Chapter 24
The restaurant closed early for the employee holiday party.
Trying to be festive, someone had strung up lights that were already sagging.
The owner, a young white guy who I sometimes saw strolling through the kitchen or looking bedraggled at the bar, thanked us for our service with mid-tier champagne.
Milan and I loitered in the bathroom, babysitting rum punches.
She applied a plum lipstick then passed me the silver tube.
We drunkenly kissed the fogged-up mirror, forgetting it was filthy, leaving dark smooches.
I longed to tell her about kissing Tristan, but I knew this was a side of me I couldn’t share with her.
At the bar, she spun in her stool, reaching for her phone every time it vibrated.
“Y’all look good.” Durk leaned against the bar.
Milan didn’t look up from her phone. “Y’all look broke.”
Durk tugged on her braids. She snatched them back. Spinning to face me, “You’re still gonna help me take these out later, right? They itch.”
“Yeah.”
Eric plopped beside me. “Where’s your man at?”
“Shut up, Eric.”
“Why you getting mad?”
“Because she’s a lesbian,” Durk said.
“I’m not mad,” I said.
“Nah,” Eric said. “She’s the other thing. Where you got like five wives and shit. They be doing that in Wyoming.”
I didn’t say anything. Durk laughed. Rah walked out of the bathroom with one of the servers. He glanced in my direction then looked away like he hadn’t seen me.
I pulled Milan’s arm. “Let’s dance.”
She didn’t respond, grinning at her phone, the screen lighting up her face. After several minutes, her chin jerked up. She yelled in my ear, “I’m gonna go smoke. You coming?”
I nodded, shrugging my coat on. On the escape, she licked the rolling paper, delicately folding it over. The streetlamps in the alley backlit her. She looked haunted.
“I’m thinking about quitting the restaurant.”
I laughed. “What? No. This is what we do together.”
“I wanna do other stuff.”
“You’re doing the play.”
She stared past me at the rowhouses. The night held a sinister beauty, the deep blue sky, trees black with shadow. “I don’t know if I’m gonna do the play.”
“What?”
“I mean, it’s kind of dumb, you know? And I got other shit going on.”
“What other shit do you have going on, Milan?”
She didn’t say anything.
“What? Some stupid guy?”
Her eyes raked over my face. “Oh, ’cause you don’t do stupid shit over stupid guys?”
“What’s that mean?”
She cackled like a witch in a children’s movie. “You think your little experiment isn’t gonna blow up in your face?” She sucked her teeth. “How many dudes are you messing with anyway? Two, three? Poor Jay.”
Heat rose in me like steam blowing up from grates in the street, shrouding everything.
I saw myself shoving her off the fire escape and slinking away, how easy it would be, what with her shaped like a stick.
Instead I posed my own mean questions. “What happened to law school, Milan? Oh, wait, Travie happened. What about med school? Oops, I forget, was it Damien or Cash?”
Her mouth was a tight line. I had to look away from her hurt expression.
“You know what your problem is? You think you’re better than everybody. Don’t act like you didn’t call me crying the first time Jay fucked someone else.”
I dragged my eyes over her gelled-down edges, the frizzy braids I was supposed to help her take out tonight. Her lipstick had dried and settled into the crevices like crayon.
She stood, hopping down from the fire escape without looking at me.
When she was gone, I went and kicked over the garbage cans in the alleyway, sending food wrappers, soupy Styrofoam containers flying.
After a beat, I silently collected the trash and straightened the bins.
Taking the inside of my wrist, I wiped her lipstick from my mouth.