" She asked, throwing her hands exasperatedly into the thick and awkward air.

Mina should have recycled the lie she had told her mother.

That would have been the rational decision to make, but Mina was far from rational at the moment. The pure unfiltered anger coursing through her veins at the moment whispered to her to do the exact opposite.

"Not to you." Mina shook her head, crossing her arms firmly over her chest. The action made her oversized winter coat puff up as she tucked each respective hand underneath her armpit for security. "No."

Now it was possible to see her grandmother's seething anger.

Pointing a tantalizing finger at Mina's figure, she stormed across the kitchen in an instant, unburdened by her old age. "You-" She began, the single word sending tiny flecks of spittle splashing onto the surface of Mina's cheeks.

She tried again. "You-"

But she was once again cut off though, this time, it wasn't by Mina.

"It's not like that, Mrs. Mendes." Sahil said, hands extended, palms facing outward. He moved forward now, slowly sidestepping in front of Mina's figure, creating a barrier between she and her enraged grandmother.

" She only wants to get him to confess." He continued on, his eyes trained to her pointing finger that was mere inches away from his broad chest. "So that he can finally be placed behind bars where he belongs." He said. "That's why they were together at the skating rink, it's all just part of a bigger scheme."