By Any Means Necessary

by Candice Montgomery

  “Well, no, Torr. Asexuality is a thing. I just didn’t know it was your thing.”

  I shrug. “It’s not. But look at you being all woke and shit.”

  He climbs off my lap, starts shoving books back into my bag.

  “What are you doing? I’m not done studying!”

  He scoffs. “You weren’t studying.”

  Who even scoffs? No one. That’s who. Not unless you’re the villain in a Disney movie.

  “Yes, I was.”

  “Yeah, okay. Sure—me.”

  Now I scoff. Doesn’t feel right. See?

  He places the bag on my shoulder before taking my hand and leading me toward the exit. He’s right anyway. I wasn’t studying. I was hyperfocusing on the meeting with Rick that’s happening a few hours from now and getting distracted from that because Gabriel can’t do anything unattractively for even, like, a second.

  But then, immediately after Gabe’s distraction, I get sucked back into stressing about this meeting and the fact that Ryan Q hasn’t emailed me back yet.

  I text Emery. Heard from Q lately?

  EMERY: No, why?

  Dammit.

  “Torrey?” Gabe says.

  “Gabriel.”

  “Don’t say ‘woke.’”

  “Ironically?”

  “Don’t.”

  I laugh way too loud and another aggressive “Shhhh!” gets thrown at our backs as we hit the elevators. These people are so glad to see us leave.

  Kennedy and I are walking up to the Black Student Union to talk to someone about extra help with our shared Critical Theory paper. Marxism is a bitch. But so is MLA formatting.

  It’s always been easy with Kennedy. She’s just my brand of quiet but not awkward, and considering who we both are as people, that’s really saying something. We’re both pretty big on internalizing our issues before we decide to share them.

  “Helps with the delivery,” Kennedy always says. “If I can just really break down things to the root of what I’m trying to say, it’s easier to get it out sometimes.”

  Which is why, I think, we spend so much time walking toward the BSU’s learning center in silence. Until Kennedy says, “I don’t think I want to study programming anymore.”

  She’s a few steps behind me, which is how Kennedy lives her life, it seems—a few steps behind but somehow still a few jumps ahead, too. “What do you mean? You want to take on some other branch of STEM?”

  “Mm. No, I kind of want to look into art history.”

  I turn to her. “That’s … different.”

  Kennedy nods, hefting her backpack higher up her shoulder. The evening classes are just starting, and the buttery lights of the campus lamps come awake slowly.

  Do you ever think that your surroundings communicate with each other? I do. It feels like that now. Like, these lights maybe had a long discussion with the weather.

  Ayy. We’re getting real dreamy tonight, temperature.

  Yeah, yeah. Soft and dreamy. You lamps, always the same.

  I promise I am not high.

  “I know it is,” she says, a small, tentative smile pushing at her cheeks.

  “Wanna tell me how you got here?”

  “I’ve kind of always wanted to pursue art. I just didn’t know how to tell the other girls that STEM doesn’t do it for me like that. It’s not meant to be my career. It’s not a lifestyle thing for me. Coding was much better when I only did it for fun. After that, it’s like, yeah, I’d really just rather not, you know?”

  I do. Kind of like me and beekeeping. Did you know bees aren’t born just knowing how to make honey? The younger bees are taught how to make honey by the older ones. Like unpaid bee internships.

  “When is your birthday?”

  “I’ll be eighteen in December,” she says.

  Not far away. Few months from now. “Okay, well, as someone older, can I tell you something, Ken?”

  She rolls her eyes as we get settled at a circular table in the BSU’s lounge and wait for our student aide.

  “Yes, old man. Please bless me with your wisdom.”

  “As someone older, I am saying to you—fuck ’em.”

  She drops her binder and turns to me, a laugh in her throat. “What?”

  So I enunciate, “Fuck. Them.”

  “Not tracking.”

  “Listen, CAKE is CAKE because it’s a more-cool-than-stupid acronym for your names, and that’s it.”

  “Okay, go fuck yourself, though?”

