“Cat.”
“What.”
“Come on! I need your help.” She took my hands, swinging them like we were girls on the blacktop. “I don’t care if your writing’s a mess. I want to get inside your brain. What if this portrait were a conversation, not a lecture? What if we were messy together?”
Apparently, I had no resolve when it came to her because, before I knew it, I was agreeing to send her my works in progress, of course tweaking the parts about Tristan to make them less obvious.
Taking my cheeks in her cool, soft hands, she said, “I could literally kiss you right now.” We looked at each other. It seemed like she might actually kiss me—my heart hammered at the thought. But then her hands slid from my face to her sides.
I said, “I want to do the threesome.” Milan had been joking about fucking my way toward freedom, but maybe it would facilitate a differentkind of freedom, one where I got all these feelings out of my system, where being in love with Tristan didn’t have to mean beingwithhim, I could just have fun. And with where this country was headed, it might be my last chance to play out this fantasy.
“Really?” Nia sang.
I tried to sound casual, but my response came out thick. “Yeah, why not?”
She hugged me, nestling her head on my shoulder. “Thank you.”
Caught in her tight embrace, I was a firework breaking apart into a spray of bright colors.
Unable to get any writing done that night, I warily eyed the Black craft anthology Janine had given me on my desk. The irony wasn’t lost to me, how I resisted the preoccupation with race that made books like this one possible, necessary. Agitated by Black History Month emails, never went to the Equity and Inclusion office. Yes, the problem was they were performative and we could all feel it. But they’d also been fought for. It was easy to forget that when you weren’t the one who’d had to fight.
I mindlessly flipped to the essay on form, eyes skimming the pages.
Every shut window inside me flung open, a hundred ravens fanning out. It seemed obvious now that a story’s power wasn’t just its content but the hidden scaffolding it hung on. That was how it worked its way into your subconscious, by adhering to or disrupting a set of patterns, rhythms, that made up a story’s delivery system. Wasn’t this what I was looking for in love too? In life? New forms?
I scribbled “FORM” on a Post-it and stuck it to the wall. It fell down immediately. Picking it up undeterred, I slapped it against the wall. It fluttered back down.
Whatever: Post-it note or not, I was onto something. I felt it in my bones.
PART VAmeriican Requiem
Chapter 64
Nia lived in a Tudor home in Woodley Park. There was a white stone bench out front, a matching birdbath, a house like Cinderella’s.
A young woman opened the door. “Who’re you here for?”
I didn’t realize other people lived there. “Nia Anderson.”
Whipping her head back, “Nia! Some girl’s here.”
The young woman felt familiar. I scrutinized her while her head was turned, finally placing her short coils as belonging to the actress in Ryen’s film.
Nia thundered down the steps in striped pajama shorts. I worried I mixed up my days, but she didn’t seem surprised to see me and led me to her room.
“Tristan’ll be here in a minute.”
I said, “Okey dokey,” wishing I hadn’t said, okey dokey.
Her room was sun-drenched, the ceiling vaulted, supported by wood beams. A tree scraped the window by her bed, which was a queen with fluffy white hotel bedding. She bounced up on her toes to pull the chain of the ceiling fan. It just shifted the hot air around. Waving her hand, “We’ll be naked anyway.”
She sat, patting the space beside her. I sat awkwardly.
“So, what are your boundaries?”
“My what?”
She brushed a hair from her face. “Like, anything you won’t do.”
