I checked the time on my phone and saw my mom had texted:Have you heard from your father?
I put my phone away.
After a beat, I said, “We should probably go inside.”
Milan nodded, braids spilling down her chest like bead curtains. Instead we stayed, coiled in thick ropes of humid air, listening to late summer’s final gasp.
Chapter 3
My mom was tearing up mail at the kitchen table, my dad still gone. There’d been an argument. About dirty dishes, about the TV volume, about bills, about whatever. She was never really asking about my father’s whereabouts when she messaged me. We knew where he was: in his car, driving, probably, in circles. She was playing the role of Concerned Wife, abiding, dutiful, generating a record of caring she could dredge up, I thought, whenever she abandoned character. It seemed to me she got more out of pantomiming being married to my father than actually being married to him, but what did I know.
When I walked into the kitchen, her hair was in hard pink rollers no one had worn since the nineties. “You already know he’ll be back,” I said, reaching into the cabinet for a bag of BBQ chips.
She dumped a pile of scraps into the trash, ignoring me, and went into the living room. “Let’s watch something dumb on TV,” she called.
We shared a bowl of Orville’s while thirty women presented themselves on a staircase.
“It’s nerve-wracking being the third Black Bachelor,” Troy, the Bachelor, said to a small white man. “People are gonna want me to end up with a woman from a certain racial group more than they want me to find love.”
“You damn right we are.” A popcorn kernel fell into my mom’s bra. She didn’t seem to notice.
In one challenge, the women fanned onto a field in squishy sports gear to smack each other with oversized plastic hot dogs for the chance to fly in a helicopter with Troy.
“Why do people watch stuff like this?” I asked, even as I speculated who’d get the first rose.
“Drama,” she said. “And love. People love watching people find love, especially when it’s fake.”
My experience of polyamory thus far had reminded me just how difficult finding love was—the rotating cast of deflating dates: Communists with septum piercings who didn’t believe in work or money but did believe in sleeping on someone’s couch. The partnered men who could never host at their giant homes but were, what, supposed to come fuck me in my childhood bedroom? The professionals who blurred their faces on Feeld. The monopoly of white couples. I didn’t have a problem with white people, they just owed me a billion dollars in back pay. Imagine: two blond thirty-somethings groping my boobs, their baby screaming in the background, a new nightmare from the mind of Jordan Peele. Where the fuck was this garden party, the kitchen table, the Black people?! It was nothing like I expected it to be. Even though Jay and I were six months into our open relationship, I felt as lost as ever. There was a nameless place I was trying to reach in love, but how could I get somewhere so poorly marked on a map? A map on which I couldn’t even locate myself?
“That’s sad,” I said finally.
My mom grabbed the Ross bag she stored her rollers in. It crinkled in her hand like a rainstorm. “Not sadder than real life.”
That night I watched voguing videos on TikTok to help me fall asleep.
HERE COMES THE HURRICANE, BITCH! HERE COMES THE HURRICANE, BITCH! KATRINA! KATRINA! KATRINA!
The front door groaned open around one. Feet padded across the floor like thunder. The self-important murmur of CNN snaked through the hallways. I imagined my dad slumped in his armchair, eyelids teetering on collapse.
After a while, I stumbled into a deep sleep. I dreamed my hands framed my face, wrists like windmills. Dreamed that when I fell backward, one leg reaching into a perfect point, I looked like a woman born to fall.
Chapter 4
My fiction workshop was exiled to the basement of the humanities building. On the way to class, I was mocked by the glut of already-past events like the “Let’s Get Baked” brownie bake sale from April. Pastel flyers crowded the bulletin boards by the door (“Participate in a hair-pulling disorder survey for a $50 Amazon gift card!” “Racism on Campus: An Intergroup Dialogue!”). I took only one course a semester. It was what I could afford with my tiny scholarship. Based on my calculation, I would graduate with my MFA in ten years.
The classroom’s gray-green carpet, the piss-fluorescent lights, were giving academic hellscape. Professor Milken was riffling through papers when I walked in. I sat far away from him and got on my phone. The first story in my news app was about a lake in Africa that was going to explode any day now.
Milken watched me with translucent blue eyes. There was a coffee stain on his shirt that looked like a gunshot wound. “I’m looking forward to talking about your story, Catherine.”
“You are?”
“That Amira character made some interesting choices.”
That Amira character was me, so basically, I was about to get my ego blown to pieces.
Edgar ambled in with bulky headphones around his neck. Then came the Trashy Trinity: Chloe, Michelle, and Oscar in patterned vests, slouchy jeans, thrifted rings, like Urban Outfitters mannequins. Jason was the last to arrive. He was the only other Black person in the class and was either my age or in his forties. He never had my back.
Milken said, “Let’s take out Catherine’s story. Catherine, would you tell us what you were trying to do?”
