Eleven
DRY V-WEDGIES
I’ve got a bag of Adaoha’s stuff going stale on the bottom shelf of my bookcase. Next to that is a bundle of unopened mail with her name on it. They’ve been there for a while now, since before and way after her funeral. I refuse to open either, much less make direct eye contact. I threw out bravery for such things with my Amy Grant tape and sadistic sleepover games.
Adaoha has become either Bloody Mary or the Tooth Fairy, depending on whether I miss or hate her. Some days she makes me afraid of my own reflection, and I have to sneak past the bathroom mirror to get in the shower, embarrassed and dirty. Afterward, with the room all misty, I squeegee only the skinniest slice of mirror with my right hand, wiping the shower sweat away with one swift karate move. Despite the badass technique, I’m still too scared to look for too long. Even the thirty seconds it takes to wash my face freak me out. Something could easily materialize behind my back while I’m bent over the sink with my eyes trapped shut by soap. Once I’ve straightened out, I still don’t look.
“Helena? Hey. Do you need a ride?” The voice on the other line was feathery soft, almost ephemeral, reminding me of a grade-school teacher’s after a problem child has saturated his or her pants. More than an inside voice, this was a voice inside my head.
I happened to be taking a mental health day that afternoon. Too scared of what I might do with access to the Internet at work—continue refreshing certain people’s Facebook pages and writing biting one-liner away messages—I’d decided to spend the day more sanely. As I furrowed into the farthest reaches of the bat cave better known as the bedroom of my basement apartment, the last thing I wanted to do was talk to anyone about anything unless it was a certain person named Dex begging for my forgetfulness. The calls kept coming.
None of them were him. Each time the phone rang, I’d wait a few rings before pulling it from my pillowcase. Three-oh-one. Somebody from Maryland. Ignore. That became impossible as the calls kept coming. Four in an hour. Fine, fine, I stopped feeling sorry for myself long enough to answer. It was a friend of Adaoha’s and a club friend of mine at best; thus far our telecommunication only involved the very occasional text. I must have forgotten something major—another Dirty Thirty birthday celebration, perhaps. Smooth. See what this dude was making me do? I was f*cking up on my friends! I was missing out on a chance to scream, “Woo-hoo, you’re old, bitch!” at a woman I didn’t know but felt sorry for in a crowd of twenty-somethings too busy belting out Beyoncé lyrics to care that they were next. An excuse was worked out in my head by the time I reached into the pillow.
“Oh, uh, hey lady,” I croaked, attempting to come off equal parts drunk, germ-infested, and sleepy. “What’s going on? Am I supposed to be getting dressed?”
“What?” She sounded lost, possibly doubting my ability to go from zero to sexy in minutes.
“Seriously, I can put some clothes on in…” An outfit was worked out in my head by the time my feet hit the floor.
“No. Helena, you don’t know?”
“What?” It was my turn to be skeptical.
“Adaoha died last night.” And rip goes the Band-Aid.
Ignoring the invention of the perm, black chicks are not susceptible to magic. We don’t go up in clouds of smoke. We don’t disappear down suspect rabbit holes. We don’t walk into coat closets, never to be heard from again. Plans have to be made, hair has to be pressed, and bags of stuff have to be packed.
Black chicks don’t do this. They aren’t supposed to just up and leave, because they have expert knowledge about just how much that shit sucks. They know how much no one wants to be the a*shole getting left. The one standing at the edge of responsibility, too tired to lie down and too reasonable to leap. The one on the receiving end of all those tears and snot and spit and shit and piss and blood and cum and whatever other carnal fluid nature makes a living getting rid of.
She got rid of us. I would do the same to her, except I have this bag of Adaoha that I’m actively ignoring right now. It’s my new thing. Some days I pretend to forget it’s there.
Those same nights, I think she might come for me in the middle and sneak something special under my pillow or maybe snatch me away to the place that only she knew about. Maybe she’ll show me the secrets she kept there. Because this whole time, she had to have known something we didn’t about whatever was on the other side of that fall that was so much f*cking better than staying on solid ground with us.
