This is fake, right? There’s no way it can be true.” I pushed my phone toward Dawn. She had been going on about my upcoming schedule and asking when I thought my next batch of canvases would be done.
“What?” Dawn took the phone from my hand, her touch surprisingly gentle. Not the brisk way she usually had. Not that I’m saying my friend was in any way rude or snatchy, but gentle wasn’t generally her style either. Between Dawn going in with the soft touch and True with my full name, I must have put them both in a panic for a minute there.
Dawn glanced at my phone, and her eyes went wide. There was a brief flash of alarm, and I could guess exactly how she felt. Was she cold? Did her insides recoil and twist inside themselves?
“No way. And in ninety days? This is bullshit. It sounds like they are pulling from that reality show.”
“Right?” I said, agreeing with her. Thank goodness for Dawn. I could always count on her when it came to seeing things my way. “That’s what I thought.” I laughed. It may have come out slightly hysterical. “He’d never do that. Not to us. Not to me. Not to the world. Also, that show is crazy pants.”
“In the best way,” Dawn interjected. She shook her head and handed me back my phone. “Nah. Definitely not. This really is bullshit. Keanu wouldn’t do it, hon.” She went from riled back down to soft and gentle again, amping my anxiety. It was as if she were talking to a small child or someone praying in the waiting area of an ICU surgery center. Fuck. Could it be Dawn thought there was some truth to this tweet?
I tried hard to look beyond her wall of defense. Through to the bond of our almost thirty-year friendship. We connected, she and I, in a way that no one else on the planet ever had and I suspected ever would. Well, all except True, but he was different. You know, given he had a penis and all, and the fact that he was, I don’t know, just…True.
Dawn tapped at her phone, then looked at me, the placating tone now laced with an edge of anger. “Actually, I’m low-key pissed at whoever on the PR team thought it was a good idea to release this news. Ninety days my ass. Are they putting us all on some sort of fan-flail doomsday countdown clock? Just do it if you’re ready, or get engaged and be quiet about it. We’ll find out when they are on the cover of People like everybody else or when TMZ releases the telephoto shots. It’s not like he’s a royal. Damn!” She shook her head as she turned up her lip and placed her phone back on the edge of the worktable, careful not to put it where it would get paint or glue on it.
She glared at the phone. “Keanu is never getting married. He’d never settle down and make just one woman, man, person…ferret, that happy while ruining the lives of the rest of the world. I have a right mind to make a complaint.”
“I agree with you, but where would you even start?”
She shook her head and gave me slightly overconfident “trust me” eyes, which I’d learned from all our years of near misses, whoops and almost-had-its not to trust all that much. But with the glint she had going on, I half expected her to go protesting at some PR firm in a stunning vintage ’70s designer outfit, signage in hand, shouting about how someone must pay for these grievous misdeeds.
True let out a groan, as Dawn and I swiveled toward him in unison.
“Seriously? This is what your whole zone-out was about? Damned Keanu Reeves?” He took a step back. Lucky for him, just out of my arm’s reach.
“Watch it with the blasphemy, mister.”
He hit me with an eye roll and a sigh before rubbing his short nails over his close-cropped curls. “I can’t with you, Lu,” he said, before shifting to Dawn. “You either. The fact that you fall right in, entertaining her mess, makes you just as bad.”
Dawn gasped. “Bad? The hell you say!” She scrunched up her nose and her mouth went wide with feigned shock. “I don’t know what you’re getting on me for, Truman Erickson, you giant soggy blanket.”
“That part,” I added. “Just because you’re grown, don’t think you’re grown-grown.”
True’s eyes went back and forth between the two of us in silent irritation. I could almost see words being swallowed back down his throat, and I opened my mouth to argue against them. But this wasn’t the time to fall into one of our bickering spirals. This was serious.
The fear had my stomach knotting up. I reached for my phone, then paused. True was right. As much as I hated to admit it. Dammit, True was right.
What the hell was I panicking for? And Dawn was right too. It had to be fake. Keanu would never be tied down. He was a free spirit. He was the free spirit.
And so was I—grown-ass, forty-plus fangirl that I was. There was no reason to be afraid. I was fine. I smiled and fought to slow my heart rate.
Quick Lu, think of something calming! But shit, the meditation app I’d sworn I’d listen to every day had lasted less than a week. The pressure of daily relaxation was too stressful. Now all I had was a monthly bill because I kept forgetting to cancel the stupid subscription in the app store. Besides, if I did cancel, that would mean giving up on meditating and therefore admitting defeat. And Carlisles don’t give up. We see things through. Till the end.
I looked over to the far corner of the loft and sighed. I had set up the perfect tranquil space with a cool-ass altar and tufted pillow to get my meditation on. So what if Morphie had co-opted it?
