By Any Means Necessary

by Candice Montgomery

  The mixer is lame as hell. You and I both knew that was gonna be the case, didn’t we?

  It’s a university-run event, so it’s pretty much just cheap balloons, cheap foldout chairs, and cheap cheese trays, which really says everything in and of itself.

  The whole setup is mostly in Prominski Hall’s rec room, which sits at the very bottom floor. I lose Desh within the first five minutes, so I find myself two floors up from that, once again, on my own floor, Floor B. Our entire hallway is littered with people loitering in doorways, cups of something interesting and/or something that tastes like the definition of “toxic” in hand. Someone’s brought out a Bluetooth speaker and is blasting some older Chano tracks all through halls and up against the walls.

  I sit right in the threshold of my room and sip on the watery stuff that’s in my red Solo cup. Whatever Desh poured and then shoved into my hands … yeah, that got disposed of in the nearest drinking fountain. I gave it one sniff, and it made my gums itch.

  This threshold is going to be a thing for me. My spot. If I stay here, anyway.

  What the hell am I saying? I can’t stay. I shouldn’t be making future plans in my head like that. I shouldn’t be claiming a space, establishing intent, giving it meaning, ready to carve my initials into this proverbial tree. I should be arranging my trip home and figuring out how to square away the other half of the tuition I owe. I should be trying to figure out how to disenroll from my classes. I should be figuring out if “BEES!” is a feasible excuse for a temporary leave of absence. I should—

  “Hey, are you Torrey McKenzie?”

  I look up from the blue liquid mixture that’s in my cup and smile. The first real, genuine one since I got here. I am entirely surprised at how easily it comes, how smoothly my mood shifts.

  “Lookit all this CAKE!” I say, standing. The four girls in front of me, introduced to Desh and me by way of the university’s student-housing portal, share a suite in the same hall as us. The six of us Skyped a few times, chatted and exchanged numbers eventually. It was a nice way to get comfortable. Ish. To mute the anxiety that comes with new people, new digs, new city, new responsibilities, new credit card, new you-get-the-point.

  Still, it’s there. The jitters. The first-meeting jitters. Are my eyes open too wide? I don’t wanna be smiling all hard with that wild serial-killer look going on.

  I guess … maybe I’m in the clear, though, because all at once, the four of them—CAKE: Clarke, Auburn, Kennedy, and Emery—wrap me up in what I like to call the “oh, my God!” hug. You know, the one girls do when they’re trying to convey their excitement to you in as few words as possible. Mostly I think it’s because women know their time is valuable and if they’re gonna spend it anywhere, it’s not going to be with the likes of me or any other cis college boy.

  Especially not these girls. A quad of Black STEM girls? Nope.

  The thing is, Black women already fight tooth and nail for what they’ve got. Add in the fact their interests lie in male-dominated fields—STEM—and then there’s an additional layer of battling they have to go through.

  Totally makes sense that the four of them are no nonsense on every level.

  The five of us can’t quite fit in the doorway, so as they squeeze through, they move us farther into my room, away from the hum of the other freshmen talking and laughing about their SAT scores just outside the open door.

  The girls all talk at me in a collision, grabbing up on my biceps, telling me I shouldn’t have shaved my beard off, pretty much reading me the riot act in the same way they do online.

  The way they’re able to just be so comfortable in their skin reminds me of home. Of the Black girls who walk down to the liquor store off 49th, casually friendly with perfect strangers.

  I’m not entirely sure what STEM entails, but I know the basics. I get it’s some smart-people shit that takes place in spaces usually reserved for the whites.

  (“The whites.” We’re going to mention them a lot. Just know I’m not talking about an irritating, neighboring family. “The Whites.”)

  But that doesn’t stop me from mistaking STEM for exactly what it isn’t every chance I get, just to annoy these four.

  “Solve any CSI mysteries on campus yet?” I say, leaning on the bed next to Emery, who is all legs, stretched long and pushed up onto the squat wooden table in the middle of this pseudo group circle.

  Auburn bangs her head into the chair back she’s seated on. “Torrey,” she says with an eye roll.