I say “us” like we were a gang. Maybe we were, and jumping was the only way out.
The girl was offering me a ride to Adaoha’s parents’ house in Maryland. We—the friends who knew her best—were gathering there to console and have council. What happened? Nobody knew, the girl said. She’d been found. Found. She’d done this to herself. Nobody mentioned the word that rhymes with civic pride. We don’t even smoke cigarettes.
The girl’s voice was still in my head, saying she figured I was ignoring her calls because I already knew. Because I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t. If I said another word, the feeling might come back to my tongue.
“No, that’s okay,” I said. “Adrienne will take me.”
F*ck. Now I have to tell Adrienne. I call, and she doesn’t pick up. I text something urgent. She calls back—was coming out of class. Law school. She is laughing with someone. I don’t want to say it, don’t want to change her. I almost hang up. Whoever’s walking next to her is laughing like a maniac. There is the opposite of a pregnant pause. I contemplate hanging up again.
“Yeah, what’s up,” she said.
“Adaoha died last night,” I say.
“What?”
In times of crisis, what gets the most use out of any of the five W’s. Like f*ck, it’s ambidextrous, able to play both sides by way of inflection. What (emphasis on the “tuh”) demands an answer. Whaaaa (with an endless “ah,” almost like pi) is genuine shock and awe. What (with a breathless “whuh”) is deflated, defeated. We practiced each one over the next week, as if rehearsing for something thrown together at the last minute. Everything was hectic, and nothing was patient.
We’d become walking automated voice systems. No matter how hard you raged against the machine, “What” was the only response, when the obvious prompt should have been “Why”? We didn’t bother to ask until six feet of packed dirt buried any hope of an answer. I probably didn’t want to hear it anyway—I probably would have told Adaoha, Keep it moving, please get it together, do something with yourself, or something like that. Maybe I’d cursed her, killed her. On a church pew, guilty tears threatened my face, twisting it into something so grotesque I was terrified it might freeze that way forever if someone happened by and slapped me on the back.
Funerals f*cking suck. The name itself brings to mind stiff organs, whorish makeup, and venereal disease (for me anyway). To remedy that in civilized circles, the ceremony is renamed a “homecoming,” which itself brings to mind broken beer bottles, communal anger, and matching uniforms. The tailgate was in the bat cave. I went into overdraft buying a dozen white roses to make corsages out of and was blessed with a mindless two hours, wrapping green floral tape around freshly cut stems.
There is a false sense of accomplishment in numbers and costume. The corsages were for us—her sorority sisters. Standing in my kitchen, each of us pinned one above the heart of another, making sure it wasn’t crooked. The actual ceremony was an ominous afterthought. It was all about the preparation, preparation, preparation. Which of course all went to shit as soon as we saw Adaoha in a coffin. A f*cking coffin. Another word in desperate need of a euphemism.
The flowers had to be white. White like the dresses we wore when we became sisters. When Adrienne, LaKia, and I saved Adaoha from a life sentence of nerd alerts. Despite the pats on the back we gave ourselves, she still turned out better than us. See, we all had the same bag. Note here that I am not speaking in the metaphorical sense, that each one of us tiny human beings has some tiny “bag” of fear and loathing festering on the bottom “shelf” of our “bookcases.” No, I mean that Adaoha, Adrienne, LaKia, and I each have the same exact bag. We got them as presents on the night we were made Deltas. After a nationally sanctioned and predetermined period of learning about sisterhood, scholarship, and service—and also screaming, sit-ups, and sleep deprivation—we put on those white dresses, said a few magical words, and poof, we were related.
Adrienne I’d known since hating her freshman year. We lived in the same dorm, but not the same planet. It was me, her, this tall guy who played the saxophone like a virgin, and a girl who wore ankle-length jean skirts and Keds topped with tube socks. Those were the blacks on our floor. From a scientific point of view, I took an educated guess that all black people on campus were either geeks or militant (Adrienne wore loose-laced Timbs). I decided to hang out with white people and got hanged for it. Supposedly a mental memo went out to all the Black Student Organization members. I’d been Oreo listed.
