“Nah. If they take Apple Pay, I can use my phone,” he said. “Lemme go see.”
He walked away, with the check in hand, but I was already certain given the datedness of the place that they were likely to have only an old-fashioned cash register and card reader. And sure enough, Kai returned moments later looking mortified.
“It’s fine,” I said, reaching for my backpack on the curb next to me. “You’ll get it next time.”
It was only then that he looked slightly more upbeat. I guessed it was the reference to “next time” that had done it. I only meant it as a common figure of speech, but once it was out, I had to admit. I wouldn’t mind if there were a next time.
Bill taken care of, we stood awkwardly for a few moments at the curb before I extended a hand. Kai looked at it, then grinned.
“You’re just gonna shake my hand?” he said, grinning. “And walk away just like that?”
I laughed. “Well. I mean …”
“I admit, it’s been a crappy first date. Getting arrested and me stiffing you for our breakfast … or lunch. But I was hoping I could get your number at least, and maybe …” He let his voice trail off.
The fact that he called it a date was, I knew, just a joke. But it still gave me confidence that he wasn’t slotting me into the friend zone. That was when I admitted to myself that that was not the zone I wanted to be in with him. There was something a little embarrassing about knowing that even in a full-blown racial justice crisis, I was noticing cute boys and crushing on them. Like, how shallow was that? Tianna would never …
I handed him my phone. He dialed a number and his phone rang. He handed mine back to me and declined the call on his, typing something in.
“What’s your last name?” he asked without looking up, still typing.
I told him. “Yours?” I asked.
And he told me, so we were done. But we both stood there for a minute, updating each other’s contact information probably more slowly than the task merited.
When we were done, it was Kai who finally broke the silence.
“I promise, I’ma make this up to you,” he said. “A classier joint, no arrests … And I’ll hopefully have a wallet with cards in it and everything.”
Cops were exiting the carryout in pairs, skirting around us, until Kai held my arm and pulled me out of their path.
“Anyways …” I let the word drag, shifting my weight from one leg to the other.
“Yeah. It was cool,” Kai said. “Hanging out. Eating breakfast … and having you pay, that was not so cool, but …”
His geek-lite thing was growing on me more each second. I thought about the tasks ahead of me – finding Tianna, calling my dad, getting back home. I wasn’t sure how much of Center City was blocked off now, and where I might have to go to meet him, likely on foot.
“Actually,” I said. “Did you … do you have your keys to get back into your house and everything, or … I mean, since you don’t have your wallet, are you going to be okay?”
Kai’s face brightened a little and I saw the moment he reined it in.
“I was planning on going over to my building and seeing whether anyone was there to let me in. Like the maintenance guy or whatever,” he said. “But if you need me to …”
“I’m going to call my dad,” I said. “But I don’t know how long it’ll take him to come or anything, so maybe I could go with you to your place. I mean … just your building lobby or whatever and call him from there?”
I didn’t even know where he lived, so it was a very thin excuse for wanting to spend more time in his company. But he didn’t call me on it. He just smiled and nodded.
“Cool,” he said.
Chapter Five
Kai
Once we got our bearings, we thought about calling Uber to get to the north side of City Hall where my apartment is, but with all the unexpected street closures, we finally decided it would be way quicker to hoof it. We didn’t talk much at first. Everything around us seemed changed and so we were both just taking it all in.
The city seemed to have split into parts. Some blocks were eerily quiet, and on others, people were out walking dogs, plastic bags in hand to pick up and dispose of their excrement, like nothing had changed about their world. And still other blocks had clusters of folks like us, dressed in black, still wearing their face-coverings, protesters who had somehow become displaced from the main event.
As we moved farther north, the sound of voices and sirens and a general air of unrest became thicker. By the time we were two blocks from my building, we could hear the sound of hundreds of voices, carrying from maybe as far as ten blocks away.
I stopped outside the door leading into the lobby and looked at Lila and she looked at me.
Without another word, we turned, and walking past my building headed toward the sound of the other protesters.
“Is this crazy?” she asked me, her voice sounding a little jittery and excitable.
“Yup,” I answered.
“Because … I mean, we already got picked up today and we were probably lucky to get out as quickly as we did …”
“Yeah.”
“And if they pick us up again, especially if it’s late, we might be in lockup overnight.”
“Probably,” I said.
She looked at me, and I noticed for the first time just how slight she is. She had taken off the sweatshirt that had been around her waist and stuffed it into her backpack halfway through our walk to my apartment, so I saw how delicate she was. Like a lily, probably easily bruised.
“When we get down there,” I said. “Let’s not split up, okay? Stay close.”
She didn’t answer right away so I looked at her, worried that she might think I was trying to boss her around or something, but she nodded.
“Look in the bottom pocket of my bag,” she said stopping for a moment and turning her back to me. “Open it.”
I unzipped the compartment she told me to and inside found a length of cord, about twice as thick as a shoelace. On either end were loops with snaps that allowed you to open and close the loop. I looked at it, confused.
