The Illusion of Us

Chapter 28

Mina thought about not showing up to meet Sahil, she thought about leaving him sitting in a cafe booth by himself to wallow in his own defeat and in the fact that she would never help him exact his revenge on the boy he seemed to unexplainably dislike so much. But, as she passed the diner on her way home from school, she spotted him through the window, in a booth as she had expected, but she was surprised to find that he wasn't alone.

Sat taunt next to Sahil like a phantom figure was Noah.

Mina gripped the wheel of her car extra tight in her palms, her knuckles gleaming under the fluorescence of the traffic lights as she attempted to bury her rising anger at the sight of her ex-best friend and Sahil sitting beside one another so nonchalantly and blamelessly. Noah looked unbothered, seemingly paradoxical to her demeanor at school. Her face was no longer flushed red from yelling, her eyes no longer shining with tears or pulsating with anger, her finger no longer pointed accusatorily at Mina.

She was complacent.

She was complacent and it made Mina furious, so furious that she couldn't refrain from making an illegal u-turn at the nearest light and barreling into the nearly empty parking lot of the cafe.

The bell above the door ran loudly as she pushed the singular glass door of the cafe open, a blast of warm air engulfing her figure as she stepped inside. She ignored the greeting of one of the numerous pony-tailed servers, making a bee-line straight for the Sahil and Noah's table.

Both of them looked surprised to see her.

"What the hell is she doing here?"

Sahil's surprise slipped from his face with ease, instead replaced with the smirk that Mina had grown to hate so much.

"I'm going to be honest-" He chuckled to himself. "I wasn't expecting you to show up."

"What the hell is she doing here?" Mina roared out once more, jerking her head in Noah's direction though her eyes were still trained to Sahil and his indifferently amused figure.

"She wants to help." He said casually as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

"Mina-" Noah spoke in what Mina was sure was an attempt to reassure her and affirm Sahil's words, but she had barely whispered Mina's name before Mina was yelling over her in a fit of rage that garnered the attention of a few customers in adjacent booths.

"Please shut up!" Mina exclaimed, though the shakiness in her voice as she spoke was explicitly evident and she closed her eyes tightly to avoid accidentally crying in front of either of them as their argument replayed freshly in her mind.

"If you start talking-" Mina swallowed, speaking once more after a charged beat of silence. "I won't be able to resist the urge to give you and your boyfriend matching black eyes." She warned, finally tearing her eyes open. "Nice shiner by the way." She pointed, sarcastically complementing the swollen purple skin of Sahil's left eye which looked to be perpetually shut.

His smirk fell and his lips pursed into a tight line as he said, "Your psychotic boyfriend throws a good punch."

"You deserved it." Mina told him without missing a beat, crossing her arms defiantly over her chest, the adrenaline currently coursing through her veins growing stronger with each word he spoke and she was itching in her skin to gift him the black eye she had reserved for Noah.

"Just hear him out, MJ." Noah obliviously spoke once more.

Mina dug her fingernails into the skin of her arms, her teeth catching the inside of her cheek.

She tasted hot blood.

"If she talks again-" Her eyes seared into Sahil's figure, once more ignoring the figure of the girl sitting beside him. "-I'm leaving." She said with finality, before asking for confirmation. "Understood?"

With a quick glance to Noah beside him, Sahil silently nodded his understanding and Mina mimicked him.

"Good," she said satisfactorily before sliding onto the ripped red cushions of the booth in front of them. "Why'd you text me to meet you here?"

"Because I wanted one last chance to tell you the truth, and I wanted you to have one last chance to come to your own conclusion." Sahil explained before adding, "-without his influence."

Against her better judgment and every single nerve in her body that was screaming at her to get up and walk away, she stayed seated and resolved to listen to Sahil one last time, hoping to catch him a lie that could be used to incriminate him and send him away forever this time.

Unfolding her arms from her chest she slid her hands beneath the rickety wooden table between them, sneakily sliding her phone from her pocket, opening her notes app, and pressing record just as Sahil began to recount his version of what happened the night Khalil was taken into police custody and sent to juvie.

"I didn't do anything to him, Mina." He began, settling his forearms on the table and leaning forward. Mina instinctively leaned backwards, her back flush against the cushion behind her.

"That story he told you was bullshit." He deemed, his voice rising with agitation. "I never wanted to get him in trouble, it was the other way around. Since I've known him, Khalil has been obsessed with his parent's deaths-" He revealed.

"-so obsessed to the point that he's willing to do anything it takes, even if that means using others as scapegoats, to achieve some demented form of justice. That's how he ended up in juvie. The police closed his parents' case and determined it was caused accidentally by a faulty gas line, but Khalil wasn't satisfied with that explanation and, somehow, he got it into his head that the family that owned the hospital his parents died in was responsible for his their deaths. He convinced us to break into the police station to steal the files from his parents' case but, when we got caught, he tried to lie. He tried to tell the police that me and the other boys were responsible for the break-in, that we forced him to come with us, that we were the criminals. Of course, one of us let slip about Khalil's past and that was that, the police took him away immediately." Sahil ended finally but, to be perfectly honest, Mina was transfixed on the hospital fire he had mentioned at the beginning of his long anecdote.

Mina remembered Khalil mentioning that his parents had died here in Dallas and the graves that they had visited reaffirmed that fact, but the fact that they had died in a hospital fire- that was new and this new information was now swirling in Mina's subconscious.

There hadn't been too many hospital fires in the city in a few years, in fact, there was only one that Mina could think of.

Suddenly, Mina became distinctly aware of the overwhelming pressure of large wrinkled hands bearing down on her smaller than normal shoulders, pressing her smaller than normal feet into the soles of her smaller than normal shoes.

Flashing red and blue police and ambulance lights painted the night sky, the loud sirens accompanying them echoing within her ears.

The hands on her shoulders lifted and, in a moment, on her knees beside her was a younger version of a familiar face: her father.

"It's going to be ok, Mina Joyce." His deep voice pierced the air. "Everything's going to be ok, ok? Go to your mother. Go to your mother!"

"You remember, don't you?" Sahil's lips turned upward at the corners, reminiscent of the sinister smirk he always sported and a sudden chill ran down Mina's back, but not at the sight but rather the memory that had just plagued her mind.

"I know you still don't trust me-" Sahil said. "-or rather my word. So, go back to the group home and ask Donna. Ask Donna, she'll confirm what I just told you and she'll tell you anything else you want to know."