Just One Day(52)

“I’ll make more tea,” I say.
We study together in silence. It’s nice. At five fifty, the alarm goes off and Dee packs up to go to work.
“Wednesday?” he says.
“Sure.”
Two days later, we go through the same routine, cookies, tea, hello to the “dropsillas,” Shakespeare out loud, and silent study. We don’t talk. We just work. On Friday, Kali comes into the room. It’s the first time she’s seen Dee, seen anyone, in the room with me, and she looks at him for a long moment. I introduce them.
“Hi, Dee. Pleasure to meet you,” she says in a strangely flirty voice.
“Oh, the pleasure is all mine,” Dee says, his voice all exaggeratedly animated.
Kali looks at him and then smiles. Then she goes to her closet and pulls out a camel coat and a pair of tawny suede boots. “Dee, can I ask you something? What do you think of these boots with this jacket? Too matchy matchy?”
I look at Dee. He is wearing sky-blue sweats and a T-shirt with sparkly lettering spelling out I BELIEVE. I’m not clear how this reads Fashion Expert to Kali.
But Dee gets right into it. “Oh, girl, those boots are fine. I might have to take them from you.”
I look at him, sort of shocked. I mean I figured Dee was gay, but I’ve never heard him talk all sassy-gay-sidekick before.
“Oh, no, you won’t,” Kali replies, her strange ways of KO’ing words now blending with some latent Valley Girl tendencies. “They cost me, like, four hundred dollars. You can borrow them.”
“Oh, you’re a doll baby. But you got Cinderella feet, and ole Dee’s like one of them ugly stepsisters.”
Kali laughs, and they go on like this for some time, talking about fashion. I feel kind of bad. I guess I never realized Dee was so into this kind of thing. Kali got it right away. It’s like she has some radar, the one that tells you how to pick up on things with people, how to be friends. I don’t really care about fashion, but that night, when the alarm goes off and Dee packs up to leave, I show him the latest skirt my mom sent me and ask if he thinks it’s too preppy. But he barely gives it half a glance. “It’s fine.”
After that, Kali starts showing up more often, and she and Dee go all Project Runway, and Dee always switches into that voice. I write it off as just a fashion thing. But then a few days after that, as we’re leaving, Kendra walks in, and I introduce them. Kendra sizes Dee up, like she does with people, and puts on her flight-attendant smile and asks Dee where he’s from.
“New York,” he says. I make a note of that. I’ve known him for almost three weeks, and I’m just now finding out the basics.
“Where in New York?”
“The city.”
“Where?”
“The Bronx.”
The flight attendant smile is gone, replaced by a tight line that looks penciled on.
“Oh, like the South Bronx? Well. You must be so glad to be living here.”
Now it’s Dee who gives Kendra the once-over. They’re eyeing each other like dogs, and I wonder if it’s because they’re both black. Then, he switches to a different voice from the one he talks to Kali or me in. “You from the South Bronx?”
Kendra recoils a little. “No! I’m from Washington.”
“Like where they got all the rain and shit?”
Rain and shit?
“No, not state. DC.”
“Oh. I got some cousins in DC. Down in Anacostia. Shit, those are some nasty-ass projects. Even worse than where I came up. There’s a shooting at their school every damn week.”
Kendra looks horrified. “I’ve never even been to Anacostia. I live in Georgetown. And I went to Sidwell Friends, where the Obama girls go.”
“I went to South Bronx High. Most wack school in America. Ever heard of it?”
“No, I’m afraid I haven’t.” She gives me a quick look. “Well, I have to go. I’m meeting Jeb soon.” Jeb is her new boyfriend.
“Catch you later, homegirl,” Dee calls as Kendra disappears into her room. As Dee picks up his backpack to leave, he is quaking with laughter.
I decide to walk him to the dining hall, maybe eat there for a change. Eating alone sucks, but there are only so many microwave burritos a girl can stomach. When we get downstairs, I ask him if he really went to South Bronx High School.
When he speaks again, he sounds like Dee. Or the Dee I know. “They closed South Bronx High School a year ago, not that I ever went there. I went to a charter school. Then I got snagged in Prep for Prep—scholarship thing—by a private school that’s even more expensive than Sidwell Friends. Take that, Miss Thang.”
“Why didn’t you just tell her where you went?”
He looks at me and then, reverting to the voice he’d used with Kendra, says, “If homegirls wanna see me as ghetto trash”—he stops and switches to his lispy, sassy voice—“or big-ass queer”—now he switches to his deepest Shakespeare voice—“I shall not take it upon myself to disabuse them.”
When we reach the dining hall, I feel like I should say something to him. But I’m not sure what. In the end, I just ask him if he wants chocolate chip or butter cookies next time. Grandma sent me both.
“I’ll supply cookies. My mama sent up some homemade molasses spice ones.”
“That’s nice.”
“Nothin’ nice about it. She’s throwing down. She wasn’t about to be outdone by somebody’s grandma.”
I laugh. It’s a strange sound, like an old car being started after a long time in the garage. “We won’t tell my grandma that. If she accepts the challenge and bakes her own cookies, we might get food poisoning. She’s the worst cook in the world.”