“You … talked to them?” I ask.
“Yeah! That’s what I’m trying to tell you. All you’d have to do is sign on the dotted line, pretty much.”
Just a signature. Maybe I could even have Ryan Q look over the legal documents. Though, I’m not even sure that’d be necessary.
I’m familiar with the farm.
The Addie Rose Apiary is located not far from campus. It’s in a better area for bee farming than the hot, smoke-heavy city air of Los Angeles. It’s a really nice place. We’ve been up a few times to tour, Uncle Miles and I, and they’ve come down to see us a few times, too.
Bob and Elaine Rose are the softest, kindest, most Precious Moments type of old white people, and it’s really hard not to beg them to adopt me at each visit.
They love bees.
They know bees.
They’ll be very well taken care of.
“I was such a jackass to you,” I say to Gabe. I can’t believe he did all this.
“You weren’t. I get it, okay? I hope that you understand, that now, I understand. Miles is important to you. And I also hope that with your bees moved, maybe a little of him can still live on. In a different way than we thought, but still somehow existing.”
JFC. Like hot water poured into a pool of cold, the warmth in my chest starts right there in the middle and only spreads bigger and bigger, in ripples, out of me. I’m so happy. My heart is such an asshole. Everything hurts. Because this is the kind of bending no one has ever done for me. Nothing hurts. I know, right then, that he’d promise me the moon and break it in two if it meant I’d smile for even just a moment. That’s who London Gabriél Silva is.
I exhale. “I am such a complete bonehead. I want you as you are. Would never ask you to change a single thing about you.” I lower my voice to a whisper. A whisper in this big, public place. “My dancing, magical boy with his heart perpetually open and exposed.”
“For you. Only for you, though, Torrey McKenzie. I’m going to stop running. You’re right. I’ve lived this sort of free-floating life, and I can absolutely afford to come back down to Earth every now and again.”
He would be the most beautiful Icarus, I think. Dancing a little too closely to the sun all his life.
Gabe presses a kiss to the corner of my mouth just seconds before Desh walks up and grabs us both up into the most annoying hug and then walks away.
Low-key though, it feels amazing. Do not tell Desh I said so.
I laugh and lace my fingers on top of my head. “You did all this. You did all this, and I don’t deserve you.”
“Shut up,” he says, a kiss pressed gently to my lips. A dragging, pulling thing.
Gabriel finds me again after what seemed to be a lengthy conversation with Mr. Jones. Weird and unexpected, I know. If anyone could have managed to get Mr. Jones talking, it’s Gabe.
“I like him,” Gabe says.
I glance back at Mr. Jones, whose eyes catch mine. His face is that same old frown, all bottom lip.
“Yeah, he likes you, too.”
Mrs. Xu walks up and hands him a WE WILL VOTE YOU OUT poster. I try not to look too hard but he grabs it reluctantly and doesn’t even put it down when she walks away to push food into the hands of a few people from the Collective.
Gabe laughs, not understanding. “You seem nervous.”
“Do I?” I say. I’m not even sure he can hear me over the din that’s inhabiting the neighborhood, bodies dodging around one another, familiar faces finding one another from across the street.
Across the way, my cousins Rhyan and Parris and a half dozen kids, probably a year or so younger than me, stand in a semicircle, freestyling. They’re all wearing grey sweatpants and Jordans, which seems like the official uniform of protest.
“Yes. Estás bem?”
I lift my shoulders, ready to deny it. But why? Why should I? “Gabriel. Are we making a mistake? Protesting like this?”
“Oh, príncipe,” he says. “This is not a mistake. Discussions, dialogue, policy proposals—they wouldn’t listen to us.”
I nod, but that’s not enough for him, so he continues. “You know, Pac said once, in this interview, that the music he made was made that way for a reason. Black people started out with a basic request for equality and civility. We even said ‘please.’ And we got denied. So we made another request. That time, we didn’t say please, and we also got just a little bit louder in volume. So after so many attempts at showing them the kind of civility we wanted given to us, we stopped worrying about respectability politics and words like civility. So now our requests for what are essentially our constitutional rights don’t come with inside voices and the word please. Now we raise our fucking voices and scream ourselves hoarse and we demand, and we are not polite about it. All this to say, príncipe—are you listening?”