I had no clue how bad it was until one drunken night in the elevator to the sixth floor. Hamish, who was Irish or British and smelled like chlorine and foot fungus, was seeing me home after too much “punch” from a house with Epsilon or Chi on the facade. Adrienne, her good friend LaKia, and a bunch of fellow conscious card-carrying black girls were coming from something with “African” or “Malcolm” on the flyer. Buried in Hamish’s pasty neck, my arms wrapped around his concave swimmer’s waist, I never heard what they were whispering about. But when we got out, I saw the looks—disgust, shame, envy maybe.
After that, Adrienne was just a fancy Bed, Bath and Beyond shower basket in the bathroom, overstuffed with Victoria’s Secret lotions. We never spoke, but I had a speech prepared in case of an eminent showdown. It began thusly: “First of all, I’m from Compton. I have a cousin on death row. I went to public school for a friggin’ entire year. You don’t know my life!” And my ghetto résumé went on from there.
As fate would have it, though, my oratorical skills would go untested, because one shitty work-study job grilling hot dogs for outside “jams” later, the two of us were inseparable. Adrienne made me go to $3 pajama parties at the Pan African house, saving/drowning me in a mosh pit of black bodies pulsating to the xylophone stylings of “Money, Cash, Hoes.”
One semester later and I was deemed sufficiently black enough for even the most discerning of palettes. I rebelled by letting Spencer Schulz, a blond Floridian of German descent, lick my fingers in private and hold my hand on College Walk. Hey, I enjoyed white people and delicious Korean BBQ. But the Benetton ads of my teens had been canceled. Welcome to the real world as experienced through four years of voluntary social segregation. Having seen School Daze on VHS, DVD, and BET, I figured joining up with somebody might help simplify things.
So, Delta. Adaoha thought all we had to do was sign our names on a sheet numbered one through five, and then allakhazam, we’d be in. “Umm, no, honey,” was the thought bubble that hovered above every already-Delta. “Do your research.” That meant going to all their parties, study breaks, and women’s forums on the state of black relationships as depicted in Love and Basketball. Adrienne and I, having done the aforementioned research, knew all the tricks—have at least one intelligent thing to say per run-in with a sister, covet the color red but never think of wearing it, and always stay till the end.
Adaoha, we thought, didn’t have a chance, seeing as how she was a total weirdo, one of those black folks on campus who do hang out with other black folks, but not the normal kind, so they might as well be hanging out with white people. That was me before Adrienne saved/drowned me with black lip liner and Lil’ Kim. Adaoha should’ve gone first, maybe.
Somehow she made it in—something to do with a 3.6 GPA. So, it would be the five of us—me, my new best friend Adrienne, her friend LaKia, Adaoha, and her freak of a friend from the women’s college across the street, Darienne. We all lived together temporarily while studying for the DAT—the Delta Aptitude Test, which every candidate for membership had to pass. Grudgingly, the five of us spent Spring Break ’00 in my double in McBain Hall (Stella was gone on vacay). We figured the bigger the room, the less likely it’d be that anyone would have to breathe the same direct air as Darienne.
This is going to sound extremely elementary, but Darienne picked her boogers and then ate them, according to Adrienne, who knew her from nursery school or something. She could have been reformed, having completed the twelve-step program for chronic nose diggers better known as puberty, but we didn’t give a shit about any of that. Adrienne said, we laughed, and Darienne was marked.
It didn’t help that she still lacked the basic life skills of any human being not raised by benevolent wolves. Deodorant was exotic to her, as were hot combs and the plastic drugstore kind. Then, of course, there was the conspicuous snot mustache we couldn’t rightly make fun of because she was scheduled for functional endoscopic sinus surgery somewhere in the distant future. Since medically diagnosed conditions are by definition unmockable—openly—we instead implied our resentment, hoping she’d infer her way to social betterment. Sometimes I felt sorry for her, but most times I just wished she’d wipe her f*cking nose. Being her ace boon coon, Adaoha either didn’t care, was too good to notice, or pretended not to, so it was up to Adrienne and me.
