Honey Girl(54)

Yuki holds her hands up in surrender. “I can tell when I’m not wanted.” She bends down and pauses, just for a moment, before she kisses Grace on the cheek. There is a lipstick imprint left behind, Grace knows. “Listen to the show tonight?”

“Always,” she says, and Yuki gives her a helpless smile. “Text me when you’re there.”

Yuki rolls her eyes. “Cute how my wife thinks I can’t kick anyone’s ass if I need to.” She blows a kiss at them and the scent of her soap lingers.

In the quiet, with just the TV and the lull of Dhorian’s fingers, Grace remembers this is Colonel’s favorite movie. She hasn’t seen it since she was a teenager and found him watching it in the living room. She was grounded for being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong girl, caught by a cop who knew her father.

She was brought home in the back of a squad car, heart thumping with each mile, eyes trained on the baton and the gun and the cold metal handcuffs. He dragged her by her arm up to their front door, and she listened, standing on the doormat, as Colonel assured him it would never happen again. Not with his daughter.

She was grounded. No phone, no TV, no iPod. Just school and homework and helping Miss Debbie file papers and listening to her endless tirades about how rude and disrespectful and disappointing Grace was to her father. That was the true punishment. So, when she crept down the stairs at the sound of loud music and Colonel—Colonel—bellowing with laughter, she didn’t expect to see him lounging on the couch, watching a movie about college kids with ’90s haircuts and ’90s clothes.

She fully expected to be sent back up to her room, but Colonel hadn’t minded her joining him. There were two beer bottles in front of him, empty, and he sprawled on the couch, relaxed. “You ever seen this?”

She crept closer, sitting primly on the edge of the cushion. “No. What is it?”

Colonel groaned. He groaned. “Damn, Porter. How have I never showed you this? Sit down. I’ll start it over.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Got to,” he said, rewinding. “This right here is a classic. A staple in the culture.”

She sighed, getting comfortable in her own little corner. “If you say so.”

“Oh, I say so.”

It’s a good memory, Grace thinks, brought back to life here.

Dhorian’s pager beeps. “Shit,” he says. “I’m the on-call resident this week.” He completes one of Grace’s twists; there are only a few left to do in the back. “You can finish these up, right?”

“Go save Harlem,” she says. “You’re like Spider-Man.”

“Only if it’s the Miles Morales version,” he says, grabbing his bag and his hoodie from the living room. “Bye, Porter!”

And then Grace is alone. The movie loses some of its appeal in the quiet of the apartment. There’s just the hum of the huge fish tank and her circling thoughts. There is Yuki’s incense and bottled sea salt and rough-cut crystals. Her mishmash butsudan has small, cutout pictures of her grandmother and dried flower petals and candles and a glass of water she changes out every morning, first thing. It has all become familiar to Grace.

She will miss it, when this champagne-bubble dream pops.

She decides that tonight, in the hours before Yuki’s show, she will not brood. She crawls under the covers and pulls out her laptop. The Skype call is dialing before she registers it. It rings and rings, and finally Ximena and Agnes become grainy and visible. There they are, down to the overworked shadows under their eyes and Agnes’s lips, peeling and irritated from stress picking.

“Hi,” Grace says. She feels herself drawn to them. “Miss you guys.”

They are both cuddled on the couch. It has been many years of will they, won’t they, do they, don’t they, and she realizes she has missed that, too: the reliable uncertainty of their relationship status. Ximena holds Agnes around her small waist and buries her face in the shock of blond hair. “Hi, conejito,” she murmurs quietly. “We miss you, too. We were just talking about you.”

Agnes’s eyes flutter open. She looks tired and sharp. “Hi, Porter,” she croaks out, and Ximena meets Grace’s eyes.

She shakes her head slightly. Grace suddenly feels the entire country between them. She cannot hold Agnes and wait for her sharp edges to dull. She thinks of Raj’s words. They all have their hard things. She wants to be there, really be there, for this one.

“Hey, Ag,” Grace says, because she can, because she must, because she wants to support her friends. “Bad day? Bad week? Bad person? Want me to fly back and put them in their place?”

Agnes laughs, and it leaves her like a heavy, burdened weight.

She gives a small smile, and Ximena presses a barely there kiss to her neck. Grace pretends not to see Agnes shudder. “What about if the bad thing is my brain?”

It’s always the goddamn brains. “I’ll put your brain in its place, if it helps,” Grace says, scooting closer to the screen. I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. “Me and Ximena have grown rather fond of you over the years. What would we do without our feral white girl?”

“She is feral, right?” Ximena asks. “And that means strong, and powerful and so dangerous that any brain wouldn’t dare try to fuck with her.”