by Ibi Zoboi
It takes a while, but Garry looks away from her and turns around. He won’t talk to her. Not now.
He thinks he gets it. Gets her. She was struggling. She was trying to figure out who she wanted to be. She just wanted to know.
Garry slowly walks back over to Marc, who’s enjoying his strawberry way too much. Garry laughs. “Something wrong with you?”
“Me? You the one asking about Inaaya all night and you find her and won’t go talk to the girl.”
“I’ll talk to her,” Garry says. “Just not now.” And it’s true. They’ll probably be in a class together, or they’ll run into each other at the library or the cafeteria. Or maybe he’ll see her at some CompSci student meeting or something.
Maybe they’ll be friends again, the kind of friends who meet and talk under the arch in Washington Square Park.
But that’s all. He knows he has to let her go. She made her decision.
And it wasn’t him.
Into the Starlight
Nic Stone
When Makenzie Taylor was younger, she promised Mama she’d never go into the Starlight. She was ten, eleven, something like that—she’s too distracted to remember right now—and they were passing it on the way home from Aunt Trish’s new place on the Eastside (“Still the damn ghetto,” Mama said). The letters S-T-A-R-L-I-G-H-T were placed vertically on a tower-type thing at least as tall as Mak’s three-story house, and beside it, Six Drive-In Theatres glowed red above a list of movie titles.
Mak’s face lit up almost as bright as the massive marquee.
“Whoa!” she gasped, leaning toward it as if drawn by a string. Her nose hit the cool glass of the back passenger-side window. “What is that place?”
“Somewhere you’re never to go,” Mama replied. “It’s a place where gangbangers deal drugs and fast girls like your cousin get pregnant.” She turned around to look Mak in the eye then. “It’s not a place for nice young ladies like you. Promise me you’ll never go in there.”
And Mak did. Promise.
She’s breaking that promise right now.
In fact, at this moment, Mak’s not only parked inside the Starlight. She’s in the back seat of the Audi Mama insisted Daddy buy for Mak’s sixteenth birthday, with Kamari Funderburke’s amazing lips all up on her neck.
“You smell good,” he says, dragging his beautifully wide nose up under her jawline to her ear before nipping at the lobe. His long dreadlocks tickle the exposed skin near her collarbone. Whatever kind of oil or pomade or butter he uses to keep them so neat? That smells good. All natural and nutty, but kinda sweet and spicy too. Nothing like the artificial serums and burnt-hair smell she’s used to from getting her coils pressed bone straight at the salon every Saturday.
Just got it done this morning, and she’s totally sweating her edges out right now.
Mama is going to flip.
Kamari’s massive hand—Mak will never forget the time she saw him palm a basketball—slides beneath the hem of her top and around her waist. “Damn girl, you burning up,” he says. “We need to crack the windows a little more?” And he laughs.
“Oh my God, shut up,” Mak says.
“Make me,” And his lips latch onto hers.
The first time Mak saw Kamari Funderburke, he was leaving the Starlight on foot with his arm draped around some girl. Mak was driving her cousin Crystal back to Aunt Trish’s house, and they were stopped at the traffic light by the drive-in entrance. There was no ignoring the tall and slim but clearly solid, mahogany-skinned boy on the corner whose long locs swung as he turned to say something to someone behind him.
When he faced back forward, he was smiling. Big, bright (though dark) eyes twinkling in the light from the marquee. Dimples so deep, Mak instantly wanted to put her fingers in them.
She gulped.
“There that nigga go,” Crystal said from the passenger seat, yanking Mak back to the present. As Kamari and the girl passed in front of Mak’s car on their way across the wide, five-lane road, he turned and looked into the windshield. Crystal flipped him off, and he rolled his eyes.
Then he looked at Mak.
And looked away.
“Punk ass,” Crystal said as the light turned green.
Mak wanted to let it go, but she couldn’t. “Who is that?”
“Girl.” Crystal waved her hand like the question was a waste of time. “Some fuckboy I go to school with.”
“Ah.”
“His name is Kamari, and he’s triflin’. Knocked up one of my homegirls last year, then basically made her get an abortion.”
