Page 30 of Even If the Sky is Falling
MY LUCKY STARS
LANE CLARKE
My Lucky Stars
Each photo passed by in a blur as Jones Miller scrolled throughhisInstagram feed. Him. Warren Cox. The man she was certain she was going to marry just three months ago. A certainty built more on inertia than romance, but a certainty, nonetheless. She had been wiped from his page like she had never existed. Five years’ worth of anniversary posts gone in what felt like an overnight erasure. Quickly replaced by a blond-haired, blue-eyed debutante who had a toothy smile and a pronounced mole above the left corner of her stained red lips.
Jones zoomed in on the diamond ring taking over his most recent photo. Smiling faces and a balloon arch announcing their engagement. An acidic taste crowded the back of Jones’s tongue as she read through the comments of ex-friends who had chosen Warren in the split. Even the friends who had been hers first, their solo to shared custody breaking apart in the wrong direction.
The door to the small room snapped open. Jones ducked her head on instinct. She was usually the only person in the Reserves Room, the small collection of textbooks set aside for law students like her who couldn’t afford books that cost as much as her rent to serve as a doorstop for nine months. This was one of the few times Jones wished she still had her locs instead of the buzz cut she now donned instead. Locs were much easier to hide behind, even if it was the kind of hairstyle that stole attention and curious eyes. Sometimes even the curious, and disrespectful, touch.
Dianna Ellis rounded the corner in a blur. Even after two years, Jones was unsettled by the frequency at which Dianna seemed to vibrate. They didn’t have anything in common. Where Jones was rough around the edges, Dianna was spit shined to a squeaky-clean gleam. Everything about Dianna seemed inauthentic. Her straight teeth purchased with expensive dental procedures, her waist-length sew-in. Her always made-up face and designer everything. Jones couldn’t help but roll her eyes. Everything about Dianna screamed plastic. But worse, she didn’t share the inherent mistrust that Jones had learned to have toward her mostly white classmates. Dianna didn’t approach them with the hesitancy Jones’s parents had taught her. And she most certainly did not have Jones’s back like Jones had expected their first day of 1L Orientation.
Jones had been excited to see another Black girl as they registered. But the levity of not feeling so alone, both invisible and unavoidable, quickly faded when Dianna paid her as much mind as a paper bag in the middle of the street. Her mother had always taught her that not all skinfolk were kinfolk, but she had never experienced it until Dianna, who preferred to be accepted rather than heard.
Jones took Dianna in now. Her legs were practically bare in fifty-degree weather, her skirt ending in that middling space between her hip and knee that was just low enough to be school appropriate and just short enough to be risqué. If Jones’s mom was around, she’d scold Dianna for having open pores out in Chicago fall, the precursor to an eternally long winter. But Jones kept her mouth shut. The pneumonia her mother had always warned about might do Dianna some good. Maybe it would teach her that sweatpants weren’t the devil and it was totally fine to wear them on the two-hundredth freezing cold day in a row.
Her mouth settled into a disapproving grimace, her tongue settled against the back of her teeth.
It was a sound Dianna knew as well as her grandmother’s voice—the sucking of Jones’s teeth. But her usual response, a roll of the eyes as quick as a blink, was halted when she saw Jones slumped into her favorite side chair. She had shoved it to the farthest corner of the room, directly below the heater. No matter what the temperature was outside, Dianna liked to maintain a body temperature of at least eighty degrees at all times. If she wasn’t sweating, it wasn’t hot enough. Blame it on growing up in Savannah but being warm just felt like home. And right now, Jones was squatting in her territory.
But unlike Jones, who Dianna felt made a precious attempt to make all social interactions as unpleasant as possible, Dianna clucked her tongue softly and shifted to the thinnest aisle in the room, housing the textbooks for environmental science. It was a small specialty for their law school class, where nearly everyone focused on corporate work at big New York and Chicago law firms or criminal justice work in DC. She was one of only six students on the Environmental Law track, and she liked it that way. There was no need to pretend to be someone bigger than she was in a room full of people who cared more about oil spill restitution than who wore what at the Met Gala. Despite the empty-headed fashionista that served her so well as her public persona amongst her classmates.
Dianna dragged her finger along the textbooks, looking for the one she used for every starting point she needed in her Law Review article. But the space where it usually sat was empty.
“What?” she muttered aloud, the echo between the shelving elevating her voice much higher than expected. For the past two years, the book had never left the shelf unless by her hand.
