On Rotation(35)

Except, now I knew better. I knew why I was losing Nia. It was because, when Nia looked at Shae, she saw a home. She saw a person who accepted her as she was, with all her bumps and crevices and cracks and beauty and graces. Just like Tabatha accepted Chris and vice versa, and my parents accepted each other. Forever was a long time for a twenty-three-year-old, and yet here was my baby sister, promising it without hesitation.

And none of the stories I read could have ever hoped to capture dedication like that.

*

I dropped my backpack with a thud on the bench next to me. Ricky’s chosen coffee shop, Jackalope, turned out to be only a fifteen-minute drive from my apartment, and without even tasting a drink, I knew I would be back. The colors I’d seen on its website were only more vibrant in real life—the walls were painted bright orange and yellow, teal and highlighter pink. The table we picked was nestled underneath a shoulder mount of a large hare with suspiciously real-looking antlers: the shop’s namesake. We had arrived at the shop at the same time, stepping out of our cars simultaneously, and the smile that had graced Ricky’s face upon seeing me had almost knocked me out. Like my presence was the biggest box under a Christmas tree and it had his name on it—

Stop it, Angela.

Knowing that Ricky just wanted to be friends should have made things easier for me, and to a degree, it did. My daydreaming took on a much more innocent edge now that I knew it could go nowhere, and his small favors—like getting me a latte, as he did now—didn’t send my mind into a flurry. Because I knew they were just that, favors. Ricky liked doing things for people. It made him feel needed. Before the improv show, he had taken Shae out to dinner, and he’d already stopped by my apartment on an evening when I was working late to help Nia change out a flat. From him, a latte wasn’t a hint or a romantic gesture. It was just a latte from a guy who wanted to show off his favorite drink.

And a necklace . . . is just a necklace.

Ricky’s gaze dropped to my collarbone, his grin broadening.

“You’re wearing it!” he exclaimed.

My hands jumped instinctively to the Water Tribe pendant, and I flushed. I’d been wearing it to the hospital lately; it worked wonders as an ice breaker for my teenage patients.

“Yeah, well,” I said. “It’s pretty. Thanks.”

I focused on unloading my backpack, but I could still feel the triumph coming off him in waves. The table groaned in complaint as I dropped my ob-gyn shelf review book onto it, then my First Aid* text, and, finally, my laptop.

“Those look heavy,” Ricky observed.

“Yeah, ’cause they are.” I watched him open up his laptop. “So, what are you working on?”

“I’ll show you. But wait a second,” Ricky said. He pulled out his phone and opened up a timer application. “When me and Shae were in college, we’d do this thing,” he explained, “where when we were working on a project, we’d give ourselves seven minutes to talk, then thirty minutes to work. Rinse and repeat.”

“Ah,” I said, “so that’s what this is about. Your position for a quirky Black bestie’s just opened up, and you’re interviewing candidates.” I stuck my tongue out at him. “Weird way to grieve, Ricky.”

Ricky rolled his eyes and punched the timer on.

“Starting now, I guess.”

I snickered. “You realize I was premed once, right? You think I didn’t pump out these study exercises like a pro?”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Except it was seven minutes every hour.”

“Oh, of course. You even sound like a freaking premed,” Ricky said. “We used to look left and right to make sure you guys weren’t lurking in the bushes somewhere before complaining about how much work we had to do, because you’d always pop out to talk about how none of it compared to organic chemistry.”

I laughed.

“Guilty! But where I went, we didn’t bother you art school students as much. You guys lived in a studio.”

“Ha, well then I would’ve definitely been a target,” Ricky said. “Majored in poli sci and English.”

I did not know that.

“You’re self-taught?” The little green monster in my chest I’d last felt the first time I’d seen his work lurched again.

“I took a few classes my senior year once I figured out what I wanted to do,” he explained. “But yeah, for the most part.”

We talked a bit about school then: the evolution of his career aspirations (“I want to open my own design firm someday”), the study abroad trip to Colombia he’d gone on after his sophomore year, the year-long power struggle with his grandfather when he decided to pursue his passion instead of translate his very law-aligned coursework into a doctorate.

I slapped at his laptop playfully.

“Let me see what you broke your grandpa’s heart for, then.”

He flipped it around. Unexpectedly, it was a brochure, and a dry one at that. My face must have dropped because Ricky slumped forward onto the table and laughed out loud.

“What do you think graphic designers do, Angie?”

I threw up my hands. “I thought you were drawing!”

Ricky’s shoulders still shook with mirth.

“What?”

“You should see yourself,” he said. “Pouting like a baby!”