By Any Means Necessary

by Candice Montgomery

  That definitely wakes me up. The thought of Gabe dancing. “What, right now?”

  “No, yesterday. Yes, right now,” he says. His smile is so patient. So gentle. There’s no intent behind it, and he’s really not a huge pusher. Which is to say, he actually is just asking me if I want to join him. There is no expectation in saying yes and no harm in saying no.

  That’s all the thought required for me to stand, pull Gabe up with me, and throw a peace sign at the group.

  Clarke sings, “Torrey and Gabey, sitting in a tree.”

  And, yes, because they are all five, CAKE choruses, “K-I-S-S-I-N-G!”

  Cheyanne claps in a timid way that mirrors her personality, and Desh uses his thumb and forefinger to whistle louder than God at us.

  I pull my hood over my head and whisper-yell, “Jesus, will y’all please shutthefuckup, it’s late as hell, and I’m too Black to be out here making this much noise on a white college campus like that.”

  “Us, too,” CAKE says in unison.

  Do you think they practice this? Maybe they all share a brain. No, never mind. Not possible. Can absolutely admit they are the smartest people I’ve ever met.

  Gabe slips his arm around me, pulls my back tight up against his chest, and rests his chin on the dip of my shoulder. He’s laughing and carefree, and I don’t know what we’re all on or why or how, but I think it’s a good thing. I know it’s a thing I shouldn’t question the way I do with everything else. And I think I can feel whatever exhale of a moment my friends live inside of all the time, whereas I only let myself watch others enjoying it.

  We slip through the studio’s back gate. My hand in his, he tells me the manager of the studio never locks it, for no other reason than he is dumb as rocks and that’s basically it. There’s another half beat of time where I think maybe I should protest and weigh the consequences of what is essentially two Black boys breaking and entering.

  I don’t though. And that is a victory for me.

  Here, now.

  We only have illumination from the lights that are intentionally left on each night but it doesn’t even feel like the rest of the overhead lighting should be necessary for moments like this.

  Inside, the space smells like wood. It feels softer in here, quieter and also louder in some ways.

  Ducking into a small closet on the far end of the studio, Gabriel emerges a moment later, shirtless, lower half wrapped in what I think are biker shorts? And with taped feet? I’m clueless here.

  Doesn’t matter though, because he moves. He starts moving to no music, and then there is music. A symphony of legs, limbs. He is dance as a gale force. Gabriel Silva dances like oblivion.

  And then he’s spinning circles around me, brushing his fingers across my forehead in a simple hush. Silence doesn’t begin to cover it when he stops moving. For a moment, I think the world is going to end if he doesn’t kiss me, and I almost can’t breathe with the need for it.

  We are kismet: He reaches for me in the same breath that I reach for him, and then he’s saving me with every promise possible, hidden inside a kiss. Promises I don’t think I’ll ever get from anyone else.

  I press closer to him the minute I start to feel my thoughts rip him away from me. He tastes like mint, beginnings, healing, sea salt, and sunlight.

  He pulls back for a moment, meets my eyes in a way that says, It is okay.

  “I’m here. I’m right here,” he says, the softest smile hidden just there. “I’m right here,” he repeats, just before pressing a tear into the swell of my cheek.

  I’m so used to people fucking leaving. Staying is not a thing I expect from anyone anymore. But this? I’m all in for this one, y’know?

  This is an obligation I’m willing to nurture into something big. I’m willing to do the work, leave it under the sun, watch it bloom into new colors, hope it doesn’t curdle.

  Obligation isn’t so bad when you choose it for yourself.

  It’s then that I know I’m staying.

  I meet with Coco every morning an hour before class as mandated. It’s been the same ritual for weeks now. I show up at 6:58 a.m., wait ten minutes, and then head downstairs to find her sipping coffee and reading the paper. There’s literally no reason for me to show up to her lecture hall when she’s not there, except maybe I think she wants me to show her that I can.

  Sometimes, it feels like a game. A joke between us.

  A lesson, even.

