Lisa watches from a distance as we call, walking slowly down the hallway, popping in to make sure we’re “just doing okay.” She wants to help. It’s who Lisa is. But I can tell that she’s also a little torn between helping and washing her hands of all things bees, as not to encourage me.
Little does she know, I don’t need any encouraging.
Emery scoops up her towel and toothbrush, catching Lisa loitering in the hallway under the guise of folding sheets in the linen closet.
“Shower,” Em says and I nod.
It’s Lisa’s cue to come sit with me.
She puts a hand on my arm. “I’m so happy you’re here. I hate that you are. That you have to be. The circumstances are awful. But I’m a little bit lost without you, T.” She smiles sadly.
I don’t know what to say, and I think Aunt Lisa sees that, so she opts for a subject change. Which. I mean. Thank God.
“Oh, my God,” Lisa says, “Did I tell you about the guy that came by here a few days ago?”
“Guy?” The back of my neck itches. “What guy?”
“Some skeeeeezy white-collar jockstrap wannabe type. The oily skeezy noodledick bro-dude type. He comes by, tries to finesse my name and some info about the farm and Miles and you and Theo.”
Shit.
“Says he wants to buy the farm if I make it easy on him. Had all these lush promises in his mouth, talking butter.”
(Translation for the whites: Talking Butter, gerund phrase; to smooth talk your conversation partner, often includes promises of rewards, gifts, or grandeur. Or weed.)
She goes on: “Says some shit about setting up Miles’s widow real nice in the Hollywood Hills, getting me out of here.”
I don’t like this. “What’d he look like? White, money, greasy forehead, oil-spill black hair?”
“Mm. You know him?”
“Of him,” I correct.
“Torrey, did this man approach you, too? At school?”
I nod. “Must’ve been right after you.”
Nope. Not liking this at all.
“What’d he promise you? He say the same things to you?” There’s so much urgency in her voice now, I can’t handle it.
“More or less.”
Her nose goes a little pink, and it looks like she’s about to cry. “That is not okay. It’s unsafe. And should be illegal. Did you tell him anything?”
“I didn’t say anything.” Nothing he wanted to hear, anyway.
I pause as an incoming call buzzes against my leg. It’s Gabriel trying to FaceTime. I’m not great with random phone calls, let alone spontaneous FaceTime calls. But I should talk to him. If only so that there’s some clarity and clean air somewhere in my life.
Lisa starts to walk out of the room, smiling. “It’s okay. Go. Take that. I’ll be downstairs.”
Later I will stop and feel bad about how quickly I swapped out Aunt Lisa’s company for Gabriel’s. Lisa, to whom I owe many, many gifts and favors.
To whom I will soon be—yes—talking butter.
I hold my breath to re-center myself. I’m holding my breath? Jesus. Well, there you have it—totally not just a thing girls do.
“Hi,” I say.
Gabriel’s face is a pixelated mess, but that’s mostly because my reception always skips in and out when I’m upstairs, and Theo doesn’t believe in the Internet.
“Hey, there,” he says. And the way his eyeteeth always peek through that right-side-of-the-mouth smile he gets going on threatens to drop me. “How’s home?”
I shrug and then remember that Gabriel knows me. Gabriel is my London, and London knew home wasn’t home for me.
I tell him as much. “Yeah, it’s not … that. Anymore.”
“Mm. I get that. But the signatures, though? And your bees? That going okay?” Gabriel reclines on his bed so that he’s all the way slumped down, turning over onto his side to prop his phone up right in front of him. It’s like we’re face-to-face and my racing thoughts that’ve tried to ride the top of my shoulders all day begin to slow.
I mimic his position. “Bees are good,” I say. I smile at him because it feels good to, because even through the exhaustion, this part feels almost as good as a kiss from him would. “And, I guess, the signatures are adding up, but who knows if a court or judge or even a lawyer will find them valuable enough. How’s academia without me?”
“Please, academia left the moment you did. Got a manicure and a new sew-in and went club hopping.”
I have to sit up because otherwise I might swallow my tongue and my esophagus along with all the laughing that’s happening.
“Fair.”
“Academia doesn’t miss you, but I kinda do.”
“Oh, kinda. I see.”
“Do not flatter yourself, Torrey Aloysius. Yes, kinda.”
I’m on a down pillow that I’m sure is having a lovely time of knife play with the back of my head. I pull it from behind me, chuck it at the floor.
At.
Not “to” or “on.” At. Because fuck down pillows and comforters, amirite?
“You’re the second person today who’s used my first and middle names together. What have I done to warrant this?”
“I don’t know but you deserve.”
My eyes trace the fullness of his lips and the sensory tantrum of kissing him, pressing my every-damn-thing into his all-of-that comes coasting up on me like the shock of a defibrillator.
A lot of my life has been spent proving to myself that I am not prey. With Gabriel, every conversation begins with a game of who gets to play the part this time.
“You don’t,” he amends. Then, “Você é lindo.”
Every hair on my body dances. When he speaks Portuguese, I just … Christ. “What did you just say to me?”
He laughs. “Nothing you didn’t already know, I’m pretty sure.”
