Ten

Grace has never been to New York.

Yuki offered to meet her at the airport. “We can make it a cheesy Hallmark movie,” she said the night before, voice faint through the phone as she painted her nails. “Or, we can make it gay and awkward. Visitor’s choice.”

Grace told her she could do it. She was already imposing on Yuki’s hospitality. She could figure out this part by herself.

She waits.

Grace makes her way outside, already feeling the heat from early summer.

She has the money from Mom in her savings account, but she still feels afraid to spend it. The sooner she spends it, the sooner she has to make her way back home.

“I can’t believe you let me do this,” she whispers into her phone while the driver turns the music up. “This is a mistake,” she says. “What was I thinking?”

“What?” Ximena asks. She sounds way too chipper for it to be so early. “Why do you sound like that? Were you stuck next to a baby the entire flight?”

“My seatmate was actually very nice. We exchanged a few pleasantries while boarding and didn’t speak or make eye contact for the rest of the flight.”

“Sounds wonderful. Why so glum?”

“I’m in New York City,” Grace says. “I’m in New York City to meet a girl I married in Las Vegas.”

Ximena makes a thoughtful noise. “Yes, I thought we already knew this.”

“Colonel will kill me if he finds out,” Grace hisses. “I told my parents I’d found a summer research opportunity. I’m not just derailing the plan I’ve had for over a decade, but I’m making shit up about it now. In the contest for World’s Worst Daughter, I’m top two, and I’m not number two.” Her breath hitches, and she covers her eyes with a free hand. She’ll die if she cries in this Toyota Prius.

“Calm down,” Ximena says softly. “Don’t cry, you know it stresses me out.” She lets out a deep exhale, and Grace can almost hear her mind whirring. “Okay, do you need me to tell you again why this isn’t a terrible idea?”

Grace sniffles and hides a smile in her sleeve. It’s too hot for her tie-dye hoodie, but she’s wearing another one she’s taken from Raj, and she pretends she can still smell his cologne in the fabric. It’s comforting to have this reminder of her family. “Yes, please. Love you.”

“So much it hurts,” Ximena says. “Now, we decided—you decided—it was okay to need a break, right?”

Grace shrugs. “I guess,” she mumbles. “I probably should have taken a break in Florida.”

She hears an exaggerated “oh my God” in the background. “Is that Grace Porter?” Agnes asks. “I thought we already convinced her it was okay to enjoy being married to a cute girl? Summer in NYC. It’s like a movie!”

Grace’s eye twitches.

“Go away, Ag,” Ximena tells her. “Go eat before you leave to terrorize the working world. There’s mangú and huevos fritos and aguacate.”

“I want mangú,” Grace sulks. She’s starving after a five-and-a-half-hour flight, and it mixes with the apprehension and anxiety churning in her belly. The tops of her wrists are sore. Where the skin is thicker and sturdier, and she pinched and released and pinched and released while she waited at baggage claim.

“You,” Ximena says. “You need to just relax. I promise it’s okay.” She lowers her voice, so it is just her and Grace the words fall between. “I know we think we have to be on all the time. But, Porter?” she asks, voice quiet. “It’s okay for us to just be, too. Enjoy this, okay? Enjoy getting to know Yuki, and don’t overthink this like your ridiculous Virgo brain tells you to do.”

“But—”

“Go meet your wife. Fall in loooove.” She yawns, a little squeaky thing that makes Grace homesick. “I worked a late shift last night. I’m heading back to bed.”

“But, Ximena—”

“Text me later! Love you!”

The call ends, and Grace lets out a muted scream through clenched teeth. She hides under her hood and stares out the car window.

“Okay, Grace Porter,” she mutters. She squares her shoulders. “You married this girl. Now, go get her.”

The car pulls up in front of a redbrick building. Her heart skips because this is it. She’s a Porter, and Porters are strong and fearless. But she is also Grace, and Grace is nervous and scared. Her hands tremble as she gets out of the car and grabs her bags.

