By Any Means Necessary

by Candice Montgomery

  He’s not getting it. He’s not listening to me.

  My chest feels white-hot, and there’s this pressure in my throat that just … I have to get it out. “Everything,” I say. “Everything I have ever known, ever been—ever will be—it’s all back there.”

  He’s in front of me so fast, grabbing a fistful of my shirt in one hand and then, just as abruptly, he lets go. “Listen to me when I say this. Are you listening to me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Torrey.”

  “Yes! I’m listening.”

  “Good. Hear me. You are more than that place, than those people, than this place and these people, too. You are the universe if ever I could see it in a single person. Do not let this thing become all of you. Some is okay. All is a waste of a very good thing. You’re right to be here, bettering yourself. Giving yourself something good. You’re right to do that. So, go. Go home for a couple days. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Visit and get whatever it is you need. But then, after that, you come back. You come back here and plant your roots in this ground as deep as they’ll go. Ficar comigo.”

  I surprise myself when I make my next move, pressing up as close as I can to him and my lips meet his again in a tangle, an inhale, a desperate exhale when it doesn’t feel like enough. And I feel the joy of his smile on mine.

  Gabriel pulls away first, pushing me back and going to stand in the farthest corner of the room. All I can do is look at him. He has to know what that kiss was. It was a warning. It was a message: This thing will consume us both, and I’m already shackled to something that’s always been bigger than me. I don’t know how to be any other way.

  He does a series of ballet turns toward me, just enough to get him across the tiny room. He makes it seem bigger than it actually is. Although I suspect that’s just Gabe. All movement and perfectly crafted lines in a difficult space.

  “Pretty cool trick,” I say, sitting down on my bed.

  “It’s not a trick. They’re called pirouettes. Torrey, do you want to date?”

  I look up at him, standing just above me. “I’m not following. How did we get here from making out to pirouettes to this line of questioning?”

  “I mean, I’m just asking. Like, I just want to know. Do you want to date? Not even just me—although, I hope it’s mostly me—but anyone. Do you want to date at all?”

  I hesitate. I do. Obviously, I do. But I don’t know how that can work if I’m trying to give everything I have to something else. Gabriel is all risk and wild decisions. But me? I am hesitation. I am Gabriel’s antonym. The Taurus to his Pisces.

  I hear Lisa’s voice in my head. You’re going to kill yourself one day, trying to give away your entire self to the wrong thing.

  “Yeah,” I say. And I … don’t think I really realize it’s just come out of my mouth. Definitely did not authorize that. But it’s true. I want to date him. Slow burn. I want him.

  “Yeah?” he says, crouched just in front of me now, hands on the ripped knees of my old-ass black jeans.

  “Yeah. I want to date.”

  “Uhh … me? You maybe wanna date me?”

  “I kind of definitely wanna date you.”

  That’s all the indication he needs to rush me, pick me up. Throw me over his shoulder and shout about how he’s going to lock me up and make me a “kept woman.”

  There are swears. There are shouts. There is laughter—mine, but also his. There are “Torrey Aloysius, I am going to kick your entire ass!” threats when I manage to flip the script and pin him down on my bed.

  And there is a breathless moment in time where he and I don’t have to try.

  There’s nothing else in the world like it.

  16.

  Do you ever wake up and feel like your dream is still going?

  I do.

  Right now. Right now, I feel like I’m still dreaming. It’s because I can still feel Gabriel’s lips on mine. Can still feel the bite marks he’s left on my skin. The feeling of yes that he’s left in my room.

  In case you thought shit was about to get romantic, I’m here to let you know—all that stuff I feel … Desh can, too. And he won’t shut up about it.

  “So how was the seeeeeeex?” he says from his flopped position on my bed. He didn’t have to whisper the last two words, he just can’t do anything without level-ten dramatics.

  “Shut up,” I say. Oh, sick burn, Torrey.

  “Fine! You don’t have to tell me about the sex, just talk to me about how this all went down. One moment you’re all,” and here—the way he takes up this super-weird impersonation voice, not okay—“oh, my bees! Whatever shall I do? Le sigh.”