“Here,” Lila said, taking it from me.
She attached one end of the cord to a loop on her backpack, and handed me the other.
“Wait,” I said. “Is this like protest chic or what?”
She laughed. “Tianna made it. Isn’t that cool?”
“Who’s Tianna, and why …?”
“Not that we remembered to use it, but it helps you not to lose your buddy. It’s a tether. You’ll feel the tug when you’re getting separated, but it isn’t so secure that it won’t release you if one of you falls, or has to run.”
“And what happens if someone steps between you?”
Lila shrugged. “It’ll snap apart, easy-peasy.”
“So, it’s basically …”
“Useless. Yes.” She laughed again. “But Tianna thought … I’ve never … this is my first …” She caught herself and blushed.
“Okay, I gotcha. She decided to treat you like a toddler for your first big march,” I said nodding and hooking my end of the tether to my belt loop.
It gave us about two-and-a-half feet of slack, so that I naturally walked closer alongside her, and our shoulders and arms occasionally brushed.
“If you think it’s … weird, or stupid …”
“Nah, it’s a cool idea,” I lied.
But when I looked at her, she was wearing a cute little sad face.
“It’s cool,” I said, again. “‘Cause I definitely don’t wanna lose you.”
She looked up at me.
“Out here,” I added. “In this … you know … because …”
But she was biting back a smile, having peeped a hint of my real meaning.
While we walked, I thought about all that stuff I’d let spill while we were outside the diner. I didn’t talk about my parents much to anyone. Mostly because when I did, the questions were so damned predictable. People skirted around
it, danced close to it, but the crux of what they wanted to know was the generally the same—what was different about a Black man who’d been raised by a white woman? What was different about a man who had married one? It’s tough not to get defensive at questions like that and exhausted by them. It’s harder still not to get angry when you know what people are getting at, but just won’t say.
But Lila has a neutral listening face. I couldn’t tell much from watching it as I spoke, except for when she occasionally nodded or made a quiet sound of assent. I think I told her all that because I felt like I was on an accelerated timeline. I mean, we’re in the kind of times where the words ‘tomorrow isn’t promised’ feel like the truest thing ever spoken.
You can go to a corner store for some snacks and booze and wind up having the life crushed out of you by a dickhead with a gun, a badge, and something to prove.
Or you can meet a girl who feels like everything right and let her walk away just because you’re too cool to admit that from the second you saw her, she made your heart quake.
“Who’s Tianna?” I asked, trying to revive the conversation.
“My best friend. She leads the campus racial justice group.”
“Like the Black Student Union president,” I said.
Lila shook her head. “No, she would never be part of the BSU.”
“Oh, for real? Why not?”
“They’re all about respectability, playing it safe. They distribute petitions and stuff.”
I laughed. “What’s wrong with petitions?”
“Nothing. Just … I’ve never seen one that produced sustainable change, have you?”
I thought about it for a second.
“Not sure,” I said. “Can’t say I paid much attention. I mean, if the petition is something I’m all for, then I sign it.”
“And then move on with your life, right?”
I tried to detect judgment in her tone, but there was none.
“I guess.”
“And that, Kai, is what’s wrong with petitions as a strategy.”
I nodded. “Does it gotta be either or though? I mean, you can do … whatever it is your uber-radical group likes to do, and you can have petitions. Both might be effective in their own ways.”
“I’m sure that’s true,” Lila said, but her voice sounded a little tight. “But that’s just not our lane. We don’t color between the lines, we disrupt the lines.”
“Sounds like Tianna talking,” I joked.
But from the look she gave me, I knew I was probably at least partly right.
“You don’t even know her,” Lila said. “So …”
“I know. I’m just …”
“People like Tianna,” she continued, “are the people that folks roll their eyes at behind their backs and call ‘social justice warriors’ to be sarcastic. But people like her, they never get caught off guard when things like this happen. They’re the first to mobilize, the first to lead. They’re the ones who can get a thousand people on the streets to march with four hours’ notice.”
“Nah. I mean, yeah. I didn’t mean to …”
“It’s fine,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s … whatever.”
“Hey,” I said. I stopped walking, taking care that the tether didn’t pull us apart. It seemed very important that we not be pulled apart right then.
Lila stopped and looked up at me, but her expression was flat and long-suffering.
“I’m here though, right?” I said. “I’m one of the thousand people that ‘social justice warriors’ like your friend got out here. So, I’m definitely not knocking it. I was being funny. I didn’t mean to …”
Her face softened a little. “It’s fine.” This time it sounded like she meant it.
She sighed and looked around, taking in where we were.
“Maybe I should call my dad real quick,” she said. “D’you wanna call your folks, or …?”
“Probably not,” I said. “Far as they know I’m home studying.”
“Okay, well I’ll just …”
I waited while she pulled out her phone again and we moved closer to the side of a building while Lila placed her call. I watched as her face changed when someone answered.
“Daddy?” she said.