Up ahead, a girl sits on a stoop with a bouquet of yellow and orange flowers next to her.

“Yuki?” Grace calls, and the girl jolts, standing up jerkily. “Yuki Yamamoto?”

She decides to be brave about this. She dumps her duffel bag on a dirty New York City sidewalk and throws herself into Yuki’s arms. Yuki catches her. There is a solid body against hers, and the world goes quiet. She squeezes her arms around this girl’s soft waist, her girl’s soft waist.

“Grace Porter,” Yuki murmurs. “In the flesh, at last.”

Grace leans back. “Were you afraid I was a figment of your imagination or something?” She reaches out, hands hovering over Yuki’s hair. It’s shorter, she’s positive, hanging just over the tops of her ears. Feathered, too-long bangs fall into her eyes. Her undercut is neatly buzzed. “Did you cut your hair just for me?”

Yuki steps away, head down so all that shows is her septum piercing and the curve of her mouth. “Yes to both things,” she says. When she talks, it’s different from her radio voice and less distorted than how she sounds on the phone. She sounds like a real person with a real body and real fingers that grip a bouquet of yellow and orange flowers tight enough that they start to droop.

“Here,” she says, holding them out.

Grace takes the flowers gently and buries her face in them, inhaling. “You got me flowers,” she says, her voice held tight with wonder.

Yuki scratches behind her ear. She tilts her head up, just enough that one eye peeks out from underneath her fringe. “If you hate them, then it wasn’t my idea,” she says quickly. “If you like them, then they reminded me of you. The yellow and the orange. As close to gold as I could find.”

“Yeah,” Grace breathes out. “I like them. They’re beautiful.”

Yuki squints at her. “Good,” she says. “Then it was my idea.”

Grace rolls her eyes, feeling light and silly. “Thank you.”

Yuki looks up fully. Grace can take in all of her: her scrunched nose and her sharp eyes and her dimpled cheeks and the quarter moon light that glints off her ears from all her piercings. “You’re welcome,” she says back, like a challenge. She steps back and holds out her arms. “Welcome to Harlem.”

Grace turns and just from here she can see copper-brick row homes and small apartment buildings and cramped little food spots. There’s soul food and West African carryouts at two opposite corners and a buffet farther up that smells like Maw Maw’s at Thanksgiving, the table filled with mac and cheese, and greens, and yams with the syrup dripping from them like grease.

“You hungry?” Yuki asks. “We can have leftovers for lunch if my roommates haven’t eaten them all.”

Grace cranes her head to take it all in. “You haven’t told me about your roommates,” she says distractedly. Somewhere in the distance, she can pick out the familiar smell of hair grease and burning curling irons. Maw Maw always did her hair when she was younger, always told her to hold your ear and that’s just the steam, girl, calm down. Portland is many things, but it tucks away all the things that remind Grace of herself in secret corners and shadows.

“Are you listening to me?” Yuki asks, and Grace turns.

“No,” she says honestly, and Yuki sticks her tongue out. “I was having some culture feelings, sorry. Wasn’t expecting it.”

“Ah,” Yuki says, following her line of sight. “Is this your hashtag Asian rep moment, Grace Porter?”

“Maybe,” she confesses. She turns to Yuki, who’s staring back at her. “Okay, quick. Tell me about your roommates before I meet them.”

Yuki leans against the stoop railing. “They’re a little weird,” she says. “My weird, queer family I made myself. I thought it would be too much, living with three guys, but we make it work.”

Grace blinks. “You live with three guys?” she asks.

Yuki shrugs, a small, shy smile on her face. “We make it work,” she says. “And they’re not assholes, I swear.” She scrunches her nose up as she thinks that over. “Not unbearable assholes. I would have smothered them in their sleep otherwise.”

She turns toward the front door, and Grace takes in the apartment building in full. It’s crumbling in places, but there are flower boxes hanging from every window, little pink and purple blossoms that bloom in hello. From the flagpole hangs a rainbow flag with the black and brown stripes. There’s a sign taped to the first-floor window that says “God welcomes all, regardless of color or creed.” There’s a welcome mat on the front porch that says “All love welcome here.”

