by Mia Mckenzie
When we’re a few blocks from the B and B, Faye asks, “Are you ready to go home?”
I look at her. “Do you have another idea?”
“I feel like being outside,” she says. “Do you want to sit on my porch—”
“Yes.”
* * *
—
When we get to Faye’s house, I have to pee, so we go inside. The TV is on in the living room. Vicky is at a sleepover at Jaz’s, so it must be Nick. Sure enough, he comes out of the kitchen, eating a sandwich and looking infuriatingly comfortable in a T-shirt and boxers. “Hey, Skye,” he says, smiling with a mouth full of pb and j. “I didn’t know you were coming over. Good to see you.”
I somehow resist the overwhelming urge to punch him in the dick.
When I get back from the bathroom, he’s still there. No bears broke in and mauled him to death while I was pissing, unfortunately.
Faye is in the kitchen. I join her there. “Do you want a drink?” she asks.
Listen: I pretty much always want a drink. Much more than that, I want an excuse to spend more time with her, so I can figure out how to get her to hold my hand again. But the presence of Nick and his penis feels disruptive of the energy that moved between us at the club and in the car, and I’m not sure if we can get it back tonight, which makes me want to quit while I’m ahead. Also, I don’t want to feel like I’m in a contest with Nick for Faye’s time. Competing with men for the attention of women is not how I do life, y’all.
“I’m pretty tired,” I tell her. “I think maybe I should just go to bed.”
She looks disappointed. “Are you sure?”
NO, I AM NOT SURE.
“One really small drink,” I say. “And then I should go.”
She pours me a drink that isn’t all that small, then grabs a bottle of Belgian beer from the fridge for herself.
“I thought you don’t like the taste of alcohol.”
She shrugs. “My friend Angie left this here. I’m in the mood.”
We head for the porch.
“You coming to bed soon?” Nick asks Faye from his seat on the couch.
She nods. “In a bit.”
“I’ll be there,” he says with a little smile.
I already regret not punching him in the dick.
* * *
—
There’s a nice set of porch furniture, including a rocker and a chaise, but Faye bypasses all of that and takes a seat on the front steps. Which is so Philly, I can’t even deal. Some people describe this city as having “porch culture” but what it really has is “step culture.” My adolescence was chock full of neglected chaise lounges, my friends and I always preferring to perch on steps or stoops, which offered a better view of the block and whatever was happening on it that day.
I sit down beside Faye and sip my bourbon while she sips her beer and we both scan the goings-on around us. The block is pretty popping tonight, music wafting toward us from several different directions—some hip-hop, some R&B, and even, from farther down, some jazz. I can smell weed smoke coming from a porch a few houses up and hear kids who should definitely be in bed already screaming for no good reason from a porch a few houses down.
Faye takes off her shoes and places them neatly on the porch. I try to make out the color of her toes in the dark, but I can’t. I watch her place her feet flat on the concrete step below and wiggle her toes in the warmish night air.
In the distance, sirens wail. When they go silent, their sound is replaced by the laughter of a group of girls walking by. One of them smiles at us. It seems almost like a summer night, even though it’s only May.
“It feels a little like summer tonight,” Faye says.
I nod. “I was just thinking that.”
It’s been a very long time since I sat on a porch and listened to—and watched and smelled—Philly at night. The familiarity of it is almost overwhelming, in the way nostalgia can be. I think again about Tasha and that summer when we were fourteen, when our entire world was somebody’s front steps and the secrets we whispered to each other across them.
“Are you okay?” Faye asks me.
I come out of my head to find her watching me, a look of curiosity on her face.
“I was just thinking how crazy it is that you’re MC Faye Malice. I can’t believe Vicky didn’t tell me.”
“Vicky doesn’t know. I swore her parents to secrecy.”
“Why?”
She takes a long moment to think about it, then says, “That time in my life wasn’t all good. Rhyming was fun. Being Faye Malice was fun. But other things were very hard. For a while, I put it all away. The bad, and the good along with it. You know what I mean?”
This is normally the point in a conversation where I’d start to get uncomfortable. We’re veering into “difficult human feelings” territory and y’all know that’s not my jam. But for some reason, I don’t get awkward. Instead, I think about what my mother said the other day: You only remember what you want to. And I think maybe I do know what Faye means.
“Is that why you didn’t get onstage tonight?”
“No,” she says. “I didn’t get onstage because if I’d bombed, it would’ve gone viral and my students never would’ve let me hear the end of it.”
“What if you hadn’t bombed?”
She smiles. “I guess we’ll never know,” she says, and takes another sip of beer.
“You can rap for me if you want,” I tell her. “I promise to love every moment of it.”
She laughs. It’s a lovely laugh but it’s not the laugh she laughed with Winston, and I find myself wishing it was, wishing I knew her when she was MC Faye Malice, and long before then, and after then, too.
“Why’d you stop rapping?”
“I didn’t have time for it once I started college and had a full class load and a job.”
“Do you miss it? Being onstage? Dropping the dopest of the dope rhymes?”
“Oh, God.”
“Being the illest rapper in the two-one-five?”
“Stop.”
