Love Out of Order (Indigo Love Spectrum) (5 page)

Apryl, her husband, and four-year-old son lived in a
townhouse near downtown Richmond, so not far from
the school at all. I went to her place whenever I wanted a
real meal or just to hang out and get away from school.

Apryl was round and brown. She reminded me of a russet potato, but not in a lumpy, warty way or anything.
She was a bubbly, cute potato. And her son, Taye, was too
adorable. He followed me around the house whenever I
came over, anxious to show me his new toys—he even
called the ones I’d seen a hundred times new as if that
would entice me to want to see them more. Like I needed
c
oaxing anyway. I enjoyed following him while he
hopped around the house, shouting and laughing.

“Denise. Please call your mama. That woman is
driving me crazy,” Apryl said. She stood by the stove,
oven mitts in her hand, preparing to check her meatloaf.
“She calls me almost every day, complaining about how
she never hears from you anymore.”

I was chopping vegetables for the salad. “I will.”
“When?”

“Soon. She can call me, too.”

“You know how she is. She worries she’s bothering you. That you’re too busy.”

“I’m never too busy to talk to her,” I said, the guilt
settling in around me. I didn’t like avoiding her, but I
didn’t want to talk about the things she wanted to talk
about, either. Most of the time when we did talk, we eventually ended up at that one subject I tried to stay
away from. My avoidance issues. Imagine that.

“I dunno, Denise. You spend an awful lot of time
studying. You’re busy a lot of the time with that,” Astoria
said, looking up from the lattice work she was laying in
doughy strips across the top of the pie. “Real busy.”

I swallowed hard and sliced a cucumber so quickly it
was a miracle I didn’t chop off a finger.

Apryl glanced back and forth between us, her eyes
filled with confusion. Leave it to Astoria to say too much;
way more than anybody had asked her.

“Yeah, who told me to take fifteen credits this
semester? With journal and everything else, it’s insane,” I said, trying to laugh off Astoria’s comment. I didn’t know
w
hat she was trying to pull, or why she’d been glaring at
me off and on ever since John showed up at the Habitat thing, but she wasn’t going to drag me through any non
sense in that kitchen with Apryl. Apryl, who reported to my mom almost every day.

Astoria didn’t say much else that evening—well,
unless you counted all the heated murmuring under her
breath. Apryl and I talked about my school and her job
with occasional, way off-topic quips thrown in by Taye,
creating most of the conversation. Apryl’s husband wasn’t
there to join in because he was at work.

A little while after dinner, we got ready to leave after
helping Apryl clean up the kitchen. Usually, I stayed at
Apryl’s house for hours when I came over to visit, but I
needed to get back to my cite checks, which meant I
would be spending the rest of my evening with the foot
notes to journal articles, making sure they were accurate.
I also didn’t feel like sitting around with Astoria much longer was going to be a good idea that evening.

Taye held my hand all the way to the front door, bab
bling about some cartoon character he was infatuated
with. I wished I had that much energy.

“See you later,” Taye said in a high-pitched voice, his
“r’s” still sounding like “w’s”. He waved manically to us
until his mother closed the door.

“What was that about? In there?” I asked Astoria. We
walked toward the end of the sidewalk.

“Hm?” Astoria shot me a glance that would have shut
me right up if I hadn’t been so angry.

“
All through dinner, the whole time we were in there,
you were making cracks at me.”

“I just don’t understand you, Denise. That’s all.”
“Huh?”

“Why are you setting yourself up to get hurt?”
“What?”

“Look, I don’t have time for you to play dumb. Can you just take me home?”

I stared at her, still trying to figure out what had
gotten into her.

“Just—let’s go.” She walked down to my car, stood by
the door and crossed her arms over her chest.

I decided to let it go because there wasn’t much else I
could do. She wasn’t making any sense. It’s hard to reason
with a person who’s already made up her mind about
something, especially when you don’t know what it is
she’s made up her mind about.

ASTORIA (“JUST CALL ME
ANGELA DAVIS”) BANKS

Tuesday at the gym, I found out what had been both
ering Astoria so much. I wished I hadn’t. We always took
an aerobics class together on that night of the week. And
afterward, in the locker room, I confronted her.

“Okay, I’m tired of all the dirty looks and snide com
ments from you the past few days,” I said with an angry
sigh. “What?” Astoria had been mumbling under her
breath again. The only words I caught were “white boy.”

“What is with you lately?” She was notorious for
answering a question with a question.

“I’m the same person I’ve always been. Wish I could
say the same for you,” I said, slinging my towel around
my shoulders.

“Whatever. What was that on Saturday? I’ve never
seen you act like that before. And over some stupid boy
who has a girlfriend?”

“I thought this was about John.”

“What are you doing, Denise?”

“Nothing. I know he has a girlfriend. We’re just
friends.”

“
Really? I’m sure he thinks that. But you were all over
him when he was ‘teaching’ you how to use a sander.
Which isn’t all that hard to do, by the way. Are you sure
that’s all you think is going on?”