One 3:00 a.m., the five of us were delirious with facts about Delta’s maternity ward in Africa when, predictably, the talk turned to our own vaginas. I thought this would be an A and B conversation with the only two nonvirgins (me and LaKia) hosting a smutty talk show for a captive audience of one (Adrienne). As usual Adaoha had her nose in a book, and Darienne…well, come on. But to our double surprise, Darienne had something to say about double happiness “up against the wall.” “Oh, yeah, that’s the best,” she said, interrupting us with a nasally nonchalance we’d never heard before and would never believe.
She even went so far as to provide a visual aid, her mouth open and head thrown back to one side in mimed rapture and her arms thrown above that ridiculous scene, stopped short by an imagined wall of sin. Eyes. Wide. Shut. We could’ve just ignored her, as was our usual coping method, but it was dangerously past midnight, when boredom and ridicule become obvious bedfellows.
“With who?” someone asked, while the others feigned disinterest.
“A boy from my neighborhood,” Darienne answered neatly, excited to be part of the conversation but still skeptical of whether she was in in.
“Your boyfriend?” someone else asked, without sounding too interested…or disgusted.
“Something like that.” She was getting coy.
“Was iiit…good?”
The cross-examination continued until we veered off into really dangerous territory—early ’90s R&B. Hypnotized by Darienne’s tall tale of the phantom booty call, we forgot how much we hated her long enough to let her eavesdrop. Listening to us reminisce on the real love we had back in the summah, summah, summah time of our youth, we thought maybe she’d learn a thing or two about how we do it. As luck would have it, SWV’s jam “Weak” was everybody’s favorite. Adaoha, studying, ignored us. Kia, the silent but deadly type, let another one rip from far enough away that it seemed innocent. “Remember the Butterfly?” she asked, talking to us but looking at Darienne. We surrounded her like professionals.
“Hell, yeah,” I said, skywriting the familiar figure eight with my kneecaps—a dance move that took me three PE’s to learn in middle school.
“Thanks, Debbie Allen. It’s like this,” sang Adrienne, mimicking me and mocking what we all knew Darienne could never do. These were the pelvises of cool kids. Kids who knew when to wipe their noses and put lotion on. Kids who watched Video Soul after school and copied what they saw in the mirror. Darienne, deflated from the big-chested video vixen that she was just a few minutes before, decided to audition herself back in.
“IIIIIIIIIII geee-iiitttt sooo, weak in the knees….” she belted, trying and failing to execute the infinite motion of knees and hips that was the Butterfly. On “weak” she dipped as low as her wasted five-foot-long legs would allow and then tried thrusting her allegedly experienced pelvis forward. She was more moth than butterfly—specifically one buzzed off too many granny panties.
Naturally, we begged her to do it again and again and again. And she obliged, each time singing a lot more off-key and gyrating a lot more like a rusty washing machine. Someone grabbed her knees (a rare moment of physical contact that would only be repeated under extreme duress) and tried to manipulate them into a spectacle worthy of Solid Gold while the rest of us stared greedily, storing the mental image like a squirrel does nuts—this being before digital cameras. And like a twice-deported illegal on an inner tube, Darienne kept coming back for more. Already a citizen, I felt sorry for her only in the most intangible of ways. We were sisters, right? Therefore this was all in good fun under the purview of…sibling rivalry, if you will. If you won’t, then we were just bullies with lip gloss, ready to smack down on anything with less shine.
“Okay, one more time. Seriously, I think you’ve almost got it.”
“IIIII geeee-iittttt, sooooooooo…”
That song would’ve been on repeat all night if it wasn’t for Adaoha scratching up the record with a pointed “Darienne.” The three of us froze in place like how you do in musical chairs, Darienne sitting back down in front of the computer. The only seat left; I guess she won. Adaoha, who we thought had been busy cramming, eyed the three of us with something worse than contempt, breaking whatever spell had been cast. Turning Darienne back into a bumpkin and us, her evil stepsisters. Mood. Killed. We sat down on the floor reluctantly, unwilling to admit our defeat or our crime. Nobody asked her.