“Foul play, my friend.”
“All’s fair, blah blah blah.”
“You saying we’re at war?” Or maybe the former?
“Something like that.”
I’m a goner. I feel like someone’s hooked up some sort of electric current straight onto my smooth criminals, and I have to change up my leg positioning to find any kind of relief.
“When do you get back?”
“Tonight. Pretty late though.”
He picks at the cuticles of his nails. “Can I see you?”
Are you melting? I’m melting. “If you must.”
“You’re such a shithead.”
“You like it.”
“I do.”
We’re both quiet, just staring at each other, eyes reading braille against each other’s faces.
“Do you think it’s possible to fall in love with someone entirely, but only for a little while? Or are we just at that age where every small encounter with someone given to greatness seems like an amazingly large one?”
“I think,” he says, and it takes him so long to continue that I want to smack myself for even asking. But then he does. And it’s beautiful. “I think that love can be mighty, and so that’s why people place limits on it. I think it’s really that we can’t believe something so big, so grand and perfect, can occur at literally any stage it wants to, for any length of time it damn well pleases. So, to answer your question, yes. I think it’s very possible to fall in love with a person or thing for whatever length of time the moon allows. I think that love can be genuine and true from the moment you sustain that electric thing that lovers, apparently, get.”
We make eye contact so unabashedly that I can feel my pulse touch his. It touches me back. And I know that sometimes love happens fast and whispers that it has every intention to stick around for the ride.
I drop my backpack literally at the threshold of my dorm room and collapse facedown on my bed. I’m exhausted, and it’s just now hitting me. The physical heaviness of I’m tired.
My phone pings, and I open it—face still very much pressed into my mattress, I can multitask—to see an email from my academic
advisor, who wants to speak to me about my classes, picking a major, and reminding me the Add/Drop deadline is coming up in a couple of days.
Lovely!
I thought I’d have time to figure this out but it’s like they’re trying to shove me off a cliff toward some legitimate and life-defining thing.
The truth is, I don’t have any answer to that question, and I’m not the kind of person who’s indecisive. I just like to have a basic understanding of the consequences to my actions. And if that means I gotta take my time, well, then:
And I understand the need to pick something if I’m going to stay here. It will dictate the rest of my class scheduling for the next however many years. It’s not that I decided to go undecided because I’m not serious about college. I am. It was supposed to be my out.
Or, is. I meant it is supposed to be my out.
But obligation had other plans for me, and now the Add/Drop is first—that decision that needs to be made before any major or minor or whatever. And I can say with all surety that obligation is going to hold me back from choosing a thing for me, the way it always fucking does.
He’d encourage you to save yourself before ever thinking about those bees.
Sitting up, I reach over into my side table drawer and pull out that stupid business card. Why the hellllllll did I even keep this thing? I should have set it on fire the second he tried to hand it to me.
Desh walks in. “Yo! You’re back, I almost tripped over your old-ass backpack.”
“My bad.”
“No worries, I would never judge you because your backpack looks like it’s from the 1970s. What’s that? Calling up some nude ladies?”
“I am aggressively gay, Desh. I don’t know how you would’ve come to this conclusion. Homosexual.”
“Okay, but doesn’t that business card look like the ones that’re all over the strip in Vegas? The ones that are all black with silver or gold writing in some gaudy-ass font, advertising a strip club called GIRLZ GIRLZ GIRLZ for a fifty-cent entry fee or something?”
Yes. You can take a moment to question his sanity. That’s totally fair, I’m doing the same. “I haven’t ever been outside of California, so I’ll trust you on this part.”
“Never been outside this state? That’s rank.”
That’s poverty.
“This guy approached me about the apiary. I think he might be able to help. He says he can.”
“Call him,” Desh says without a single moment of thought. I’m not someone who can just do anything. I think my decisions through. I have to.
But what’s the harm in a phone call? I can totally hang up or back out at any time.
My phone’s in my hand before I know it, and somehow with even more immediacy, it seems, he’s on the line.
This is going to be a good thing. This is going to manifest the very beginning of my future. This call is going to set me up for success. It’s going to prioritize me.
I exhale and then say, as soon as I hear him spout his name as a greeting, “I’m not saying I’m all in or totally willing to finesse any of this process for you. I just want to talk details.”
There’s a groaning sort of creak in the background and I picture him, reclining in his ergonomic office chair, smug and feline, immensely pleased with himself. Dickwad.
“I see,” he says. “Well. I’m going to be straight with you, Timmy—”
“It’s Torrey. And if you pretend to get my name, or my uncle’s name, wrong one more time, I’m going to shove it up your ass.”
He straight-up laughs at me. “Understood. Y’know, I like you, kid. I do. So here’s what I’ve got for you. You’re doing fulltime school up there at your fancy SFSU, are you not?”
“… I am.”
“Tuition’s a bitch, isn’t it?”
“I get financial aid. It’s not too bad.”
“We’ll keep you covered. All four years, kid. Which means you’ll essentially be pocketing the tuition you’ve already paid for this semester.”
Is this a thing? I don’t know what I’m doing here, and I’m in way over my head but I’m not entirely sure this is the legal way things are supposed to go.
