My smile slipped out. Traitor.
Malakai regarded me a fraction longer than was necessary as Kofi responded, causing both our gazes to jump apart. “Yeah, it was real zoo vibes. Made me feel like we were playing for massa.”
Aminah’s eyes narrowed in glittering ire. “They’re lucky I wasn’t there. The cussing I would cuss would make their bodies and souls shrivel up on the spot. All that would be left is a pile of Barbour gilets on the floor.”
Kofi grinned. “I love it when you go off.”
Aminah caught herself and rolled her eyes. “Whatever. Look, Keeks and I are going food shopping right now and we were going to cut through the park to get to the market. We can walk along with you. We were just finishing up—”
I kicked her shin under the table, but Aminah’s face remained unmoved. She was looking placidly at Kofi, my discomfort obviously of no consequence to her. I knew she thought that the best way to deal with the situation was to confront it head on, but she couldn’t have been more wrong. The best way to deal with it was to pretend it never happened. The best way to deal with it was for Malakai and me to extricate ourselves from each other’s orbits. My stomach tightened as Kofi’s face relaxed further, his smile widening goofily at the invitation.
“Yeah? Okay! I mean, yeah okay. Cool. Calm. Let’s bounce, beautiful.”
Aminah shook her head, but I detected the smile she was trying to bury under the surface. “You talk like a tween sitcom character,” she muttered, while making eye contact with a waiter for the bill.
Kofi laughed. “Be my leading lady.”
Aminah rolled her eyes. “You’re a clown—”
Aminah and Kofi descended into a back and forth that made the awkward silence between Malakai and I louder. Eventually, Malakai looked at the table in careful study, stepping back a little, as if to allow him the full scope of it. I hadn’t fully intended on talking to him properly yet, but somehow, I found myself asking the weirdo what he was doing.
Malakai straightened up and shrugged, swerving his gaze back on me. “Just making sure the glasses on the table are completely empty. You know. For my safety.”
Dick.
Chapter 9
Prince’s Park was the largest verdant space in Whitewell, slapdab in the middle of town; so big that it also served as the divider between west Whitewell and east Whitewell. West Whitewell was where our campus was, complete with sprawling suburban gated houses, artisanal coffee shops, cat cafés, and yoga studios owned by white people with blond dreadlocks.
In west Whitewell, there were literal limits to how many Black kids they allowed in a club, although they obviously never made this explicit, having the decency to pretend that it was because they were overcrowded. These clubs were full of hip-hop and white kids that rapped along to it—but when faced with too many real, breathing Blacks that weren’t confined to a consumable form of entertainment for them, they panicked.
There needed to be just enough niggas （Kendrick said it and therefore, so could they） in the club to make them feel cool, enough dotted around, so they could feel diverse. Enough Black guys for white girls to say, “Everyone tells me I dance like a Black girl.” Enough Black girls for white guys to proclaim with J?gerbomb-spiked breath that they ain’t ever kissed a Black girl before, like you were the lucky one, something like The Princess & the Frog, except the Black girl would remain the exotic curiosity and the white guy would feel transformed into something elevated, something unique, perhaps a little dangerously deviant. They needed just enough Blacks in the club to make them feel cool. Too many Blacks, however? That was going too far. Too much Black would make them feel too white.
East Whitewell—or Eastside—was where Aminah and I went to do the bulk of our grocery shopping: bell peppers, scotch bonnets, plantain, okra, rice, cheap packs of ramen to inhale during brutal all-nighters （ramen so bad that it could be used to plaster into broken ceramics. We saw it on TikTok. Somehow, this didn’t stop us）。 Eastside is where we got our hair supplies, where aunties, carrying swollen blue plastic bags with leaves sticking out of them, spoke loudly in Yoruba and Twi, Urdu and Gujrati. Eastside was the place where Aminah and I took turns to go to the Jamaican shop and order, faced with straight-faced “We nuh ave dat,” till Ms. Hyacinth served us whatever she wanted to serve us. And Eastside was the side of the park where the basketball court was.
It was far too far. At least a twenty-five-minute walk. It was a trek. And we had been walking down the plush park path as a foursome, Aminah and I on one side, Kofi and Malakai on the other, but at some point Aminah and Kofi had drifted ahead and together, leaving Malakai and I to hang back awkwardly behind. Technically, we could have just caught up with them and disrupted our discomfort, but that would mean severe cockblocking and apparently neither of us were that selfish. So, we’d been walking in excruciating silence for the past five minutes, the only noise being our shoes crunching on autumn leaves, kids squawking in the background, and our friends’ bizarre mating ritual up in front. I guessed it was up to me to make it bearable. The labor of a Black woman in this society really is unending.