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Chapter 2
I snuck into the cramped campus radio studio, hoping the fact that I’d opened the door gently would make a difference given the fact that I was late to my preshow meeting with radio tech, producer (informal capacity), and my best friend (formal capacity) Aminah. However, as soon as the door clicked open, she whizzed around on the bright blue Office Depot chair, from where she was sat at the radio desk, twenty inches of wavy hair, swishing with the movement, a badass Bond villain with an exceptional ass.
She rose an immaculate brow. “Where you been, bitch?”
“Library.”
“Lying.”
I grinned and shrugged my jacket off. “Yup.”
“Do I wanna know?”
“No.”
Aminah narrowed her eyes. “But Iknow.”
“I know.”
Aminah shook her head with kind concern, looking like a reality TV show therapist, pressing lilac gelled nails against her chest. She wasn’t about to let this go.
“You know, sis, it really isn’t healthy to purposefully emotionally disinvest from intimate relationships—”
I furrowed my brows in mock confusion as I threw my jacket on the worn leather sofa against the wall. “I’m sorry, I forget, are you a psych student or marketing?”
Aminah shook her head as she relinquished the seat by the desk and moved to the sofa, smacking my butt on her way over. “Alright, I don’t like attitude. Very hostile. And actually I took a psych module this term, but that’s not the point. I got that from Auntie Jada Pinkett Smith’s talk show—”
“Speaking of shows. Can we prep for ours?”
Aminah smirked humorlessly. “Nice pivot. Very well done. So now you wanna work? After being late for the staff briefing?” She grabbed a packet of plantain chips from the stash we kept in the cupboard in the corner of the room and sat herself on the sofa, pointing at me like a disappointed Nigerian grandma with a hand on her wrapper-wrapped waist. “No snacks for you.”
I resumed my rightful place in front of the desk, slipped the headphones around my neck, and tapped the laptop alive. “I didn’t wanna eat anyway.” Another superfluous lie. “And also, wearethe staff. And it’s fine, I know the topic I’m gonna cover and youknow all we ever do in these meetings is talk shit—”
She popped a plantain chip in her mouth. “Cffrucial for staff bonding—”
“We live together—”
“What’s your point?”
I laughed. “You know what? I don’t have one. You’re right. I’m sorry...” I paused and cleared my throat, schooling my voice into nonchalance. I mean Iwasnonchalant, but I wanted to be very clearly, unequivocally nonchalant because my best friend had emotional X-rayvision. “Hey, real quick, um... I bumped into this guy earlier, and I’ve never seen him before, which is weird because—”
Aminah had brought her tablet out of the expensive structured bag she had lying on the sofa, presumably scrolling the show’s page for today’s topic. She immediately pulled down her black-rimmed designer spectacles and smirked, doing precisely what I hoped she wouldn’t do, making my casual inquiry into athing.
“Oh? Kiki Banjo intrigued by someone? Well, put me in a gray double jersey sweater/jogger combo outfit because the world is clearly ending.”
In another life, Aminah Bakare—who was currently wearing a checked blazer together with a matching miniskirt and a black polo shirt—could easily have been Supreme of the Naija rich bitches at Whitewell College. Her parents ran a Nigerian snack empire called ChopChop (source of our endless supply of plantain chips), and up until the age of fifteen she’d been schooled in a prestigious international British school in Lagos, where everyone inexplicably spoke in an affected Valley girl accent that she eschewed out of principle. (“Why would Ichooseto sound Kardashian? What kind of recolonization?”) Her parents thought that finishing her education in England (where she was born but not bred) would help her when it came to applying to university, so she ended up in a private boarding school in Sussex for a few years, which she hated. (“It was full of literal landed gentry and Freemasons, Kiki. You know what Freemasons are? It’s white juju. The most wicked kind. I was the only Black girl and I swear to you my English teacher looked me directly in the eye and said the word ‘nigger.’ Yes, we were discussingCatcher in the Rye,but is that the point?!”) She left to complete her A Levels at a state school on the East London/Essex border while staying with her aunt, achieving the straight As her parents swore she wouldn’t be able to get without a school that counted Margaret Thatcher’s grandchild among its alumni. It was to Rosewood Hall’s relief. She’d made their existencevery difficult by levelling formal complaints about racialized comments made by staff members and students alike, refusing to wear a Memorial Day poppy, and questioning why they learned about the British Empire without criticizing its brutality. The point is, that despite being a relative renegade and a Bad Bitch who rejected all expectations and presumptions, on a granular level—my best friend, my sister—Aminah Bakare was a princess who could detect the presence of a pea beneath a custom memory-foam mattress and, therefore, would not be caught dead wearing gray double jersey out in public.
I rolled my eyes. “Alright, a little dramatic.O?e,Halle Barely—”
Aminah almost choked on a plantain chip. “Wow—”
“Look, it’s just for the social database, so we know what’s going on in the uni. For work purposes. How can I talk about what’s going on if I don’tknowwhat’s going on? It’s just weird because I’ve never seen him before and he was going to see Zuri Isak—”
Aminah pulled her glasses down further. “Uh-huh. Zuri Isak, who just so happens to live in the same building and Ibelievethe same floor as—”
“You know what? Forget it. Let’s just get ready for the show, we got ten minutes. Can you shoot me over some of the questions please?”
Aminah smiled and turned her gaze back to the tablet screen “Okay, I’m gonna pretend to move on, but...” Her slickly shaped brows suddenly knitted in curiosity as she scrolled.
