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The waiter brought our food—piping hot and delicious smelling—and I hoped he was also going to serve us a side of distraction, but when he walked away Malakai was still looking at me, his soft gaze questioning.
I swallowed. “A fewwhos. A couplewhats.”
Malakai’s eyes scanned me, and he obviously saw something that made him say, “Got you—whos andwhats that you don’t want to talk to me about yet.”
I speared a forkful of plantain waffle and Southern fried chicken intomy mouth partly because I was hungry and partly to delay answering him. The waffle had been drizzled with honey instead of maple syrup, the chicken infused with a perfect mix of herbs and spices, its coating crispy, the flesh succulent. It was a perfect explosion of sweet and savory, a sublime balance of honey and spice. I wanted more as soon as it made its way to fill my belly up. It was satisfying and indulgent, enough but also greed-inducing.
Malakai smiled right up to his eyes. “Good?”
I pressed a hand to my chest, closed my eyes, and let out a little moan from the soul.
Malakai roared with laughter. “Good, ’cause not gonna lie, I was feeling the pressure.”
I hadn’t answered his question yet. I thought I got away with it when he started on his own food but then he paused, looked up at me, fork suspended. “Scotch, I want you to know that we don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to. I’m cool with anything you’re cool with.”
I felt my bones liquify a little, easing something warm around my body. This was probably the longest personal conversation I’d had with anyone that wasn’t Aminah, in my year and a half at Whitewell, and it didn’t feel too long, didn’t feel too personal.
“Thanks. Same. So, do you want to talk about why you transferred here? About whether it’s a who or a what?”
A shadow flitted across Malakai’s face, dimming his smile slightly, and he swallowed. “It’s a complicated who and what.”
“That you don’t want to talk to me about yet.” My words echoed his.
Malakai’s smile returned. “Not yet. Not all of them. I can talk about a who though. She is a notable who.”
She.“I already know she’s fine.”
“She was. Is. She’s also my ex. Ama.”
I perked up. This was how I would discover his Wasteman originstory, despite the fact that “Wasteman” was no longer fitting him as well as I thought it was, splitting and slipping from the image of the new Malakai that had reconfigured in my head. It was baggy on the caricature I’d created of his player archetype, too small on the parts of him I hadn’t known; like his sense of humor and the way he listened. Malakai listened with his whole face, eyes attentive and mouth patient with a penchant to curve heart-stoppingly at the right moments. He gestured at the yam chips I’d thought I’d been surreptitiously eyeing throughout our conversation. And now I discovered that he sharedfood.What the hell was I supposed to do about that?
I took a chip, managing to say “Tell me everything” with it between my teeth. He grinned as I expertly tossed it into my mouth with a flip of my tongue. “So, what happened between you and Ama?”
Malakai thought about it for a few seconds, eyes narrowed and thoughtful. “She was kind of mean.”
I choked on the chip and had to push it down with a few frantic slurps of Coke. “Is that it? I’m sorry, you broke up because she was mean? Have you met me? Also I hate it when guys call girls mean.”
Malakai laughed and shook his head. “Nah. Look, I get how it sounds. I’m not a sexist prick, I swear. Which is exactly what a sexist prick would say, I realize, but listen. You’re bossy and you say shit how you see it and honestly, it’s cool. I respect it. You know your mind. It’s not like from a fundamentally badmind place. Ama was mean, like high-school-movie cheerleader mean, you know? It was almost parody. Like, she made waiterscrymean. If we were at a birthday dinner and it was time to sing ‘Happy Birthday,’ she’d straight up refuse to join in. She said it was corny. You know how much effort it takes to resist singing ‘Happy Birthday’ when you’re surrounded by people singing it? Like, you really have to make a conscious decision to keep your mouth shut.She mustered that strength.”
I bit down on my lip to keep from smiling. “So why did you date her?I mean she is who she is, so once you figure that out and you don’t like it, maybe it’s on you to stop hanging out with her. At some point you can’t blame her anymore. It’s on you.”
Malakai’s lips quirked up at the corner. “You’re good.”
“So I’ve heard.”
He laughed. “Uh, I guess it was familiarity. We grew up together. Our dads are friends. They work together. It was just kind of a given that we’d date and then we’d go to the same uni. She’d study law and I would study economics. We’d dated for years and she was all I knew. I thought that was what romance was. You’re attracted to someone and you just power through the fact that sometimes you genuinely feel like they’re a stranger to you. Like they don’t really know who you are. I thought distance was normal. That’s what I saw with my parents and I had no reason to think it could be any different.”
His voice had another dimension to it when he spoke about his parents, lightly detached, breezy enough to know it was concealing something heavy. I nodded.
“But you have a point.” He frowned. “I should have ended it. I just thought that part of being a good guy was sucking it up. And we had good moments, like my parents had good moments. So, I just rolled with it, hoping that we’d just figure it out.” Something dark flitted across his eyes—it was only a split second but it was so dark it made me miss his light. “But... something happened that made me realize that life is short. Too short to be at a uni I hated, studying a course I hated, and with someone who called me childish for finally having the guts to tell her that I wanted to maybe make movies one day.”
He coughed and there was a bite to his eyes and in his voice that pinched at me. The breakup was just the surface. I decided to leave the dark alone for now.
I sat up, sighed. “Alright. You get to complain about your ex-girlfriendtwo more times and then I’m going to have to stop you out of feminine solidarity. Okay?”
Malakai shot me a warm look of gratitude. He knew I wasn’t asking what I wasn’t asking. He leaned forward. “She hatedThe Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. How can you actively hateThe Fresh Prince of Bel-Air?”
I laughed and felt the mood shift. “Right. It’s like not liking plantain.”