Mak had no idea what to say to that. While a good number of the kids at her snobby-ass school on the Northside were “sexually active,” as adults liked to say, every girl she knew was on birth control. Mak’s best friend, Tess, had a scare a few months prior—condom broke, she said—because Tess sometimes forgot to take her pill, but that was the closest Mak had ever been to a teen pregnancy.
“All the niggas around here are exactly the same,” Crystal said as Mak turned onto Crystal’s street. “They get in, get off, and get out. That’s part of the reason I can’t wait to leave this place.”
As Mak pulled into the driveway of the three-bedroom ranch house where, at seventeen, Crystal shared a bedroom with three of her five siblings and a bathroom with those three siblings plus her older sister, Divinity, and Divinity’s three kids (all of whom lived in one of the other bedrooms), Mama’s warnings—and judgments—rang through Mak’s head the way they always did when she came to her auntie’s place. Just look at Trish for what not to do; All them kids in that tiny-ass house; You would think she’d want to get off government assistance; It’s no wonder Divinity repeated the cycle; I know you and Crystal are close, but you be careful, Mak. Bad company corrupts good character, and I won’t have my daughter acting all ghetto . . .
That last one always tripped Mak up. Crystal had been accepted early to Duke on a full academic scholarship, and was smarter—book and street—than Mak could ever dream of being. Yeah, she cussed like the very concept of verbal communication depended on it, and tossed the n-word around like a Frisbee, but in the grand scheme of things, did that actually matter?
Mak took in the surroundings: house to the left was uninhabited—if the broken windows, sagging porch roof, and shin-high grass/weeds were any indication—and the one to the right had a blue tarp on the roof and three cars parked in the yard (one of them permanently, since it had no wheels) in lieu of grass. Even Aunt Trish’s house looked a little worse for the wear. The formerly peach paint was faded and peeling, and there was a big hole in the screen door. (Divinity’s son had “lost his muthafuckin’ mind and kicked the shit out of it,” according to Crystal. Mak can only imagine the whoopin’ he got. Mama didn’t “believe in corporal punishment,” but Mak knew it was the go-to at Aunt Trish’s house.)
The one thing all three houses had in common were the bars on their respective windows. Aunt Trish’s were decorative-ish. Kinda swirly, fleur-de-lis vibe. But the first thing Mama said when they pulled up to this house after Trish’s move was “Look at them damn burglar bars. How she supposed to get all those kids out if there’s a fire? You’d think she’d want better for them.”
Mak will never forget the time she asked Crys what they would do if there was a fire since they couldn’t go out the windows. They were both ten, and Crys looked Mak dead in the face and said, “Go out the door, stupid.”
That’s when Mak knew they’d be close forever. Everybody else always talked to Mak like she was some princess. Yeah, Daddy was a bigshot banker, and Mama had a JD from Emory and had never lost at trial, and yeah, the Taylors were one of the most well-respected families in North Atlanta, but the way people handled Mak like fine china—Mama included—got on her nerves. Crystal didn’t have time for that. She’d let Mak know that living in a fancy house in the expensive part of town didn’t make Mak better than anybody else.
Then they’d played Barbies (which they both secretly loved despite
being fifth graders), and Crystal put cornrows in Mak’s hair.
Of course Mama lost every ounce of her shit and made Mak take them out.
At any rate, it never ceased to amaze Mak just how close she and her cousin were despite how differently they were raised.
“You sure you don’t wanna just come to my house and sleep over, Crys?” Mak said as Crystal gathered her stuff to get out of Mak’s car. Mak liked when Crys slept over. She felt way less alone inside her unnecessarily large house. Mama talked about the bars on Aunt Trish’s windows, but the concrete wall surrounding Mak’s family’s acre of land—accessible only by the motorized wrought-iron gate at the end of the winding driveway—made her feel just as trapped as she assumed Crys felt inside Aunt Trish’s house.
“No, ma’am. You know I can’t deal with the way your bougie-ass mama looks at me. Like I drug a dead cat all over her imported Moroccan rugs or something. Besides, I have a movie date.” She flipped her braids.