Yuki pinks up. She looks embarrassed. “Our landlady is a little much,” she says quietly. “But we got really lucky with her.”

“She seems pretty fucking cool,” Grace says. “How long have you lived here?”

Yuki ushers them inside and up the stairs. “Long enough that Auntie Anna Mae—that’s our landlady—knows way too much of my business.” They stop in front of apartment 206. “This is me,” she says, looking nervous. “I’m not responsible for anything my roommates say or do. You’re not allowed to divorce me if you hate them.”

Grace frowns, feeling her edges to see if the gel is still holding her baby hairs down. “What if they hate me?” she asks, her mind racing with worst-case scenarios. Maybe they’ll take one look at her and know Yuki made a terrible mistake.

Yuki waits for silent permission before she runs soft, gentle fingers through the ends of Grace’s gold-honey strands. “All this hair,” she says softly. “It’s all I could remember for so long. All this gold hair. The sun did want you to stand out.”

Grace groans, pushing her hands away. “I should have never told you that. It’s such mom bullshit.”

Someone raps on the door from the inside. “You told us to make sure we were all home, and now you’re gonna make us wait while you stare into each other’s eyes like a Harlequin novel?” There’s muffled curses and a muted thump. “I’ve been silenced,” the voice calls out. “Oppression wins again.”

Yuki shuts her eyes tight. “They’re all awful,” she confesses. “I lied. They’re all total assholes.” She opens the door.

Three people are spread out. There’s a white guy sitting cross-legged on the floor, glitter in his long shaggy hair as he folds paper hearts.

There’s a dark-skinned Black guy sitting on their kitchen counter. It’s not so much a kitchen as much as the insides of a kitchen pushed against the wall. But there he sits, alternating between eating out of a huge mixing bowl between his legs and throwing glitter at the guy with the hearts. Little mini paper hearts are tucked in the strands of his dreads like flowers.

In the very front of it all, hands on hips, is a guy with his chin tipped up in defiance. His right eye is bruised and black, and his long shiny black hair hangs in a thick braid on his shoulder. Somehow, he is completely free of glitter and hearts. His only decorations are the pinkish-red indents in his deep brown skin from his chest binder.

“I cut my MMA training short for this,” he huffs, eyes flicking over Grace. “And,” he says, thumb pointing back at the glitter and hearts behind him, “I’ve had to supervise arts and crafts time. So many hearts! It’s not even Valentine’s Day! It’s June!”

“You sound bitter,” Heart Guy says. “Plus, I like hearts. Hearts are love and all that shit I have to teach to my first-graders.” He looks up and gives Grace a salute with his scissors. “Are you the wifey?”

Grace shoots Yuki a look. “I think so? Most people just call me Grace. Or Porter. I answer to both, I guess.”

“But which one do you like?” he asks. “Which one feels like you?”

“Jesus,” the guy on the counter says. Another clump of glitter goes flying through the air. “She just got here. At least let her sit down before you make her question her entire existence.”

Yuki dumps Grace’s duffel bag on the floor. “Before this devolves any more,” she says, “let me introduce you. That’s Dhorian.” She points to the guy on the counter. “You probably won’t see him much today because he’ll be cleaning up all this goddamn glitter. That,” she says, pointing to the guy meticulously cutting out hearts, “is our token white boy, Fletcher. We love him but will kill him first when the revolution starts.”

Fletcher shrugs, holding a pink heart up to his face. “I’ve accepted my place in this household.”

Yuki moves to wrap her arms around the guy with the swollen black eye. She pinches his cheek. “And this absolute looker is Sani. Don’t let the black eye scare you. He almost always has one. Happens when you’re a big ol’ softie in the boxing ring.”

She ducks, cackling as Sani whips around to grab at her. “Behave,” she screeches, slung over his shoulder. “We have company. Grace, this is my commune. Commune, say hi.”