  “I am sorry, woman, but listen. My point still stands, I’m getting wisdom-y as shit. If your breaking away from STEM can’t keep you guys the same old quad you’ve always been, then it wasn’t going to stay that way much longer anyway. It’d mean the friendship was flimsy.”

  “It isn’t!”

  “I know it ain’t! I’m just saying.”

  A tall redheaded girl comes to the table. She has super thick, frizzy curls and her cheeks are trying to eat up the rest of her face, but those ice blue eyes in her head are putting up a gnarly fight about it.

  “Hey. I’m Spicy. Are you guys Torrey McKenzie and Kennedy Jane?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  Kennedy nods but is what I think people usually call punch-drunk. The way she’s looking at this girl just confirms so many of my suspicions.

  Kennedy is gayyyyy.

  “Is Spicy a nickname, or were your parents just one of those California hippie couples who name their kids flavors they’ll never remember to use in the kitchen?”

  “Torrey!” Ken punches me so hard, right into one of my pecs-that-aren’t-actually-pecs. I’m a beekeeper, okay? I’m not out here trying to bench press small children.

  Spicy White Girl™ laughs so hard I worry that one of the veins I can see in her arms will rupture. “No,” she says, sobering. “Name’s actually Seraphina Spicer. Spicy for short because I don’t want people thinking they can call me Sera or Seraphina.”

  “Spicy it is,” I say. “Think you can take a look at our paper and tell us if we’re on the right track?”

  Fumbling much less than I figured she might, Kennedy hands Spicy our stapled ten-pager just as Spicy pulls out a chair and takes a seat next to her.

  Spicy reads out loud in this weird, almost inaudible ASMR whisper.

  While we’re waiting for her to finish, Kennedy pulls out her phone and tries to conceal the fact that she runs a porn Tumblr. Ken is large. Ken contains multitudes.

  I leave Kennedy feeling decidedly worse than I did earlier today. Anxiety eats at me, sitting just under my skin, pulsing in spots and then swimming away.

  I walk and walk and don’t know where I’m going. It hits me then—there’s not a place on this stupid campus that feels like safety or solid ground beneath my feet.

  Except, maybe, for Gabriel. Wherever he is, I feel like I’m at my most calm.

  The walk to his dorm is even farther than the walk to my own dorm. But it’s necessary. It’s basically dark now and those lights are still buttery but with a little more flare now, and my footsteps aren’t at all memorable. Which is how I come to find myself at the door to Gabe’s room, just sort of standing in front of it like it’s Platform 9¾.

  Geek reference, I know. I’m not above that, though, and neither are you.

  The door whooshes open after maybe a minute. Possibly two. And Gabe’s there holding a highlighter-pink flyer in his hand.

  Looks like someone made it on their mother’s 1997 version of Microsoft Paint.

  “Hi,” Gabe says. He’s so happy and God, just … so damn lovely, if that is a word I am even allowed to use. He’s lovely without even trying, which only makes him all the more so.

  Like, the way he pulls the corner of his bottom lip in with his teeth. Or the way he scrunches his nose up sometimes, the picture of adorable confusion. It’s the angles of his jaw plus his almost-feminine mouth. He’s the most explosive combination of brazen sexuality and unacknowledged innocence I’ve ever seen in a person.

  I’m datin
g a baby Adonis.

  Gabe presses a firm kiss right up under my jaw.

  “Príncipe?” he asks, tugging on the hem of my shirt. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

  He’s pulling me inside and I don’t know how I’m supposed to get words out right now. I don’t feel like myself. Not unless he’s touching me. So I squeeze his hand and beg him with my touch to be my anchor to this reality.

  What I’m about to discuss with Richard Mathew in just under two hours is big. So much bigger than me or anything I should be allowed to handle.

  I wish I could just get there and be done with it now.

  “Lisa?” Gabriel says. “Theo? Did something happen to Theo?”

  I shake my head, seated on his bed now. I think I’m sitting on the flyer, so I pull it onto my lap to find the flyer’s still in his hand, too. So now his hand is in my lap and all I can do is stare at it and shake my head as he runs a list of people who are important to me.

  “Your mom? Lisa? Are you sure it’s not Lisa? Mrs. Xu, Mr. Jones? God, Torr, you’re scaring me.”

