Walking on Cowrie Shells

by Nana Nkweti

  These trinkets lured cornpone princesses in pink-sequined UGGs. Girls gone gaga for show-show and bling. Amber H’s family rec room was unexpectedly the perfect recruiting ground for my start-up. Too grown for pillow fights and pinky swears, she was hosting an “ironic” slumber party. There we were, lounging in the most cerebral man cave I’d ever seen, walls lined with walnut shelves faced in glass, recessed lights showcasing her dad’s collection of intricately carved Meerschaum pipes and Japanese netsuke—miniature demons, Buddhas, dragons sculpted from ivory, from boxwood. Not a pool table or arcade game in sight. Yawn.

  Even the eats were ridiculously posh; we noshed on all things artisanal. No mixes—Chex, trail, or otherwise—for this sleepover spread. Amber H’s parents were known foodies, weekday meals featuring yummy wordplay like Taco Tuesdays and Stir Fry Days.

  At Amber H’s imperious behest, we arranged ourselves in a circle on the floor, cross-legged, seated “Indian style” according to Bavishni, who’d insisted, “It’s not racist when I say it. And no way are we calling it lotus pose like we’re Lululemon yogis. Appropriate much?”

  Amber H, who considered herself “super-woke” for inviting half our school’s POC population to her silk-pajama-clad shindig and for that one time she retweeted #blacklivesmatter “protesting” yet another dystopian shooting by public servants sworn to protect and serve, said, “You’re not that kind of ‘Indian,’ Vish.”

  “I think it’s pronounced ‘Native American,’” I chimed in, between yeasty mouthfuls of ragged bread torn from a pumpernickel bowl brimming with spinach dip. This drew a chuckle from her bestie Amber C and a scowl from Amber H, an omen that someone would pay for that infraction later.

  Amber H broke out a Carmichael yearbook for a death match round of Marry-Kiss-Kill that left an OCD Amber C sniffling in the laundry room as she stress-sorted whites and coloreds. The “Aryan Wash Cycle” is what I called it once the maid was let go and that particular chore fell to me. Next came a round of Never-Have-I-Ever and I could see the secret side looks hinting at devious pregame plans but no one was brazen enough to game the game and suss out if the rumors from my old school were true. Never have I ever “stolen from my boyfriend’s home.”

  Try to put me in your trick bag? Never have I ever fallen for it. But midround, my phone beeped with a check-in text from Jessica and it was downright Pavlovian how girls hungrily eyed my bedazzled next-gen cellie.

  “Where’d you get that?” the hive voice asked, the gaggle of girls sharpening their nails.

  I shrugged a coy “this ole thing,” even as I toyed on and on with apps, letting it shine bright in the low light. “It’s from a wish list online. I’ve got a whole bunch of them for high-end boutiques like Farfetch, Matches, Shopbop—you name it.”

  “Wish lists? But who buys you the stuff? And what do they get for it?” A volley of voices pinged questions all at once; some of these girls still sucked their thumbs when they slept, some had graduated to sucking other things. I could see all the seedy, no-tell motel thoughts running through their heads. Hilarious.

  “All I do is chat with them. Online. On the phone. That’s it. It’s called findom, for secure men who just love showering us ladies with gifts.” I scanned the room, giving a knowing smile to those who leaned in, eager to learn the how-tos of securing that bag, then said, “I tell guys my weekly minimums from the get-go, so they really know I’m worth it. So they really feel the pinch.”

  Don’t @ me with your outrage. Je suis rien commes des autres. I’m a hustler. You were warned from the start. I’m no victim, I made men pay for the mere suggestion of what my uncle tried to take for free. Back home, these tit-for-tat, transactional relationships between men and women were de rigueur. Future Entrepreneurs Club hipped me to the blunt economics of it all. Women cashed in on the wasting asset of their youth, all too aware of its inevitable depreciation in the years to come. They instinctively understood the “time value of money” principle, how money makes money in the here and now. Why wait on a degree in an already uncertain economy, when guaranteed capital was only a flirty smile with Daddy Warbucks away? Call it an investment in your future self. They offered companionship to wealthy older boyfriends otherwise known as “sponsors,” “patrons,” and “blessers” (these men answered prayers for new shoes, yes, but also financial solvency for tuition bills, your mother’s medical bills, life). In findom we call these men paypigs or cash$laves. In findom, I told Amber H and Co., we refined this business model, no sweaty-sheet commerce required.