  “Desharu, I swear to God and also Jesus.”

  “Then tell me what happened, bro. I would tell you!”

  “I wouldn’t ask!”

  “I’d tell you anyway, c’mon, man.”

  And I actually do decide to tell him. Because I really do want to.

  I exhale. “And then he put his shirt back on and left like literally a minute before you walked in.”

  He’s on his back, no longer flopped now. “So, no sex then?”

  “No. Jackass.”

  “Can’t I be excited for your personal success?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I am, and you can’t stop me.”

  I hate him sometimes. But I also kind of don’t know what my life here would be like without his flop-ass.

  We’re both quiet a moment, and I can’t even guess at Desharu’s reasoning. He doesn’t exactly have a “resting state.” This is probably new territory for him.

  I decide to first flip the silence on its head. “I need to go home, Desh.”

  He sits up fast. “What? Why? You can’t.”

  I stare at him.

  He stares back. “Can you?”

  “No,” I say. “Not really. But I think I’m going to try to go for, like, maybe a weekend.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s not obvious?”

  “If you say ‘bees,’ Torrey, I’ll have to fight you.”

  I laugh, get up, and grab a gym bag out of my closet. It’s hideous. Royal blue, given to us on the first day of orientation. Inside it, a treasure trove containing two number two pencils, a campus map, a very small plastic water bottle, and a magnet that says I DO SFSU. Which—issa no from me, dawg.

  There’s a smile on my face, which means I shouldn’t turn around to look at Desh when I say, “Okay, then I won’t say it.” A second later, I feel his pillow hit the back of my head, hear him mutter, “Dumbass.”

  My phone chimes and Desh is saved by the bell.

  “What’s up, Emery, everything okay?” I say, tossing some hopefully clean shirts in a bag.

  “Yeah, fine fine. Did you see that flyer for gamers? There was a whole bunch of them over by the campus theatre. I need a partner-in-crime to go with me to check out the group.”

  “CAKE wasn’t down? Seems like a thing you guys all might enjoy.” STEM girls and all. Like, I’m sure gaming counts in that acronym somewhere, doesn’t it?

  “Torr, don’t be ridiculous. You’re totally my first choice here.”

  Oh, I’m sure. “Your lies only hurt me because they are so poorly crafted.”

  “Okay fine, I asked Kennedy but she’s rushing a sorority and can’t be bothered. But you were definitely my second choice.”

  “Be honest.”

  “Goddamnit, Torrey, okay! You were my last of like eight or nine possible choices but only because I know you don’t really give a shit about gaming. At least I asked you before I asked Desh!”

  She has a point. “When’s it at?”

  “Tonight. I think they normally do a weekly thing but because this is the first meeting, they do a special thing for incoming freshmen. Are you mad, though?”

  “Em, I couldn’t be mad at you if I tried.”

  She exhales. “Good. It’d suck if my ninth pick was out, too.”

  “You’re such an asshole.”

&nb
sp; “I know. So you want to meet me?”

  “Yes. But also, no. I can’t.”

  “Ugh, Torrey, you put me through all that only to decline! What thing in your life is more important than me? Tell me so I can kill it.”

  Emery was definitely one of those weird-ass theatre kids in high school. “I’m about to catch a bus down to LA for a few days.”

  She is so quiet over the line that I have to take the phone away from my face twice to be sure the call hasn’t dropped. It hasn’t. And after a few more silent moments, I can kind of feel her seething.

  “Torrey, this has to stop. It has to. You can’t keep doing this.”

  I throw a crewneck into my backpack and zip it shut. “You don’t understand.”

  “Oh, I do. I totally do. But you need to understand that you are here in body and not at all in mind or spirit. You hate it here but only because that stupid apiary won’t let you enjoy it. All you do is talk about how this is temporary and the bees are taking precedence.”

  Again, not wrong. But that doesn’t mean any of this is easy to hear. “I don’t know what you want from me, Em. I’m just doing what I have to.”