“I’m not making fun of you!” I tell her. “I swear! I loved those albums!”
She eyes me like she’s trying to decide if she believes me or not. Then she nods and says, “Sometimes I miss it. Mostly when I accidentally turn to the BET Awards and see today’s rappers running around onstage, mumbling nonsensically.”
“Right? Who even are those people?”
She laughs and sips her beer and is quiet for a few moments. Then she says, “What I really miss, more than rhyming, is just…being young in Philly. On a night like tonight, when I was seventeen or eighteen, I’d have been with my friends on South Street, probably high, talking to guys who were too old for me, never imagining that one day I’d be forty-two. You just never conceive that there will come a time when you’re not young anymore, when your whole life won’t be in front of you. You know?”
I nod and sip my drink. “I never hung out on South Street, though.”
“Never?” she asks, like that’s unheard of.
“Never felt cool enough to go there.”
“So, where would you have been?” she asks. “On a warm Friday at”—she checks her phone—“eleven-thirty, when you were seventeen?”
“Probably on my friend Tasha’s front steps. Drinking her mom’s liquor mixed with blue raspberry Kool-Aid, out of a red Solo cup. Talking about gay shit, but quietly, so nobody would hear us. While The Score played in the background.”
“That is very specific.”
I laugh. I don’t tell her how much I’ve been thinking about that time in my life lately.
“I envy you having gay friends at that age. I probably would have gotten into less trouble if I had.”
“You think gay friends are less trouble?”
“I just mean�
��I think some of the trouble I got into was because I was trying to resist ‘gay shit,’ ” she says. “Queer feelings.”
“What kind of trouble are we talking about?”
“Drugs. Sex with boys,” she says, “and its many consequences.”
“I hardly did drugs,” I tell her. “Not that I was morally opposed or anything. My friends just weren’t cool enough to know any drug dealers. We only got weed when we could talk someone’s older sibling into getting it for us or steal it from their room when they weren’t paying attention. Which wasn’t that often.”
“Sex?” she asks me.
I resist the urge to say something corny like, Yes, please. “I never got laid in high school.”
“What about your gay friends?” she asks. “You weren’t…?”
“Ugh. No. I knew Tasha since first grade. She was like a sister to me, except with better parents. The couple of times we tried to make out, it felt wrong on a deep, deep level. I did fool around with a couple of girls junior and senior year, but it was mostly above the waist.”
“Okay,” Faye says. “Boys must have tried below the waist, though.”
I sip my bourbon and nod. “They always do. But none of the boys I knew were sophisticated enough to balance out my awkwardness to the point that actual sex was possible. It was a lot of fumbling and early ejaculations. Really early. Like, before I even took my shirt off. Tyrone Edmonds came in his pants while offering me a can of grape soda. What even is that?”
She laughs.
“It’s funny now. It wasn’t then. I wanted to be having sex so badly,” I say, sighing. “I envy you.”
“No one envies a pregnant teenager.”
“Okay,” I say. “Yeah. I don’t envy that part. That sounds hard. But I think sex—not its consequences, but the act itself—can only ever be a temporary regret. Do you think there are ninety-year-old ladies on their deathbeds thinking, Wow I shouldn’t have got laid so many times? Probably not. In fact, I’d guess most of them are like, Damn, I really shoulda had more orgasms.” I say that last part in my best ninety-year-old-woman voice.
Faye makes a sound like “hmmm,” like she’s thinking about that. Then she nods slowly and says, “You might be onto something.”
“Oh, I definitely am.”
“I wish you’d been around when I was being called a ho by my social worker,” she says.
“So do I.”
She looks at me like she did in the record store that day, with that same intense gaze. I watch her eyes travel from my eyes down my face to my lips and linger there. I can think of no reason why a woman would stare at another woman’s lips with this level of interest other than that she wants to be kissed. So, I kiss her.
The moment our lips touch, a sound escapes her. It’s part moan, part sigh. All yes. Her mouth opens. Her eyes close. She leans her body into mine. All of this I take as a sign that I made the exact right decision and should keep going, which I do, eagerly. I put my left hand on her left thigh, for leverage, and also because I really want to touch her thighs, and I wrap my other arm around her waist and pull her closer. She slips her tongue into my mouth. She tastes like fancy Belgian beer in all the right ways. We kiss for what somehow feels like both a long time and no time at all; it’s maybe half a minute. And then I feel Faye’s hands on my shoulders, pushing me away.
“Stop.”
“Okay,” I say, leaning away from her, breathless. “Why?”
“I’m getting really turned on.”
Which, not gonna lie, doesn’t make me want to stop.
“That’s bad?”
“It is when I’m in a monogamous relationship with someone other than the person currently making me wet.”
Again: DOESN’T MAKE ME WANT TO STOP.
She stands up, adjusting her blouse, which has become a little disheveled in the heaviness of our making out. She looks suddenly worried and tense. I consider telling her that she’s engaged to a cheater and that being faithful to him is the last thing she needs to concern herself with. But something tells me that, of all the wrong moments to do that, this is the wrongest. For a lot of reasons, one being that even if knowing the truth makes her more likely to let me see her naked, it wouldn’t be purely out of desire for me. It would be tainted with anger at Nick. And fuck that. If I ever do get the pleasure of Faye’s mouth on my most sensitive regions, I don’t want Nick to have anything to do with it.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a question occurs to me: “Do you love Nick?” I ask Faye.
