When No One Is Watching(15)
“Theo, this is my best friend and housemate, Drea. Drea, this is Theo from across the street. He lives in the Payne house.” Because I’m mean and want to deflect, I add, “His girlfriend is the one who threatened me at the store yesterday.”
“Oh. Oh.” She perches on the arm of my chair and fixes her gaze on Theo. Drea is all of five feet tall and currently wearing a purple T-shirt with a unicorn on it, but her death stare is terrifying—it was why no one had fucked with me from grades five through twelve.
“Hello, Brad,” she says. “Wonderful to meet you.”
“Oh, it’s Theo.” His flirtatiousness is gone and his body is tense, as if Drea herself has a unicorn horn and might gore him.
Good.
Drea claps her hands together, then drops them between her knees as she leans forward. “You do know this is the planning meeting for the annual block party and not the Police Benevolent Association fundraiser, right?”
“Drea.” I laugh. “Be nice.”
“Fine.” She gives Theo an evil look. “But tell your girl that if anything happens to my Sydney, or one of my neighbors, because she wants to call 911 for no reason? Then we’re gonna have a problem. She don’t want no problems with me.”
She leans back and spreads her arms, and when she speaks again, her voice is light and chipper. “Welcome to the neighborhood!”
Theo swallows. “Thanks.”
The room has started to fill with other neighbors: Asia Martin and her son Len, who’s a foot taller than me now, somehow, even though he was at my shoulder when I moved away. Jenn and Jen, who brought homemade dog treats for Count and homemade hummus for us humans. Tiffany, LaTasha, and Amber, the head of the neighborhood’s teen dance troupe. Ashley and Jamel Jones, without their son, Preston, who’s probably at one of his fifty-leven college-prep extracurriculars. Ms. Candace, who’s stepped up to help with the organizing since Mrs. Perkins passed away. Their chatter fills the den as they pour soda into plastic cups and grab handfuls of chips; even with so many people here, there are noticeable gaps where so many of the old familiar faces used to be.
Theo ends up perched awkwardly on the edge of the couch next to Len, whose back is to Theo because his focus is on the three girls demonstrating dance moves for Jenn and Jen. Theo looks nervous, out of place, but trying to be cool. It was how I felt living in Seattle and never quite fitting in at all of Marcus’s work functions and sports events and happy hours. I eventually stopped trying.
“Hot damn, ho, here we go again,” Drea mutters, breaking the unfortunate direction of my thoughts.
I whip my head up to find her looking down at me, judgment a divot etched between her brows. “What?” I ask innocently.
“What?” she mimics in annoyance, then leans over and whispers in my ear, her voice sharp and singsong. “Why are you staring at Theodore like you’ve spotted fool’s gold, yet again?”
I raise a brow. “Do you propose I just ignore the strange white man at our gathering? Have you read a newspaper lately? This is surveillance. I’m trying to make sure I don’t need to take his ass out.”
She stares at me.
I hold up my index and middle fingers and covertly gesture from my eyes to Theo’s general direction. “Sur. Veil. Lance.”
She just looks at me, a glimmer of frustration in her eyes, then she shakes her head. “You have theeeeee worst taste. The worst. Though . . .” She glances over at him. “He does look a little spicy, with them thick-ass eyebrows. He at least puts paprika on his chicken, I’m guessing. Maybe even some Lawry’s.”
“Drea! If you don’t stop—”
“Stop what? Predicting your dumbass behavior based on a lifetime of observation?” She says it jokingly, but she’s right—she’s always been there to warn me when I was about to slip up, and to catch me when I ignored her and inevitably fell. When my nightmares weren’t about the devil at my elbow, they featured Drea walking away from me and my neediness—like Marcus had.
She touches my shoulder lightly. “You’re lucky I love you.”
“I am.” I lean into her a bit, letting myself rest against the familiar warmth of a side that has propped me up countless times over the years, through failures and bad decisions, marriage, divorce, and . . . everything since I came back to Brooklyn. Drea would do anything for me—like, that’s a fact and not a supposition.
My lips turn up at the corners and I sigh, comfort sliding over me like a weighted blanket. The beginning of a bangin’ nap, this one not marred by weird half dreams of colonial destruction, starts to pull me under.
Drea nudges me with her elbow, jostling me away from the edge of sleep. “I talked to work bae in the contracts department about the VerenTech stuff you were complaining about.”
“You didn’t have to ask,” I say grumpily. “I didn’t tell you about the rejected information request so you could do the work for me.”
She rolls her eyes. “Well, I did. And it’s too late to tell him never mind, because then he’s gonna be mad at me since he’s already going out of his way for me since there’s all this extra security around this project.”
That was the thing with Drea: a simple question can turn into her going ten blocks out of her way to get something you didn’t ask for, or, in this case, having her coworker do possibly illegal searches for info that’ll probably be useless to me.