“Hi, Grace,” they intone out of sync. “Or Porter,” Fletcher adds, not even flinching as more glitter gets thrown at him.

Sani puts Yuki down. “So,” he says. “You’re the girl that got Yuki drunk and married in Vegas.”

“Relax.” Yuki frowns. “Technically, I think I got her drunk.”

“You did,” Grace says, fidgeting with the straps of her backpack. “And I can’t remember it, but from the picture, the wedding seemed really nice,” she admits.

Yuki makes a surprised noise. “You kept it?”

“Yeah.” She shrugs. “It makes me happy when I look at it.”

The room is silent, and she stares down at her feet.

“Did you bring the picture?” Dhorian asks. He shakes a spoonful of cookie dough at her. “You can share this with me if you say yes.”

“Yes,” Grace says. “Why?”

He lets out a shriek. One of their neighbors beats on the wall. “Yuki refuses to let us see it,” he says. He lifts his mixing bowl like an offering. “Today, girls and gays, we feast on drunk love.” He jumps down off the counter. “I think I have vodka stashed somewhere. Reconvene in fifteen. Hut hut!”

“Hut hut!” Sani and Fletcher yell.

They scatter, and Yuki grabs Grace’s hand and pulls her down a hallway. The grip has started to feel familiar, as does the way Yuki sends shy glances at Grace out of the corner of her eye, like she’s checking to make sure Grace is still there.

Are you there?

“I’m here,” she says quietly. She feels an unhindered sense of acceptance. She can just be here, without any heavy, weighed down expectations.

She says it now, standing in the middle of Yuki’s room. She is surrounded by posters and old radios and a little altar, as Grace suspected, with crystals and herbs and vials of sea salt.

Yuki looks at Grace to check that she is really there, and yes, she is.

The first lesson Grace learns about Yuki Yamamoto is that she’s a blanket hog.

It would bother Grace, if she was someone who slept much. Instead, she climbs out of the full-size bed and the memory foam topper Yuki splurged on. The apartment doesn’t have a balcony like Grace’s back in Portland, so she makes do with cracking the window open. Yuki doesn’t wake.

She has to be careful with the windows because Yuki has little statues lined up along the sill. They go in between burned down incense, and Grace leans down to smell the lingering remains. She finds herself wondering, sleepy and alone under moonlight, what Yuki was thinking when she lit these. If she was thinking about the stars or work or the lonely creatures in the dark. If maybe she lit these once and thought of Grace, and watched the incense burn down to its stumps.

“Honey Girl?” Yuki murmurs, voice hoarse with sleep. The half-moons under her eyes are part of their own galaxy. “What are you doing?” She doesn’t lift her head off the pillow, so her hair falls in her eyes and covers them up. “Sleepy.”

“Sorry,” Grace whispers back, carefully closing the window and tiptoeing back toward the bed. Her body sinks into the mattress as she crawls back in. “Insomniac.”

Her hair falls around her in streaks. Yuki reaches out hesitantly, watching Grace’s face as her fingers start to twirl in the sleep-flattened curls. She hadn’t said anything when Grace changed out her pillowcase for a silk one. Had only rolled toward it and said it smelled like jasmine.

Now she tugs lightly at Grace’s hair, the strands meandering over the sheets. “This is what I remember,” she croaks out. “It never really got dark that night in Vegas, and you were passed out on the bed. All the lights hit your hair. Honey gold,” she tells Grace. “A girl with hair from the sun.”

Grace sighs. She closes her eyes, cocooning herself in the quiet intimacy. “That’s not me,” she says.

Yuki makes a soft noise and shifts closer. “It’s a good story,” she says.

“It’s just a story.”

She feels Yuki’s gaze on her, sharpening by the second. “Can I tell you something I’ve learned from stories, Grace Porter?”

In a fit of spiteful bravery, she tugs half the covers away from Yuki. “Yes,” she says finally, burrowed underneath. “What have you learned?”

