I rolled my eyes. “Alright, a little dramatic. O?e, Halle Barely—”
Aminah almost choked on a plantain chip. “Wow—”
“Look, it’s just for the social database, so we know what’s going on in the uni. For work purposes. How can I talk about what’s going on if I don’t know what’s going on? It’s just weird because I’ve never seen him before and he was going to see Zuri Isak—”
Aminah pulled her glasses down further. “Uh-huh. Zuri Isak, who just so happens to live in the same building and I believe the same floor as—”
“You know what? Forget it. Let’s just get ready for the show, we got ten minutes. Can you shoot me over some of the questions please?”
Aminah smiled and turned her gaze back to the tablet screen “Okay, I’m gonna pretend to move on, but . . .” Her slickly shaped brows suddenly knitted in curiosity as she scrolled.
My brows instantly did the same, because when Aminah frowns, so do I. It’s instinctive. “What’s up?”
“Yo . . . so, this is weird. All the advice questions this week are hella . . . specific? ‘How to make a guy wife you?,’ ‘How to make a guy choose you?,’ ‘How to be a priority?’”
I wheeled my chair over immediately. This was alarming and unlike Blackwellian women. They knew better—I’d made sure of it. True, we mainly dealt with relationship dilemmas and I primarily gave out romantic advice, but we’d never received a lump genre of question before. Nothing this focused.
Since first year, when I started this show—R&B and soul punctuated with advice that tied into themes of songs—the Blackwellian babes and I had been through a lot. Together we dealt with boys who said, “You’re moving kind of mad still,” when you asked them the simple question “What are we?” I’d helped guide them around mandem who elongated their “wows,” to questions that were veiled iterations of “If you profess to like me, why don’t you fucking act like it, you prick?”
That “woooww” was a tool, I told the girls, the extra syllables added to buy the boy time to figure out what lie to tell you when you queried why you got a “good morning, beautiful” text from him when your girl said he’d been seen coming out of Teni’s flat this morning. I broke down how to handle guys who would then turn around and ask, “Why u preeing for?,” like you were the crazy one when the day before he had drawled, voice rumbling through collar bone, “You’re different still, you know that, babes. Never met anyone like you.” We had grown, developed in our studies of fuckboiology, my syllabus strong. So it seemed strange that suddenly they were preoccupied with being chosen. We were the choosers, we never begged.
Aminah had pushed her glasses back up, inspecting the comments with scientific attention: “The comments are clique wide: the Vegan Cupcakes, the London Gyaldem, Naija Princesses, Bible Study Babes, and all with the same kinda question. Plus, they’re interacting with each other. Badly. There’s no ‘You got this, sis.’ It’s . . . savage. It’s ‘Stay away from him–type shit.”
I took the tablet from her to examine it for myself. She was right. Instead of the usual supportive comments that littered the page there was infighting, sniping—“Have you considered that maybe he ain’t want you, sis?,” “Sis, wasn’t your man just caught in the bed of one of those white girls that always crash our motives dressed as rebore Kim Ks? Maybe take time to recover??” Sheesh.
“Sis” was a powerful, potent word, one that had the power to build up or destroy with the same intensity; it was a sword that could either be used to knight or slice. There was a bloodbath in the Brown Sugar comment section, even worse than when someone said they “didn’t really get Beyoncé” during a debate session at a Blackwellian meeting.
This was bad.
Since its conception Brown Sugar was the glue that gelled the female factions of Blackwell together; the show was where we virtually communed and our social page was a safe space where girls would put aside their differences to bond with double-tap likes over dickhead drama. Groups that didn’t really fuck with each other during Blackwell socials （other universities had African-Caribbean Societies, but we flipped the name of our institution and made it our own）， would coalesce in the comment section to drag a Wasteman who replied to an errant “I love you” with “safe babes.” This was deep.