Page 138 of The Other Side of Green

I shook my head, shifting the black dots slightly.

Eva slipped down onto the floor and wrapped her arms around me. “What can I do to help?”

“Make all this go away.” I sniggered, closing my eyes.

“I wish I could. You deserve so much better.”

I cranked open an eye. “Do I?”

“Yes, you do.”

“If I hadn’t cocked up that audition maybe I would have been top of that list.”

“So?” Eva stared at me hard. “Don’t you get it? Even if you’d been top of the list you still might not have got the place. They gave it to you so they wouldn’t get in trouble. Any other year that might not have happened.”

Her words slowly connected in my head. Snapping into place, providing clarity where before there had just been thick fog.

“And,” she continued, “until this blew up, they would have taken the slightest excuse to get rid of you. If you hadn’t played the way you did at the gala you would have been gone.”

The hard lump in my chest burst into red hot flames.

“I don’t understand it, Eva. I mean, we’ve had a black president. How is this still happening?”

Dropping her hold on me, she caught up my hand in hers. “Shall I tell you what made me protest?”

I nodded, my eyes filling with water which I blinked away. “Because you like bra burning?”

“For the record, I didn’t actually do that.” Grinning, she reached up and tucked a hair behind my ear. “But I would have done.”

“So why did you?”

“You’ve just said it yourself. We live in a society that proclaims to be progressive. I mean you could be Beyonce and earn fucking billions of pounds. You could sit in the oval office and run the free world.”

“Exactly.”

“Wait. The reason I marched isn’t about equality for all. It’s against the fact one white family, with money to spare, thinks that they can have a say in the future of another person, that they can chose the path that person is on. Lyra, you could have played a stormer in that audition and they still could have said no.” She stared at me hard, waiting for me to understand all the things I was too naïve to grasp. “One family could have changed your future. Hell, it changed the direction of all the other applicants that day who didn’t get the place either.”

I mulled over her words, trying to make sense of them, attempting to see the bigger picture that wasn’t just me and Jack, or the questionable genetics of my heritage.

“You don’t think there should be scholarships?”

Eva stared at the floor and shrugged. “I don’t know. All I know is that it feels wrong in my gut. Do you know what I mean?” She offered me a faint smile.

“I know. And I feel it too. But the truth is, Eva, I couldn’t afford to come here without that scholarship. Right or wrong, I wouldn’t be sitting here in this dorm with you if they hadn’t said yes for whatever reason.”

“I know, and I don’t know how that gets fixed. But it’s wrong that the less fortunate get less opportunity.”

I cracked her a smile. “You sure you want to play flute? I’m sensing a politician sitting in front of me.”

“Well, you know, I did want to be president when I was small.”

“I think you’d make an amazing president—” my cell ringing cut me off.

“I’d better get that, it might be Jack.”

“He is sweet to look at, even for an old dude.”

“Eva! He’s not that old.”