He takes my hand, squeezes, and goes on, “All this to say that you’re doing the right thing.”
I look down, but he doesn’t let me get away with it. A finger under my chin, he meets my stare and says, “Look around. You’re doing the right thing.”
After a second or so, I catch Aunt Lisa’s gaze and she smiles, winks, then turns back to Mrs. Jericho.
These individuals who’ve lived, loved, and worked in this neighborhood all their lives, these people who care so much it hurts them, these scorched-earth young activists—they’re all here. Ready. Sure.
I owe them the same.
Issa protest, y’all.
And, goddamnit, do we ever. The farm is out of my hands now, gone and out of my control. But this? This is well within my control. Using who I am to demand something so basic as the preservation of life—that I can do. This protest is a message. It still has purpose.
Some buy T-shirts and others sign clipboards. A single mother of four children speaks to those who need bolstering, giving them her story, having won several court battles against her landlord who has been hellbent on trying to raise the rent on her eastside apartment building.
When the police do show, and the skin on the back of my neck prickles, we hold. They use the loudspeakers to “advise” us to stand down and go home.
We’re having none of that. The marching band from Roosevelt, a local high school, uses their saxophones, violins, trombones, and trumpets like weapons to drown out their unwelcome warnings.
I’ve known all along that the only thing that’d really halt gentrifiers is intimidation.
The only thing that works is fear, Torrey. The fear of harm. So we got to take small steps, little by little, and show them that same thing. Because they are harming us.
Uncle Miles told me I wouldn’t understand it when I was a kid. That someday, I’d be a man and then it might make more sense.
He was right.
Our ranks are small, and the tactics we’ve chosen to employ at this protest will be called controversial, even within the communities we’re defending. But as young millennials of color, on fire for something bigger than ourselves, anxious over our economic standings in this country, I feel like we’re onto something. A newer, more militant war on gentrification.
34.
I don’t bother trying to stay the night in the city. After a high like today, it’s just not where I want to be. There’s a better spot for my heart to hang out these days, and I’m going to take advantage of it.
Found families and all that.
I do run by there real quick though, once things have calmed and we’ve put our picket signs into the apiary’s freshest earth with wooden posts. There are a few things I want to get out of my room at Theo’s. Some pictures of me and Moms. I still have a couple of her favorite perfume bottles. Might be nice to have those things. You know, for when things maybe get a little rough, as life is wont to do.
It’s supposed to be an in-and-out procedure, so while CAKE and Desh drive back to San Francisco, Gabriel decides to come with me, and we decide we’ll catch the Amtrak later.
I should have known. I really should have known better.
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Theo’s seated on the living-room couch when I let myself in using the spare key. When I moved out, Theo made me leave my key.
He’s not shocked when I come inside, but I sure as hell am. It’s almost like he was waiting for me. He never hangs inside unless it’s in his cave of a bedroom. Those are his two options: bedroom cave or in the back, surrounded by dying plants and grass that the LA sun just couldn’t bother to have any mercy on.
“Heard your little party was a big hit with all the best minds in the city.”
He damn well knows it wasn’t a party. That adjective tells it all. “Little.” It’s the way Black people talk about things they deem worthless. To minimize them in stature. Toxic AF.
He’s also not serious about that “best minds in the city” thing. He doesn’t think anything about the hood is of value anymore—the apiary included. He moved here to live white adjacent, and when the neighborhood deteriorated in the early ’80s, so did Theo’s respect for the place he lives.
“Yeah,” I say, walking past him. Just in and out. In and out, Torr.
I hurry up the stairs, around the banister, and into my room. The one all the way in the back. It’s mostly empty. Emptier than I remember leaving it when I left for college or even the last time I was here with Emery. It would not at all shock me if Theo was coming in here to throw away my crap when I’m not around, just to be a spiteful POS.