  I mimic her. “Auburn.”

  Auburn is the epitome of hood. Girl was born and raised in the very (culturally) rich and (no pun intended) riotous beehive of Watts. We were practically neighbors all our lives and didn’t even know it. She’s all started from the bottom, now we here. Don’t tell her I used a Drake lyric to talk about her.

  “CSI, STEM—not the same thing, honey.” That’s Clarke. She’s the mama bear of the group. There’s one in every girl group, they say.

  One in every gay group, too. I should know. It was me.

  Auburn snorts, says something in Spanish way too fast for my basic ass to catch. “And he knows this.”

  “Okay, but hear me out—What if it is the same?” Kennedy says.

  I high-five her because that’s my girl. Can always count on her to have my back and irritate the others in her posse with me.

  “Exactly,” I say.

  Clarke rolls her eyes, does this complicated updo thing with her hair. “Glad to see you’re just as annoying in person as you are online, Torr.”

  I laugh as Emery pulls her phone out and watch as her thumb scrolls through some social media app she’s only barely paying attention to. “So why aren’t you out there?” she says in my direction. “Not interested in this particular socialization tactic?”

  “We all know I’m Mr. Sociable, but even this is pushing it for me.”

  “You always seemed pretty extroverted online.” Kennedy shrugs. “Some of the stuff going on in the hallways is pretty cool.” This girl. Ever the optimist.

  Emery adds, helpfully, “Yeah, there’s a girl out there dislocating her shoulder and then popping it back into place.”

  That gets our collective attention, and for a second we all look up in disgust from our half-hearted social media scrolling.

  “How’s it going with that girl, Clarke? That horse girl.”

  “Oh, my God, Torrey, don’t call her a horse girl. That’s so mean.”

  Clarke’s all fluff, too. She just won’t ever admit it. “Fine, what’s her name again?”

  “Rithika. Or River.”

  I hop over from Twitter to Instagram for the third time in as many minutes. “Her name is River?”

  “Shut up,” Clarke says. “Your name is Torrey; you’re not allowed to talk.”

  Touché.

  There are a couple of new likes on my most recent post, a sneaky Boomerang I snapped of the four of them sitting around my room, faces in phones.

  @returnoftheMcKenzie:

  One of my three notifications is a new follower.

  @leirbagavlis started following you four minutes ago

  I have no clue who this is. CAKE continues to chat at and around me, and I’m still listening and responding, but there’s like, maybe 12 percent of my attention now being used to figure out who this person is.

  Their avi is so small, it’s indecipherable. The bolded display name at the top of the private profile is just “gls.” But the ratio of followers to following is a reasonable number, so I doubt it’s a spam follow.

  There is literally no reason for me to be as invested in—and suspicious of—this random follow as I am, save for the fact that maybe it’s a few more moments where I can be somewhere else other than back home, thinking about how much fixing I’ll have to do this time.

  “Torrey, are you listening?” Auburn says.

  And it startles me so much that I flub and my thumb hits that stupid fucking FOLLOW BACK button even though I’m still only, like, mid-sleu
th, but the universe has other plans, apparently.

  I hit home twice. Swipe the app up and closed.

  “Shut up, yeah, I’m listening.”

  Kennedy and Clarke laugh as Auburn tries to reach over them to hit me.

  I’m about to ask if they wanna go get food when my phone buzzes and then chimes with a notification that means Instagram. My fingers tap into that app so fast, I’m shocked there isn’t permanent damage done to the device.

  This time, it’s a private DM.

  From, yep, you guessed it: @leirbagavlis.

  The message reads, holy shit I found you.

  4.

  I hate that I have read receipts running on Insta.

  It’s the dumbest thing ever. Why do people need to know I’ve seen their messages? And more importantly, why do they get so peeved if you read the message and then don’t respond immediately? I am a person whose time is limited and (kind of) valuable (probably).

  Don’t rush me.

  But in this instance, what’s done is done.

  I’ve read the DM and this person knows I’ve read the DM, and there is literally no reason to worry about it until I know who this person is anyway. This is what I tell myself.

  Don’t look at me like that, this is a judgment-free zone.

