Six

Before, Grace had been afraid to hope for the best about her champagne-fizz wedding. The girl who clung to her hand and kissed her gently and climbed through flower bushes to click a lock into place may not have matched her memory. But hearing Yuki’s voice, hearing her call for a girl that glows like bee honey and talk so intimately about loneliness, sparks something brave and warm in Grace.

She finds herself hoping, desperately and passionately, for this to be good. For Yuki to be good.

She has a phone number Agnes found somehow and tries to find the courage to press Dial.

“What are you doing?” Meera asks, and Grace jolts from her thoughts.

“I’m still on break,” she says. She holds her phone up to her chest, suddenly possessive. “I have, like, fifteen more minutes.”

Meera blinks. “Relax,” she says. “Not even Baba cares if you go over your break. You’re his favorite.” She squeezes into the space where Grace is hiding. “Whatcha doing?” she asks again.

Grace exhales. She still has to tell Meera and Raj. Soon. But she wants to call Yuki first.

“I have to make a phone call,” she says. “It’s mildly terrifying, and not for the normal ‘I have to talk on the phone’ reasons.”

Meera frowns. “Is it for a job?”

Grace sighs. “Don’t tell anyone this,” she says. “But I got an email from a recruiter. He said my research seemed impressive.” Grace’s initial joy at the interest had quickly turned sour as she kept reading. She deleted the email as soon as she was done, but it still leaves her bitter and angry. “He also had some questions about my listed membership with the Black STEM Group and the queer group I started in the astronomy doctorate program.” She shakes her head. “I’m trying not to think about jobs right now.”

“You know they’re full of shit, right?” Meera asks. She wraps an arm around Grace. “You deserve better than some place that doesn’t want you in all your glory.”

Grace turns her head so she can fully wrap herself in Meera’s hug. “Thank you,” she mutters into her kurti. Today the fabric is sun yellow and orange with stripes of green. It makes her look like summer. “Same goes for you. You’re going to be a dope-ass psychologist one day.”

“I know,” Meera says, smiling. “Okay, so it’s not a job that has you anxious right now.” She traces the inflamed nail imprints in Grace’s palms. “What is it?”

Sirens, Grace thinks. Girls who stand below the surface to sing you a song. They have flowers behind their ears. Their eyes are dark. They know you, the deepest part of you.

She doesn’t get to answer before her phone buzzes with a text.

“Supportive as ever,” Meera says, reading the texts. She untangles herself, tidying up the errant strands loose from her braid. “I’ll cover for you, okay? Do the scary phone thing.”

“You don’t even know what it is,” Grace says. She frowns as Meera moves to leave. Maybe it would be easier with someone here, someone to hold her hand and coax the words up from the pit of her stomach.

“I have tact sometimes.” Meera shrugs. “Besides, the Grace Porter I know isn’t afraid of anything. I’m giving you some time to get your shit together before I bombard you with more questions. See how nice I am?”

“A saint,” Grace tells her, only kidding a little. “Thanks, M.”

Meera sticks her tongue out, and the kitchen door swings shut behind her.

The Grace Porter I know isn’t afraid of anything.

The Grace Porter Grace knows is afraid of many things. She is afraid of disappointing people. She is afraid of straying from her carefully curated life plan. She is afraid of being a brown, gold, bee-honey lesbian in an academic industry all too willing to overlook the parts of her that don’t make sense to them. She is afraid of hearing her rosebud girl on the other end of her phone.

But she is a Porter, and Porters do what needs to be done. She dials.

Someone answers, first with an unsure breath and then with a hesitant, “Hello?” and Grace is tongue-tied.

“Hello?” Yuki’s voice turns wary and impatient and she says, “Anybody there?”

Grace takes a deep breath, like one does before jumping into the water. “Hello,” she says. “This is Grace Porter.”

A silence. “Hi, Grace Porter. Do I know you?”

“You do,” Grace says. Her fingers clench around her phone. “We, um. We got married in Las Vegas?”

“Fuck,” Yuki says under her breath. “Hold on, okay? Jesus, just hold on. I thought you were a fucking bill collector, and I was ready to scam my way into debt forgiveness. I’m at work. Hold on.”

Grace holds on and hears the background noise of what sounds like a restaurant. There’s the faint buzz of a crowd, the clink of dishes and kitchen timers that remind Grace of the ones at the tea room.