  And that—that very thing right there—you’re scaring me—that’s the thing that wakes me up.

  “No, I’m fine. Just tired and overwhelmed and anxious about this meeting and also aggressively sure I’m about to bomb this critical theory paper.” Should I add a laugh in there for good measure?

  No time for a vote—I do it anyway. A good self-deprecating one, too.

  He runs an unsure hand up and down the front of my neck, down to my collarbones, fingers splayed. “Príncipe. You would tell me, wouldn’t you?”

  “If there were something to tell, yeah. Always.”

  He whispers, “Okay,” and presses his mouth to mine, whispering, again, just to be sure I’ve heard it and felt it, “Okay.”

  “What’s this?” I say, shaking the paper in both our hands.

  It really is the ugliest flyer I’ve ever seen. Jesus.

  “There’s this thing called an Undie Run. It’s later on tonight. Let’s go.”

  I give him a look. Just one lifted brow.

  “Yeah,” he says, “Let’s go. We can go be goofballs and take your mind off of things. Just let loose, y’know? It’ll be good. Good for all this.” He gestures at me.

  Skeptical, I ask, “What is it?”

  He shakes the flyer in my face, leaning all his weight into me. “What it sounds like, ya goober. You run around campus in your underwear with, like, a bunch of other people.”

  I stare at him. Goober.

  “I don’t know! It sounds like fun to me.”

  I shake my head and ask, “People run for fun?”

  “Apparently so.”

  “You understand that when a group of people is running away from something, it’s usually bad, and Black people don’t typically stop to ask questions. We just haul ass and book it in whatever direction everybody else is going.”

  “I’m sorry, are you explaining Blackness—Black culture to me? Of all people?”

  Ahh. Slippery slope with him. Gabe’s one trigger when we were kids was the not-Black-enough debate. His dad is Black. Like, Black as it gets. Like, Blackity-Black. Like, this-country-owned-your-ancestors Black. His mom’s Brazilian. Still ID’s as Black, but primarily Afro-Latina.

  Look, okay—it was a whole thing. For Gabriel—for London, a greener, newer heart—it mattered. It was a discussion he got so tired of having with people.

  Not one I could understand, really. So I just listened. It was really all he wanted. Someone to listen to him while he called them all bitches in his cracking, barely-there puberty voice. Identity politics is a hell of a thing for a thirteen-year-old to have to digest.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to him now. “You’re right. I don’t have to and never have had to explain that kind of shit to you. Let’s meet up here later and then we’ll go. Yeah?” I press up against him, no hands, and then kiss him because I’m not sure how else to say I’m sorry.

  He nods, quiet.

  “Yeah?” I say again.

  “Mm-hmm.” He runs his lips across the apple of my cheek, inhales. It’s ocean ripples, growing wider until they’re no more. It’s natural.

  Words … am I perpetuating the stereotype if I say I’m no good at them? Never have been. I just never learned that stuff and exploring it wasn’t an option.

  Quit bein’ a sissy, boy, ain’t nobody tryna be up in here talking about your delicate-ass feelings. Out here crying like a little girl. Go sit your ass on the porch then if you need to be emotional so bad.

  Theo made sure I never got a chance to touch it. And no one ever corrected him. Not Miles, not Lisa, not Moms when she was around. Not the neighbors or old Ms. Ollie down at the corner beauty supply that time Theo made me go with him to buy a new hair pick and caught me looking at some of the earring studs.

  Which is ironic.

  I kiss Gabriel because, instead, my family tried to teach me that expressing emotions was non-masculine.

  Two masc dudes kiss to express feelings that homophobia tried to rob them of.

  Write that tell-all.

  When he pulls away, he presses his forehead to mine. “Let’s just stay in.”

  I shake my head. “No. No, we should go. It does sound fun. Plus, if you wear your Spider-Man briefs, I’ll wear my Batman ones.”

  “The ones with the bat over the crotch?”

  “Yes, and BAT SIGNAL right across the ass.”

