“Sometimes people don’t know how to love the way they should,” I said. “It’s sad. And unfair. But it doesn’t mean you aren’t lovable.”
She cried into my shirt until she fell asleep.
I lay awake staring at the ceiling, hating a stupid dance in a stupid gym more than I’d hated anything in a long time.
My sister, Leila, came over the next day.
She found me in the kitchen, mascara smudged, coffee untouched.
“What happened?” she asked.
I handed her the flyer.
She read it, then read my face.
“They said no?” she asked.
“They said ‘not appropriate,’” I said. “Like her heartbreak is a scheduling inconvenience.”
Leila swore under her breath.
Then she did what millennials do in times of injustice and rage: she opened her phone.
“Stop,” I said weakly. “Don’t tag the school. I don’t want them taking it out on Sita.”
“I won’t,” she said. “I’ll just… shout into the void a little.”
She wrote a post.
Something like:
My niece was told she can’t go to her school’s “Daddy-Daughter Dance” because she doesn’t have a dad. Fatherless girls being excluded from school events because “tradition” matters more than their feelings. Make it make sense.