“What?” Jones responded.
Suddenly she was there, at the end of the aisle, her hands pressed firmly into her hips in annoyance. Dianna couldn’t help but notice the way her fingers sat comfortably in the dip of her one-piece dungaroos. Dianna was pretty sure they were designed to hide her body entirely, but they weren’t doing a good job. Or Dianna had become sensitive to the curves of Jones’s body. If only the words that came out of her mouth were as sweet as the rest of her.
“Oh,” Dianna said, becoming defensive. She wasn’t sure why Jones despised her so much, but Dianna tried not to step on her toes as much as possible. “Sorry. There’s just a book missing that I need.”
She would have to ask the circulation desk, though she couldn’t help but wonder what other person in the school both needed the free textbooks and had a sudden interest in factory pollution in low-income rural areas.
Jones’s eyebrows perked up in interest, and the smug grin that Dianna had come to see whenever she closed her eyes settled on her lips, a perfectly pink shade that most woman had to purchase in lipstick form.
“What book?” Jones asked, in the tone of someone who already knew the answer. “Not this book.” She turned around and grabbed the book from the small desk Jones had also pushed to the corner to accompany her perfectly placed chair. When she faced Dianna again, she was holding up the very textbook Dianna needed and had until that point considered hers.
Heat rose up Dianna’s face, and she knew that her cheeks were becoming an embarrassing shade of cherry red. Out of habit, she lowered her head, letting her hair fall forward in order to hide her visible anger. The last person who was interested in environmental law was “Make as much money as humanly possible for soulless corporations” Jones fucking Miller.
Dianna took a deep breath through flared nostrils. She channeled her grandmother and every pageant coach she had ever had.You catch more flies with honey.She straightened her shoulders and put on her stage smile, one that stretched at the corners and gave her a headache from her clenched jaw. But it photographed well, and, more importantly, won any and everyone over.
“Do you know how much longer you’ll be using it?” She tilted her head to the left like a puppy hearing its favorite word. Big eyes, even brighter smile. If she could make her ears flutter, she would.
“I don’t know.” Jones shrugged. “I’m not sure what I’m looking for. I might have to read every single page.” She spoke slowly and deliberately, letting each word sink in as far as possible before twisting. She had watched enough Steven Segal thrillers to know that’s how you really went in for the kill. “I might even have to check it out.”
Dianna grimaced. For once, her champion smile wasn’t working. Which was even further proof that Jones Miller was not human. But worse, if Jones checked that book out, Dianna would never see it again, and she couldn’t afford to buy her own copy. Ideally, Jones would turn it in on time, in the prescribed two hours the reserved books were out of the library. But this wasn’t an ideal world, and the circulation desk was worked by Ms. Mindy, the nicest woman alive who erased so many fines for late returns that no one was ever incentivized to return anything to the library they had checked out.
“I can wait,” Dianna offered. She walked toward Jones, who flinched as Dianna passed her, as if physical contact would cause her actual pain. Dianna brushed so close by that the fibers of her sweater brushed Jones’s forearm, making every hair on her body stand on end. Jones’s body emitted a warmth that one could usually only find emanating from beach sand. Hot in a delicious kind of way.
Dianna settled into the only other chair in the room. She shuffled around in the seat. It was definitely in the wrong spot, and the leather had not yet been broken in. It pressed against Dianna’s bare thighs uncomfortably. But she was going to sit in this chair for as long as it took.
Jones returned to her seat, setting the textbook on her lap. She took ten minutes to read the table of contents, deliberately slow, and then proceeded to flip through each page. Dianna bit down on her tongue, her acrylic nails tapping on the arm of the chair. Jones was going out of her way to drive Dianna wild, but instead she was the one going nuts. Each tap against the leather made Jones twitch, the sound interrupting any train of thought she could muster. Like a leaky faucet that dripped through the night or a fluorescent overhead light begging to be changed. Jones had always had trouble tuning out noise, so much so that she felt crazy whenever she couldn’t stop hearing something that everyone else quickly discounted.
“Do you mind?” she said finally, nodding her head at Dianna’s still dancing fingers.
Dianna tilted her head again. Jones wondered if she knew she looked like a damn dachshund every time she did that. She refused to admit to herself that it was cute in an impossibly annoying way, like sloths who were mostly useless but still made her stomach soft inside.