“Can you cover for me?” Yuki says to someone. “For like fifteen minutes. Yeah, I need that long, Christ.” A door creaks, and there’s the noise from outside. Wind and car horns and foot traffic. “New Yorkers,” Yuki mutters. “You don’t live here, right?”

Grace blinks. “No,” she says, settling into the crook of her little corner. “I live in Portland. I don’t really think it’s the same.”

“It sounds like a dream,” Yuki says, a little laugh catching over the line. “So, Grace Porter. I’m guessing you know my name?”

Grace nods and remembers Yuki can’t actually see her. “Yeah. Yes. I, um, I looked up your show. Your radio show.”

Yuki whines. “That’s humiliating,” she says. “I left you that note and my business card like a total asshole. I don’t even know why I have business cards. I think there might have been a discount.”

Out front, Meera and Baba Vihaan laugh. There’s the faint clank of teacups against saucers, and for a moment it’s like Grace and Yuki are in the same space. They are in the same kitchen with the same plates clinking against each other.

“It was cute,” she says quietly. “It was. No one’s ever done that for me.”

“What?” Yuki asks. “Nobody’s ever made a total ass of themselves the morning after they got married to you in Vegas?”

“Nope,” she says. “You’re the first.”

Yuki makes a satisfied little noise. “Congratulations,” she says. “You married an innovator.”

It’s quiet. Maybe it’s that word. Married, said aloud in an alleyway, in a deserted kitchen, between two coasts. Married. It makes her laugh. She laughs like she has buzzing fireflies tickling her ribs.

“What?” Yuki demands. She sounds so petulant. “What’s so funny?”

Grace smiles. “Married,” she says lightly. “I mean. That happened. What the fuck?”

“What the fuck?” Yuki agrees. “I came home, and it felt like—” She pauses here, and in the stillness, Grace catches dozens of words unsaid.

“What?” Grace asks, suddenly desperate to be let into Yuki’s thoughts.

“It felt like a dream,” Yuki confesses quietly. “It felt like one of the stories I talk about on my show, you know? Like, there’s no way I married this beautiful girl and was so fantastically happy, and it was real.”

“It felt like that for me, too,” Grace tells her, like a secret. “In my head you—”

“Tell me,” Yuki presses.

“You bloomed,” Grace says. “In my head you bloomed like the flowers that were stuck in my hair. You had—you had rosebuds, growing on your cheeks, you know? That’s all I could think about. The girl who bloomed roses. The girl who held my hand and danced with me and—”

“Got married to you,” Yuki finishes. “That was mad beautiful, Grace Porter. I almost hate to tell you the roses you’re imagining were probably just the Asian flush. Not half as romantic.”

Grace laughs. “That makes you more real and less like the champagne-bubble girl in my head.”

“Champagne-bubble girl,” Yuki says softly. “Cute. You were Honey Girl in mine. When I pictured you, it was just honey, everywhere. I woke up next to you, and I swear it was like buzzing bees. That sounds ridiculous.”

“A little,” Grace admits, and Yuki lets out an indignant “Hey.” “It was just my hair,” she says, separating her curls with careful fingers. “It’s not blonde, not brown. It’s gold,” she says. “My mom used to say the sun took a liking to me.”

Yuki hums, and Grace relaxes. “Sounds like something moms say,” she answers. “Do you think she was right?”

“About what?”

“The sun,” Yuki says impatiently. “Do you think it took a liking to you?”

“No more than anyone else,” Grace says.

There’s shuffling and noise again, like Yuki’s opened the door back to the real world. “I don’t know, Grace Porter. It would be nice to be married to someone like that.” Her voice goes muffled. “Yeah, yeah, I know it was longer than I said. Hold on a goddamn minute.”

“Someone like what?” Grace asks, terrified suddenly that if they hang up, it will be for good.

“Chosen by the sun,” Yuki says, like it’s the simplest thing in the world. “Honey gold, melted sweet under the summer sun. Real poetic, you know? Oh my God, I said I’m coming.”

“Yes,” Grace says, listening to Yuki move farther and farther away. “That does sound nice.”

“You’ll do for now,” Yuki tells her. “Listen, I have to get back to work. Can I—can I call you? Next time?”

Grace lets out a breath, and in it, the fear begins to dissolve.

