Such a Fun Age(57)
Alix reached to the side of the tub and picked up her phone. She texted the girls that she wanted to meet at ten a.m., not eleven. She took her iPad and went to the restaurant’s website, moving their reservation up one hour.
* * *
—
“I’m furious.” Alix slumped. Across the table and over plates filled with brunch specials, Jodi held her coffee in both hands. To Alix’s left, Rachel broke a yolk open and it ran onto a bed of greens. To her right, Tamra salted her eggs, but she kept her eyes raised and focused on Alix. “I hate that I’m completely shocked,” Alix said, “and that I’m not surprised.”
Tamra laughed bitterly as she set the saltshaker down. “This all makes a whole lot more sense now. I knew there was something off about him.”
“Alix, don’t be mad at me,” Jodi said carefully. “But I’m having a hard time understanding. If anyone did what he did to me—telling awful kids where I live and putting people I love at risk—I would be furious too. But you’re also saying that he’s the opposite of racist? That he likes black people too much?”
“Alix is saying”—Tamra stepped in—“that Kelley is one of those white guys who not only goes out of his way to date black women but only wants to date black women.”
With kale in her cheek, Rachel chewed and said, “That’s racist.”
“It completely fetishizes black people in a terrible way,” Tamra went on. “It makes it seem like we’re all the same, as if we can’t contain multitudes of personalities and traits and differences. And people like that think that it says something good about them, that they’re so brave and unique that they would even dare to date black women. Like they’re some kind of martyr.”
Alix nodded so vigorously that the table lightly shook. “This is what he does,” she said. “In high school it was the black athletes. According to his Facebook it’s now black women. And if he’s still surrounding himself with black people just so he can feel good about himself, I couldn’t care less . . . but now Emira is on the other side of it. And this doesn’t even touch on what he did to me back then.”
“Okay. I get it now. No wonder you were so upset last night!” Jodi cut into her hash browns. “Here I was thinking you still carried a flame for him, which I wouldn’t judge you for either, but this takes it to a whole new level.”
“No no, it’s nothing like that. God, no,” Alix said. “For the record, this has nothing to do with me dating Kelley Copeland.” She said his name as if it were a myth or fickle philosophy, something to put air quotes around. “But I do care about my sitter. This guy completely ruined my high school experience, and I don’t trust him as far as I can spit. And I know, I know people change . . . but when he showed up yesterday . . . I don’t know. At first I thought, ‘How are you here?’ And then I thought, ‘What do you want with my sitter?’”
Jodi placed a hand to her cheek. Rachel looked up from her plate and said, “I just got chills.”
Tamra removed a bag of mint tea from her mug. “This is not good.”
“It makes my skin crawl,” Alix said. “And I can only imagine what he’s told her about me.”
“I’m playing devil’s advocate here . . .” It was clear Jodi still didn’t completely understand, but Alix appreciated her dedication to the topic at hand. “But is there a chance that while he may have a fetish, that fetish may have grown into something more serious? People do change, right? And call me crazy . . . but it seemed like he really liked her.”
This observation made Alix’s ears burn.
“Well, there are plenty of misogynists out there who are obsessed with a certain type of woman,” Tamra said. “Despite the fact that they use women to validate themselves, they think they aren’t sexist because they love to objectify women so much. And you’re right. People do change . . . but it’s not like he was twelve.”
“But even so, what can we do about it?” Rachel, as usual, bent the conversation into another direction. “Because think about it. How difficult is it to tell someone, ‘Hey, your boyfriend likes you for the wrong reasons?’ If someone told me that I’d be like, ‘No he doesn’t. Mind your business.’ It’s not like Alix can tell her to not be with him.” Then Rachel added this as if it were an unfortunate fact: “Emira is a grown woman.”
“But she’s not, though! She’s . . .” This outburst surprised Alix as much as it seemed to surprise her friends. Her face suddenly felt hot as she remembered Kelley’s hands on Emira’s backside. The text he’d sent her. Is basketball something you’d be interested in? The way he’d turned to her when the video was mentioned. That’s Emira’s property now. “Emira is still so young,” she said, and with this, Alix felt her eyes begin to water. When she let her voice crack to say, “What the fuck is he doing with her?” a tear dropped into her napkin. The idea of Kelley truly having feelings for Emira seemed slightly worse than him using her for his own gain. Just the thought of it put a sharp buzzing sound into her head. Alix also realized that sitting here at brunch with her girlfriends, with a legitimate excuse to discuss Kelley Copeland, might have been the happiest she’d felt since she moved to Philadelphia.