  … Ohhhh. Oh. Okay, yeah. I get it.

  After a few instances of exactly this dance, Coco has started leaving a latte and a copy of the paper on my side of the table. I always sit down to it wordlessly, flip the pages of what is honestly a well-curated student paper, pull in sips of caffeine with the same dedication I would use with a pipe.

  Vices. Funny how people think I’m too young to have them. I was old enough to be left behind, to find money to keep our lights on, and to almost singlehandedly bury the man that raised me.

  I’m not too young for anything anymore.

  “You look stressed, mijo.”

  I don’t know when she started calling me that, but it happened once and I didn’t question it, and its been happening ever since. I feel a little bit blessed by the weight of it.

  “I’m an eighteen-year-old college freshman,” I say in explanation.

  “Don’t get cute. You know what I mean.”

  I do. “If I say your class is the thing that’s stressing me out, do I still have to write the term paper?”

  “If you say my class is stressing you out, you’ll have to write two of them and turn both in next week.”

  I laugh but only because I know she’s serious. I know Coco a little bit now and because of that, I can tell you she’s absolutely not joking.

  “I’m staying,” I say.

  “I didn’t know we were leaving,” she responds, eyes still glued to her paper.

  Draining the last of my coffee, I say, “No. Me. I am staying. Here. Enrolled in school.”

  Coco glances up sharply and if I didn’t know she liked me as a person before, I know it now. That much emotion from her, the way her eyebrows stand at attention. Not something I’ve seen in her before. She doesn’t smile so much as subtly lift one side of her long mouth when she says, slowly, “That’s news I’m glad to hear.”

  Nodding, I mumble, “Yeah. It’s good.” Scary and big and good.

  “You let me know if that changes. You come to me, and you let me know what you need.”

  I should look at her, meet her stare. But I can’t. Not until she demands it by throwing the balled-up wrapper of a straw at me.

  “I will,” I promise. And I actually feel really good about it at the time.

  I’m sitting at my seat in Coco’s half-circle-shaped lecture hall, the lights dim as they always are, when I pull up a webpage on my laptop in front of me. The school should have known we’d only use these things for Facebook browsing and that one oddball who watches porn in public.

  Once Google loads, I type in one word: gentrification.

  It’s the first thing I think of when it occurs to me I should know what I’m looking at when this meeting with Oily Rich comes around. Figure research and preparation are the best ways to combat anxiety.

  Gentrification is the very beginning of that.

  In a perfect world, some jackass on the Internet is able to prove me wrong. To tell me that what’s happening to the apiary and the rest of the neighborhood isn’t actually gentrification, that this situation doesn’t check all those boxes.

  So, the first couple sources I find presuppose that I am an idiot. They’re the dictionary definition of the word, the wiki link, and a geotagged government-run resource page.

  Fourth on the list is the Urban Dictionary link, which I open just for shits and giggles.

  The user entry says: When a bunch of white people move to the ghetto and open up a bunch of cupcake shops.

  You are not wrong, Tucan121. You’re not wrong at all.

  I don�
�t close out that tab because it’s the closest I’ve ever come to a laugh about this situation. I know I’m supposed to be washing my hands of this whole thing. I’m aware, stop me, Susan. It’s just that my hands are still technically dirty. So I’m still in this. The last thing I owe the farm is my due diligence. So I sit low in my seat, knees kissing the back of the auditorium-style seat in front of me, and I ignore Coco’s lecture in favor of Google in the name of intel.

  Business card out of my wallet, I type in the web address listed just under his name (the name he wishes he had). Rick Mathew.

  The page opens slowly because the campus Wi-Fi is kind of trash, but once it does, I’m consumed. I’m entirely engrossed in the contents that unfold in literally the ugliest puke-mint-pastel-green color scheme I’ve ever seen.

  His company’s relatively new. They’ve got a ton of testimonials from people I’ve never heard of (not that I know anything about … whatever this is), Big Shot Whatever Whomevers, but I’d put a lot of money down on the fact that they’re all straight, white, middle age, and male.

