Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Astupid blue highlighter brought Dre back to me.
I found it in one of the half-open boxes near the bookshelf, buried beneath old notebooks, folders, and things I had packed because throwing them away felt too final when I was leaving New York.
The cap had bite marks along the edge, and the label was nearly rubbed clean from years of being tossed into bags and drawers.
I stood in my living room with a hammer in one hand and that highlighter in the other, and suddenly I was back at AWU.
Outside the student center between classes, sitting at one of the small tables near the breezeway because freshman-year Imani had convinced herself that corner would be quiet.
It was not.
Nothing near the student center stayed quiet for long.
People cut through in waves. Somebody was always laughing too loudly, calling a name across the walkway, arguing about a professor, begging somebody to scan them into the dining hall, or pretending they had somewhere important to be while clearly waiting to be seen.
I still had my Story & Place interview due Friday, which meant finding a Pittsburgh elder willing to let a freshman record an hour of their life for AWU’s Black Pittsburgh Archive.
Every first-year Royal complained about the requirement until the stories started coming in.
Then somebody’s grandmother, barber, old coach, choir director, or block captain would say one thing no textbook had bothered to keep, and suddenly everybody understood why the school made us listen.
Still, I had claimed my little table like optimism could change architecture.
My tote sat open at my feet. My notebook was full of color-coded ambition.
Two highlighters, three pens, sticky notes, a half-eaten granola bar, and my copy of Consumer Behavior took up most of the space in front of me.
I was tired, behind on reading, and due at a student-business association meeting in less than an hour, but younger Imani believed studying in public meant I had my life together.
I did not.
Dr. Yates had handed back my first paper in that class with enough notes in the margins to feel personal.
I had written about Black consumers like I was studying people from across a room instead of writing about people I knew, people I came from, people whose choices made perfect sense if you bothered to understand what mattered to them.
Near the bottom of the last page, she had written: You are not outside this audience, Ms. Bennett. Stop writing like somebody else has to approve what we value before it counts.
I had been irritated for two days. Then I rewrote the whole paper.
I was halfway through fixing a sentence when the energy around me changed.
You always knew when the football team was coming.
They traveled in packs and took up entirely too much sidewalk.
Big men in AWU sweats and backpacks, laughing loud enough for everybody around them to hear whatever foolishness had started before they arrived.
A few girls moved with them too, pretty and practiced, smelling like body spray and lip gloss, laughing at everything like laughter was the price of admission.
I glanced up once and immediately went back to my notes.
A handsome man surrounded by women was rarely an emergency I needed to involve myself in.
Then somebody clipped the edge of my table.
My book slid straight off and hit the ground with a flat, disrespectful smack.
“Oh, come on.”
I bent down at the same time a large hand reached for it.
Mine landed over his.
Warm skin. Long fingers. A little roughness at the knuckles.
I looked up.
Andre Fine Ass Jones.
Everybody knew him, even people like me who did not organize their week around football.
AWU’s running back. Number twenty-two. The one students were already talking about like college might only be the beginning of something much bigger.
I had heard his name enough to know it and seen his face on enough flyers and game-day posts to recognize him.
None of that prepared me for him up close.
Dark skin. Broad shoulders. Low cut. A serious mouth that changed completely when he smiled. He was fine in the kind of way that made a woman irritated with herself for noticing too quickly.
And he was looking at me.
At me.
“My fault,” he said.
His voice was lower than I expected. Smooth too, which felt unnecessary.
“It wasn’t you.”
“I was with them.” He picked up my book and handed it to me, his fingers brushing mine again. “Shared responsibility.”
A laugh surprised me before I could stop it.
His smile widened like he had been waiting for that exact sound.
One of the girls behind him stretched his name into three sweet, syrupy syllables.
“Dreee.”
I looked past him.
She was beautiful.
Then I looked at him again. “You travel with a full production?”
He laughed. “I don’t know them people.”
“Mmmhmm.”
“I’m serious.”
“You’re standing in the middle of them.”
“Circumstantial.”
I bit the inside of my cheek.
He was funny.
That was unfortunate.