I grab the small box under my bed where the two perfumes are nestled into newspapers that should have long since been turned into something else, and next to it is a thick photo album. There are photos of Moms and me, Uncle Miles and me, the three of us together. Even a good dozen with Aunt Lisa in them.
That’s all I need. I’m done. I hurry back down to my sweet boy with his rakish smile, all white teeth and strong jaw.
Just as I’m walking out the door, Theo, half asleep, calls, “What you taking out here? Don’t think you can come up in here and take things that ain’t yours, boy.”
“None of what I have or want is yours, Theo.” I turn to go again. In and out. Just in and out.
“It ain’t gon’ work,” he laughs. “Whatever y’all was doing today for that farm ain’t getting nobody nowhere. Watch.”
“Okay,” I mutter. “Whatever.”
Theo laughs again. “Little girl just running away. Always running.”
That stops me. It’s been … a day. A bit of a day. And, so, I’m not prepared to put up with Theo’s toxic-ass Black man homophobia. I’m so sick of this shit. I’m not doing it with him anymore. I’m done letting it happen.
“What the hell is the matter with you.”
He sits up, the motion so much smoother than I’ve seen him move in a long time. “I’m all you got, you know that.”
It’s not true. I’m all he’s got.
He goes on. “I’m all you got, and you don’t want no part of me. How’s that for some kinda family?”
I try to speak again, but he cuts me off. “You need to be done with me here. I can’t stand looking at you no more, I’ll be dead before I ever understand what this style of life is doing for you.” He shakes his head. “You were raised better than this. I know it’s bad parenting that got you here.”
Bad parent—what? Bad parenting made me gay? News to me.
“I thought I’d intervened soon enough. I’ll never understand, so what the hell’s the gotdamn point.” He’s quiet. And I think he’s done. And I’m trying to catch up to wherever he’s at. But then he says, “The way you live, this disgusting life you’re out here living …” He is this close to spitting at me. “It would break your uncle’s heart—”
“He knew,” I say. “He’d known for years.”
He is so quiet. So quiet and still. I worry for the first time in my life whether Theo is going to hit me hard enough to do irreparable damage. I didn’t think before I said that. I definitely should have thought before saying that. He’s a tempest. A mildly contained brush fire. A titan ready to be loosed. And just when I think to speak again or even raise my arms to protect whatever part of me he can hurt the most, he says, as all the oxygen in the room stills, “Get out.”
And I don’t hesitate. I take my box and my photos and I get out. The door is closed and I’m halfway across the street, close, so, so close to Gabriel’s arms, when I hear Theo scream, the rage of a wounded animal, “Don’t ever come back!”
It’s the sound of branches breaking under my feet.
I see my heartbreak mirrored in Gabriel’s eyes.
I feel it in the way he reaches for me and pulls me into his arms. “I’ll keep you safe,” he whispers. “We’ll shove this darkness into a box, and I’ll keep you safe.”
Violence is the first way Theopolis James McKenzie learned to hold anything. It’s then that I know I’ll do as he says. I won’t ever, ever, come back to this place.
35.
I was here.
It kind of makes sense why people feel the need to write that phrase on yellowing public-bathroom stall doors, high school yearbooks, and chalkboard walls in those hipster juice bars.
I want to leave my mark so everyone will know I was here. That, if I’m being honest, is also part of why I’m hanging on to the apiary with my claws sunk deep.
But maybe, it hits me, I need to find out what my bathroom stall door should be. Yes, this, too, is an awful metaphor. Take a shot every time I fire off a completely ridiculous analogy.
RIP your liver.
Point is … when I think about each of my friends, I see them having things they can call their own. CAKE has STEM—Kennedy’s even branching out to art history—Gabe has ballet, Desh has photography. Desh is one of those annoying people who will completely interrupt the flow of walking traffic to lie on the ground to “get the shot.” And me? I had a torrid love affair with my dead uncle’s bee farm. Not great on a resume. Probably.