  Many of the girls were hooked. They wanted so much more than Daddy’s Little Girl deserves. So, I taught them how to find spanking-new daddies. Took a cut—a modest 20 percent finder’s fee—for the connections I facilitated. It worked so well I set up a dark web site. And soon another for sexy maid services, where a girl could cash in on a giggly Oopsy-daisy, I dropped the feather duster, bending low to flash fishnets, saying, Silly me. How clumsy. It was just that easy. This is a land where homemade XXX equals endorsements, a hip-hop hubby, and an iPhone app of your very own. Sex always, always sells.

  Question was: how to keep Mrs. Fontep aka Ngando aka Ndukong out of my profit margins? She was a truffle pig for money stashes, rooting out hidden revenue streams. Frieda told me she ambushed Maman at her shop, confiscating top-notch merchandise I’d shipped the month before. She was relentless. She had to be stopped. So, I gathered intel, touched base with some of the other children she had airdropped in barely vetted homes across the US.

  A girl in Houston. Sleeping on a lumpy pallet? That cannot lie!

  A boy in Chicago. They touched you down there? You don’t say?

  Horrific tales, all.

  My mission? Accomplished. Had all the ammunition needed and then some.

  Don’t judge. It was war. Kill or be killed.

  So by the time they took the Whirlpool, I was ready. A sugar daddy client knew a guy who knew a guy who worked at the Post. A week later, Aunty Gladys was arrested. There were allegations of human trafficking and slavery and forced labor. A special prosecutor appointed.

  My interview is in the Post today. My side hustles too salacious to pass up in print. It was publicity for my businesses—Comely Cleaners set to double its customer base.

  It really was never meant to be about the Salikis. My story is my own to tell.

  Said as much when I talked to them last night.

  Listening as they blubbered on and on about all the things they’d done for me.

  For me? Seriously? It was me who made them a family. I’m the one who made them real. “Wasn’t I worth it?” I asked. “I was snatched up from my loving family so yours could be complete. All this talk of giving me the American dream. Then just like that, you’re raiding my college fund.”

  “We had a mortgage to pay!” they cried. “You needed a roof over your head!”

  “I needed a future,” I said finally. “And now I’ve made sure I’ll have one.”

  I left them to their tears and seltzer water.

  Tucked away in my hotel bed, I dreamed of better. Maybe I could parlay my story into a book. Or a Lifetime movie at the very least. I pictured the opening credits.

  Based upon a true story. With my true name in bright, blazing lights …

  ZORA.

  Rain Check at MomoCon

  There is a crush of Stormtroopers, Men of Steel, and Optimus Primes milling around the cavernous confines of the Javits Center. Surrounded by freaks and geeks, Astrid Atangana wonders how she and her friends—the self-styled Nyanga Girlz—come across to the Comic-Con crowd. Mbola, rocking grills and street gear, calling herself “Fly Girl: Superman’s dope-ass cousin from the hood.” Mimi, in the Psylocke cosplay costume, preordered from China a full month in advance. And her, a too-tall Black girl in a too-short red kimono. Wearing bifocals, no less. She takes off her glasses. She cringes, thinking about the Princeton admissions letter, secreted away in a notebook, in the far reaches of her knapsack, then secures the bag’s straps, along
with the side-slung holster of her katana, for what feels like the kajillionth time.

  “Batman has a bomb booty,” Mimi opines, twirling an eely purple hair strand that slithers and coils around her index finger. Her flinty eyes are fixated. Medusan, Astrid thinks, filled with equal parts fascination and disgust, watching her friend watching yet another guy.

  “Which Batman?” Mbola asks. “There are like a billion Dark Knight wannabes up in this piece. Look at these clone wars muthas. Him, him, him.” She points an accusatory diamante-crusted stiletto nail, its gold gun charm swinging wildly, at each and every offender within eyeshot. “Folks is so basic.”

  “That don’t matter if they hot,” Mimi says, jerking her head to their left. “Dude, right there, could totally get it,” answering their blank looks with a rapid-fire whisper, “him, the retro, Adam West-y one, over there by the Halo booth,” then loudly exclaims, “Oh my God, Astrid! Don’t look straight at him.”