  There is a sudden sensation of what feels like cold metal pressed to my gums and saliva pools in my mouth. I know it’s a weird description, but the feeling’s not new. It usually means one of two things: I am going to get a debilitating migraine, or I’m anxious.

  The body’s got a lot of ways of warning us when something’s off. Most people ignore them. I read this study once that said if more people told their physicians about their physical responses to stress, fear, anxiety, et cetera, doctors would have three times the amount of information they do regarding how to treat those issues and disorders.

  I click through to the site’s contact page, through its “about” section and then on to its affiliates page.

  Demolition sites.

  There is a moment here when I cross over into the kind of anger there ain’t no coming back from. Demolition. And I become a boy made of gravel.

  I make it through all eight of the listed links, most of which boast Dick’s name somewhere, noting that he’s played a part in developing said companies in some capacity or another.

  How? Why … why would he be this connected to so many of them if—

  Demolition.

  Shaking my head, I exhale, tired. He is going to tear down my apiary.

  I swallow it down, all the exhaustion, all the hope, all the potential for bigger and better. And it’s like cold metal slips down my throat impermissibly. I am helpless to catch it in exactly the same way I’d been unable to catch what was going on with the apiary in the first place.

  Switching to my Messages app, I shoot one off to Gabe.

  ME: I think the guy taking over the apiary lied. I think he lied to me, Gabe.

  He texts back fast. Lied like how? How do you know?

  I don’t know. Not for certain. I’m sitting in class and I Googled. Gdi Gabriel, I Googled.

  GABRIEL: I love it when you use “Google” as a verb

  ME: Gabriel. He’s affiliated with like, eight demolition companies and projects. His name is all over some of these websites I’m seeing! Maybe I should tell him I’m out? That I don’t want to go any further.

  GABRIEL: Okay, what I’m about to say to you, I say out of complete and utter adoration.

  ME: I’m listening and also ready to be thoroughly offended.

  He always overdoes it with the cry-laugh emojis and here, the situation’s no different. You worry too much, Torr. You’re literally about to work yourself up into a serious fervor over what could totally be AND PROBABLY IS just a thing that won’t apply to you. You’re meeting with him to talk, right? So, talk to him. Hammer out the details, fine print, the I’s and the T’s or whatever when the time comes for that. Get it? Hammer. Demolition. ???

  ME: Cute. Very cute. It’s my farm, though. It’s Miles’s and my farm. I can’t just walk away from it.

  GABRIEL: At all, or right now? Because, príncipe, I’m not sure you’re being very honest with either of us here.

  I exhale so loudly Coco’s head snaps up right in my direction. “Everything okay, Torrey, or do you need to excuse yourself for some kind of deep-breathing yoga retreat?”

  “Too many white people at those things, Coco.”

  Some of the class laughs. Coco does not.

  “Yes, well. Mayhap you ought to keep some of the implied techniques to yourself. Reserve them for a later time.” And then she turns back to the whiteboard and keeps lecturing.

  Look, Gabriel continues. I’m just saying, don’t cross any bridges before they’ve even been built.

  I feel like I am quite literally in love with this boy, but he’s a Pisces in every sense of the word. Free and whimsically careless in ways that both terrify and excite me because they exist in such opposition to who I am.

  My email app is already up, so it’s the work of a moment to shoot off an email to Ryan Q.

  I don’t message Gabriel back, in case that wasn’t implied by the way I so quickly type out an email to the Collective’s sort-of lawyer. It stands to reason that he’s helped in the past and I think he can again. Right?

  Yes, it does occur to me that I’m composing this email as though my laptop has offended me, cursed out my moms, and told my granmama her wig is greasy.

  I get it. But that’s not any kind of psychosis on my part. It’s just urgency.

  That, I guess, is what gentrification does. It’s colonization. It’s genocide. It’s displacing brown people in ways that generations of their families are destroyed by. I am doing this for my uncle Miles. But I’m also doing it for the neighborhood, against all reason, sure. But the fact remains that I’ve got skin in the game.

