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My brows instantly did the same, because when Aminah frowns, so do I. It’s instinctive. “What’s up?”
“Yo... so, this is weird. All the advice questions this week are hella... specific? ‘How to make a guy wife you?,’ ‘How to make a guy choose you?,’ ‘How to be a priority?’”
I wheeled my chair over immediately. This was alarming and unlike Blackwellian women. They knew better—I’d made sure of it.True, we mainly dealt with relationship dilemmas and I primarily gave out romantic advice, but we’d never received a lumpgenreof question before. Nothing this focused.
Since first year, when I started this show—R&B and soul punctuated with advice that tied into themes of songs—the Blackwellian babes and I had been through a lot. Together we dealt with boys who said, “You’re moving kind of mad still,” when you asked them the simple question “What are we?” I’d helped guide them around mandem who elongated their “wows,” to questions that were veiled iterations of “If you profess to like me, why don’t you fucking act like it, you prick?”
That “woooww” was a tool, I told the girls, the extra syllables added to buy the boy time to figure out what lie to tell you when you queried why you got a “good morning, beautiful” text from him when your girl said he’d been seen coming out of Teni’s flat this morning. I broke down how to handle guys who would then turn around and ask, “Why u preeing for?,” like you were the crazy one when the day before he had drawled, voice rumbling through collar bone, “You’re different still, you know that, babes. Never met anyone likeyou.” We had grown, developed in our studies of fuckboiology, my syllabus strong. So it seemed strange that suddenly they were preoccupied with beingchosen.We were the choosers, we never begged.
Aminah had pushed her glasses back up, inspecting the comments with scientific attention: “The comments are clique wide: the Vegan Cupcakes, the London Gyaldem, Naija Princesses, Bible Study Babes, and all with the same kinda question. Plus, they’re interacting with each other. Badly. There’s no ‘You got this, sis.’ It’s... savage. It’s ‘Stay away from him–type shit.”
I took the tablet from her to examine it for myself. She was right. Instead of the usual supportive comments that littered the page there was infighting, sniping—“Have you considered that maybe he ain’t want you, sis?,” “Sis, wasn’t your manjustcaught in the bed of one of thosewhite girls that always crash our motives dressed as rebore Kim Ks? Maybe take time to recover??” Sheesh.
“Sis” was a powerful, potent word, one that had the power to build up or destroy with the same intensity; it was a sword that could either be used to knight or slice. There was a bloodbath in theBrown Sugarcomment section, even worse than when someone said they “didn’t reallygetBeyoncé” during a debate session at a Blackwellian meeting.
This was bad.
Since its conceptionBrown Sugarwas the glue that gelled the female factions of Blackwell together; the show was where we virtually communed and our social page was a safe space where girls would put aside their differences to bond with double-tap likes over dickhead drama. Groups that didn’t really fuck with each other during Blackwell socials (other universities had African-Caribbean Societies, but we flipped the name of our institution and made it our own), would coalesce in the comment section to drag a Wasteman who replied to an errant “I love you” with “safe babes.” This was deep.
I passed the tablet back over to my best friend. “This is over one guy. There’s a unifying source here—”
Aminah nodded. “Right, but this hasn’t happened before. I mean we’ve had girls fighting over guys but not like this. And I really don’t think the demographic of the Blackwell mandem has changed that drastically in the past year, and—Whydo you have that look on your face?”
Ofcourse.It had to be. Fellow Superhuman from earlier wasn’t like the other guys. No, he was smooth, actually, genuinely smooth. Or at least extremely skilled at seeming genuine. He was warm, looked you in the eye. I had built up an immunity and he hadalmostgot me. He had looked at me and I had felt it under my skin—and if he almost got me that meant that he definitely had got some of the other girls.
I nodded at Aminah. “I think I know who it is. You have a wayof checking if the girls have had a mutual follow on social media recently?”
Aminah smirked. “Do I own every single item from Fenty Beauty? Let’s not ask silly questions. I study digital marketing. I am good at what I do. I am a social media savant, sweetie.” She said all this while swiping and tapping like a maestro conducting an orchestra, effortlessly subduing technology with a perfectly manicured hand. She stopped abruptly and held the tablet up to her chest, mischief peppering her face.