  Astrid is already looking straight at him. Staring, in fact. Mbola rolls her eyes in exasperation, yet all too soon she is staring too. Batman catches their gaze and gives them all an even-toothed, Tic Tac grin. Mimi denies him a smile. Instead she turns away, flips her synthetic tresses, then tosses him a knowing, coquettish look over her shoulder. Classic Mimi. Astrid hopes he’s worth it; hopes she gets a bang for her buck. The girl spent two weeks’ worth of pay to buy her wig—its shock of violet locks had to be the exact shade of purple as her costume; the cheapo wigs at the beauty supply in the West Orange mall where they all worked deemed insufficiently “Con-worthy.”

  A schlubby East Asian Boy Wonder sidles over and palms Batman’s left butt cheek, his wandering hand partially obscured by a waterfall of midnight blue polyester. Manhandling, Astrid thinks, her brain continuing a weeklong streak of randomly churning out M words, morphing her into some Tourette tic-ish freak. It was weird but strangely familiar, like the month after their class trip to see Hamilton on Broadway when quotidian conversations tempted her to segue into song. That month, talk of Batman’s heinie might have triggered wordless humming of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s ’90s throwback hit “Baby Got Back” under her breath. Or at least some bars from the Nicki remix.

  Mimi is glaring at the Dynamic Duo now. “Look, Astrid. It’s one of your fairy tale up-the-rear endings.”

  Mbola sniggers her approval of the diss.

  Maleficents, Astrid thinks. She mentally kicks herself, again, for ever, EVER sharing her slash fan-fiction with these so-called friends. For months, they had cracked on her about Luke Skywalker letting Han Solo stroke his light saber during long and lonely desert nights on “Brokeback Tatooine.” She had almost given up on writing before she met Young Yoon at Arcania, their mall’s comic book store. He was the one—the only one—who hadn’t laughed. Instead, he had pulled out a sketch pad and shown her his storyboards, shared panel upon panel of darkly rendered swordplay. The only text was his name in Hangul: . They’re pretty much just mimes right now. I need someone to give them a voice. Can you help with that, Astrid? And Astrid, knowing what it was like to be kept mute, had said yes. He was upstairs right now, manning their spot in artists’ alley. The one they had spent months scraping together funds for in hopes that they could really make a go of all this.

  Silently, Astrid packs up her ever-growing collection of Jetstream uni-ball pens, her glasses, and finally her notebook, its pages full of secret letters, story scribblings, and haiku descriptions of passersby: Rotund Robin comes / Caped Crusader smiles, grateful / Their night play begins.

  “Where you goin’?” Mimi demands, in a voice that spoke of razor blades stashed under the tongue. Mimi was tiny, but in an instant her body could radiate this rude-gal aggro energy that Astrid had all too often taken the brunt of. Astrid’s tongue would grow heavy with blood and conciliatory words yet unsaid, only for Mimi to flip the script entirely and threaten to “cut a bitch” just for looking at Astrid “funny,” stank-eye connoisseur that she was, nobody was allowed to step to her crew, and “crew” meant Astrid too. It boggled the mind.

  “Just heading to the booth right quick,” says Astrid. Booth is a misnomer really, it was just a table they were sharing with another vendor, some dude hawking a cheesy bootleg comic about homicidal bees called Stinger.

  “Yeah, you tell the booth I said hi,” Mbola says, then turns to Mimi, “ ’cause that booth is fine as shit.” Mbola has a crush on Young Yoon. An insistent one. She thinks he looks like Night—the humanoid robot cum heartthrob from her all-time-fave Japanese soap opera, Zettai Kareshi. She also thinks Astrid is secretly dating him. She is a dim bulb: her belief in Astrid’s frequent assertions that they are “just friends” flickers off, and on, and off again, fickly.

  “You hear me, Astrid?” asks Mbola. “I said tell Young Money I said ‘make that paper.’ Get that shmoney. Get it. Get it.” She’s dancing and dipping low as she chants the last of it, doing a little butt bounce that would have been innocuous on anyone else but in those tight, low-rider jeans with her disproportionate “all my height went to my donk” derriere. Wow. Just wow.

  “Shut up, Mbola,” Mimi commands. “Come on, Astrid. Don’t be mad, girl. You promised. The panel, remember? The open buffet of K-town hotties. I’ll buy you some boba after. You know I know what you like.”