  Hey Q,

  Torrey McKenzie. Emery’s friend. With the bee farm.

  Anyway, I asked her to pass along your email info and hoped you might have time—literally any time and, of course, at your leisure—to answer some questions for me? I’m pasting the link of a company below. Just want to know how much of this business is kosher, if any. I got approached by someone from this firm not long ago, and they’re interested in my bees. Or, I mean. I think they are ??? They say they are. That they’re interested in the property, yes. But also in preserving what’s already there.

  Thanks for literally any help you can provide, man.

  T.

  21.

  I’m “studying” at the library with Gabe, which feels like a very adult thing to do. You go study. With your boyfriend. In your college campus’s library.

  Since I started school here, my days seem to taste less and less like childhood and more like rough decisions and their consequences. I mean, with the Add/Drop deadline having passed yesterday, I’m at a wall. An impasse. This meeting with Tiny Dick Rick has to go well. If it doesn’t, I run the risk of having to leave school, taking an automatic fail in all my classes, thereby annihilating my GPA for any future college potential, and owing the college money.

  To say the least, I’m stressin’ it. And you know who can see it? Gabriel.

  Whom I can feel staring at me.

  Is that weird? His attention’s always been like a physical sensation to me. I glance up from the $80 textbook I’m highlighting in and, yes. He is very much staring at me. The way he lifts an eyebrow, stretching his legs, all length and sinew, across the floor, is a dare if I ever saw one. And it’s then I realize I am no longer peeking or glancing at him so much as staring with every possible thought running through my head made loud and clear.

  “What?” I say, as if I don’t know.

  “I can’t stare at you?” he counters, and it is the most sexual nonsexual act I’ve ever experienced.

  I shake my head, a quick, jerky, back-and-forth thing to say Uh, no. You may not. Because my lips don’t work properly anymore.

  He chuckles to himself and goes back to studying. Aka, playing Pokémon GO on his phone for a few more minutes before he stands abruptly.

  “Whoa, take it easy, Turbo.”

  “What?” he laughs. “Are
you seventy?”

  “You’ve been playing Pokémon for an hour on your phone. And you’re talking about my age?”

  On a stretch, he says, “Touché, jerk. I need to move.” And it’s so typically Gabriel that I want to squeeze him. But he starts doing this long series of … turns? With this, like, pointy leg-out move?

  Look, whatever it is, it’s goddamn beautiful.

  He is goddamn beautiful.

  I take out my phone and capture it on Insta story with a muttered, I’m-so-done-but-actually-so-just-getting-started, “Oh, my God.” Which is about the time Gabe notices, stops, and all but sprints at me, Usain Bolt style, climbing into this very hard plastic chair with me, smacking a series of sloppy, wet, I-am-a-four-year-old kisses on me.

  And I realize I’m still holding my stupid thumb down on the record button.

  “Oh, shit!” I say, too loud.

  The “Shhhh!” that comes back at me from somewhere in the general vicinity of the library help desk is comical.

  Gabe snatches the phone from me, hops off my lap, and glances at me. “I’m posting it.”

  “Wait, I need content approval first, those are the rules!”

  “Says who?”

  “Well, it’s my phone and my account, so. Me, basically.”

  He nods seriously. “Fair.” Then, “Anyway, you can have it back now because I already did it.”

  “London!”

  “Torrence!”

  And goddammit I laugh, I can’t help it. “You’re the worst human I’ve ever met; I need to have a word with your mother about her carelessness with birth control.”

  “Okay whatever, masochist, you like me.”

  “Semantics.”

  “You want me.”

  I scoff and thank whomever-the-hell for my dark-ass skin. No human as dark as me has ever been caught blushing. “We’re not having sex.”

  He pulls back and it dawns on me that he is still in my lap like a cat. Comfortable and proprietary. “Wait. Like, ever? Or just right now?”

  “Would it be an issue if I said both?” I’m not saying both. It was just a dumb comment because there was all this implication and innuendo flying around in the air, and I got nervous and, yeah. I don’t know.