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“I am holding still.”

“You’re vibrating.”

I was. I could feel it in my knees, a low hum under my skin, like the window unit.

“Three weeks,” Brielle said, perched on the counter with her one lash on and her mouth still full. “Three weeks of ‘I’m busy, I have an exam,’ and he’s still texting you good morning. He’s either a saint or he’s hiding something.”

“Or he just likes her,” Sofia said.

“Everyone is hiding something,” Imani said, pressing a nail flat against my thumb. “That’s why we have rules.”

“Show them his picture,” Brielle said.

“You’ve seen his picture.”

“I want to see it again. For research.”

I took out my phone and passed it over. Brielle held it up like evidence.

“Okay, no,” she said. “That is illegal. Tall. Cheekbones. Soft eyes. A fade that deserves its own insurance policy.”

“And he’s Dominican?” Sofia leaned over her shoulder. “Ay. I’m already in love.”

“On his mother’s side,” I said. “And Black American on his father’s. He grew up here. He says Spanish at home.”

“And you’re going to take him to meet Mama Mwende,” Brielle said, grinning. “She’s gonna feed him three plates and ask him who his people are.”

“She will,” I said, and laughed with the others.

The laugh sat strangely in my chest.

Auntie had opinions about who I might bring home. She had never said them outright. She said them over pilau, in glances at my cousins’ husbands, in the particular way she asked, ‘And where are his people from?’ Kenyan first, preferably Kikuyu. African second, with a nod. Black American, tolerated, with questions about his mother’s side. Anything else was a conversation.

Adrián didn’t fit a single one of her boxes.

I had grown up between two worlds that loved each other and misunderstood each other in equal measure. I had learned to carry both without spilling. I did not have the strength to carry a third into her kitchen.

“What’s she going to say?” Brielle asked, watching my face. “That he’s not African enough?”

“Not Kenyan enough,” I said. “Which in her language is the same thing.”

They laughed. I laughed too, and let the thought go.

Mika hadn’t laughed. She had taken my phone back from Brielle and was scrolling through his profile slowly, her thumb moving with the patience of someone reading a contract. I watched her until she handed it back without a word.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing.” She shrugged. “He’s very… polished.”

“Polished is good.”

“Polished is good,” she agreed, and went back to her phone.

Imani finished the last nail and blew on my fingertips. The press-ons were long and smooth and nothing like my own hands.

“There,” she said. “Dr. Kimani can wait. Tonight you get to be a woman with nails.”

Face next. Brielle abandoned her own lash and took over, sweeping bronzer along my cheekbones with a brush that tickled, telling me to look up, look down, don’t blink, stop blinking, how are you still blinking. A little shimmer on the lids. Lashes that fluttered when I moved. Gloss that tasted of strawberries and stuck to everything.