The Last Friday

The Corner Booth, Book 10

by Kimani Upshur, M.Ed.

Six friends. One corner booth. One week left. Grace Whitfield, Marcus Bennett, Priya Nair, Jayden, Sofia Reyes, and Omar Haddad began the school year as five friends and a stranger, and the corner booth at Mabel's diner made them six. Now it is the last week — finals Monday through Thursday — and on Friday, June 5, Grace graduates, the only senior among the six, while Mabel decides whether her diner stays, and for how long, and the five who remain watch the calendar run out on the year that made them. Priya writes two drafts of her graduation piece — the polished one, excellent and dead, and the honest one — and gives Grace the true one. Jayden asks the question he has been circling all year: whether God is listening. Sofia draws all six seats from memory — all six seats, honestly. And on graduation night, with the diner open late, the six write down the covenant they made in March, in six different hands, in a place the room will keep — and Grace adds one line more: a sixth rule, not about them at all, about a chair left ready for whoever comes in next. Rooted in Ecclesiastes 4:9–12 — two are better than one, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken — The Last Friday is a Christian young adult novel about endings that are not endings, and a table that keeps what it is told. It is Book Ten of The Corner Booth series, and its conclusion.

Written from a Christian worldview — Scripture first.