The story would get mangled over time like a bad game of telephone. We teased her about what a misguided compassionate she once was. How she’d still be stuck living in Plimpton with the lesbians of Barnard wearing Old Navy cargo pants if we hadn’t saved her from being too good. “Adaoha was such a dork before we rescued her,” we’d say.
When we put on our white dresses, we became sisters. Made Adaoha cool. Made her part of the black girls’ club we’d joined ourselves so many years before. The four of us (Darienne would dump us in a semester) sealed together like Mormon wives. Because eventually everyone joined the club, grabbed a mask, and walked around like their feet and the ground didn’t mix. Playing at being grown is what we were doing. Maybe Adaoha knew the truth. Maybe she was the only one not playing. Maybe she got winded.
We lost her to the wind in March. We lost her to these intangibles about strength versus weakness and perfection versus reality. We lost her because we never took the time to think about any of that shit before the call came: our good friend—our sister—had slit her wrist, taken a bottle of pills, tried to drown herself, and finally taken a leap of faith off a building. We lost her.
In these types of situations, old people on TV always say something like “She looks good.” She did not look good. She looked dead, with pink nail polish. I wanted to touch her hand but decided against it. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d touched Adaoha. The last time I hugged her. Adrienne kept saying it would be okay. My throat was too sore to tell her to shut up. Kia let me lay my head on her lap, her pregnant belly taking up most of it.
Whatever happened next was all snow and static. Unwatchable.
There was a slide show at the repast, French for force-feeding your sorrow with baked chicken and nonalcoholic iced tea. Through the awesome power of PowerPoint, her life flashed before our eyes like we were the ones dying. Microsoft was never so macabre.
The last slide was stolen from her Facebook page. Adaoha took the time to change her profile picture before she left. Thoughtful. In it, she looked small. The camera is too far away, making her shoulders seem shy, her face sweet and childish. She is none of these things anymore. Was none of those things. I want never to see this picture again but am too superstitious to remove her from “friends.” While contemplating this, Adrienne leans over to tell me that Paul, one of Adaoha’s two ex-boyfriends and an a*shole, told one of us that he alone knew “the real Adaoha.” I tell Adrienne I will deliver a roundhouse kick to his face. This is a funeral, not a who-knew-Adaoha-best dance-off. And if it were, we’d win. Obviously.
“I’m telling you, it’s harder out here for us than it ever was for our mothers,” I said out loud to no one in particular, the three of us stretched across my bed in our Sunday black. We stared up at the ceiling with our shoes off, watching the water stains as if they were clouds and wondering if we could have saved her somehow.
“Is it really, though?” asked Evelyn, another one of us, from the doorway. She was getting married in August.
“I think that shit makes sense,” said Kia, from her side. Twenty-seven and pregnant with her third child (on the ride back to New York, she’d call to ask me to be the godmother), she looked doubly pathetic in funeral clothes. “When there’s so many ways to go, it’s easier to get lost, I guess. I don’t know…”
What did we know? Like true Ivy League grads nothing worth a good goddamn. A bunch of cocktail-party chatter about the accomplishments of a woman we clearly never saw or would see again. She’d just bought a condo with granite countertops and West Elm furniture. She’d sold a tract of affordable houses out in Baltimore. She’d just gotten back from a trip to Brazil, where she shook her ass with the best of ’em. She’d joined Match.com and went on a date with a short African guy. She’d gone to a bruja once who told her marriage was in her future. She’d told me that Dex and I would work out someday. She’d broken my heart. What did we know?
Weeks after the funeral, Adaoha’s mother asked her friends in Washington to stop by her new/old condo and help clear things out. She was twenty-seven when she died, so this probably wouldn’t take long. Her mom also wanted us to take some things with us, mementos or something.