“Yeah. I’m sure.” I turned to my locker and pretended
to look through my gym bag. I didn’t want Astoria to see
my face. She knew me too well.

“I don’t want to see you get hurt, Denise. I don’t want
you to get your hopes up over this guy.”

I yanked my bag out of my locker and set it down on
the bench behind me. “There’s nothing to get my hopes
up over. I know I’m not on his level.”

“No. He’s not on yours. But anyway, be careful how
seriously you take this ‘friendship’ thing. Because John
Archer is the kind of guy we make fun of, Denise. The
spoiled, white frat boy who doesn’t live in the real world
and will never have to. He wants you, all right, but not
the way you want him to. Please don’t catch feelings for this pretty boy.”

“Astoria, I don’t need a lecture,” I said, yanking the
zipper on my bag closed.

“I’m just trying to be a good friend.”

“Then stop trying to tell me what to do.” I threw my
bag over my shoulder. She looked put out by my attitude. I didn’t care.

“Fine. You know what, do what you want. I’ll just
have to be there to pick up the pieces.”

“You are the last one who should be counseling me on
guys anyway.” I knew I had dug too deeply. I did it on purpose, angry she was so dead on about my feelings for John. Keith, Astoria’s boyfriend from high school and
college, was off limits. All I knew about him was that she’d had to let him go because he kept doing all the
wrong things, and him stealing from her friends and
family had been the last straw. And he was now married
to a stripper. We never talked about him and I knew how
Astoria got when the conversation so much as leaned that
way.

“You know what? You know everything there is to know, Denise. Having a boyfriend for a few months once
in your life made you an expert on everything relationships, love, and male. Sorry for trying to help. Obviously,
I was out of line,” Astoria said. She pushed past me and
huffed out of the locker room.

That wasn’t very smart. Now I would have to walk
home. I didn’t admit to myself the real reason I shouldn’t
have done what I did; that it was just plain wrong.

I took the walk home as an opportunity to think
about Astoria’s words. I knew Astoria had strong views on
the race issue, and that’s probably where a lot of her hos
tility was coming from. There was no way to be friends
with her and avoid knowing. I agreed with her in some
respects, but in other ways I thought she was a little too
militant, and maybe even off-base.

I never realized how large a divide there is before I
started law school. Even at my huge undergrad school,
when I was the only black person in some of my classes.
Here, in this small place, it’s probably the way it was in
high school, but I didn’t have a high enough level of
awareness to process it back then. I was still living in my
s
afe, adolescent, self-centered bubble. I think I believed
then what Suse still believes. I thought that since my
friends were so diverse, everyone’s friends must have been. However, law school brought me crashing back down into
reality. A lot of self-segregation happened on both sides. I thought part of the problem was huge amounts of misun
derstanding. Astoria had her own theories.

I remembered one conversation I had with Astoria on
the subject. It happened after a racially charged incident
that headlined every news broadcast and newspaper in
the country during our first year of law school. That con
versation made me more aware of how rotten things
really were in the state of Denmark, so to speak. And of
the true extent of Astoria’s bitterness.

The night of the conversation was right after a special
report on the news about a rash of lynchings in the pre
ceding two weeks. We were at Astoria’s place. I sat on the floor and Astoria was on her bed. There wasn’t much fur
niture in her apartment our first year.

“I just don’t get it. When will this ignorant shit
change?” Astoria snapped, flipping the television off with
the remote.

“Will it ever? To a lot of them, we will always be less.
We will always be these inferior wastes of space,
encroaching on their land, taking their jobs and threat
ening their way of life,” I said.

“Yeah, when their way of life wouldn’t exist without
us. The damned slaves built this shit up from the ground
while they sat on their asses in the big houses. And it was
built up on land they stole from the Native Americans.”

“Some people will never see it that way.”

“Obviously. With people riding around, swinging nooses out of their car windows and our government
over-prosecuting, over-incarcerating, over-condemning
our men,” Astoria said, her face clouded with anger.

This was an issue we both felt strongly about, but I
don’t think anyone felt more passionately about it than
Astoria. Her brother was wrongly convicted and still
served a stretch for manslaughter. Wrong place at the
wrong time. And wrong color.

“Yeah, it’s messed up.”

“See, that’s why I can’t understand why you like Suse
so much. She’s so oblivious and not even trying to get
schooled.”

“She’s a good person,” I said stiffly. I didn’t like to get
into to it about Suse with Astoria.

“Hm. She always takes up for those ignorant, opin
ionated bigots. I bet her family is like that.”

“Astoria.”

“What? You know they are.”

“I’m not gonna listen to any more of that.”

“I’m just sayin’. That girl volunteered just a little too
quickly in Con Law to take the dissent’s position on
Grutter v. Bollinger
for me.” Astoria sat up straighter on
the bed and narrowed her eyes at me. “Yeah, she would
think that case came out the wrong way. She probably
doesn’t even think you or I should be in law school. And no way we could get into the same school she got into
without a little extra help, right?”