“That’s irrelevant.”
OH, IS IT?
“It seems pretty relevant to me.”
“Of course I do.”
This answer catches me completely off guard. Because, honestly, it’s never before occurred to me that she might. I don’t know why. Maybe because she’s smart and sexy and interesting and he’s a liar pretending to be a good guy.
“If you love Nick, why’d you kiss me?”
“My kissing or not kissing you has nothing to do with Nick,” she says. “Besides, you kissed me.”
“You kissed me back!”
“Okay,” she says, holding her hands out, palms down, like she’s trying to push down the rising tension levels. “You’re right, Skye.”
I know I’m right!
“I’m attracted to you,” she says.
I’M LISTENING.
“I thought I could ignore it. I tried to. But then when you started coming over so much…” Her voice trails off. She shakes her head, sighs. “I don’t know. I guess I thought if we became friends I could somehow…manage my attraction to you.”
“How’s that going?”
“It was going okay until just now,” she says, sounding almost defeated, like kissing me was a failure. Which I sort of get, considering the situation. But also: Wow, that doesn’t feel good at all.
“Skye,” she says quietly, gently, “I like that you’re here. I like it for Vicky. And for myself. I like our friendship. I don’t want one kiss to complicate all of that. It has to be platonic between us.”
I think about São Paulo. And Paris. And Atlanta. And Shanghai. And all of the places this wouldn’t be happening right now.
“Because of our friendship?” I ask. “Because of Vicky? Or because of Nick?”
She doesn’t answer, just shakes her head.
Here’s the thing: She’s right. If I know anything about sex and romance, it’s that they complicate everything. I have avoided meaningful romantic relationships for a decade because they’re just so goddamn extra. Who wants to have to deal with all of those feelings? Not this girl. So, I get it. It’s a lot. It’s too much to manage, especially when there’s also a possessive kid and a dead sister you didn’t like and a fiancé who’s cheating on you but you don’t even know that yet. It’s emotionally exhausting to think about! And also: I still want her.
“It’s late,” Faye says. “I should go to bed.”
I nod and start down the steps.
“I can take you home,” she says.
I want that. I want to get in her silver SUV and spend the two minutes it’ll take to get to the B and B with her. But I know that when we get there, I’ll just want her to stay. And if, by some unforeseen turn of events, she does stay, and we talk and make out until morning, I still won’t want her to leave. And even if she doesn’t leave right then, even if I can talk her into eating breakfast with me first, she’ll still have to go at some point, to make Vicky’s breakfast or suck Nick’s dick or whatever. What I’m saying is: I can’t make her want me by just drawing this moment out as long as I can. So I tell her, “It’s okay, it’s only six blocks.” And I fucking walk.
22
“If you had to die from an animal attack,” Vicky asks me, “but you got to choose what kind of animal, which animal would you choose?”
It’s
around eleven the morning after I kissed Faye. I got up “early” to kick it with Vicky for a bit before she’s dragged off to Bala Cynwyd for the rest of the weekend. We just finished buying lipglosses and Tastykakes at the corner store. On our way back, Miss Vena gave us some tomato starts to give to Faye, and Vicky and I each carry one as we walk back to her house.
“Hippo,” I tell the kid, adjusting one of the plants in the crook of my elbow.
She stops walking and looks up at me. “Why?”
“Well, hippos don’t have claws. So there wouldn’t be any tearing of flesh. It’d probably just trample me. It’s super heavy and has really big feet, so it would be over in, what? One or two stomps? That’s pretty quick. I’d rather not suffer. Also, ‘she was killed by a hippo’ is a really cool obit ending. Amirite?”
She stares at me for a few seconds, wide-eyed, then says, “That’s the best answer EVER!”
Her phone plays a tune and she looks at it and frowns. “It’s my stupid dad. He’s on his way.”
Kenny was supposed to pick Vicky up yesterday, but he called last minute and said he couldn’t because he had a work thing out in Cherry Hill, and that he was sending Charlotte in his stead. Vicky refused, said she wouldn’t go with Charlotte, and Kenny relented, agreeing to pick her up today instead, although Vicky’s preferred pickup day was never.
We get there before Kenny and Charlotte. Faye’s not home, which, on a Saturday, usually means she’s out with Nick or Angie of the Belgian beer. I’m relieved not to have to face her yet. After I got back to my room and rubbed one out, I realized kissing Faye was a mistake. I’m in Philly for Vicky, not for romance. I need to stay focused.
“You want a snack?” Vicky asks me, after we put the tomato plants by the back door.
“Shouldn’t you be packing?”
She shrugs.
When Kenny’s beamer pulls up out front twenty minutes later, we’re on the sofa eating Butterscotch Krimpets and, once again, Vicky doesn’t move a muscle to respond to the honking. When the bell finally rings, she rolls her eyes and trudges miserably to the door.