He goes on. “And your mom? She’s in that care center, right? Beautiful lady, by the way. We’ll take care of her past-due payments. Sucks being in the red, I bet. We’ll cover all future expenses for the year.”
This feels like a threat. I’m young and maybe naive, but I’m not a fucking moron. He knows where my mom is and has even been to see her. I don’t like it.
“We’re here to help you, Torrey. We want what you want. We want to preserve your uncle’s dream, to help it last. To make sure your bees are kept and kept well.” He laughs at his own joke. I’ll never understand the humor of mediocre white men.
I wonder who the “we” is that he keeps referencing. The one thing I don’t know that I’ve ever had or will ever have in my life is financial security. And for an offer like this … I’m so tempted to let them be whoever the hell they want to be.
“How about this,” he says. “How about I send you over some information? Let me take down your email, and we’ll go from there. I’m traveling on some business the next few days. But I have a feeling I’ll be around soon enough that you and I can talk shop.”
Talk business. No. Everything about that exhausts me in strange ways. Maybe that’s the work of exhaustion on top of exhaustion.
I’m tired. I’m beat down mentally, emotionally, which to be frank, feels much worse than any physical ass kicking I’ve ever gotten. And growing up where I did, running the streets the way I did—they happened often enough.
And there’s really no getting around the fact that I’m doing this alone, for a neighborhood that thinks it’s okay to physically assault me as I walk down to the corner laundromat. That thinks it funny to spray paint words and figures on the walls of my apiary. For a neighborhood that says they’re just trying to make it to tomorrow, paycheck to paycheck, but doesn’t want to do the work today.
Every night, I spend those hours dreaming about the thorns in my feet I’ve gathered in the midst of this neighborhood. I never dream about pushing back, about using my voice, about telling them how wrong they are about me.
But I want to.
I really, really want to.
“Just tell me what I have to do to make this happen.”
“Excellent!” he answers. And it’s almost too quickly. “Let’s set a date and time to meet.”
20.
The sky is the color of a dusky bruise, a dirty plum, and a fat pool of scalding water all layered on top of one another.
I can only wax poetic about it because of the company I’m keeping at the moment. CAKE, Desh, some girl Desh has been “talking to” named Cheyanne, Gabe, and myself are seated in what the university calls the “Common Living Outdoor Patio.”
It’s not a patio, first of all. It’s a bunch of benches and tables with some umbrellas over them located just behind the school’s oldest building. But still, second, it’s a space I’m pretty grateful for tonight, at what is possibly the darkest hour San Francisco ever sees as a city that chooses to sparkle instead of sleep.
My head’s down on my folded arms as my friends speak around me, Gabriel’s large palm stroking a path up and down my jean-clad thigh.
“Wake up, beautiful boy,” he whispers.
I crack one eye open and then crack a smile, too. “Hello, don’t tell me what to do.”
He laughs and runs his lips across my temple. He does that, I’ve noticed. It’s not a kiss, just a simple stroke and a steady inhale.
“What’s got you so content?” he says.
“You,” I say back.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Gabe shakes his head. “Nah. I’m not that special. What else—be honest!”
It’s a really excellent feeling, to be able to do this with him. With anyone. “I think I might have fixed everything with the apiary. I think I can maybe let go o
f it now and not have to carry it by myself.”
He shakes his head. He’s not sure what I’m saying.
“There’s a guy. An … investor? I guess?” I wet my lips and Gabe’s eyes track it, so I do it again. “He says he’ll take care of it. His company—I guess it’s kind of what they do?”
On a slow nod, he says, “So … would you have to pay him something for this?”
“No, that’s the thing! He’s, uh, making it mutually beneficial. With no cost on my part.”
He just stares at me but says nothing, and I really don’t know how else to explain what happened, so I tell him, “Feel like I can breathe, Gabe. Feel like all the steel that’s been soldered into my spine has been lifted out.” This probably isn’t the best way to talk about what’s going on inside my head. I once watched a video in this article about a man who was having a steel rod removed from his leg. Know how they get it out? They take a hammer-like tool and basically swing it upward and into the protruding, exposed part of the rod until it’s basically out.
They beat it out of you.
Still, I say, “I feel weightless, buoyant for the first time. And I’ve been so ready for this feeling for longer than I’m willing to admit, so ready to feel untethered to anything but you.”
My favorite thing about kissing Gabriel has gotta be the fact that I never have to negotiate my way into it. I lean in, press my lips to his, use my tongue to trace the inside of his upper lip, and when he smiles into it, I hold that inside me. And it moves my heart into sweet, sweet ease, just like honey.
Some of CAKE’s conversation floats back to me.
“Please, no private-parts talk at this table right now,” Kennedy says. It’s just like her. Private-parts talk.
“Uh, okay, Mom. The Vagina Monologues is art.” This from Clarke.
And here is Kennedy, flustered. The most flustered she ever really gets. “Okay, well, can you just leave your work talk, like, at work?”
“Since when am I a gynecologist?” Clarke says. Those two. I think they’ve got a thing going.
“Want to come with me to the studio?” Gabe says in so low a whisper, I almost miss it.
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