  I found you.

  Kennedy is asking me if she can borrow the book of poetry that’s sticking out of my backpack, some stuff by Mahogany L. Browne. I mumble something to her that I’m pretty sure is a yes, go ahead, but who can know. I’m so busy clicking into this mystery person’s profile that I can only really offer a small percentage of my focus outside the realm of my phone and this app now.

  Once I’m there, my stomach falls and then jackrabbits up into my throat.

  After which, fickle as it is, it begins to dance.

  He doesn’t have a ton of photos posted. A scant sixty, which isn’t really enough for any stranger to form a concrete opinion on. My eyes zero in on the second-to-most-recent image.

  And I mean, if you’re going to be sparing with Insta post quantity, you had better be ready to plate up some supreme quality.

  Somebody give me a green check mark emoji on that one, because wow.

  In the photo, he’s seated, legs pretzeled, with six very small kittens around and on his lap.

  Like, if there were Instagram-post Olympics, he’d take the gold for this one. It’s like the world’s purest thirst trap.

  People love baby animals. People love masc dudes with baby animals. Unnf, yeah, look at all that muscley forearm and all that feral house cat fur, yes, baby.

  Ridiculous.

  It’s not the clearest image of his face. But it’s enough to spark recognition. The way his chin is tucked down, a secret whispered, lips to heart; eyes closed, a prayer on its own; inky lashes kissing the terra-cotta skin of his cheeks; a smile stretched entirely too far across his face. But his hair. His hair is the giveaway. That particular photo shows it up in this messy ball on the very peak of his head, the kind that I’ll never be able to make sense of. It’s larger than life. He’d always say that. He’d say that whenever I asked why he kept it braided instead of letting it down “to do whatever.”

  My mom won’t let me cut it. It’s larger than life.

  To use an old phrase: a blast from my super-fricking embarrassing junior high past.

  I laugh as I think about the surreality of it, and Kennedy, being the only one tuned in enough to hear me laughing at my phone like an idiot, asks, “What?”

  With a glance up at her, I smile, wink, shake my head. It’s the tangible creation of all the things I’m feeling inside.

  I spent a large portion of seventh grade crushing on London Silva. I spent all of eighth grade becoming friends with London Silva.

  That same year, miles and miles of maybe-more-than-but-not-quite friendship under our belts, London Silva was the first boy ever to kiss me.

  @leirbagavlis is Gabriel Silva. “gls” is Gabriel London Silva.

  Gabriel L. Silva is London Silva.

  The lifting, weightless thing I felt then, at the time of the kiss I knew was coming but didn’t know how to want—I recall that now. I don’t even know where to start with untangling this thing. The achy, blue knot of emotions sitting just below my collarbones. I’d call it off if I could. Strangely, it’s the same colorful smudge of questioning I got when I realized that the very next night, he and his family had moved away without warning.

  And London and I, we never talked again.

  “Torr!” Auburn yells, and I almost drop my phone, hoping like hell I haven’t accidentally favorited something from sixteen weeks ago.

  I grab my phone up quick and confirm that I’m safe.

  “We’re trying to figure out food.” Emery’s eyes narrow at me. “What are you doing?”

  “Nunya.”

  “Very mature, Torrey. Excellent and totally not suspicious at all.”

  Clarke yells, loud enough for the entire hall to hear—yes, even over the music and voices outside the room—“Oh, my God, are you cruising for porn?”

  “Shut up, Smallville. I got your dad in my contacts if I need something qui—”

  I absolutely, 100 percent deserve the fist she sends flying at my biceps. She laughs it off and then continues the conversation about where we could get some baller Mexican food on short notice, this time of night.

  This is the college town area of the Bay, there’s gotta be gentrified Mexican food to be found here somewhere.

  Back inside the relative safety of my DMs—relative being the operative word—I type a million things and then backspace them, then immediately panic that he’s probably watching the TYPING … line appear and then disappear, appear and then disappear.

  My thumbs fly, uncoordinated, across the screen’s keys, and I hit send before I can think better (or worse) of it.