“Keeks, the guy you met before, was he tall, dark, and handsome? Looks like he walked out of a nineties rom-com? Looking like some sort of stem-cell experiment between Kofi Siriboe and Morris Chestnut?”
I would have laughed if the description wasn’t so creepily accurate. “You found him?”
Aminah flipped the tablet around: it was zoomed in on the ProntoPic page that had Fellow Superhero staring at me from a beach, topless, in pink board shorts with palm trees on them, a red cup in hand. His chest was all ridges and slopes. I was never really a fan of extreme sports but hiking suddenly seemed like a cool thing to try.
Aminah’s smirk broadened. “I think we found the reason our girls are moving mad. His name is Malakai Korede. Transferred in September from Northchester University. So, we know he’s smart. Smart enough to haveyouwondering who he is—”
I narrowed my eyes, took the tablet from her, and scrolled through his pictures. His selfies were sparse, so we knew he wasn’t overtly vain. He was confident and breezy with his looks, and when hedidtake selfies, they were purposeful. They were neither the badly angled close-ups of nostrils that made a sis quickly rush to say “He’s better in person,”nor were they the cringey mirror poses, the squinted eyes, slight pout, captioned with a lazy trap lyric that boasted of money, bitches, and swag the dude most likely lacked. Nah, Fellow Superhuman’s, sorry,Malakai’sphotos were interesting. There was one in front of theMona Lisa.
I asked what she’s on tonight and she side-eyed me. Curved by a 516-year-old, I can’t believe. #notageist.
A smile I didn’t agree to release slipped out. Unnerving. Huh. Okay, so he somehow managed to be part of the 0.001 percent of the male population that was vaguely amusing. I could see how that might rattle our girls. I was pretty sure the majority of guys in our uni thought satire was a way of describing an outfit.
I swiped a little more and came across a picture with the most cherubic little girl with rich black clouds at the side of her heart-shaped face, annotated with:
She’s the boss of me. #uncleniecebonding #PrincessAliyah
So he was good with kids, had a softness to him. The most dangerous thing about that was clearly it wasn’t performed: there was no way he could fake the adoration with which he looked at that angel. With that obnoxious display of genuine cuteness, he was speaking directly to a bunch of young women whose mothers had told them that they were to graduate with a diploma in one hand and a future Obama in the other. The case of Malakai Korede was solidifying. He was a catch—fresh manna from heaven in the form of a man from Brixton (gleaned from tagged locations). And we, the girls of Whitewell, were in a romantic desert. Who were we to question God’s boon, an oasis to satisfy our thirst? The comments on his photos (“Go off king!”) were from members of the same clique. The most recent photo featured heart emojis from Nia. And he was also desirable enough to be used as a pawn within intersquad politics. Yeah, this was worse than I thought. He was evolved. He wasn’t a cookie-cutter player, dumb but affable. He had a personality, ridges and hard edges, and quirks and crooks, and he still managed to be apparently generally palatable enough to be attractive to all the men-loving, femme subgroups in Blackwell.
It was only mid-October, but the scope of his reach in the female cohort of the ACS was already impressively wide—more than your regular tall, dark, and handsome headache could hope to achieve in six months. There was something about him, a different kick to his sauce. Our girls weren’t fools; they were wary, tough. Sure, Malakai was fresh meat but if they found him unpalatable, they would have spat him out pretty fast. But this boy remained undragged on social media, managing to fly under my radar, somehow safely untethered, despite having some sort of link to a spice from every female Blackwellian clique. No other boy on campus could have got away with it. Somehow, he was turning our girls on each other. Like an infection, he had to be drawn out.
I passed the tablet back. “I’m gonna deal with this. He’s messing with our girls. Plus, they’re our core demographic. We’re a space of peace and truth and if he’s causing discord within them that’s an issue for me.”
Aminah cackled and threw a plantain chip at me, which was mainly annoying because I hadn’t managed to catch it with my mouth. A waste. “Yeah. I’m sure you want him to cause discord inyourcore demographic—”
I wheeled myself back to the desk. “Okay. Well, I see you’re not taking this seriously enough. Also, that doesn’t even make sense—”
Aminah shrugged. “I thought it was poetic.”
