Honey Girl(13)

“She was nice,” Ximena says absently, like she has the night playing out in her head, too. “She seemed nice. We tried to make sure.”

“We did,” Agnes murmurs. “Ximena even let me put my knife in my pocket and not my boot.”

“Absolutely not the point,” Ximena says. “We’re listening right now.”

“What about me?” Agnes whines. “What about my problems? I don’t get married in Vegas, and suddenly I don’t matter?”

“Are you done?”

“Yeah.” Agnes sighs. “We’re listening, Porter,” she says, nails returning to gently scratch down Grace’s spine.

Grace shrugs. “We danced. We talked. She was a little mean, but like, in a good way.”

She gets lost in the memory. “There were people everywhere. Street performers and food vendors and tourists. We bought some flowers and tucked them behind our ears. We were so drunk.”

Ximena and Agnes are quiet, and Grace tries to paint it, the hazy dream of it all.

“She kissed me, or maybe I kissed her. We didn’t want it to end, so—we made it forever, I guess. I woke up, and it felt like I had dreamed her up.”

“I believe you,” Ximena says, hushed, as if she can see Grace’s memories. They are fragile. Grace worries they might fade if she looks at them too long.

“Me, too,” Agnes says, voice rough and low.

Grace traces the gold wedding band.

She puts her knees up and curls up small. “I’ve had my whole life planned out for so long. What school I was going to, what I was going to study, what job I was going to get. I feel like I don’t know how to make my own choices anymore,” she confesses. “But I met a girl, and I had fun, and I felt good. I chose that. And she chose me.”

It was easy to miss someone you don’t really remember. Maybe not the filled-in parts of them: their name, if they kicked in their sleep, if they really kissed you before they disappeared out of the hotel room. But, it was easy to miss the outline of them: their laughter and their sea-salt skin and the traces of magic they left.

“Fuck,” Agnes says eventually. They laugh, the three of them, in disbelief and awe of the tale that has been spun. It feels like a fairy tale, a Cinderella story, but instead of a shoe, Grace has been left with a note and a radio frequency she has been too afraid to tune into. “You really don’t do things by halves.”

“I know,” Grace says. “I’m terrible. I’m the worst. Who just gets married? Who does that?”

Ximena waves her hands. “Okay,” she says. “Okay, existential crisis later. You’re married,” she stresses, “and you have no idea who this girl is or how to get in touch with her?”

Grace moves out of their embrace. The note and business card are plucked out of her hoodie, and Agnes snatches them away and holds them between her and Ximena like a treasure map. Her mouth moves along to the words that Grace knows by heart.

“Holy shit,” Agnes breathes out. “It’s so romantic. I feel sick.”

Ximena rereads it. “Do you have your phone, Porter?” she asks slowly.

“Yeah? Here.”

Ximena’s fingers tap rapidly as she reads off the front of the card.

“Wait,” Grace says. “You’re not really—you’re not looking up her radio show?”

“Yes, I am,” is the answer that comes. “I want to know everything about this girl.” She puts the phone down. “How the hell haven’t you looked her up yet?”

“I don’t know,” Grace says. “What if—” What if reality is not like the champagne-pink dream? What if this, too, does not turn out how I planned? What if I am once again too brown and too gold and not the right fit? “What if she regrets it?”

Ximena moves closer, close enough that their knees touch. “Baby,” she says, playing with the coils of Grace’s Bantu knots. “What if she doesn’t?”

“Found her,” Agnes cuts in, still curled up under her blanket. “She wasn’t lying. The radio show has a dot net domain. That’s downright spooky.”

“Fine.” Grace leans over. “Fine, let me see.”

ARE YOU THERE?
brooklyn’s late-night show for lonely creatures
& the supernatural. sometimes both.
99.7 FM
There’s a picture of the host. Yuki Yamamoto, it says. The sea-salt girl. The girl that left traces of bitter herbs in the hotel bed before she sneaked out. She has weird circular glasses and short black hair and a jeweled septum piercing. Your conduit to community, her caption reads.

“Question,” Agnes says, scrolling up and down the page. “Did you marry a fucking ghost hunter? Does she, like, perform exorcisms when normal people in Brooklyn would do hip-hop yoga?”

Grace laughs. There she is: the rosebud girl.

“Slow down,” Ximena complains. “How can we read if you’re flying through the pages like that?”

“There’s not much to look at,” Agnes says. “Bio page, an About Us, ooh, look, past episodes.”

“We can’t,” Grace says.

“Oh, babe,” Ximena says, linking their fingers. “We totally can.”

“Yes,” Agnes hisses. “Can we listen to one now?”