On the twenty-minute metro ride there, Adrienne and I sat in silence. I shut my eyes once we pulled into the PG Plaza station. She asked me if I was okay about a zillion times. Yes, yes, I’m fine. I’d been sleeping with the lamp next to my bed turned on, a red scarf draped over it. The dark simply wouldn’t do. I was as far from fine as any one person could get.
Her mom had pizza and chicken wings waiting. I grabbed a slice and went about the business of gathering up her Delta things in the black tote bag that was exactly like the one I had, but with Adaoha’s name on it. I could joke with all her high school friends, but whenever Adrienne walked in with an old photo or a funny story from college, I’d leave the room or start inspecting my pepperoni. It was easy to act like we were throwing a surprise party and that Adaoha’d walk through the door shouting, “Loooosers,” any minute. But I was stingy with my real grief. After we finished, I couldn’t look inside the bag or in Adrienne’s eyes.
“Because life gets you f*cked up, and you need some clarity from an uninvolved party.” Gina was preaching therapy again. I was kind of sorry I brought it up.
When Adrienne called a few days later—we were all on this “check-in” thing now—I answered with a gruff, “Whaddayawan?”
“Hello,” she said, ignoring my bitchy welcome. “I’m alive, in case you were wondering! Some best friend you are. You’re supposed to be checking on my sanity.” It was already summertime, and she was studying for the bar.
“Ummmm…”
“Which I’m COMPLETELY losing, by the way!”
“I have my own damn sanity to worry about. Thanks.” I thought this might get her to hang up.
“What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with your sanity?”
“Nothing’s wrong with me.” How could I tell her what I didn’t know?
“Oh, so you’re just being stanky.”
Silence.
“Well—” She sighed. “I see you woke up on the wrong side of the bed…just saying hello.”
“Dude, I’m working on a story that’s due. I’m trying to keep my job, so I have a f*cking career. And I hate everyone! Jesus. Can I live?” Maybe she’d leave me alone now.
“Like I said, just saying hello. You can go back to your dry v-wedgie now.”
Everybody’s got a thing. Kia talks to strangers. Adrienne’s from Hah-lum! I’m a nomad. Adaoha? She had a dry v-wedgie.
If it sounds uncomfortable, that’s because it’s supposed to. We had no clue what a dry one actually felt like but imagined it involved vaginal friction equal to corduroy-on-corduroy action. If this sounds pornographic, it’s not supposed to. The dry v-wedgie is more like an aphorism. A v-wedgie stings for but a moment, a dry v-wedgie for a lifetime. Basically, it’s about spinsterhood. The first warning sign of that apocalypse. It was a joke, and Adaoha, our good friend and sister, had the misfortune of being its butt.
It started like this. We were two years out of college and at another one of Kia’s baby showers. One little girl in attendance was wearing a pink corduroy jumpsuit that was too constrictive. In an effort to escape, she kept yanking it toward her chest as if it were a tearaway, the force of which created what can only be described as baby camel toe. No one saw but me. I tried to get her to stop violently exposing the outline of her little vah jay jay, but she was insistent, outlining the tiny V shape with each pull. “Okay, that’s enough,” I said gently, bending down to lift her little hands out of the pockets of her one-piece.
“She has a v-wedgie!” shouted some six-year-old in eyeshot.
“Excuse you?”
“A V-WED-GIE”—exasperated now, she was shouting like how you do with someone who doesn’t speak the same language as you—“it’s when—”
“Umm…I know what a v-wedgie is, little girl.” I had no idea what a v-wedgie was, and neither should a first-grader. I shooed both of them—the v-wedgee and the v-wedger—into the next room for more fruit punch and innocence.
A few weeks later, we were having an alcohol-fueled debate on men—why we wanted ’em, where to find ’em, how to keep ’em. Adaoha, twenty-three, was a virgin then, or something close. It was my opinion that as soon as some dude got past her bra, all moral authority would go the way of the underwire. She ignored this and instead ticked off her list of requirements for happily-ever-after in old-school MASH style. Remember? Mansion, House, Apartment, Shack. Adaoha wanted a man with a degree, a six-figure salary, perfect teeth, a good family, a healthy 401K, and who would be ready to get married after a year of dating (and perhaps not doing it).
