I smiled at her pointed brow. “Not exactly that. I mean that was going to be a debate, a battle of the sexes thing. We need a hook, a story. I’ve been thinking about how popular Simi’s blog is and it’s because people love a narrative, and they also love love. Or its idea, anyway. Imagine how interesting people would find it if I was actually dating Malakai. And that thing at FreakyFridayz was just . . . like a fight. What if I capitalized on that interest that surrounds new couples? Like, actually make our relationship the show? Feeding the gossip straight to them, instead of going through a third party like The TeaHouse.”
Aminah froze. “Stop. I’m getting chills.”
“Right? The only complication is that it’s Malakai. Not only can we not stand each other . . .”
“Is that true, though?”
“I definitely poured a drink on his crotch.”
“Okay, so, the fact that you poured it there and not on his head shows where your mind is at, like maybe you thought there was a fire there that you needed to extinguish.”
I stared at my best friend, bemused. “You are not taking another psychology class. I forbid it. Anyway, there’s no way he will agree to it. . . . Let’s move on. Wassup with you and Kof?”
Aminah immediately rose from my bed, adjusting her gown around herself primly. “I don’t know. What is up with me and Kof?”
“Oh. So that wasn’t you up there last night by the DJ booth being his hypewoman?”
“Hypewoman? Ew. I am his muse. Also given that the music really determines how live the party is, all I was doing was making sure people were having a good time by bringing the best out of Kofi. It was an act of kindness. I’m basically Angelina Jolie. A devastatingly beautiful humanitarian.”
“Right.” I couldn’t really argue with her reasoning. Aminah Bakare was truly amazing. My sis was a mistress of marketing, a PR princess, a spin savant.
Aminah twitched a shoulder in petty triumph and flounced toward my door. “I’m giving you forty minutes to get ready, bitch. Aaron awaits and I have a line I wanna test on him: ‘Is that a pin machine in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?’”
I laughed. “Poetry. I think I’m just gonna trace his tattoo slowly and go, ‘Did that hurt?’”
“Can’t wait to be sister wives!”
I opened my laptop to stream music as I got ready. “Only person I’d want to do it with, babe.”
From: [email protected]
Subject: Study Buddy
Or, if you prefer, “Academic Acquaintance.”
Here is a link to the other student’s work. I have sent them your work too. Let me know what you think. I really think your ideas complement each other’s.
S.M
I stared at the email blinking at me on my laptop screen. It had popped up as I switched on my Saturday Soul playlist, just as Jill Scott asked me to take a long walk with her. So, Dr. Miller hadn’t forgotten. It was a Vimeo link. A film. Pretentious.
I stared at my D’Angelo poster on the wall for guidance. It was his Voodoo album cover, body hard, eyes soft. Slight smirk, lips looking tender, gaze beckoning. It didn’t help. All it did was make me slightly horny. Ugh. I felt irritated about the fact this stranger was apparently good enough for me to seek help from. I didn’t need help. I had this on my own. Maybe I needed to look at their project to prove it to myself. Besides, keep your academic enemies closer. I clicked the link.
It was called Cuts, a fifteen-minute short about a Black barbershop. It was terrible in that it wasn’t terrible. It was good. Really good. Really, irritatingly good—and not the artsy, derivative, pandering shit on toxic masculinity I expected it to be. It showed quick, sharp shots of men bantering and barbering, moralizing while doing-the-mosting, regaling while roasting, straddling the line between shameless sin and sanctimony, telling the crassest stories, lines that sounded like poetry: “She was sweet plantain, soft like mango,” “God is good all the time. He turned my life around man, can’t lie,” and “I’m not religious like that. Respect it, though. My mum’s house is church. Her bills are my tithes.”
It was grainy, the soundtrack a song that was somehow a mishmash of neo soul and grime. Eyes soft, body hard. Aunties coming through with shopping trolleys, singing, “Meat pie, fish pie, puff puff,” adding musical dimension to the pirate radio station playing in the background. Boys coming in to get a trim for their first dates, the old guys calming their nerves by sharpening the edges on their foreheads while making fun of the sizes of their heads, telling them their own first-date stories with their missus.