Audre & Bash Are Just Friends(50)

Zoning out, she took in Clio’s curled dreadlocks. Her soft, slightly spicy perfume. Retro New Balances. A tee emblazoned with Princess Nokia’s face. She was bad as hell.

Tee with a queer female rapper on it, mused Reshma. Encouraging.

“So, Melba and the Mean Girls have beef? Who knew swan life was so treacherous?”

“Oh, they get active. That big one leading the Mean Girls? Look closely at her.”

Reshma leaned forward, squinting. Then she gasped. “Only one eye. A war wound?”

“She fought Melba’s mom over a male swan. Jerry belonged to the streets,” said Clio, shaking her head. “There’s always one.”

“Always,” chuckled Reshma. “It’s usually me.”

“That’s not surprising,” said Clio.

“So, what made you so interested in swans?”

“My passion is aquatic birds. Ducks, herons, seagulls, swans. I loved that book The Ugly Duckling when I was little. Did you ever read it?”

“About the abandoned duckling who gets adopted by swans?”

She smiled, nodding. “And when he grew up, he realized he’d been a swan all along.”

“Now, that’s a fairy tale,” said Reshma. “In my elementary school back in London, we had a transfer student from Copenhagen, Denmark. That’s where Hans Christian Andersen wrote The Ugly Duckling. The swan is their national bird. He had special Danish notebooks with a tiny gold swan stamped on the corner of each cover. So beautiful.”

Clio smiled softly. “At such a young age, you saw beauty in little things. Nice. Most people never learn how to do that. Are you an artist?”

“No,” she laughed. “No, I don’t know what I am. My parents are.”

“Who are your parents?”

Groaning, Reshma pulled her waves over her face like a curtain. “The Well Well Wells.”

Clio froze in the middle of throwing her seeds to the swans. “The Well Well Wells? The duo with the greatest harmonies of the nineties? The king and queen of the mellow ballad?”

Reshma grimaced. “Coming to a supermarket playlist near you.”

“‘So Far So Good’ is my mom’s favorite song. Adbhut!”

Reshma’s jaw dropped open. She got full-body chills, and every follicle on her head tried (and failed) to stand up.

“Hold on. Did you just say abdhut in a flawless Hindi accent?”

Clio batted her lashes.

“Do you know what it means?” asked Reshma, heart pounding. A few of the swans, eating several feet away, looked up at Clio. Wow, she really was a Disney princess.

“It means wonderful,” she said shyly. “It’s no big deal, really. I had an Indian nanny.”

And then, because she was so transported by this enchanting girl, speaking in one of the tongues of her birth country, under the glow of the midday sun, she spoke before her brain caught up. “Mujhe aapakee aavaaz pasand hai.”

Clio gasped in delight. “I’m not fluent! What did you say?”

“Not telling. Look it up later,” she said, now embarrassed. She never spoke Hindi in front of anyone. It made her feel vulnerable, skinless. Stripped of all her bravado.

First of all, she didn’t speak it well. Her parents weren’t the kind of white people who exposed their kid of color to their birth culture. She did not grow up in an “Angelina Jolie doing the Electric Slide at Zahara’s Spelman welcome weekend” environment. So, in secret, Reshma tried to figure out the language of her ancestors on her own—through a patchwork combination of Duolingo, Bollywood movies, and “teach yourself Hindi” books. The results were mixed. But she’d never stop trying. She didn’t want to die a fake-ass Indian.

Secondly, no one she knew spoke Hindi, so she never had a reason to use it.

“Okay, then tell me this,” said Clio. “What does it feel like to have genius parents?”

“Don’t know. Ask Blue Ivy, Sir, and Rumi.”

“Got it. So you’re not close to the Well Well Wells?”

“I’m close to running away,” she joked, grabbing a handful of grains from Clio’s hemp bag. “Are your parents cool?”

“My mom is. I don’t know my birth dad. But my mom’s boyfriend is chill. He likes animals, too. And he drove me to school on really cold days when I couldn’t handle the train. He’s a stand-up dude, you know? I could do a lot worse.”

“What high school did you go to? I can’t believe we’ve never met.”

“’Cause you’re a Brooklyn girl, and I’m from Jackson Heights, Queens! I graduated from George Washington Carver High last year. Now I’m studying veterinary medicine at Cornell,” she said with pride. She glanced at her phone. “Speaking of, I should go. I have some summer school coursework to finish.”

“Yeah, no it’s cool,” said Reshma quickly, realizing that she’d forgotten her objective. That she was there to pull Clio in. To distract her from her boyfriend.

She’d been having so much fun that she’d lost track of time altogether. And it wasn’t like she had in Argentina, with Kiki, where she intentionally passed the time with her, like a cat spending a lazy afternoon batting a toy. She’d never gotten lost in Kiki.

With Clio, she’d forgotten to be strategic.