“You can call me,” she says. “We can take turns.”

“Marriage is all about compromise. I gotta go.”

“Okay.” Grace closes her eyes. “I’ll talk to you soon?”

“Isn’t that what I said?” Yuki teases. “I’m hanging up now. We can’t be one of those couples that banter instead of hanging up.”

“We’re a couple?”

“We’re married,” Yuki says, and the word starts to sound familiar. “And I’m hanging up, Grace Porter.”

“I’m hanging up, too, Yuki Yamamoto.”

“That’s cute,” Yuki says. “Is that going to be our thing?”

“This is starting to sound like banter,” Grace points out.

Yuki hangs up.

Grace saves the number in her phone.

“Come home with me,” Grace says to Raj and Meera after their shift.

Ximena and Agnes are out on one of their totally not-a-date dates, so Grace has the apartment to herself. Baba Vihaan lets them go early. Raj piggybacks Meera on the walk home, and they all tumble into Grace’s bed and put on the comfy clothes they keep in a drawer for nights like this.

“What’s up, Gracie?” Raj asks. His hair has been put into a neat bun on top of his head, and the face mask they concocted in the kitchen cracks when he speaks. “Not that I don’t love sleepovers with you two.”

Meera curls up on Grace’s lap, buried under the covers. “I’m sensing some sarcasm there, Rajesh,” she murmurs. “Some big brother you are.”

Grace reaches out for both of them. They are her family, the ones she found and made and kept. “I want you to listen to something with me,” she says, heart pounding too fast in her chest. “And you have to—you have to promise you won’t be mad.”

“I promise,” Meera says immediately.

Raj squints. “Why would we be mad?”

“Raj.”

He shuts his eyes and leans back against the pillows. “I’m not promising,” he says. “But I will try to keep an open mind. I am filled with empathy and compassion and have never judged another person in my life. Let’s hear it.”

Meera pinches him, but he stays stubbornly still.

Grace sighs and glances at the time on her laptop. She felt brave when she asked them over. She felt in control. Now she feels pink-raw and vulnerable.

She exhales and watches the little audio player load on her computer. “Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

A pause, and then, there it is: Yuki’s voice, quiet and spooky and a lonely, lost creature.

“Hello, my fellow late-nighters,” she says. “I want to say hello to a special late-nighter in particular, one that I hope is listening. In fact, she is the one that inspired me for tonight’s show. Are you there?”

Grace grabs Meera’s hand. Raj leans closer, intrigued. Above them, Grace’s glow-in-the-dark stars shine neon green and alien. Grace has counted them hundreds of times, trying to follow them to sleep, but tonight she follows them to a voice of a girl who transports her somewhere new and terrifying.

“If you’re listening, Honey Girl, this is for you, okay? You said something to me. Or, actually, your mother said something to you. She said the sunlight was drawn to you. She said the sunlight loved you so much it had to infuse some of itself in you where everyone could see, and that’s why your hair burns gold and melts into the bedsheets like bee honey.”

Grace holds her breath. One, two, three, four. Exhale.

“I asked you,” Yuki says quietly to her audience, to Grace, “I asked you if you thought it was true, and you said you didn’t think the sun favored you more than anybody else. Well, I think that’s bullshit. I think that maybe your mother knew the sun was watching when you were born. I think the sun saw something in you, something bright all its own, and it picked you. It dripped sunrays from the top of your scalp to the very ends of your hair, and it made you fucking glow. I saw it. I saw you glow, and I—”

Yuki pauses, her frantic, almost angry tone tumbling to a stop.

It is so quiet. Grace does not breathe. Raj and Meera do not breathe.

“I was scared,” Yuki says finally. “And I’m scared now, saying this to you over a local Brooklyn airwave. But you glowed, and I was drawn to it. You were warm, like a sunrise, and it killed me to leave the bed with you in it. You are orange and pink and brown-gold, and your mother was right, and you don’t even know.

“I wonder,” Yuki asks quietly, “do you ever get scared like I do? Do you ever wonder how things will come together, and how things will fall apart? It seems bizarre to wonder so deeply about a stranger, but I have half of you in the ring on my finger, so I don’t think you are a stranger at all. I think you are a favored child of the sun, like your mother said. I think maybe she watched as the sun sent its blessing down to you. I think maybe she saw, over the years, as the rays grew and multiplied, until you were Medusa in your own right. There were not snakes that sprouted from your head, but sunlight like fire. But gold.