“With who?”
“Nunya.”
“But I thought you said all the guys around here are trash?” Kamari’s dimpled face popped into Mak’s mind unbidden.
“Who said he was from around here?”
“Oh.”
“Hmph. Presumptuous ass.” And she opened the door.
“Crys, you ever been in the Starlight?” Mak asked.
“Huh?”
“That drive-in we always pass.”
“Umm . . .” Crystal was well known for her withering side-eye. “Of course I have, Mak. The hell kinda question is that?”
Mak shrugged. Took a deep breath.
Thought about seeing the Kamari guy and what Crystal had said about him.
“I’ve never been,” Mak went on. “Mama says it’s not a good place. . . . But I’ve always secretly wanted to go.”
“Girl, bye,” Crystal said, rummaging around in her bag for her keys. “No offense, but your mama talks a lotta shit about stuff she don’t have a damn clue about.”
And Crystal got out of the car.
Two days later, Mak’s friend Tess—the one who’d had the pregnancy scare—wrecked her car. Rear-ended one of her volleyball teammates whipping into the senior lot a bit too swiftly (as Tess was wont to do). Which meant that if Tess wanted to go somewhere, Mak was on the receiving end of a grossly pleading phone call or gif-filled series of text messages.
Like the night when she and her boyfriend Trent were in a fight and Tess had to go over to his house so they could “work through it like almost-adults.” Mak rolled her eyes at this one but was in Tess’s circular driveway within fifteen minutes—Tess’s fam lived in a minimansion right up the street from Mak’s (no gate to get to hers, though).
They drove across town—Trent’s house wasn’t too far from Aunt Trish’s—and as Tess got out of the car to head inside, Mak grabbed the book she’d brought, took her shoes off, kicked her seat back, and settled in for the long haul (aka one hour: the amount of time Mak told Tess she’d wait before going home whether Tess was ready or not).
Mak had read exactly two pages when the passenger door opened and someone got into her car.
“’Sup?”
Mak yelped and threw her arms out. Book went flying, and her hand smacked the horn. Which honked. Probably a good thing too—if nothing else, someone would’ve noticed. Maybe Tess would come out thinking she’d left something in the car and Mak was trying to alert her. She thought maybe she should honk it again, lean on it real good so anyone inside Trent’s house would know that she was in distress and maybe about to be robbed and killed (why hadn’t she locked the doors? Mama would die if she knew Mak had been so careless in this neighborhood).
She eased her body toward the steering wheel, trying not to make any sudden moves—
But then she saw the locs. And the shoulders. The big hands, fingers spread out over clearly solid thighs.
She froze, and her eyes lifted back to his face. His eyes, sparkling the same way they did the first time she saw him outside the Starlight.
His dimples.
Which were disappearing as the smile melted away and those eyes narrowed like he was confused. “Wait, do I know you?” he said.
Which . . . was he serious? “Oh, now you wanna ask if you know me? After you climb into my car without permission?”
“I technically dropped into your car, considering how low to the ground this shit is,” he said. “It’s real nice though. Supple-ass leather . . .” He wiggled his butt in the seat.
Which was disarming. Mak almost smiled.
Almost.
“For real though,” he went on. “Do I know you? You look hella familiar.”
Mak gulped and looked out the windshield. “I think you know my cousin. Crystal Rogers?”
“Oh, that’s right! You the girl Crystal was in the car with outside the drive-in that one night. Damn, Crys ain’t tell me she had a gorgeous cousin. Like . . . you’re really beautiful. That’s your real hair too, ain’t it? All long and shit.”
Mak couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
“I’m Kamari, by the way.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard.”
“Ah, here we go, Crystal out here slandering me again?” He shook his head.
That was when Mak noticed his T-shirt. It was orange and had a Pegasus beneath the words Camp Half Blood.
“You’re a Percy Jackson fan?” Mak said.
(Mak loved Percy Jackson. It was basically her whole childhood.)
“Why you sound so surprised?”
“Oh. Umm . . .” Yikes.
