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“Can’t wait to be sister wives!”
I opened my laptop to stream music as I got ready. “Only person I’d want to do it with, babe.”
From: [email protected]
Subject: Study Buddy
Or, if you prefer, “Academic Acquaintance.”
Here is a link to the other student’s work. I have sent them your work too. Let me know what you think. I really think your ideas complement each other’s.
S.M
I stared at the email blinking at me on my laptop screen. It had popped up as I switched on my Saturday Soul playlist, just as Jill Scott asked me to take a long walk with her. So, Dr. Miller hadn’t forgotten. It was a Vimeo link. Afilm. Pretentious.
I stared at my D’Angelo poster on the wall for guidance. It was hisVoodooalbum cover, body hard, eyes soft. Slight smirk, lips looking tender, gaze beckoning. It didn’t help. All it did was make me slightly horny.Ugh. I felt irritated about the fact this stranger was apparently good enough for me to seek help from. I didn’tneedhelp. I had this on my own. Maybe I needed to look at their project to prove it to myself. Besides, keep your academic enemies closer. I clicked the link.
It was calledCuts,a fifteen-minute short about a Black barbershop. It was terrible in that it wasn’t terrible. It was good. Really good. Really, irritatingly good—and not the artsy, derivative, pandering shit on toxic masculinity I expected it to be. It showed quick, sharp shots of men bantering and barbering, moralizing while doing-the-mosting, regaling while roasting, straddling the line between shameless sin and sanctimony, telling the crassest stories, lines that sounded like poetry: “She was sweet plantain, soft like mango,” “God is good all the time. He turned my life around man, can’t lie,” and “I’m not religious like that. Respect it, though. My mum’s house is church. Her bills are my tithes.”
It was grainy, the soundtrack a song that was somehow a mishmash of neo soul and grime. Eyes soft, body hard. Aunties coming through with shopping trolleys, singing, “Meat pie, fish pie, puff puff,” adding musical dimension to the pirate radio station playing in the background. Boys coming in to get a trim for their first dates, the old guys calming their nerves by sharpening the edges on their foreheads while making fun of the sizes of their heads, telling them their own first-date stories with their missus.
There was mixtape selling, jewelry hawking, shit-talking, confidence-constructing.... It wasgood.Maybe it needed a little work with narrative, but maybe it didn’t. I felt it. I wanted to know this person. I suddenly felt embarrassed. I’d been a petulant prick. Why was I threatened by someone being better than me? I was a nerd but I never, ever figured I’d bethatkind of nerd. The irritation began to ebb out of me just as the credits rolled across the laptop screen: stark white letters against a black background, stars on a clear dark night, just like his stupid eyes.
A Malakai Korede Film
I slapped my laptop shut. I needed fifteen mimosas.
“I am extremely uncomfortable right now, Minah. I have to say.” We were sat at a window table of W&W, me with a half–English breakfast, Aminah with a stack of pillowy pancakes and summer fruit.
She shrugged and picked up her mimosa. “If I were you, I would lean into it. Let people stare. Besides, you look good. How do you know it’s not because of that?”
I glanced down at my outfit—a men’s black T-shirt with Fela’s face graffitied on it that had “Expensive Shit” scrawled beneath it in haphazard brushstrokes, worn as a dress, with tights and combat boots.Ithought I looked good. That perspective changed, however, if I met the decoratively eyeshadowed eyes of the girls shooting me curious gazes in between dainty mouthfuls of waffles and whispers.
“I just know,” I said, as I speared some scrambled egg into my mouth. I cast a furtive glance around the flowery parlor. People weredefinitelytalking about me, and they wanted me to know they were talking about me. Otherwise they could have just talked about me without looking. It’s not like I would have heard—Ariana Grande was playing too loudly.
“Well, do you also know what you’re gonna do for the NYU program project? Any ideas? Thought anymore about the Malakai thing?”
I took a sip of my sour Prosecco. “I have, actually. Weirdly, I thinkthere’s a chance I could get him to do it. You know that student that Dr. Miller said was my competition?”
“Our nemesis, yeah—”
“You ladies need anything?” An almost hilariously deep baritone added accompaniment to Ariana’s silken whistles. Aminah and I glanced up to see AJ (Aaron) by our table, broad smile in place. I ran my gaze across his copper-toned arm as he lifted it to push a stray lock behind his ear (there was a pencil tucked there that he did not need, he had a tablet). The Eye of Horus twinkled slightly with the movement.
I felt a soft kick on my shins from Aminah’s tennis shoes. She raised a brow at me, her lips pulled back into a knowing smirk. She was challenging me. She wanted me to husk outNothing that’s on the menu,heavy with implication, like something out of a terrible rom-com. She’d dared me to do it ten minutes ago. She cocked her head at me. “I don’t know. Do we, Kiki?”
I shrugged. “Nothing, thank you.” I deliberately avoided looking at Aminah.
“You sure? No water top-ups? Yours is looking a little low.” Aminah’s glass was still full, mine half empty. Depending how you looked at it.
I shook my head. “I’m perfect, thanks.”
Aaron nodded and smiled, his eyes flicking across me. “Yeah.... Well. If you need anything. Let me know.”
“Will do!”
Aaron broadened his smile to include both of us, inclined his head ever so slightly, and walked off to flirt with the cohort of Naija Princesses behind us.
“Are you kidding me?” Aminah hissed, as soon as he was out of earshot.
