On Rotation(18)

I’m seeing someone, he’d said, and the person he was seeing made sense for him. Even with my head swimming, I could appreciate how good Camila looked tucked underneath his arm. When Nia had asked me whether I was okay after the festival, I had said yes, and I had meant it. But now? I felt like I’d been sliced with a hundred papercuts and then dunked into a vat of alcohol.

Our eyes met, and Ricky’s expression went blank. I wondered whether mine mirrored his, whether our friends could trace the path of our gazes and catch wind of the tension between us. Michelle was already excitedly introducing herself to Ricky, who had an arm slung over his perfectly sweet, perfectly fun girlfriend, and I wondered if he would recognize her from the stories I’d told him in the garden as my crazy Korean friend. Then Diamond was pulling me forward too, and I remembered to reassemble my face into something of a smile, the kind that probably would not reach my eyes, the deadly smile that only Nia would recognize. Except today she didn’t, because the Weeknd was playing over the speakers and she was too drunk to notice.

“This is Ricky,” Diamond said. “He lived across from me my freshman year! I just saw him sitting over there by himself—” She pointed across the bleachers, where Camila had said she was sitting. “Small world, right?” She looked up at Ricky, too excited to notice that he was doing a piss-poor job of matching her fervor. “Ricky, this is Angie. She’s one of Markus’s good friends.”

Ricky’s eyes flitted up and down my body as if he couldn’t help it, and I praised whatever Higher Powers There Be for at least ensuring that I looked fine as hell on the day that I ran into him again. He looked nice too. He was dressed smartly in a navy short-sleeved button-down and black jeans. He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, clearly at a loss for words.

“Nice to meet you, Ricky,” I said, and thrust out my hand. I held his gaze in a dare. After a pause, he recovered and took my hand to shake.

“Nice to meet you too, Angie.” He tilted an eyebrow up in a subtle question, and I clenched his hand tighter in a warning.

“Angie did my makeup in the bathroom,” Camila announced, beaming.

I gave Camila a thin smile.

“The artist is only as good as her canvas, Camila,” I said.

“Pretty sure it’s the opposite,” Ricky said. Camila swatted his shoulder, but I only stared coldly, taking pleasure in the way his smirk slowly lost its luster. Then, with a nod and a wave, I moved around them to the other side of Nia, as far away from them as possible.

It’s him, I wanted to tell Nia. The boy from the garden. The one who gave me the Water Tribe necklace. But then the stadium lights were dimming, and the jumbotrons surrounding the stage lit up with an image of Queen Bey’s eyes, her lips, her thighs. It was impossible to stay upset then, not with the excitement pulsing through the stadium. I screamed as loud as I could manage, my voice melding with those of the thousands of other stans in attendance.

Once Beyoncé’s curvaceous silhouette graced the stage, I was hype. When she opened her mouth to send forth her outrage, I echoed it with all the feeling in my body, eyes clenched tight, joining the chorus of ecstatic-angry fans. Because, really, who the fuck did Ricky think I was? Who the fuck did any of these men who played games with the hearts of women like we weren’t real, breathing, feeling people deserving of respect think they were? I wondered if Ricky would recognize himself in the lyrics, and if he would, at the very least, feel bad. Probably not. He’d probably already rewritten history in his head and absolved himself of any questionable behavior by assuring himself that he’d only wanted to be kind to a damsel in distress. I wondered whether he understood that Lemonade was about men like him, who could smile in the faces of the ones they loved all the while betraying them.

And then the chorus hit, and I forced myself back into the moment and far away from this man who, God willing, I would never have to see again.





Six




The Sanity Circle started the next morning much like we had ended the night, in a groaning heap across the Appiah-Johnson living room. There had been plans, of course, to split off between the couch and our respective bedrooms, but all of those had gone to shit after we’d decided to sit around rehashing our college glory days after the concert instead of going to bed. We ended up falling asleep where we sat, blankets distributed unevenly among us, leaving us with kinks and aches in places we didn’t know we could get kinks and aches.

“That’s your foot in my back, Markus,” Michelle said. She had an arm over her eyes. I didn’t feel too sorry for her. She’d earned that hangover.

“Everyone alive?” Nia asked. We all grumbled in the affirmative and no one moved a muscle until, several minutes later, Markus rolled off the sofa to pee. The next twenty minutes involved stacking bathroom use such that one person was always peeing and another brushing their teeth at a given time, hydrating ourselves via water from the few clean mugs leftover over from the previous night’s shenanigans, and discussing which greasy brunch place was least likely to have a wait.

It was not until we got to Yolk that Diamond revealed her treachery.

“How many?” the hostess asked.

“Five—” I started to say, but Diamond cut in.

“Actually, seven please.” She gave me an apologetic smile. “Sorry, I invited Ricky and Camila.”