  @returnoftheMcKenzie: Holy shit indeed. London, right? London Silva.

  @leirbagavlis: just Gabriel now, haha. or Gabe. no one but my mom calls me London lol

  Kennedy and Auburn stand and stretch. “We’re gonna pee and then we’ll go, yeah?” Auburn says. Clarke, Emery, and I, all prisoners of social media, grunt and/or nod in reply.

  @returnoftheMcKenzie: You never did like that name

  He really didn’t. He let me call him that, but not because I was anyone special. It was because I was, like, maybe one of four people at school who wasn’t using it to shove him around or calling him Brit Boy or, worse, Brit Girl. Because apparently “London” is GIRLS ONLY in the names department. Who knew.

  @leirbagavlis: it grew on me

  I glance at his tiny photo icon again. Lots of things grew on—

  Another transparent TYPING … line from him floats up on the screen.

  @leirbagavlis: how’ve you been? you look good in your photos, finally got some height huh? haha

  I’ve been short all my life. That is, up until about last summer when I finally pushed over five-foot-ten and settled somewhere around five-eleven. I’d been just barely kissing five-six until maybe a year before. Hopefully there are a few more inches to go.

  @returnoftheMcKenzie: Lol, thanks, I think. And yeah. Height finally found me.

  Not unlike you, I think to myself.

  @returnoftheMcKenzie: Looks like I’m not the only one who’s changed

  The words are coming easier now. It’d always been pretty easy to talk to London—Gabe. Gabriel.

  @returnoftheMcKenzie: You’re working with your hair now, looks like

  I tap over and briefly scroll through his section of photos that other people have tagged him in. His hair is a bleeding blend of orange and gold watercolor. In most of these photos, it’s a coil of curls running down past his shoulders, slung all the way over on one side.

  He looks amazing. I hold my breath for four seconds and then hop back over to our messages.

  @leirbagavlis: Yeah. I am. Had to. My mom still won’t let me cut it.

  This is my shocked face. I run
a hand over my fade. I been wearing it like this for a few years now. Letting the top do whatever, managing it with a brush, a good barber, a skin taper, and a curl sponge.

  @returnoftheMcKenzie: lol jesus. so where are you at now?

  I hesitate with this next thing. But how can I not ask?

  @returnoftheMcKenzie: your family left all quick. nobody even knew y’all was leaving.

  TYPING …

  @leirbagavlis: Yeah, I didn’t know either. My dad got some immediate relocation thing from his job. Better healthcare and that.

  @returnoftheMcKenzie: to where?

  @leirbagavlis: Cincy.

  @returnoftheMcKenzie: OHIO?

  @leirbagavlis: You know any other places going short by cincy???

  @returnoftheMcKenzie: lmao ok asshole, fine, don’t get cute

  @returnoftheMcKenzie: so ohio, jesus. what do people even DO in ohio?

  @leirbagavlis: Meth

  I laugh hysterically, and Emery glances up at me, all, your weird is fucking with my ability to ignore you and while we’re here is there something you’d like to tell me?

  “What the hell is that funny to you? I’m trying to figure out how we’re gonna talk them out of making me eat thirteen-dollar burritos for the next four years, and you’re laughing at cat videos on the Internet.”

  My phone buzzes in my hand.

  @leirbagavlis: no seriously tho, I’m tripping out right now. I looked for you online and shit but couldn’t find you. I’m back in Cali now tho.

  No one who actually lives in California calls it “Cali.” No one. And if you are someone who does, turn your location on.

  I just wanna talk.

  @returnoftheMcKenzie: I just started using FB and Insta like, last year-ish

  It hits me. Back in California. He’s back. Here. Ish. Was that a lead? Is he throwing me a rope? If so, I probably just missed my chance to catch it.

  @leirbagavlis: seriously? ALL late.

  @returnoftheMcKenzie: Shut up. I’m here.

  @leirbagavlis: yeah. you are.

  5.

  Clarke rides on my back for the entire walk to the taco place, so I don’t really have a chance to message Gabriel back until we get there, order, and are all tucking into our wet burritos, tacos, flautas, and enchiladas de mole.