“So we’re gonna steal Ma’s pills?” Donna asks.
“She won’t even notice, D,” Pri says. “It’ll be good for her to get off them shits anyway.”
The drive back home is longer and quieter because Chantal doesn’t put on any music. Something heavy sits between me and my cousins. I wish I’d never found out about their drug dealing. I wish that the detective had never asked me for anything. I wish my mother had never been detained. I wish, I wish, I wish. Enough wishing. There is nothing else to do but to walk through the doors that are opening for me. But this one with my cousins is locked with a key. This is the information I could’ve given to Detective Stevens if it had been Dray doing the selling. But no. It’s my cousins. My family. I won’t give them away like that. I would be giving myself away, too, because now, I’m the Fourth Bee.
I let my mind wander as I stare out the window. I notice how much wider the skies are in Detroit. There are no hills or mountains or valleys. In Haiti, behind the mountains are more mountains. But here, at the end of every road are more roads. And slowly, it seeps in—like water on a boat. I have an idea. It’s fuzzy at first. I sit up in my seat and find something to focus my eyes on so I can think. It begins to sharpen. It becomes clear.
“Well, did you kick her ass?” is all Matant Jo says when she finds out about the fight. She’s come out of her room just to hear all the details. She doesn’t yell at me; she doesn’t threaten to not pay my tuition, or send me back to Haiti.
“Hell yeah! Or else she wouldn’t be my cousin,” Pri answers for me.
“Still, fighting is not gonna solve anything,” Chantal says as she wraps a bag of frozen broccoli in paper towels for me to put on my forehead. “You want to be the kind of chick who no one even thinks of fighting.”
“I think she got the message loud and clear. No one fucks with the . . . what? The Four Bees!” Pri slaps my back so hard that I bite my tongue.
Now everything hurts even more.
I don’t eat anything and am stuck on the couch in front of the TV for the rest of the evening. Kasim texts me that he’s already heard about the fight. He’s working now and promises to call me when he gets out. But I fall into a deep, heavy sleep and my whole body simmers down, then cools, and I am myself again.
I ask Chantal to take me to Kasim’s job before she picks up Donna and Pri. It was the first day of my suspension and I’m beginning to feel less sore from the fight. I have to use this time to plan. I know exactly what I have to do.
“Make sure you bring some books with you,” Chantal says. “And don’t get him fired.”
I’m at a table by myself and Kasim has brought over a croissant and hot chocolate.
“I’m on my break, so I can chill with you for a hot minute,” he says, and takes a seat right in front of me.
I take a sip of the warm chocolate. “You never make it sweet enough,” I say.
He starts to get up to bring sugar to the table, but I grab his arm. “It’s okay. You’re enough sweetness for me.”
He laughs. “You want a corn muffin to go with that cocoa? ’Cause that was kinda corny, Fab.”
We’re quiet for a moment. Then he reaches over to touch my still-bruised face. “I heard you fucked up Tonesha and Raquel. Damn. Obviously they don’t know nothing about no Haitian revolution. Y’all don’t play when it comes to fighting.”
“That was not a revolution, Kasim. They were disrespecting me, and Raquel told me that she wanted to be with you,” I say.
He laughs. “For real, though, they were fucking with you. And you didn’t see how butt-ugly Raquel is? I have standards, Ms. Fabulous. There’s a bunch a girls out here who will pop off at the mouth just to get a reputation. She would’ve never stepped to Pri or Donna with that mess. Just ’cause you’re new and you got an accent and you’re cute, she thought she could fuck with you. And I swear, I’ll check both Tonesha and Raquel when I see them. I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
I grab his hand and bring it close to my face. “So is this real?” I ask.
“I don’t know. What’s real to you, Fabulous?”
“For one, my name is real.”
“All right, Fabiola Toussaint.” Then he takes my hand in his and breathes into it. The warmth travels up my whole arm. “You feel that? That’s real.” He leans in and kisses me on my sore cheek. It’s a mix of pain and sweetness, and I take his hand again and hold it near my face.
Before he leaves the table, he says that Dray will be dropping something off, then he has a surprise for me after he closes up. He kisses me on the lips.
I step outside so that he and his coworker can wipe the tables, mop the floor, clean the machines, and count out the register.