“What if you meet some gorgeous garbage collector or a street sweeper whose penis is like ten inches long?” I asked.
“Nope!”
“Boooooo. Just wait until some dude licks your titties. It’s gonna be Reynolds for you, honey—a wrap, done, finito.” At least that’s how it was for me. All my onward-Christian-soldier brainwashing in Awanas came out in the wash once Gary Johnson convinced me to just let him “put the head in.”
“I’m friggin’ serious,” Adaoha said. “I’m not going to settle for some ole bullshit.” She beat back our barrage of explanations (the ones we’d been telling ourselves): there weren’t that many college-educated black men on the market in the first place, and those who were on the auction block wanted white women or ghetto girls or men, not bourgie broads. A good black man wasn’t just clandestine, he was near Jurassic. We were twenty-three and jaded.
But Adaoha wasn’t—then. She’d skipped born-again trips to health services (“Please, God, if I’m okay this time then…”) and reality checks before dawn (“Soooo, you’re not staying over?”). I couldn’t let her get away with being the me before I got grown and a prescription for Ortho. I wanted her down in the dumps with the rest of us. Back in the black girls’ club.
“Well, then, you have fun with your dry v-wedgie!” I shot back.
There was a vacuum of silence and shocked looks right before the table burst into epiphany-strength laughter. DRY V-WEDGIES! This would be Adaoha’s new epithet and our new rallying cry. Whenever heartbreak conned one of us into hating men, all anyone had to do was mention the word dry together with v-wedgie. Most closely translating to the phrase “Open sesame,” “dry v-wedgie” unlocked visions of a nightmarish future where we spent each day racing through life with our heads down and our legs strong but all that chafing in between.
Maybe that’s what Adaoha was thinking about the night she left us. We had our last conversation the day before.
JamAmPrincess (12:30:33 p.m.): Uh, what’s with the piss face
nyCALIgrl4 (12:32:45 p.m.): no more Dex
JamAmPrincess (12:33:45 p.m.): what y?
JamAmPrincess (12:34:08 p.m.): y r u makin it sound so final
JamAmPrincess (12:36:26 p.m.): ppl get back together
nyCALIgrl4 (12:36:32 p.m.): nope
nyCALIgrl4 (12:36:36 p.m.): we break up too much
JamAmPrincess (12:37:02 p.m.): ur still not telln me what happened
nyCALIgrl4 (12:37:06 p.m.): he doesnt want a relationship
nyCALIgrl4 (12:37:17 p.m.): nothing “happened” per se
JamAmPrincess (12:38:02 p.m.): so no more friends either?
nyCALIgrl4 (12:38:23 p.m.): i’m so not into s&m
JamAmPrincess (12:38:34 p.m.): lmao!
JamAmPrincess (12:38:59 p.m.): i’m just sayn mayb he’s on a diff schedule
JamAmPrincess (12:44:42 p.m.): but u guys seemed so comfy together
nyCALIgrl4 (12:44:46 p.m.): we are
nyCALIgrl4 (12:47:28 p.m.): but he’s so schizo about it
nyCALIgrl4 (12:47:36 p.m.): one second he wants to introduce me to his parents
nyCALIgrl4 (12:47:46 p.m.): and the next he’s still hollering at this other chick
JamAmPrincess (1:02:49 p.m.): the one he was canoodling with in the club?
nyCALIgrl4 (1:07:05 p.m.): GIRL YES
She wasn’t online the next day. Had already logged off. In real life I couldn’t forgive her. Wouldn’t. Or myself for letting her sign out without a warning. Something. I couldn’t help thinking she had a secret. It made me jealous. Maybe what it really was: a surprise. Buried at the bottom of her bag. A lot of good that would do me: I was still too scared to look.