“What you studying?” he asked.
I held up the book. “Consumer behavior.”
“For fun?”
“For a degree.”
“I figured that part.”
“Then why did you ask?”
His eyes narrowed slightly, but he looked more amused than offended. “Okay. You like giving people a hard time.”
“I like good questions.”
One of his teammates called his name from farther down the breezeway. Dre lifted a hand but did not look away from me.
I noticed that.
More importantly, he had not introduced himself like I was supposed to be impressed. He had not led with his name, his number, or whatever amount of campus attention already trailed him. He simply stood there holding my attention like he was curious what I would do with it.
“You always study out here?” he asked.
“Sometimes.”
“That means yes.”
“That means sometimes.”
“You got a name, sometimes?”
I stared at him.
The audacity was comfortable on him. Easy. Like he trusted the ground beneath his own feet and did not need me to confirm it.
“Imani.”
“Imani what?”
“Why?”
He blinked, then laughed. “Damn, you answer every question with one?”
“Only the questionable ones.”
His mouth curved again, and something in my stomach moved before I gave it permission.
“What?” I asked.
“That mouth.”
My eyebrows lifted.
His smile stayed, but his eyes warmed. “I mean you talk back quick.”
“That is not what you said.”
“That is what I meant.”
“Convenient.”
He laughed again, and I hated how much I liked it.
“Andre!” one of his teammates called. “Come on, man.”
I glanced toward them, then back at him. The girls were watching now. So were two of the players. Enough for me to remember where I was and who he was to everybody standing around us.
I hugged my book to my chest and stood.
“I need to get back to studying.”
His gaze held mine for one more beat, like he was deciding whether to keep me there a little longer.
Then he nodded.
“Aight, Imani.”
He let me go.
No demand for my number. No performance for the audience waiting behind him. He simply stepped back, joined the group, and walked away like he had not just interrupted the entire rhythm of my afternoon.
But he looked back once.
So did I.
Then I sat down, opened Consumer Behavior to the same page, and pretended any part of me remembered what I had been reading.
The first time Andre Jones entered my life, he picked up my book, made me laugh, and walked away.
My mother’s voice pulled me back.
“You heard me.”
I blinked.
The breezeway disappeared. So did the football players, the girls, the book in my hands, and nineteen-year-old Andre Jones looking back at me like he already knew he would see me again.
I was in my living room, standing in front of a wall I had changed my mind about twice, with a hammer still raised and an old blue highlighter trapped against my palm.
I turned. “What?”
Denise Bennett stood beside the kitchen island with one hand wrapped around a mug of tea she had reheated twice and forgotten to drink both times.
She had traded the heels she wore to church that morning for a pair of flats she kept in the car, but everything else remained intact: sleek bob curved beneath her chin, gold hoops at her ears, deep-brown skin, and the expression she had perfected while raising two children who occasionally believed they knew more than she did.
At five feet two, my mother had never needed size to command a room.
After almost thirty years in banking, she had worked her way from teller to regional vice president of community lending at Allegheny Trust, where she spent her days helping Black families and business owners get money from institutions accustomed to explaining why they could not have it.
At the moment, all that authority was aimed at me.
“You have been doing something since we got here,” she said. “The condo will survive if you stop moving.”
I looked down at the hammer, then at the highlighter, and slipped the highlighter onto the nearest shelf before anybody could ask why I was holding it like it had personally offended me.
“I skipped church specifically so I could get some of this done.”
“And yet here we are, hours later, still unpacking things you apparently needed to supervise personally.”
Daddy sat near the television console with his tie loosened and a screwdriver between his fingers.
Samuel Bennett had the height neither my mother nor I received, a broad chest age had softened only slightly, dark-brown skin, and the low haircut he maintained with military consistency.
He spent twenty-two years in Army logistics before retiring as a first sergeant and moving into government work.
Now he directed facilities and fleet operations for Allegheny County, which meant he could manage buildings, vehicles, contractors, multimillion-dollar budgets, and apparently the assembly of every piece of furniture I purchased.
Jabari had stretched his long body across my new couch as though supervising everybody else counted as his contribution.