  He’s excited. I’ve made him happy. For a second, I am a college kid just trying to figure out how to coordinate underwear with my boyfriend—how to have a relationship with another person at all—and that feeling stays with me all the way up until I leave his dorm room to go change into the aforementioned mammal-crotch boxer briefs at my own dorm.

  22.

  I’m pulling the briefs up and settling them around my hips, running scenarios through my head about this meeting with Mathew when my phone does that double buzz that means I’ve an email waiting. I open it up to find Ryan Q has emailed me back, finally. I haven’t been waiting long, but it just feels like twenty-four hours is much longer than it actually is when you’re waiting on something like this.

  Torrey,

  Hey. Sorry about the delay. I’m sleep deprived and stacked on shit I have to do, but I know Emery would probably castrate me if I dropped the ball on this for you, so thank her and let her know how much I came through for you.

  That said, uhh, this guy is a fucking Sketch McGetch. Like, in a big way. I’m gonna link you to some articles I found that basically map out how this guy just jumps from business to business and has been totally infamous for orchestrating these low-key deals that backfire for the other parties involved.

  The companies he has listed at the bottom of his site aren’t ALL his, but he owns a percentage of enough of them that he could blackball each and still turn some kind of profit. There’s even one that’s local to SF. They just started working with the company that bought up that one restaurant in the Tenderloin.

  Torrey, hear me right now.

  Do not do business with this dude. He’s oily, bro. Dude’s a modern-day mobster with the way he’s sliding in and out of legal hang-ups. His MO seems to be that he’s been tearing up neighborhoods block by block and doing it through some super not-right deals. Deals that he’s reneged on. Some of the people in these deals have even tried to sue him, but none of their suits ever stick, and the ones that do often just get a settlement and then they’re closed.

  Better safe than sorry if you care about your family’s property at all.

  Let me know if I can answer any other questions for you.

  Good luck out there.

  RQ

  Shit.

  Shit shit shit!

  Abruptly, I’m on my feet, reaching into my back pocket for a worn, familiar business card.

  His voicemail picks up. “You’ve reached the offices of Rick Mathew. Leave your name—spelled twice, slowly—and a contact number, and I’ll return your call a
t my earliest convenience. For a more immediate response, please email me at R dash M at R dash Mathew Corp dot com.”

  And when that damn beep sounds, I go ape shit all over his voicemail.

  Spell your name twice, slowly my ass. I’m not spelling shit.

  “Hey, Dick!” Off to a great start here, aren’t we. “Torrey Aloysius McKenzie, here. I’m sure you won’t have any trouble spelling that. So listen, I’ve got some interesting information for you. Yeah, found it in an article. On the Internet, where information goes, not to die, but to be preserved in sixteen-point Comic Sans on local eNews sites.”

  Here’s a little from one such article:

  A California property management company is under investigation for allegedly collecting rent from its tenants and failing to pay property-tax owners.

  “Numerous complaints have been filed against R & M Management of Central California Properties and its owner, Richard-Fucking-Mathew.”

  I definitely improv’d that last bit. Seems they don’t know your nickname preferences either, Dick.

  “Here’s what I’m getting at: I know you own a ton of management companies across the fucking country. I know more than half are twice as oily as your pasty-ass forehead. I know you’ve been kissing my ass while trying to finesse me out of this property so you can eventually just screw us over the same way you always have and put a Whole Foods or a … a, I don’t know … a fucking kombucha factory in its place.

  “Well, fuck you very much, dickhead, I’ll give you hell at every turn and Black people don’t even like Whole Foods, we’re Trader Joe’s people. And, to make sure you really feel me, I need you to know that you won’t ever touch a single bee on my property. Consider this my cancellation of our meet-up later. You played yourself. Congratulations.”

  And I turn around after hanging up, phone clenched tightly in my hand, because if I loosen my grip on it at all, it’s going to get hurled against one of the walls in this hallway.

  I’m shaking. It’s never going to end. I can’t stay here, and it was so dumb of me to think it’d be this easy to wash my hands of it. To have my cake and eat it, too.

  God, I should have listened to Emery.

  Moms used to always say, “Hard head makes a soft ass.”