I passed the tablet back over to my best friend. “This is over one guy. There’s a unifying source here—”
Aminah nodded. “Right, but this hasn’t happened before. I mean we’ve had girls fighting over guys but not like this. And I really don’t think the demographic of the Blackwell mandem has changed that drastically in the past year, and— Why do you have that look on your face?”
Of course. It had to be. Fellow Superhuman from earlier wasn’t like the other guys. No, he was smooth, actually, genuinely smooth. Or at least extremely skilled at seeming genuine. He was warm, looked you in the eye. I had built up an immunity and he had almost got me. He had looked at me and I had felt it under my skin—and if he almost got me that meant that he definitely had got some of the other girls.
I nodded at Aminah. “I think I know who it is. You have a way of checking if the girls have had a mutual follow on social media recently?”
Aminah smirked. “Do I own every single item from Fenty Beauty? Let’s not ask silly questions. I study digital marketing. I am good at what I do. I am a social media savant, sweetie.” She said all this while swiping and tapping like a maestro conducting an orchestra, effortlessly subduing technology with a perfectly manicured hand. She stopped abruptly and held the tablet up to her chest, mischief peppering her face.
“Keeks, the guy you met before, was he tall, dark, and handsome? Looks like he walked out of a nineties rom-com? Looking like some sort of stem-cell experiment between Kofi Siriboe and Morris Chestnut?”
I would have laughed if the description wasn’t so creepily accurate. “You found him?”
Aminah flipped the tablet around: it was zoomed in on the ProntoPic page that had Fellow Superhero staring at me from a beach, topless, in pink board shorts with palm trees on them, a red cup in hand. His chest was all ridges and slopes. I was never really a fan of extreme sports but hiking suddenly seemed like a cool thing to try.
Aminah’s smirk broadened. “I think we found the reason our girls are moving mad. His name is Malakai Korede. Transferred in September from Northchester University. So, we know he’s smart. Smart enough to have you wondering who he is—”
I narrowed my eyes, took the tablet from her, and scrolled through his pictures. His selfies were sparse, so we knew he wasn’t overtly vain. He was confident and breezy with his looks, and when he did take selfies, they were purposeful. They were neither the badly angled close-ups of nostrils that made a sis quickly rush to say “He’s better in person,” nor were they the cringey mirror poses, the squinted eyes, slight pout, captioned with a lazy trap lyric that boasted of money, bitches, and swag the dude most likely lacked. Nah, Fellow Superhuman’s, sorry, Malakai’s photos were interesting. There was one in front of the Mona Lisa.
I asked what she’s on tonight and she side-eyed me. Curved by a 516-year-old, I can’t believe. #notageist.
A smile I didn’t agree to release slipped out. Unnerving. Huh. Okay, so he somehow managed to be part of the 0.001 percent of the male population that was vaguely amusing. I could see how that might rattle our girls. I was pretty sure the majority of guys in our uni thought satire was a way of describing an outfit.
I swiped a little more and came across a picture with the most cherubic little girl with rich black clouds at the side of her heart-shaped face, annotated with:
She’s the boss of me. #uncleniecebonding #PrincessAliyah
So he was good with kids, had a softness to him. The most dangerous thing about that was clearly it wasn’t performed: there was no way he could fake the adoration with which he looked at that angel. With that obnoxious display of genuine cuteness, he was speaking directly to a bunch of young women whose mothers had told them that they were to graduate with a diploma in one hand and a future Obama in the other. The case of Malakai Korede was solidifying. He was a catch—fresh manna from heaven in the form of a man from Brixton （gleaned from tagged locations）。 And we, the girls of Whitewell, were in a romantic desert. Who were we to question God’s boon, an oasis to satisfy our thirst? The comments on his photos （“Go off king!”） were from members of the same clique. The most recent photo featured heart emojis from Nia. And he was also desirable enough to be used as a pawn within intersquad politics. Yeah, this was worse than I thought. He was evolved. He wasn’t a cookie-cutter player, dumb but affable. He had a personality, ridges and hard edges, and quirks and crooks, and he still managed to be apparently generally palatable enough to be attractive to all the men-loving, femme subgroups in Blackwell.