On Rotation(25)



I considered just walking away. I knew I was about to be that girl, the uncool, overly clingy one who has the nerve to expect emotional accountability from people she’s only just met. But maybe because I was tired, maybe because I was already getting beaten down by the posturing of my third year, maybe because I was sick of the Fredericks and the Rickys of the world making me question my own otherwise keen EQ, I couldn’t take it anymore.

“Stop it,” I hissed. “Stop acting like you weren’t coming on to me. Like you don’t have a girlfriend who’d be pissed if she knew that you kept running me down! We are not going to be friends. We are not going to be anything. Leave me alone!”

It was not my first time erupting on someone, but it was my first time doing it to someone who didn’t expect it. Ricky’s smile crumpled; his hands dropped to his sides. For a terrifying moment, I thought he was going to cry. But then his face shuttered and became cold. I could never have imagined that he could look like that—like someone who could hate.

“Well damn,” he said. “I was just trying to be nice. Not every guy who’s nice to you is hitting on you, you know.”

I laughed humorlessly.

“Nice? You’ve got to be joking,” I said. “You are not nice.” Then, before he could say anything else, I spun on my heel and stomped all the way to room 4062.

*

Nia got home late that night. She had begun taking an improv class at the undergrad campus when I started on the wards, which meant that her Tuesday and Thursday nights, previously all mine, were now shared with ten other comedy hopefuls. I sent her a text (You won’t believe who I ran into in the hospital today) that I knew she wouldn’t respond to for the next two hours and studied in petulant silence. Nia was the only one of my crew I really trusted with stories like this. Michelle, who drew men to her like flies to honey, couldn’t empathize with my romantic woes. Markus always thought I was being overdramatic and needed to “chill.” I’d once whined to Tabatha about a short-lived flame, and she asked, perplexed, Didn’t you only go out with him, like, three times? But Nia understood, because she was just like me—unlucky in love, but somehow always falling into it.

And now here she was, positively twirling through the front door.

“Honey, I’m home!” she sang. I shrugged off my blanket to go greet her and stopped in my tracks at the entryway. Nia looked . . . amazing. Like, “done up” amazing. Her curls glistened with mousse, and her makeup was especially done, complete with contour and red matte lipstick. She was twirling in a green vintage dress that billowed around her, looking for all the world like the poster child for the pretty fat girl performative femininity she was always railing against. It was not an outfit one wore to improv on a Tuesday.

“Okay, so I know you’ve got something to tell me, but first I have a confession,” Nia said.

I crossed my arms and looked her up and down.

“Clearly. Who’s the girl?”

At my invitation, Nia launched into a long description of her new sweetheart, a person named Shae, interspersed every few seconds with a declaration of how “cool” they were. I guided Nia to the couch and grasped her hand as she spoke, my chest seizing intermittently with quiet despair. The last time Nia had been this goo-goo-eyed over someone was with Ulo, and that was two years ago. My best friend had been falling in love and I’d been too deep in my books to notice.

“They’re a copywriter, like, full-time for a PR agency. But they also write poetry on the side.” Nia leaned forward and added, in a whisper like a secret, “They’ve let me read their work and oh my god. They’re just incredible. The things they can do with words . . . ugh! Girl!” She waggled her eyebrows suggestively. “Makes me wonder what else that mouth do.”

“They sound great, Nia,” I said. “Where’d you guys meet? In improv?”

Nia bit her lip.

“Well, no. Um. Actually, we’re . . . uh . . . taking the class together.”

I blinked owlishly at her. Nia tucked her hair back behind an ear, as sheepish as I’d ever seen her.

“You mean the class you’ve been taking for two weeks?” I swatted her arm. Suddenly the getup made sense. “What. The. Hell?”

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I was going to tell you, but you’ve been busy. And also. I may have broken a cardinal friendship rule. I did it for the pussy, so I know you’ll forgive me. So tell me you forgive me first?”

I laughed. Nia took my hands out of my lap and held them, looking up at me with sad puppy eyes until I stopped.

“No way, you crazy girl. What did you do?”

“Well. You know at the Beyoncé concert”—my pulse quickened, somehow already knowing where this was headed—“me and Camila started chatting. And somehow it came up that I liked women, and so Camila, bless her heart, did that thing. You know, the ‘I know a lesbian’ thing . . . and I tried to brush her off. But then she showed me a picture.”

Nia held up her phone. On the screen was a person just as cool as Nia had described. They had a clean undercut, with thick silver-beaded dreads piled into a bun at the top of their head. Their skin was a smooth, even slate, the undertones so cool that they looked more blue-black than brown. They had an angular face, all high cheekbones and sharp eyes; even in the pictures where they were smiling, they looked fierce. I could see why Nia kept calling them cool. They reminded me of a Final Fantasy character.

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