Girls who are older than thirteen and call their fathers ‘daddy’ are a different breed. The ones like Lila, whose faces open into guileless smiles just at the sound of daddy’s voice, are rarer yet. These are the girls who would never call a lover or boyfriend ‘daddy’, because to do that would be like sacrilege.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” she said. Then she listened for a while. “I lost Tee. But I’m with my friend Kai. He promised he’s gonna look after me.” She gave me a wink. “Yes. Tell her I’m okay, really. Love you, too. Bye.”
She heaved a deep sigh once she ended the call, like you do when you complete an important task.
“I’m an only kid,” she said, blushing a little as she stuffed the phone away once again.
“I didn’t say anything.” But I was grinning at her, thinking again how cute she was. How I wanted to wrap a few of those braids around my hand, gently tug her toward me and kiss her.
“Are you?” she asked.
Again, with the distraction technique. Don’t look at me. Let’s look at you instead.
“Am I what?”
“An only.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I have a sister. Younger.”
“Wow, really?”
“Why ‘wow’?”
“You give off strong only-child energy.”
“What’s only-child energy?”
“I don’t know. I just know it when I feel it. Is she much younger than you?”
“Not much.” I started walking again, not really sure I wanted to talk about Taylor.
“Okay, so … where is she?”
“Home. She’s in college too, but in DC.”
“Really, where?”
“Georgetown.”
“And you’re not close.”
“Why d’you say that?” I looked at Lila and she shrugged.
“Your voice is tense,” she said.
“Is it?”
“Yeah. But, I mean, we don’t have to talk about her, I just wondered.”
I took a deep breath.
“Taylor …” I began. “Went another way.”
“What does that mean?”
“She … relates more to my mother’s side of the family, let’s just say.”
Lila’s mouth opened, like she was trying to think of a polite response.
“Oh,” was all she managed.
“This?” I said. “Out here? Taylor would never in a million years. Her mission in life is to be the least aggrieved Black woman in the United States.”
“Well,” Lila said. “If her mission is to not be aggrieved, she’s got her work cut out for her.”
I laughed. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell her.”
We didn’t say anything more for a little while, but the crowds were getting thicker as we got closer to the parkway. There was an almost carnival atmosphere among some of the groups milling around. You could almost pick out the real protesters and distinguish them from the people who were out there for the thrill. Their expressions were different. I wondered whether I would run into Lamar.
And because Lila’s question made me think about her, I wondered whether back home, Taylor was sitting stiff-backed on the sofa with my parents, watching things unfold, desperate to take from it all a different meaning than the obvious.
Because we were so close in age and had similar coloring, people used to think Taylor and me were fraternal twins. And because we were pretty tight, we liked it when they did.
Nooo! we would intone. We’re not twins.
He’s my big brother, Taylor would say leaning into me.
In high school things changed. Taylor got adopted into a group of shallow, catty girls who gave her compliments that I thought were pretty loaded, but she basked in.
They told her she was lucky because of how thick her hair was, and because she had the perfect skin for suntanning, weird crap like that which made her sound like an exotic toy, or their mascot. They were so earnestly, cloyingly white with their Lululemon yoga pants and uptalk that I couldn’t see what the appeal of being part of their clique might be. For the longest time, it felt like they were letting her hang out with them, rather than that they wanted to hang out with her.
But Taylor didn’t seem to notice. These were the popular girls, the ones everyone wanted to befriend. And worst of all, they stayed throwing shade at all the darker-skinned Black girls in school, except for one named Bailey, who looked like Barbie dipped in milk chocolate.
Around that time was when Taylor started saying things like, Not everything’s racist, Kai! whenever one of her friends did or said something racially suspect. Soon, I stopped pointing things out, not because I didn’t think she should see them for what they were, but because I knew she did see them for what they were, she just didn’t know where to put, or how to sort those emotions.
We hadn’t even talked about the video. I knew she had to have seen it like almost everyone else in the country. But I couldn’t even imagine what words I might say to her about it. And to be real? I was afraid of what she might say to me.
“I have kind of a weird relationship with my mother as well,” Lila said.
No kidding. All the time we talked, she had only mentioned her mother once, but her father was like the hero of every story. Even the way dude fried and ate an egg had become worthy of emulation, meanwhile her mother was a footnote.
“Why?” I asked.
“We don’t fight or anything, we just see the world differently. Like, for example, she doesn’t like Tianna at all.”
“Yeah? Why not?”
“I invited her over once for Sunday dinner and Tianna was off on one of her rants about the Democratic primaries and my mother thought that was ‘inappropriate’ of her to be talking about to people she had never met before. Later she told me she thought Tee was a little … coarse and said I should choose my friends wisely at this stage of my life.”
“Damn,” I said.
“Right? I thought that was way harsh first of all about not wanting her to talk about politics. Like … what did she expect from an educated, well-informed Black woman?”
Resistance: A Love Story (The Shorts Book 9) Page 5