When I returned to my apartment, I turned my music up to drown out the silence. The song I chose, for once, wasn’t a sappy ballad about heartbreak, but a bouncy afrobeats track that I couldn’t help but dance to. I blasted it as I looped one of Nia’s aprons over my head, singing along to myself as I prepared dinner just for me. I poured myself a generous glass of a red blend that I sipped with my meal, and another that I toted into the living room for a long night of bingeing The Great British Bake Off. I lit a massive vanilla-scented candle, dropped onto my sectional, and let myself sink into the cushions. After a couple of episodes, a fuzzy feeling of contentment washed over me. If I were a cat, I would have been purring.
It was funny, how afraid I’d always been of being alone. I’d clearly been missing out; being alone was lit.
Just when I’d started to get comfortable, my front gate intercom buzzed. I jolted, nearly spilling my wine on my rug, and steadied myself. My downstairs neighbor had a bad habit of leaving without his keys and then getting upset when we didn’t let him back up immediately. Nia used to curse him out through the intercom before opening the gate for him; I guess that was my job now. I sighed, then hit the speaker button.
“Hello?” I asked. “Tom, you can’t keep doing this—”
“Hey.” A voice I had not expected echoed through the intercom. My blood ran cold, wrenching me out of my cozy, wine-induced stupor. “Um . . . this isn’t Tom.”
Of course it wasn’t, but I wished, more than anything, that it had been. Tom, bumbling, stoner asshole that he was, I knew how to handle.
Ricky, on the other hand?
“I know this is out of the blue,” he said. He paused, sheepish. “But . . . can I come up?”
Twenty-Two
When I was twenty-one years old, I fell in love with a boy named Sean.
It was not love at first sight. I did not look across the room and see a body that my body knew it was attracted to before my mind could catch up. Nor did I sense the weight of eyes trailing me across the room, because we were at Frank Guo’s semi-annual house party and I was too busy trying to make sure Michelle didn’t sneak another cup of Jungle Juice. And sure, Sean was cute, but he was cute in a way that I had taught myself to ignore: tall, athletic, with the square jawline and squinted eyes of a future politician. My gaze glossed over him without pause as I surveyed the party, and weeks later, as I lay on my back in bed tracing the path of fading sunlight on my ceiling and wondering how it was possible to feel like someone had wrenched me in two, I would think, “All of this could have been avoided if he’d just left me alone.”
But Sean hadn’t left me alone. Halfway through the party, Markus sidled up beside me with a shit-eating grin on his face.
“Guess what just happened?” he said, nudging me in the side like the annoying little brother I’d never wanted.
“What,” I said.
“Dude over there just asked me if you and I were dating,” he said. His eyes darted in Sean’s direction and I followed them across the room until I landed on him, chatting it up with our host over the punch. “I think he’s gonna try to shoot his shot.”
And shoot his shot he did, quite literally, in a clean swoop into Michelle’s Solo cup. An hour after Markus’s warning and fifteen minutes into a pathetic game of beer pong （Michelle and Nia versus me and a distracted Markus）， Sean walked over to our table and plucked the sticky Ping-Pong ball out of my hands.
“No offense,” he said with a crooked smile, “but it was getting painful watching you miss.”
“Offense taken,” I said, assessing him. By that time, I’d had plenty of experience with boys like Sean. Many a corn-fed, all-American white boy had draped his arm over my shoulders to drunkenly declare that I was just so pretty for a Black girl,* chalking up their attraction to me to exceptionalism on my part rather than the fact that hotness doesn’t come in hues. Some part of them would be sure that I would be honored by the compliment, even more so by the attention, and be put out that I wasn’t all that impressed by their interest.
I wasn’t all that impressed by Sean’s pong skills either, which were admittedly excellent, but there was something about the clear-eyed intentionality of his pursuit that made my heart stammer. Besides, he was actually cute, not just white-with-a-discernible-jawline cute, so when I managed to get a ball into Michelle and Nia’s last cup and he swung me into a celebratory hug, I focused for far too long on how nice it felt to be in his arms.