Just go.
Chapter 4
Big Fun With The Wretched
Bianca
“Ijust got you back and you’re leaving meeeee for an Italian man and a castle on the hill.”
“Please take your dramatic ass in the house.” I blow smoke away from Stephanie’s stiff lip and flared nostrils. “I didn’t say a thing about a man or a house on a hill, dummy. You geekin’.”
“Really, Bianca? Who was the one talking about moving to Italy before my luggage crossed the threshold, hmm? You took one look at that woman on the screen and her antique fixtures and said fuck me,” she snaps between sniffles.
“Are you really about to cuss me outafterI picked you up from the airport with the food you wanted?”
Stephanie’s chin wobbles, her lips still coated in grease from the chicken box she’d inhaled with her half-and-half. The same chicken box and half-and-half I picked up from our spot on Greenmount, a bop from here.
“Excuse the fuck out of me for feeling some kind of way about my best friend of all my lifefinallyfreeing herself from the shackles of Corporate America. Now you decide to leave me? I planned to make a cake!”
I roll my eyes and take a pull from my blunt. “You don’t bake, Stephanie.”
“Is it not the thought that counts?” She stretches her arm in front of her to paint whatever delusion has her thinking she won’t burn flour. “Imagine a boxed vanilla cake with fondant icing, not that buttercream mess that tastes like clouds and whispers.”
I cough through a cackle, too high for this conversation. A piece of cake would hit the spot right now.
Stephanie’s expression remains bothered. Wide eyes and lips carved into rich cocoa. Every bit of Marsai Martin with Jenifer Lewis’s theatrics.
“Written in the middle of the cake would’ve been, ‘Bitch, you tried your best. They never deserved your pantsuits or your Pringles.’”
We crack up. Our laughter gets the attention of Ms. Spencer, who sticks her head out of her window.
“What is all that hollering?” she shouts from her bedroom window next door. Her head is a bouquet of pink sponge rollers to match the floral nightgown many a grandmother cooked greens in while raising six kids.
“Is that the devil’s lettuce I smell down there?”
Shoot.
Stephanie and I freeze. In my head, it makes complete sense to blend in with the asphalt shingle roof we’re sitting on above the kitchen. We look like the thirty-nine-year-old versions of Zoey and Diane fromBlack-ishwhose former Sunday school teacher caught them lighting up.
I deflate my cheeks of smoke in slow puffs and push the blunt between my fingers over to Stephanie, who slaps my hand.
“I, um.” My words stall on a cough.
“Did you get it from Mouse?” Ms. Spencer asks, brows drawn.
“Dartavius,” I say, too faded to lie to an elder. Mama Vee would slap me in the back of the neck if I did, dead or alive.
She nods. “I’ll give him a ring after service tomorrow. I expect to see you both.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Stephanie and I say.
Ms. Spencer smiles. “I’m happy you’re home, Bianca. Don’t be no stranger or get an ounce of smoke in Viola’s house.”
Does she want a hit?
Don’t ask her!
“Yes, ma’am,” I say.
