“Congrats on completing your balance training. Sorry I made you cry.”
Sunita Habersham is standing next to me.
“I made me cry,” I tell her. I really did make myself. Not that I faked the tears, but I forced myself to feel the things I knew would bring them. I made a decision in the moment. I can do that without losing too much face because as guys go, I’m butch; tears are counterintuitive coming from a man like me. They make me interesting. And how upset can I be with losing control when I controlled the act?
“I cried, my first week. Everybody cries, everyone who gets it. Change hurts. You have to make the decision to undergo it, or it rips you apart. That’s why Spider’s tattoo is so cool. It’s a reminder. To roll with it.”
I want to make a joke about choosing change by marking yourself indelibly, but ask, “You get one?”
Sun hands me her wine cooler. I really look at it hard, because I didn’t know they still made wine coolers. When she turns around, I think she’s just going to walk away from me once again, but she lifts the white cotton of her shirttail and shows me the skin at the base of her spine. And there it is: a Sesa the size of my fist with an Anglo star right in the middle of it, beaming.
“Yeah. I went for the Kundalini chakra.”
It’s lovely. I say that out loud too, because the skirt she is wearing is long and heavy and the weight of the fabric has pulled it low, and my eyes are on her ink for a moment before the crack of her ass pulls them down. Everything there is so plushable. It’s so plushable, it creates the word. Now the light of the bonfire flickers in that crack and makes it look deeper and living and I look away because it’s wrong of me to even notice.
“I already had a tattoo there, since I was sixteen. It was Cutter from ElfQuest.”
“Cutter the Wolfrider.” I don’t say this, I gasp it. She spins her head back, smiling at me.
“Nobody got the reference. They just thought it was a really shitty Hello Kitty. I was sixteen. My dad’s girlfriend ratted me out when she saw it. Pissed him off, so it served its purpose. Spider did my Sesa over the top. Check out the woven design. It stands for the interconnectivity of—” what I will never know, because even if Sun finishes her sentence, I don’t hear words. I just hear a pop and then the world goes mute and I’m on the ground because One Drop has gone Viking and punched me in my cheekbone.
—
I don’t black out. I want to, want to just give the fuck up and fade to black and let someone else carry my body as my head fills with enough blood to completely reverse my center of gravity. But I keep my eyes open. And when hands come at me, I grab them, get back into a standing position. And I smile. I smile as big as I can without moving my jaw because I don’t know yet that it isn’t broken. I get that smile out though. I remember to do that, because it’s the only way to fight the humiliation of getting dropped by a sucker punch, at least until you find out who’s hit you.
I’m seated in the backseat of a minivan, its door slid open, and have already been given water and the repeated instruction not to go to sleep tonight in case of concussion. I can barely stay awake as it is. I don’t even know why he did it, until Roslyn walks over with One Drop, their hands clasped together, and tells me that he has something to say to me.
“I’m sorry, bro. I shouldn’t have punched you in your head.” That’s it. I wait for more to come, but he just buries his chin in his chest, not even meeting eyes with me. Roslyn looks up at the giant, and he sees this. He holds out his hand to me. I stare at it for a moment, realize everyone gathering is staring at me, so take it.
“Sorry I beat you down, Holmes. It’s not you, it’s me. I got issues. That was not copacetic. My bad. We cool now?” He reeks of Phillie Blunts and Pink lotion. And maybe the words work or maybe it’s just that I want him to free me from the prison of his Icelandic death grip but I tell him, “We cool.”
“You can be such an asshole,” Sunita Habersham yells, and I know I can be, but she’s talking to One Drop. Me, she’s pulling away, across the parking lot to a station wagon, which is another thing I didn’t know they made anymore.
Spider’s laid out in the backseat with his legs hanging out the door. The whole cab smells like weed.
“I want, like, my own zonkey, man.”
“A what?”
“Zonkey…half zebra, half donkey”—Spider’s eyes are closed, even though his mouth is open—“like the most gangsta mulatto beast of all time…” but then he drifts off. I roll the windows down. The wind is loud as Sunita drives back down through Mt. Airy into Germantown and that’s fine because aside from my directions nobody says anything, not until Spider wakes momentarily to offer “Woah. You live in the straight up hood, man. That’s so cool,” before rolling over, presumably drifting off into the zonkey dream from which we interrupted him.
In front of Loudin, nobody’s out on the street, and the lights are off in the mansion, which means Tal had enough sense to go to sleep without me. When the car stops, Sun still doesn’t say anything. Her hands are on the wheel, and the bracelets that line her arms jingle for seconds after she brakes. She looks ahead, as if she doesn’t want the next thing to happen, whatever it is, that she’d rather the night keep going, even though it’s been going badly for a while now. The tension of the moment seems to be making her angry.
My face is throbbing. I can count my heartbeat with the pulses of pain, and now that the adrenaline has worn off and taken most of the alcohol with it, my face hurts, and I think I deserve some understanding with the suffering.
“Are you sleeping with that WASPafarian nutjob?”
“Don’t slut shame me. It’s none of your business.” Sun spins her head to stare me down and seems relieved to find a target for her anger. I whip my head right back at her, pointing at the side of it where the bastard hit me. I don’t know what it looks like; I can’t bring myself to look at it in the rearview mirror, but it feels like it has attained the size and texture of pumpkin. It must look bad, because Sun pauses a moment.
“Look, I’m real sorry about what happened. So yeah, we used to have a casual thing, is that what you needed to hear? It’s really none of your business. Can you go to bed now or do you need to hear more? He’s hung like a tree, does that help? Really, a big brown tree — in fact, it’s actually the darkest part of his body. Is that good enough?”
“Great. I was punched by Thor Odin-Cock.”
Sun’s about to say something, but it trips over her getting the joke. “I just saw that, as drawn by Jack Kirby, in my head. Stan Lee Presents: The Adventures of Thor Odin-Cock,” she says then is lost in laughter and I go with her because I want the sound to keep coming. The sound, it takes a while to work out of our systems, and then finally it does. And there are sighs. And then quiet. Then Spider starts snoring in the back and we lose it again.
“Yeah. Not exactly a great shining moment in my life. It’s been a long year up there. One Drop’s not bad. Just damaged. Grew up on army bases, looking like he does with a mom everyone always thought was his nanny. All his siblings came out darker than him. A Dutch dad who’s married four other black women since. How could he not be a little crazy? Mélange started as a retreat. You can’t retreat unless there’s something to run from.”
“So what are you running from?” I ask her. Sunita thinks about it, and for a few seconds, it looks like she’s going to tell me. That there’s a story to tell, something shapely enough to be packaged into a synopsis.
“Guys who ask too many questions.” And then all the humor is gone. Like it was never there. So I get out of the car.