“Nah, I’m just playin’,” he said, clearly enjoying the look on Mak’s face as she fumbled around for words. “If Crystal told you what I think she did, your shock makes sense.” He shook his head again. Added a heavy sigh. “Anyway: yes. I am a Percy Jackson fan. Kane Chronicles, too. And Heroes of Olympus. Magnus Chase is also pretty lit so far. Really anything Uncle Rick writes—”
“Uncle Rick, huh?”
He grinned shyly. “Whatever, man.”
Mak looked him over again. He was certainly hot, no denying that. Smelled really good too. Definitely a little rough around the edges, but there was also something softer about him than she would’ve expected. And it wasn’t just the Percy Jackson thing.
Something in the way his index finger nervously tapped his thigh as he sat next to her. And how he kept glancing at her out of the corner of his eye and clearing his throat. She expected a guy like him to be more . . . sure of himself?
But what even did “a guy like him” mean? A guy from the hood?
“Why you looking at me like that?” he asked.
Mak hadn’t realized she was staring. She swallowed. “Umm, how’d you get into ‘Uncle Rick’s’ books?”
Kamari shrugged. “I started reading the Percys to my little brother ’cause they were more, like . . . educational, I guess, than the Harry Potter books. Liked the fact that he was basically learning Greek mythology and shit just by listening to me read.”
Mak felt guilty for being so shocked. Why would him being an amazing brother be a surprise? Her big brother used to read to her when she was little. . . . “How old is he?”
“Now? Nine.”
“Wow.”
There was a pause and then: “What’s your name, by the way?” he said. “We sitting here talking about books and shit, and I don’t even know who I’m talking to.” With a smirk. That exposed one of the dimples.
It made Mak . . . feel things. In her chest and stomach. A swoopy, fluttery sensation that moved from behind her ribs to her belly button and on down to . . . Yeah.
She had to look away. “My name is Makenzie.”
“Makenzie?” He sucked his teeth. “You would have some bougie-ass name.”
“Oh my God, shut up.”
“Oh mai gahd, like totally shut UP!” he mimicked.
“Excuse you, I do not sound like that.”
He laughed. It was a very nice laugh. “Well, it’s a pleasure t
o make your acquaintance, Makenzie.”
“Stop saying it like that! And besides, my friends call me Mak.”
“Oh, so you saying we friends now?”
At that moment, Trent’s front door flew open and Tess came storming out of it.
“Welp, guess Operation Reconciliation was a bust,” Mak said to Kamari. “You should probably hop out so she doesn’t detonate on you for being in her seat.”
“Oh damn,” he said, scrambling to exit.
“Mar, tell your friend he’s an asshole!” Tess shoved past Kamari and flounced into the passenger seat.
“Uhh, yeah, I’ll do that. It was nice to meet you, Mak—”
But Mak would never know if he said her whole name then, because Tess slammed the door.
Right now though? At this drive-in she promised she’d never enter, in back seat of this car her parents bought her? Kamari is definitely saying Mak’s whole name.
Just all broken down.
“Ma . . .” Kiss. “Ken . . .” Kiss. “Zie . . .” Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss.
Chin, jaw, earlobe, neck—
The sound of the movie cuts out in Mak’s car as her phone rings over Bluetooth.
She can see “Crys” pop up on the LED screen in her car’s center console.
“You need to get that?” Kiss. (Collarbone this time.)
Mak sits up straight, pushing Kamari away a little more forcefully than she intends to.
“Damn, it’s like that?” he says. “Who even is—” He looks at the screen. “Oh.”
And now Mak doesn’t know what to do. She’s never brought up the stuff Crys told her about Kamari—frankly because she does her best to just push it out of her mind. (Isn’t that what you do when somebody you like maybe has some kinda problematic shit in their past?)
The phone continues to blare—when the hell is it gonna stop?—and Mak glances at Kamari out of the corner of her eye. Crys would lose her entire mind if she knew Mak was with him right now. And truth be told: it’s Kamari’s safety Mak’s concerned about. Mak will never forget seeing Crys take a baseball bat to the driver’s-side window of a grown man’s car after the man tried to touch Mak’s butt at a barbecue in Crys’s neighborhood.