  “Let me ask you this: at what point does it stop being a thing that you have to consider a priority? At what point do you get to put yourself first? Who gets to decide when your role in it is over?”

  I don’t know how to answer any of that. Because I don’t ever think about it. I can’t, because if I do, it’ll tear me in two.

  “I have to get going,” I say.

  She growls—a literal growl—and curses a ripe thing. “Okay, shit. Fine, wait. We’ll take my car.”

  “Emery—”

  “Nope. I’m coming with you. Meet you downstairs in twenty.”

  And she ends the call.

  Which reminds me—I slide into iMessage and shoot Lisa a text. She needs to know I’m coming. She needs to know the plan.

  “If the look on your face is any indication, I think I might be in love with Emery now,” Desh says, camera in hand. He holds it up close to his face, snaps a quick photo of my face, and then brings it back down to glance at the result. He smiles.

  I literally hate him.

  “I can’t believe I agreed to come with you to this shit city, with its satanic traffic and all its poorly crafted freeways and unreasonably large number of people wearing socks with sandals.”

  “You didn’t ‘agree to come,’ because I didn’t invite you. You invited yourself. You have only yourself to blame.”

  “Semantics,” she says. “But, look. We’re here to get signatures, right?”

  I nod. “Yeah, basically. Just here to inform people what’s going on and get them to sign the apiary’s petition.”

  “’Kay, so, that being the case—you’ve obviously made the right decision having me here. People don’t say no to me.”

  Yeah, because she won’t let them.

  Emery is probably the best option to play Robin to my Batman. And, I mean, I guess in a perfect world, it’s probably Gabriel that would’ve come with me. But that was nowhere near an option. Here’s why—bear with me:

  1. I didn’t even want Emery here to witness the way I become someone entirely different when I’m here. Home. I wouldn’t want Gabriel knowing that I lose pieces of myself. Make myself smaller so that the people here will feel more comfortable around me.

  2. It would only take Theo, like, eight seconds to pop in and make some gross, homophobic comment.

  3. Theo would not be the only person to make a comment like that.

  4. Gabriel’s mine right now. Inside my head, he’s mine and only mine and it feels really solid. Untainted. I like that for us. I’m not trying to hide him or whatever this thing with us is, but it gives me space to contemplate and, eventually (I hope), understand what’s been happening and what this means for us.

  The lot’s relatively empty, although the series of stores in this bunch of tiny markets are jammed together like Lisa’s toes in her favorite pair of peep-toes.

  You won’t tell her I used her (and her toes) as a metaphor, will you?

  The thing that only neighborhood locals know is that there is always a backlot for parking. It probably hasn’t been repaved in, like, half a century at least.

  Emily pulls into a spot in the corner, cursing as her left tires dip into a rough hole while her right tires skip up and over a sharp speed bump.

  “I hate this city.”

  “You hate this parking lot, not the city,” I say.

  She says nothing.

  We step out, clipboard in hand, just waiting for signatures. The air is thick and warm but not overwhelming. We’re close enough here in LA city proper that we get a little of reprieve off the water from Santa Monica and Zuma.

  None of the back entrances to the stores are marked. I think maybe at one point in time, they were. But now they’re just so poorly maintained that you either gotta walk around the front to figure out which is which, or you walk into multiple stores before you finally find the right one. No store owner in this Los Angeles strip mall wants you running in and out their back door if you’re as young as we are/not going to buy anything. Not even by accident.

  We push into the rickety steel screen door and I turn back to Emery, saying, “Don’t slam it but make sure it’s all the way shut.”

  She looks at me like I’m crazy but does it anyway. Emery’s from Monterey, which is its own kind of beach town, but not in the same way as any Los Angeles beach town.

  Daddy Mojo’s used to be a barbershop.

  It still is—don’t mistake what I’m saying—but it’s also a “café” that serves both soul food and sushi. Sounds more sus than it actually is. Daddy Mojo’s has the best gumbo I’ve ever had, and I’m not super well versed in sushi, but I’ll fuck up some spicy tuna.