Yuki takes her half of the covers and burrows under, too. The two of them are underneath, a hidden fortress for whispering secrets. “People may not believe the stories,” she says, pink mouth cracking open with a yawn, “but that doesn’t mean they aren’t real.”

Grace spends the rest of the night staring up at Yuki’s ceiling, wishing for her own plastic, glow-in-the-dark stars. She spends the rest of the night breathing through the feeling of her chest aching, her heart breaking, wishing she could believe the stories as simply as Yuki does. In the real world, people do not easily accept the things on the fringes, the things with teeth and claws and wants and dreams. Stories do not change that.

Grace gets up at eight while Yuki is snoring away next to her. She sleeps in, Grace will learn, until about noon, then wakes up angry to be alive until she’s had her toast with jam.

Grace meanders into the living space.

No one is cooking breakfast, but Dhorian is slinking in the door with a hoodie pulled on over his hospital scrubs. He waves a tired hand at Grace before he collapses against the kitchen counter and sighs longingly at their cheap coffee maker.

“I need coffee,” he says, “but I’m too tired to make coffee.”

She hesitates. “Do you want me to—” she starts to ask, voice breaking in the middle. “Do you want me to make your coffee?”

He tilts his head. “Porter,” he says quietly, “if you make the machine do the thing, I will fly to Vegas and marry you, too.”

She laughs quietly, coming out of the shadows. She waggles her fingers until her gold band is visible. “I think I did okay the first time around.” The coffee machine gurgles. “How was work?” she asks, anxious to fill the space with words that aren’t about her drunken night with desert flowers and forever vows.

Dhorian groans. He instructs Grace on how to work the machine between yawns. “Night shift in the ED. Sorry, the emergency department. It’s—what’s a nicer phrase for ‘absolutely fucking ghoulish’?”

“I think that works.”

“Okay.” He looks like he could fall asleep right here on the counter. “Then, it was absolutely fucking ghoulish. Kid came in with a broken arm and a suspected case of negligence. Probably child abuse. The paperwork alone is enough to kill you,” he says, “but it’s really fucked up when you gotta send the kid home. Sugar and cream, please.”

She gets the sugar and cream.

“What made you choose that field?” she asks him. “You’re a resident, right?”

He nods. Watchful, sleepy eyes follow her progress. “Mom’s a pediatrician. Dad’s a pediatrician. Sister’s finishing up her pediatric residency,” he says ruefully. He stands up to stretch. “What’s a rebel without a cause, huh?” He grabs his mug with both hands and shuffles down the hall to the room he shares with Fletcher. “Next time you see me, remind me to ask you about your work, okay? Thank you, Porter,” he says, before his bedroom door shuts behind him.

If Grace has anything to say about it, she won’t remind him. She doesn’t even want to think about it herself.

Instead, she wanders around the apartment, careful of creaking floorboards. She runs her hand along all the exposed brick, and the rough scratchy surface reminds her of the asteroid particles back in the MacMillan lab. Their little living room is exploding with pictures and magazines and a film of glitter. There’s a fish tank in the corner of the room filled with neon-bright fish. They are the same color as Grace’s stick-on ceiling stars, the ones that hear all her hopes and dreams and fears and worries.

She crouches down in front of the tank and wonders if these fish, innocuous and quiet, have heard the same from the people in this apartment. She presses a finger to the glass and taps lightly. One darts toward the sound.

“Hello,” she says quietly, watching it flick from side to side. She taps again, and it follows. “Hello, bright little thing.”

The fish swims away, back into its little coven of neon friends. They are mesmerizing to watch, content as they are to swim in their little group in their little tank in their little world.

“What do you think about?” she asks the fish in the tank. “Do you ever think about the big, wide ocean, and how you would feel if you could swim in it?” She taps the glass again, and another, or maybe the same fish, darts forward. “I thought I wanted to be out of my tank,” she confesses with a whisper. “But the ocean is big, you know, and I am very, very small.” The fish follows her finger. “I don’t know that I like it,” she says, so softly she can barely hear it herself. “I don’t know that I like feeling this small at all.”