“I dated a musician for a year in college and that was fine but dumb. I think he’s touring with some band now and tuning their guitars.”
Kelley finished chewing and said, “Why do I feel like that band is like, the Red Hot Chili Peppers or something?”
“Please, I know who that is.” Emira smirked. “And then I dated a guy for like, ten months from high school into college. But it was long distance for the second half so that was dumb, too.”
“Huh.” Kelley wiped his face with his napkin and set his hands on the table. “So you haven’t had like, a long, serious relationship?”
Emira smiled as she chewed. “Well, I haven’t had a long, serious life, so no. Is this you tryna tell me that you were married with kids or something?”
“No no no . . . why do I have the impulse to say, ‘Not that I know of!’”
Emira faked a gag and said, “Please don’t.”
“I know. Ignore that.” Kelley shook his head and started over. “My last girlfriend and I met in college but dated years after. She now delivers babies on a reservation in Arizona . . . I had a girlfriend for two years at the end of college, and we say Happy Birthday or Merry Christmas sometimes. I think she lives in Baltimore. I had a girlfriend for a little while during my freshman year. We’re still cool. And . . . you went all the way back to high school so I guess I gotta play, too. When I was seventeen I had a girlfriend who was the richest girl in town.”
Emira crossed her legs. “How rich are we talking?”
Kelley raised a finger. “I’ll tell you how rich. We took a school trip to Washington, D.C.—she was in the grade above me—and like thirty of us were on the same plane ride. She was the first one on the plane and I was right behind her. And after she found her seat, she set her luggage down in the aisle, and then she just sat down. Without putting it away.”
Emira’s head dipped and her ponytail swung. “Did she expect you to do it for her?”
“No.” Kelley leaned into the table. “She expected people on the plane to do it. I opened the overhead and she was like, ‘Don’t mess with the plane!’ She’d never been on a plane where the staff didn’t put your luggage away for you.”
“Are there planes like that?”
“Evidently in first class.”
“Oh shit,” Emira said. “Does she own her own plane now?”
“Probably. I’m fairly certain she’s in New York. I just remember that like, well, this sounds weird, but it was one of those loss-of-innocence moments where things kind of click, you know? And I had a lot of moments like this with her—that’s another story—but I remember that most of my classmates had never been on a plane, and probably wouldn’t again for a long time. And here’s this girl who travels in first class and doesn’t understand why there’s no leg room. And my seventeen-year-old mind was like, ‘Oh hey, people live very different lives.’ Do you know what I mean?”
“Mm-hmm,” Emira said. “Yeah. This is like, the opposite, but when I was little, I went to this girl’s house for a sleepover, and when I went into the bathroom there were three huge cockroaches in the middle of the floor. I screamed, but this girl was like, ‘Oh, you just shoo them out of the way.’” As she said this, Emira flicked her napkin gently in imitation, as if she were cutely herding very tiny sheep. “And I was like, you do what? And when I think back I’m like, okay yeah, that girl was mad poor. I think she and her sister slept in the same twin bed. But at the time the cockroaches seemed like a bigger deal. It shook me, I was like, ‘You live like this?’ And now I’m like oh, wait, most people live like this.”
“Eeek, exactly. That’s a really good one.” Kelley wiped his mouth, cringed, and nodded. “Okay, yeah, I have another one. When I was little, my little brother loved that show Moesha. Do you remember that show?”
“Of course I remember that show.”
“Yeah, that makes sense ’cause you’re closer to my little brother’s age.”
Emira made a face and said, “Cool, Kelley.”
“Sorry sorry sorry. So yeah, anyway . . . my whole family was sitting around the table at dinner, and out of nowhere my little brother, who was like six, goes, ‘Mom, why is Moesha nigger shit?’”
Under the mariachi music that suddenly seemed quite loud, Emira’s eyes went wide and her mouth twisted as if she’d found a hair in her food. Kelley went on.
“My mom was like, ‘What?’ And my brother goes, ‘Michael’s dad told me to turn it off because . . . ’ Well, I’m not gonna repeat it, but he obviously had no idea what that meant. But I was older, so I did. And I saw this kid’s dad all the time. And I was like, Holy shit. You’re a bad man, Michael’s dad. I’m looking at evil when I see you at school.”
Emira stared at Kelley and her heart started to double.
The two of them had only discussed race once, and barely. At the basketball game, a group of black teens saw Kelley hand Emira her ticket, and one, very much wanting to be heard, said, “That’s a damn shame.” Kelley did a very cute half salute in their direction and said, “Okay . . . thank you, sir. Thank you for your service.” When they made it to their seats, Kelley sat with his legs spread and leaned in to her ear. “Can I ask you a question?” Emira nodded. “Have you ever dated . . . ” He trailed off, and Emira thought, Oh Lord. She crossed her legs, thinking, It’s whatever. Let’s just watch the game. “Have you ever dated,” Kelley started again, “someone who wasn’t . . . so tall?”
Emira laughed and shoved his shoulder. “Boy, stop.”
Kelley raised his shoulders in mock-concerned defense. “It’s a legitimate question. Would your parents be mad if you brought home a . . . tall guy?” Emira laughed again. She didn’t call him out on stealing that joke from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Maybe that was part of the joke. They never discussed it again.
Emira had dated one white guy before, and repeatedly hooked up with another during the summer after college. They both loved bringing her to parties, and they told her she should try wearing her hair naturally. And suddenly, in a way they hadn’t in the first few interactions, these white men had a lot to say about government-funded housing, minimum wage, and the quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. about moderates, the ones that “people don’t want to hear.” But Kelley seemed different. Kelley Copeland, with his dadlike humor and exaggerated expressions and his affinity for saying the same word three times (hey hey hey, listen listen listen, no no no), could apparently acknowledge that he was dating a black woman, and that she could appreciate a good story over the need for decorum, but still . . . shouldn’t he have said “the N-word” instead? Maybe save the whole thing for the seventh or eighth date? Emira couldn’t tell. Sitting across from him, she wrestled with feeling moderately appalled that he had said the whole thing, with that painfully distinctive hard r sound at the end, but as she watched the veins in his hands move as he took a last bite, she settled on, You know what? Imma let you get away with that too.