After Lina settled into the passenger seat, Nellie flicked on the blinkers and put the car in gear. They drove, and Lina watched Nellie’s fingers move with their usual ease, dexterity, and confidence. Desire knocked the wind out of her.
They drove and drove—Lina had no notion of which roads, which highways; she couldn’t keep track; in the blow of the heater, she sweated copiously.
“Go slow for me,” Lina whispered.
“You’ll get sick if we go too slow.”
They ended up on a beach somewhere, not Coney Island, but maybe the Rockaways or somewhere farther, on Long Island. They took a walk on the sand, and Lina had never been to a beach so clean. It was surrounded, it looked like, by rich white people’s homes, and at first, she found it difficult to relax. But there was the moon, dangling like an egg yolk in the sky, and there was Nellie, who hooked her elbow through Lina’s, and whose head bent so close, Lina could smell the coconut oil in her hair.
It was safely in the car with the heat turned up that she first daredto kiss Nellie. She leaned in slowly, tentatively, and Nellie waited for her. When her chapped lips at last met Nellie’s soft ones, Nellie gently brushed back Lina’s curls with her nails, took Lina’s cheeks in her hands, and pulled her closer.
They drove home, shed their coats on the kitchen counter. “Let me warm you,” Lina whispered, weaving her arms around Nellie’s slim baby-blue jumpsuit, the fabric silky against her palm.
Under the thumping of the train, Lina’s fingers grappled for the zipper, drew it down her back, Nellie’s bare shoulders and breasts emerging like petals of a moonflower. Lina had wanted this so badly, she couldn’t trust it was happening.
She kissed each soft curve of skin she had yet to meet. Removed her own three layers of turtlenecks in haste, pressed her chest to Nellie’s breasts, held the small of Nellie’s waist, her neck in Nellie’s teeth.
And then, on the floor mattress, far as possible from Annetta’s wall, Lina drank from the ocean of Nellie’s wetness. She anchored Nellie’s thighs as the tide rolled in.
Like usual, Mr. Wong showed up on the first of the month at the crack of dawn, announcing his arrival on Livonia Avenue by honking the horn of his Chevy until he’d woken every baby on the block.
This time, they were waiting. The tenants marched down to the sidewalk: Lina followed by Harry Eugene and Daddy J, the Jenkins siblings, Patricia Taylor and her eldest grandson, and another dozen renters from 80 Livonia. Young and old, Black and brown, coated, gloved, and scarved, they gathered around the car—motley figures and steady eyes, the teens channeling Panther stoicism, the elders just tired.
Mr. Wong’s eyes flitted nervously from one face to the next, his butt still planted in the driver’s seat. He rolled down his window, and Lina handed him the petition.
“What’s all this?” he muttered.
“Mr. Wong, you don’t get a cent until you fix these buildings up. We’re on rent strike, and these are our demands.”
He squinted, examining the list, his brow furrowed. In the nine years since they’d first met him, his stomach had thickened. His hair was graying in patches.
Eventually, he crumpled the paper and threw it over his shoulder into the back seat. “No, you people brought your problems with you.” He nodded toward the second floor, where June and William watched intently from the window. He waved a hand at the orange banner. “Who are these people? They’re not my tenants. What’s the ‘Freedom School’? It’s a zoo. The buildings have problems ’cause you make trouble with these parties.”
“The Freedom School ain’t no zoo,” said fifteen-year-old Jamie Taylor, angling his head toward the car window. “And it ain’t no party. It’s the Freedom School. The best school in Brownsville.”
“I said no guests. This many people, something’s gonna break.”
“You’re the one who packed us in here,” said Mr. Eugene, stepping forward and rapping the car hood with his knuckles.
“That’s right. And when you filled the restaurant with customers to eat Chinese food,” added Evelyn Garcia, her arm around Lina, “did you complain then?”
“You ain’t so different from the rest of them,” said Patricia Taylor. “Leave Brownsville, then act like it still belongs to you.”
Mr. Wong looked at all the faces now squeezing into the window to say their piece. “The building, the building is old now,” he stuttered. “If you don’t pay the rent, how am I supposed to make the repairs?”
“Man, you’ve been living off that rent for years,” said Daddy J. “And you never gave a damn about these apartments!”
They spoke their minds, and Mr. Wong held up a palm as if it could stop the truth from reaching his ears. He turned on the engine.
“You people are crazy. I’m sending the marshal. If you don’t have rent by tomorrow, you’re evicted.”
“Oh yeah?” Lina leaned her elbows on the lip of the window. He thought he could scare them, that they didn’t understand the law. “You can’t get a marshal without a court order. And you won’t getthat court order because we’ll be in court. You’re in violation of the housing code and the warranty of habitability statute. And we’ll let the reporters know what kind of landlord you are. Either that, or you give us the building. We’re already running it without you.”
He shook his head and began rolling up the window before she had a chance to remove her elbows—and then he muttered something sharp and bitter, just loud enough that she heard.
“Fucking spic.”
“Fucking bigot,” she hurled back.