“It makes me think of all the stories our parents have told us. Little magic things that we dismiss as their attempts to make us feel special. Lately, I’ve been thinking. What if we are special, and we just don’t know? What if the stories of things bigger and bolder reaching out to claim us are true? If you are favored, touched by the sun, what does that make me? Am I a creature, or favored by something big and magnificent, too?”

Yuki laughs, and the sound echoes in Grace’s ears. Her heart pounds, and her fingers tremble, and her skin pimples with gooseflesh. Meera squeezes her hand hard.

“God, I sound lovesick tonight, listeners. I met a girl, and when you meet a girl, you think too much, you know? But I hope she is listening. And I hope she knows next time is soon, and I have not forgotten that it is my turn.”

The show goes on, but Grace cuts it off. The room is dark and silent. Meera does not let go, but if she did, Grace thinks she might just float up to the ceiling. Raj sits up, and Grace feels his eyes on her: inquisitive and sharp.

“Don’t be mad,” she says. “It’s okay, it’s just—you can’t be mad.”

“It’s okay,” he repeats. “Who was that girl? She was talking about you. She was talking about you like she knew you, like she, I don’t fucking know, fell in love with you, Gracie.”

“Okay,” she cuts in, while Meera looks back and forth between them. “Stop. I—I met a girl in Vegas. We were drunk and silly and—” She taps her fingers against her arms. “She’s really nice, actually. And we got married.”

“Wow.” Raj rubs his face, and flecks of his mask fall on the bed. “What is okay about getting drunk-married in Las Vegas? This is like that movie. That American one. What’s the movie?”

“The Hangover,” Meera says.

“The Hangover,” Raj repeats. “This is like that. Only it’s you and not a white guy I’ve never heard of. What did Colonel say?”

“Didn’t tell him.”

“Wow,” he says again, falling back on the bed. He stares at the ceiling like it will provide him with answers. “Ximena and Agnes?”

“Surprisingly okay. Agnes asked me about tax benefits.”

Raj turns to look at her, and she fights hard to keep her face blank. “And you?” he asks. “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” she says evenly. She looks at both of them, both of their concerned faces. “I don’t know what you want me to say. I’ve never even thought of marriage, much less to someone I don’t know. But, here I am. It’s—” Nice, is what she wants to say. I don’t want to worry about this like I have to worry about everything else. “Okay,” she says again.

“Divorce?”

“No,” Grace says. “So Colonel can find out? He’d probably have to pay for it. Absolutely not, no. I haven’t even told my mom.”

“Then, what? What’s next?”

It’s the question that’s been circling Grace’s head. It keeps her up. What’s next? She knows, but taking that first step is terrifying. Taking your millionth step is scary. She feels like she has been taking steps for a long time.

“I can handle it,” she says. She tries to smile, and Meera raises her eyebrows. “I’m a Porter. I’ll figure it out. Haven’t I always figured it out?”

Raj opens his mouth, but Meera cuts him off. “If you think you can handle it, then you can. We just don’t want you to get hurt.”

“I won’t,” she says. “She’s still a complete stranger. Maybe I just needed to realize things don’t have to be as planned out and rigid as I thought. Isn’t that a good thing?”

“Okay,” Meera says. “We support you.”

“She supports you,” Raj corrects. “Come help me wash this stuff off my face. I can’t judge you properly while I’m peeling.”

It doesn’t have to be a big deal. It can just be a good thing for right now, the connection between two girls on opposite coasts. A siren and the one who stands ankle-deep at the shore.

It can just be a good thing, while it lasts, and then Grace will fold it up like the hotel stationery that still smells like sea-salt magic. She will gather it up and hide it in the deep cavity of her chest, camouflaged under her heartbeat. It will be a good thing, a good memory.

She has other things to worry about. Her future. Her job search. Her place in the vast, blue-black sky.

“Coming?” Meera calls from the door. “You know he only lets you touch his face.”

“Right behind you,” Grace says, and the echoes of Yuki’s words come with her. I think the sun saw something in you, something bright all on its own, and it picked you. She lets out a trembling breath and shuts the door firmly behind her.

Late at night, when everyone is asleep, Grace crouches on the metal balcony under the moonlight.