“What?” I ask.
“It’s just, he doing his best, you know, and it’s only been a few months since he quit his job. He young too, can’t blame him for not wanting to spend all his time working, and y’all are fine for now with you taking a shift at the liquor store a couple days a week. You don’t gotta dig up this shit.” She speaks with her mouth full, red sauce leaking from the corner.
I’m off the counter now, fully aware of how soaked the back of my jeans are. I slam my bowl on the table, hear it clink, and wish it would have shattered. She has stopped eating and watches me, twisting her chain around her finger.
Alé makes a small noise, like a gurgle in the throat that turns into a cough.
“Fuck you,” I spit.
“Come on, Kiara. You don’t gotta do this. It’s funeral day, we should be twirling in the streets but you over here about to break a damn bowl ’cause you mad you ain’t got no job? Most of us out here just tryna get some work. You ain’t special.”
I glance between her and the floor, her shirt glued to her skin with sweat. In these moments, I remember that Alé had her own world without me, that there was a before me and maybe there will be an after. Either way, I’m not about to stand in this steaming kitchen while the only person that got any right to say my name refuses to see how close I am to falling apart, to letting loose like Dee.
Alé steps forward, grabs my wrist, looks at me, like Don’t do this. I’m already pushing out the door, my legs betraying my breath, moving quick. She is behind me, reaching out her hand and missing my sleeve, trying again, and finally grasping the fabric. I am being spun around, her face too close, looking at me with all the pity of an owned tongue looking at a caged one. I’ve let her save me more times than I’ve forgiven Marcus and I can almost see her slight shake under that shirt.
Her lips barely move as she says it. “It’s funeral day.”
Alé tells me this like it means shit when her fingernails are short and smell like coriander and mine are sharp and dangerous. But then the pit of her chin dimples and she is everything.
“You don’t even get it,” I say, thinking of the paper on our door this morning. Her face stitches together.
I shake my head and try to wipe off whatever look has imprinted on my face. “Whatever.” I exhale and Alé frowns, but before she can continue to fight me on it, I reach up to the tender patch on her side and tickle her. She shrieks, laughs that surprising girly laugh she produces when she’s afraid I’m gonna tickle her again, and I release her. “Now we gonna go or what?”
Alé swings one of her arms around my shoulder and pulls me with her out the door, toward the bus stop. We pass the construction and start to jog until we are suddenly sprinting, racing down the street, not stopping to check for cars as we cross, the singsong of horns trailing us.
Joy Funeral Home is one of many death hotels in East Oakland. It sits on the corner of Seminary Avenue and some other street nobody bothers to learn the name of, welcoming in bodies and more bodies. Alé and I frequent it every couple months, when the employees turn over because they can’t stomach another brushing of a corpse beside a plate of Safeway cheese. We’ve been to enough funerals in our lives to know nobody grieving wants no damn cheese.
Alé and I walk up to MacArthur Boulevard, where we catch the NL, hopping on with Clipper cards we stole from some elementary school lost and found. The bus is almost empty because we are young and foolish while everybody else is sitting at a desk in some tech building, staring at a screen and wishing they could taste the air when it is fresh and tranquil. We don’t got nowhere to be and we like it like that.
Alé is one of the lucky ones. Her family’s restaurant is a neighborhood staple, and even though they can’t afford more than the one bedroom above the shop, she’s never been hungry a day in her life. It’s all degrees of being alive out here and every time I hug her or watch her skate down the sidewalk, I can feel how strong her heartbeat is. It doesn’t matter how lucky you are, though, because you still gotta work day in and day out trying to stay alive while someone else falls through the cracks, ashes scattered in the bay.
Thursdays and Sundays are the only days Alé will come crawling around town with me. She normally stays to help her mom run the restaurant, standing over a stove or waitressing. When I’m lonely, I come watch her do this, observing the way she can sweat nonstop for hours without even moving.