After getting shushed in the library one too many times, we switched to the Student Union, but Dee couldn’t hear me over the din. He projected so well, you’d think he was a theater major or something. But I think he’s history or political science. Not that he’s told me this; we don’t talk aside from the reading. But I’ve glimpsed his textbooks, and they’re all tomes about the history of the labor movement or treatises on government.
So right before we start reading the second play, The Winter’s Tale, I suggest that we move to my dorm, where it’s generally quiet in the afternoons. Dee gives me a long look and then says okay. I tell him to come over at four.
That afternoon, I lay out a plate of the cookies that Grandma keeps sending me, and I make tea. I have no idea what Dee expects, but this is the first time I’ve ever entertained in my room, though I’m not sure what I’m doing qualifies as entertaining or if Dee is company.
But when Dee sees the cookies, he gives me a funny little smile. Then he takes off his coat and hangs it in the closet, even though mine is tossed over a chair. He kicks off his boots. Then he looks around my room.
“Do you have a clock?” he asks. “My phone’s dead.”
I get up and show him the box of alarm clocks, which I have since put back in the closet. “Take your pick.”
He takes a long time choosing, finally settling on a 1940s mahogany deco number. I show him how to wind it. He asks how to set the alarm. I show him. Then he sets it for five fifty, explaining he has to be at his job at the dining hall at six. The reading usually doesn’t take more than a half hour, so I’m not sure why he sets the alarm. But I don’t say anything. About that. Or about his job, even though I’m curious about it.
He sits down on my desk chair. I sit on my bed. He picks up a tube of fruit flies from the desk, examining it with a slightly amused expression. “They’re Drosophila,” I explain. “I’m breeding them for a class.”
He shakes his head. “If you run out, you can come get more in my mama’s kitchen.”
I want to ask him where that kitchen is. Where he’s from. But he seems guarded. Or maybe it’s me. Maybe making friends is a specific skill, and I missed the lesson. “Okay, time for work. See you later, my dropsillas,” he says to the bugs. I don’t correct his pronunciation.
We read a really good scene at the beginning of The Winter’s Tale, when Leontes freaks out and thinks that Hermione is cheating on him. When we get to the end point, Dee packs up his Shakespeare textbook, and I think he’s going to leave, but instead he pulls out a book by someone called Marcuse. He gives me the quickest of looks.
“I’ll make more tea,” I say.
We study together in silence. It’s nice. At five fifty, the alarm goes off and Dee packs up to go to work.
“Wednesday?” he says.
“Sure.”
Two days later, we go through the same routine, cookies, tea, hello to the “dropsillas,” Shakespeare out loud, and silent study. We don’t talk. We just work. On Friday, Kali comes into the room. It’s the first time she’s seen Dee, seen anyone, in the room with me, and she looks at him for a long moment. I introduce them.
“Hi, Dee. Pleasure to meet you,” she says in a strangely flirty voice.
“Oh, the pleasure is all mine,” Dee says, his voice all exaggeratedly animated.
Kali looks at him and then smiles. Then she goes to her closet and pulls out a camel coat and a pair of tawny suede boots. “Dee, can I ask you something? What do you think of these boots with this jacket? Too matchy matchy?”
I look at Dee. He is wearing sky-blue sweats and a T-shirt with sparkly lettering spelling out I BELIEVE. I’m not clear how this reads Fashion Expert to Kali.
But Dee gets right into it. “Oh, girl, those boots are fine. I might have to take them from you.”
I look at him, sort of shocked. I mean I figured Dee was gay, but I’ve never heard him talk all sassy-gay-sidekick before.
“Oh, no, you won’t,” Kali replies, her strange ways of KO’ing words now blending with some latent Valley Girl tendencies. “They cost me, like, four hundred dollars. You can borrow them.”
“Oh, you’re a doll baby. But you got Cinderella feet, and ole Dee’s like one of them ugly stepsisters.”
Kali laughs, and they go on like this for some time, talking about fashion. I feel kind of bad. I guess I never realized Dee was so into this kind of thing. Kali got it right away. It’s like she has some radar, the one that tells you how to pick up on things with people, how to be friends. I don’t really care about fashion, but that night, when the alarm goes off and Dee packs up to leave, I show him the latest skirt my mom sent me and ask if he thinks it’s too preppy. But he barely gives it half a glance. “It’s fine.”
After that, Kali starts showing up more often, and she and Dee go all Project Runway, and Dee always switches into that voice. I write it off as just a fashion thing. But then a few days after that, as we’re leaving, Kendra walks in, and I introduce them. Kendra sizes Dee up, like she does with people, and puts on her flight-attendant smile and asks Dee where he’s from.
“New York,” he says. I make a note of that. I’ve known him for almost three weeks, and I’m just now finding out the basics.
“Where in New York?”
“The city.”
“Where?”
“The Bronx.”
The flight attendant smile is gone, replaced by a tight line that looks penciled on.
“Oh, like the South Bronx? Well. You must be so glad to be living here.”
Now it’s Dee who gives Kendra the once-over. They’re eyeing each other like dogs, and I wonder if it’s because they’re both black. Then, he switches to a different voice from the one he talks to Kali or me in. “You from the South Bronx?”
Kendra recoils a little. “No! I’m from Washington.”
“Like where they got all the rain and shit?”
Rain and shit?
“No, not state. DC.”
“Oh. I got some cousins in DC. Down in Anacostia. Shit, those are some nasty-ass projects. Even worse than where I came up. There’s a shooting at their school every damn week.”
Kendra looks horrified. “I’ve never even been to Anacostia. I live in Georgetown. And I went to Sidwell Friends, where the Obama girls go.”
“I went to South Bronx High. Most wack school in America. Ever heard of it?”
“No, I’m afraid I haven’t.” She gives me a quick look. “Well, I have to go. I’m meeting Jeb soon.” Jeb is her new boyfriend.
“Catch you later, homegirl,” Dee calls as Kendra disappears into her room. As Dee picks up his backpack to leave, he is quaking with laughter.
I decide to walk him to the dining hall, maybe eat there for a change. Eating alone sucks, but there are only so many microwave burritos a girl can stomach. When we get downstairs, I ask him if he really went to South Bronx High School.
When he speaks again, he sounds like Dee. Or the Dee I know. “They closed South Bronx High School a year ago, not that I ever went there. I went to a charter school. Then I got snagged in Prep for Prep—scholarship thing—by a private school that’s even more expensive than Sidwell Friends. Take that, Miss Thang.”
“Why didn’t you just tell her where you went?”
He looks at me and then, reverting to the voice he’d used with Kendra, says, “If homegirls wanna see me as ghetto trash”—he stops and switches to his lispy, sassy voice—“or big-ass queer”—now he switches to his deepest Shakespeare voice—“I shall not take it upon myself to disabuse them.”