Chapter 2
DEION
I had been in love with Nova James for years, which is not something I arrived at casually.
It didn’t announce itself. There was no moment, and damn sure no warning.
It arrived like a needle dropping into a groove you didn’t know was waiting.
Coffee shop on Baltimore Ave and she was describing a record she’d found, her whole face changed around the description, lit from underneath like a room when someone opens the curtains without asking.
That was it. I sat across from her and understood with complete clarity that I was in love with this woman.
And then I did what any reasonable person would do in that situation, which was nothing, because Nova James was my best friend and I was not willing to lose her.
Let me tell you what she looks like, because the way Nova James looks is relevant to my predicament.
She is five-two with her shoes on and carries herself like the ceiling is slightly lower than it is, the posture of a woman who has spent years moving through spaces built for someone else’s center of gravity.
Her hair is natural and she wears it differently depending on what the day requires, which she will tell you has a system, and it does, but which I have come to understand means loose when she is thinking, twisted back when she means business, and in a half-undone state around hour three or four of any afternoon when the careful morning has given way to just being a person in the world.
I have developed an awareness of what hour of the day it is based on her hair alone. This is not information I asked for.
She has a laugh she gives away freely but a smile she keeps for things that actually earn it, which means when the full smile arrives, it lands with the weight of something you worked for.
Her eyes move fast, the way they move across record sleeves, scanning for information before she has consciously decided to look.
She has a habit of tilting her head slightly right when a song does something she did not expect, like she is trying to hear it from a different angle, and I have watched her do this at tables and in cars and in her living room and have never told her, because then I would have to explain how many times I had.
Here is what I know about her that she does not know I know.
She sings under her breath when she is organizing, never a full song, always the same four or five bars of something, and it changes depending on her mood in a way she would never explain out loud.
She reads the last page of a book first. Not to find out what happens, she has explained, but to know whether the ending earns the beginning, which she says is useful before you invest. She is never late but she is never early either, arriving at exactly the right moment with the calm of someone who calculated the moment and found it acceptable.
She keeps a record she will not play. It lives in the back of the crates her mom left her, in a section only she understands, and in two years of standing in front of that wall I have never once seen her pull it.
Whatever it is, she is saving it for something. I have never asked what.
I love her because she is serious about the things worth being serious about and funny about everything else, in that order, without apology.
Because she will argue a position she is wrong about with the full commitment of someone who has decided being wrong is information she will process later, privately, on her own terms. Because she walks into a space and hears what it needs before anyone says a word.
Because when she handed me a record once and told me to listen to it alone first, I understood she had been paying the same attention to me that I had been paying to her.
And we had both been pretending not to notice.
It felt like the best thing that had ever happened to me and the beginning of a very long problem.
It was both.
I had been at WaxCon for twenty minutes before she found me.
She was at a table in the back corner run by the woman with the flower-shaped price tags who had the best eighties and nineties R&B in the building and knew it.
Nova’s coat was open, her bag over one shoulder, and she was doing the thing she did at record tables, holding completely still while her eyes moved.
Not scanning, just taking it in. The record she was looking at, the physical record itself, was small, but she was holding it with both hands the way you turned something over before you could decide what to do with it.
Her head was tilted right. The song hadn’t started yet but she was already listening to what the sleeve was telling her.
She looked up when I arrived at her elbow. Her face did the thing it did when she’d found something, the small brightness she couldn’t quite contain. “Look at this,” she said, and held it out.
I looked at it. Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles on Newtown Records, their first label before Atlantic, before anything. The Philly before the Philly everyone knew. The price tag said the woman with the flower stickers knew exactly what she had.
“It’s the right one,” I said.
“Yes it is,” she said, with the certainty of someone whose ear had already confirmed the decision and was just waiting for language to catch up.
She turned it over. Read the matrix number on the back.
Confirmed something with a small nod, the private acknowledgment of a woman who trusted her own reading.
The woman behind the table watched this happen with the patience of someone who had sold records to Nova before and understood the process. “She knows what she’s got,” the woman said to me.
“Always,” I said.
Nova sleeved it carefully, set it in her bag after paying, and moved to the next spot without ceremony.
I walked beside her. We went through four tables together, twenty minutes that felt like five because the conversation had its own logic and neither of us had anywhere more important to be.
She found two more records after I stopped by a few vendors with comics mixed in with their offerings and found something, a McDuffie signing that I had not expected to see outside an auction.
She looked at it and said that’s yours with no inflection, a statement of fact about an object and its correct owner, and I thought, as I had many times before, that there was no one I had ever found this easy to be with, which should have made everything simple and that the ease was precisely the thing making everything complicated.
Then her phone rang. She looked at it. “Simone,” she said. “I have to take this.”
“Go,” I said.
She walked toward the doors, already talking. I stood with my find in my hand and watched her go.
I am thirty years old, eighth-grade English teacher, West Philadelphia.
I teach at the school I attended, a decision I made at twenty-two that I have not once regretted, though I understand why people find it strange.
I have explained the difference between a B-plot and a C-plot to twenty-six thirteen-year-olds on multiple occasions and done it well.
I have a 401k. I floss. I drive a late-model Volvo XC60.
I own the complete original Milestone run, Hardware, Icon, Static, Blood Syndicate, Shadow Cabinet, bagged and boarded, filed by creator in a section Nova labeled in her own handwriting on a Post-it note three years ago, and I have never once taken that Post-it down because it is exactly right and I want her to know I know it every time I walk past it.
I once spent forty-five minutes repositioning Nova’s speakers by fractions of an inch because she said the bass was pooling on the left side of the room and I wanted the bass to be right, and I want you to understand that I was not thinking about the speakers.
I am a man who is very focused, very functional, and thoroughly in love with his best friend and doing absolutely nothing about it.
I also sell comics. Not my collection—the finds, the estate sale copies I can’t justify keeping, the doubles I come across at half-price shops, the lots I win at auction and sort through and price and move through a quiet network of collectors who know my taste.
It is not a second career. It is what I do on Sunday afternoons when I want my hands busy and my head clear, and what it has been doing quietly, for the past four years, is filling an account I opened specifically for the Archive.
I have never told many about my passion project. Well, more like out-of-reach dream.
I had also, for the past two months, been seeing a woman named Kendra Mitchell.
She was good. I had been trying, with real effort, not to sabotage it.
Weeknight dinners, lazy afternoons, the comfortable pace of two adults who liked each other and were being straightforward about what they were building.
I had been trying, with real effort, not to sabotage it.
I stood in front of my mirror for fifteen minutes deciding what to wear.
I had the one I wore when I was comfortable and the one I’d bought for tonight.
Two shirts. I have a complete Grant Morrison New X-Men run.
I can break down the thematic architecture of Their Eyes Were Watching God for twenty-six eighth-graders in fifty minutes flat.
I have spent actual dinner party hours defending the Dwayne McDuffie DC run and have not once apologized for it.
Fifteen minutes on two shirts. This is not who I am.
In comics, when a character keeps returning to the same object, the same place, the same person, that’s not characterization. That’s the writer showing you what they can’t let go of. I have been teaching this for eight years. Apparently I still needed the lesson applied to myself.
I put on the new one.