  The panel that afternoon featured stars from Boys Over Flowers, Mimi’s all-time-fave Korean soap. Astrid had signed up to be Mimi’s Rosetta Stone wing-woman, helping pull guys with the few Korean phrases Young had taught her. Simple stuff, really, like “hello,” annyeong, and “goodbye,” annyeong.

  “Annyeong,” Astrid says, fidgeting with her katana strap, watching the growing frown on Mimi’s face. “I’ll be back. Just checking in to see if we sold anything.”

  She doesn’t want to come back, doesn’t want to return to the cutting laughter and faux camaraderie of these frenemies, but she knows she will. She is Elastigirl (cue sad trombones), bending and contorting to the will of others in a single fold. She hates this about herself, knowing that she will give up all this comic book mishegoss and cave under seismic maternal pressures to head off to an Ivy far, far away, leaving Young in the more experienced hands of Mbola. It doesn’t take X-ray vision to see this. But for now, in this fantasy land, nothing is decided. She is surrounded by mild-mannered accountants, data entry specialists, computer analysts—assorted neckbeards. All shedding their daytime skins, thrilling to their secret identities in a dreamscape free from the mundanities of rumored downsizings, late mortgage payments, and vacant relationships. For a brief time, they all are heroes. Her too.

  • • •

  That morning, Astrid marveled at the surprising ease of her escape from home. As strongholds go, the Atangana household is rather well fortified, its days regimented by a rigorously upheld agenda of activities sanctioned by her mother. The totemic family calendar marks them all: “Saturday, October 27, 10am-2pm: Mrs. Atangana—church dinner planning meeting // Mr. Atangana—golf with colleagues at Fairlawn // Astrid—college prep with M.F.” M.F. is Mimi, with whom she is supposedly prepping for next week’s college campus tour. As alibis go, Mimi is pretty ideal. She is a play-cousin, from a suitable Cameroonian family that attends the same church as her own and who, above all, possesses the same immigrant values: education and hard work. The Forjindams own a similar beige-painted-by-numbers, prefab mansion a few blocks away from the Atanganas. Both families stoically take their steep suburban tax lumps so that their kids can grow up in nice homes, with really nice neighbors and even nicer school districts.

  Mimi never makes straight As like Astrid in said schools, but she does sing soprano in their church’s youth choir, the ultimate imprimatur of a “good girl.” With a thrill, Astrid sometimes imagines the look on her mother’s face if she ever found out that Mimi had her purity ring resized so she could slip it off effortlessly when she went out on dates. She knows what face her mother makes around Mbola already: the upturned nose, the repeated sniffing. Mbola is a distant relative of the
Forjindams. She lives in East Orange, the bizarro West Orange, where her asylum-seeker parents braid hair, tend other people’s lawns, and receive ill-considered hand-me-downs and handouts from their West Orange kin. Even further removed from making straight As than Mimi, Mbola teases Astrid for “talking white” and attends a crowded high school with metal detectors and girls named after luxury cars and liqueurs like Alizé and Lexus. Astrid’s mother thinks Mbola is an unsavory influence. “Unsavory” like corrupt food left too long on a countertop.

  “… and make sure you remind Mrs. Forjindam to bring her okra stew to the church dinner this Sunday, Astrid. That lay-lay woman likes to ‘forget’ her duties on purpose,” said her mother that morning, cleaving through the family room and its stuffy coterie of plastic-covered couches on her way to the garage. Astrid, her proximity alert blinking rapidly, had hurried in from the kitchen, only three steps behind the hull of her mother’s retreating form.

  “Astrid! See me trouble, oh. Where is that girl?” Her mother had stopped, midstride, suddenly sensing that perhaps she hadn’t been automatically attended to.

  “I’m here, Mummy,” Astrid said, bending slightly at the waist, performing the obligatory obeisance that helped her push past these moments faster.

  “Yes, you are. Don’t forget what I told you about the dinner,” said her mother, charging forward once more into the garage. Hiking up into her towering Benz S-Class, her mother ticked through her checklist: Put dishes in washer, Astrid (garage remote in hand, garage door lifting with the slow mechanized creak of an outdated android), Call your grandmother, Astrid (keys turn in the ignition, the craft readies for departure).