  It turned into something altogether queer and unheard of when, as neighboring businesses back in the seventies, the then-Ms. Xu, at the age of twenty-two, having just taken over running her family’s restaurant, fell for the barber’s son next door, Maurice Jones II.

  So basically just boy meets girl, girl likes boy, boy and girl run their families’ businesses and eventually marry before merging them into one soul-food-sushi-bar where you can get a fade that’d save even the ugliest dude from rejection, a mean-ass plate of greens, and a sake bomb (as long as it’s after 5:00 p.m. and not on a Sunday because Mrs. Xu is a God-fearing woman and that’s the Lord’s day—her words, not mine).

  Mrs. Xu lights up when she sees me and all but runs up to me in her same old tattered apron. “Mojo! Toto’s here!” she yells in thickly accented English. Woman speaks four languages but has never managed to call me anything other than the name of the dog from The Wizard of Oz.

  Mr. Jones grunts something loud enough that we can hear him from the back.

  “Toto?” Emery says with a smile. I’m about to throw her in a headlock, too, right along with Desh.

  “Shut up,” I say to her. “Hi, Mrs. Xu.”

  “You need to be in school!” she says as she accepts a hug from me. My frame dwarfs hers. “You need a haircut, too. You’ll go see Mo, his chair is always free for you. Who is this? Who is she?”

  This woman is the equivalent of five red pandas and approximately thirty-eight questions in a trench coat.

  “This is Emery, Mrs. Xu.”

  “You go to school together?”

  I nod. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I thought you were gay.”

  Emery dies of laughter, but Mrs. Xu nods, sagely, saying, “Oh. I see. She doesn’t know you like the boys.”

  Aaaaaand who here knows the Heimlich maneuver? Emery is going to need some assistance, as she is choking on some very serious hysterics.

  “We’re only friends,” Em says, sobering. “I live down the hall from Torrey. I also am well aware that he likes the boys. It is really, very nice to meet you.”

  “Sit down, I’ll bring you a plate. Too skinny and nobody likes that, sit down.”
<
br />   Once she’s in the kitchen, the sound of pots and pans and plates clanging (it’s a wonder there are any dishes left in the kitchen that are intact enough to eat off of), Emery asks, “Was she talking to me or you about being too skinny?”

  It’s anyone’s guess.

  “C’mon. If we don’t do as she says, there will be hell to pay.”

  Following in my footsteps toward the well-loved cracked booth in front, Emery whispers, “She’s like three feet tall, though.”

  I laugh. “Ever had crabcake cornbread?”

  And it’s not that much later that we’ve had exactly that delivered to the table and have wolfed it down, when Emery groans and drinks the last of her green tea. “You’ll have to roll me out of here.”

  “You’d be making Mrs. Xu a very happy woman. Come on, let’s go see Mr. Jones.”

  “He’s not going to try to feed us, too, is he?” she says, just as we pass the threshold of the restaurant’s side door, out into the barbershop’s back entrance.

  As soon as we step inside, the entire shop choruses, “Ayyyyy!” Hands all up in the air.

  It’s the standard welcome when you’ve been away at school, locked up, or you’ve been having some kind of grow-my-shit-out crisis.

  My fade is pretty fresh, but Mr. Jones gestures at his chair for me to sit and then walks away briefly to grab a seat for Emery to sit in, placing it right next to his station. The seat of honor for sure.

  “Thank you,” she says.

  “Mm-hmm,” he serves back. Mr. Jones is a man of few syllables and even fewer words. Translation for that one: Pleasure is all mine, Missy.

  All Black girls under the age of thirty-five are “Missy” to Mr. Jones. Lisa’s been pissed about it for a very long time now.

  My thumbs drum the back of the clipboard as I point around the shop and spout off names of the men seated. Some waiting for cuts, some are just other barbers, the dudes who literally just sit here all day to hang out and clown one another, then finally, formally, Mr. Jones, the owner/the only man Mrs. Xu is nice to for longer than a few minutes at a time.

  Robert, the barbershop assistant manager, calls to us from his station, “You get kicked out already, Torr? That ain’t take long.”