I’m heading down to meet Coco, but when I get there, there’s a dude in one of the chairs at the table with her. My chair’s there, my coffee in the spot she always puts it in. When I sit, it takes a moment for either to put their respective papers down and look at me.
“Hi?” I say.
“¿Qué pasa? Si quieres una página …”
Coco almost never speaks to me in Spanish. But when she does, she always does it twelve times faster than any non-Spanish speaker could hope to comprehend. She’s patient with me though and has been working to slow it down a bit. And I’ve been teaching her about bees and honey harvesting. It feels like a pretty even trade.
“Yes, please. Who are you?” I say to homedude.
The guy laughs. He sounds like he’s swallowed a cup of gravel someone lit on fire first. Descriptive, I know. He looks like Jeff Goldblum, though, so. You’re welcome for that.
“I’m Dr. Ismael Palafox. I’m chair of the Agriculture Sciences department.”
“Okay,” I say. “Why are you here?”
Dr. Palafox turns to Coco. “Kid’s kind of proprietary, isn’t he, Coco?”
She shrugs. “I like him. He’s a smart cookie. Torrey is my research assistant.”
“I am?”
She ignores me. “Plus, he’s pretty good about punctuality, so he can be whatever the hell he wants, cabrón.”
Dr. Palafox laughs again. He does that a lot. Everything is always funny to white men, I’ve noticed.
“I’m here because Coco invited me. She mentioned your farm. I’m sorry about what happened. I do some work myself in the field. I imagine your Coco thought I might learn a thing or two from you. I think she’s probably right for once.”
She turns to me. “He’s just here to hold the boring sections of the paper that we don’t want, Torrey.” And then after a moment of giggling at something in the business section—????—she turns to me and says, “It pays shit money, but it’s certainly something, and you can work around and in between your classes.”
“I am her research assistant,” I say. And I sip my coffee and read about the state of our cou
ntry with two college professors, one of whom is my boss, I guess, which isn’t a thing I ever imagined myself saying.
What a time to be alive.
Normalcy.
It’s Gabriel’s casual kisses that make me feel like the world is tilting and twirling but remind me that I am not. Or the way he says, “Behave, príncipe,” when I make every move in any book ever written about how to seduce your boyfriend during study group.
It’s those nights I stop on a foggy Bay Area curb and text Emery or Desh from inside the mouth of a streetlamp.
It’s weekly FaceTime calls with Aunt Lisa, who—right now, in this very moment—looks at me with what I think is nervousness … or hesitation? Whatever it is, it’s got pins in her shoulders, lacing them up to a beam above her head, the weight of an anvil concaving her chest.
Whatever it is, it worries me.
“Titi. You good?” I say.
“Yeah, yeah! Hi, b—op! I almost tripped over this damn … Hi, baby. I’m okay. I’m fine. You alright? Eating?”
“Yes.” Same thing every week. SMH.
“Sleeping?”
“Yes.”
“Lotioning up after showers?”
“Yes, Titi. My God.”
“Uh-uh,” she says holding up a finger to the camera. “Don’t be out here trying to shame me for loving on you, especially once I’m moved all the way up to the Pacific Northwest and—”
“I’m sorry, what.”
“Mm. Didn’t quite finesse that little tidbit of news, did I?”
What the ever-loving fuck is she talking about? “What on Earth are you talking about?” Had to clean it up for her. She’d have me by the ear so fast.
I have to sit. I have to sit down. I do, I sit.
“I got a job offer. I’ll be doing what I love.”
Science. Science is taking her away from me. “Where at?”
“Seattle. So, not that far!” she rushes to add.
“Seattle?”
“I’m sorry, Torr. I just applied without really thinking I’d get it. I’ve known I got it for a little while now, but they’re giving me time to pack the house. And I wanted to stay … for the apiary, you know? Just in case? But I can’t live with him anymore, you know that. I’ve been here too long anyway and the job, baby, it’s perfect. They’re relocating me. Putting me up in a bomb-ass apartment.”
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