“Look, you’ve got to relax. There is no need for you to get all worked up over a bit of poorly placed celebrity gossip,” Dawn said.
True let out a grunt as if agreeing to this as his phone buzzed low from his pocket, indicating a text.
“Hey, tell your T and Ai-meeee, you’re busy. We have a crisis over here,” Dawn continued.
“Is that what you’re calling it?” True quipped back.
The inner twelve-year-old in me had to suppress a chuckle over Dawn’s jibe as I piled on top. “Yeah, isn’t the semester over, Professor Hottie McHottieson? Can’t she ease up a bit now?”
True frowned at his phone, but I’m sure the face was really meant for me.
His teacher’s assistant Aimee was into him big-time. Though he liked to annoyingly put on as if he didn’t know it. Fact was, True acted as if he didn’t know a good percentage of the students who took his economics and world studies class were into him. As if. For all his brilliance, at times the man didn’t have a clue about how sexy his “I don’t have the time to be concerned about mundane things like metro male grooming because I’m too busy thinking on higher pursuits” vibe made him.
“I swear you two have a combined age of twenty-four,” he grit out as he tapped at his phone.
Dawn and I looked at each other and shrugged. “I would have accepted anything under fifty combined, so this is a win in my book,” she said.
True shook his head as he picked up his mug. It was the one he usually used at my place, simple white on which I’d painted a bent spoon and the words THERE IS NO SPOON in block letters. He knew good and well it was a homage to a scene from The Matrix, and if he had trouble with my fangirling or bouts of immaturity, he could have just as easily brought one of his own plain mugs up from his place.
True took his Matrix mug and his text convo with Ai-meee and headed to the far side of the kitchen island. I guess out of firing distance of me and Dawn for a little privacy. I didn’t blame him, but still, it grated a bit. His nimble thumbs tapped along his screen before he paused, placed the phone down and picked up another bagel from the bag of leftovers on the island.
Like Dawn, he always had at least two bagels, and with all his running he didn’t even have to worry about the carbs. And unlike me, True claimed his runs were a form of daily stress relief and enjoyment. The concept seemed ridiculous, no matter how many times he’d tried to explain it. He’d do better trying to get me to understand market conversions by country and rates of fluctuations. It didn’t matter, though. True’s tall, lanky but muscular frame could support one bagel or three.
Still, by the almost beastly way he tore into the poor everything bagel, I had a feeling that he was stuffing his mouth to clamp down on comments to Dawn and me he thought were better left unsaid. It was one of the deflection tactics he’d honed after years of being caught in the crossfire of our mini rants. At least that was what my WHET app had taught me—aka Women’s Health Empowerment Therapy—which was the app I did more religiously keep up with, not only for its cutting-edge sex talk and vibrator discounts but the fact that they had certified therapists writing pretty solid takes on their blog. But here it was again; I was going off the rails and the topic. Maybe I needed to check in on the app a little more frequently.
“Oh, let the soggy blanket sulk,” Dawn said, as if she could see inside my head.
Dawn and I have been arm-in-arm BFFs since we first met as freshmen at Forresters Academy, an exclusive private high school just outside of Manhattan. Forresters was and still is a who’s who of New York’s second-tier rich progressives’ kids. Those who were not A-listers, old money, ultra-wealthy, library donor types. We were the class of new money, the start-ups or perhaps second cousins of the A-listers who had to work management that kept the old money moving.
My father happened to be one of the new money movers. And he was so good as a private equity investor that the name Carlisle could just about open any A-list door. Money was funny like that.
But lucky us—not—we were C-list all day. Sure, on a good day we could pull off B-list, on account of being upwardly mobile and, in many folks’ eyes, uppity Black and not where we belonged—a myth my mother loved to clap back on whenever she got the chance.
That myth is part of how we’d ended up at Forresters. My mother getting “mistaken” for a nanny at my old school’s pickup one time too many. There were only so many straws before a camel’s back broke or a Black mother had had enough with the bullshit and went off. And that was what happened at my private middle school before I was sent to Forresters.
I remember the day clearly, coming out of the exit on the quiet, tree-lined Upper East Side street just off Fifth Avenue where our school was. Right off Museum Mile. We were supposed to be the elites. Tourists even stopped to get glimpses of us looking so unbothered and upper-class New York chic in our navy, burgundy and tan uniforms. But there was my mother, blaring at Trishna Greenberg’s mom, “You think I’m the nanny? What nanny wears Patrick Kelly and Chanel to a pickup?”
I was mortified. Though she had a point. Still, it didn’t stop me from wanting one of the sidewalk cracks to open up and devour me whole. All the kids were staring like we were some sort of aberration, a strange wonder to behold. They always looked at her like that. The same way they looked at me when they spared me a glance. Once again, I wondered why couldn’t she just blend. Why couldn’t she be inconspicuous like the other moms in the latest Ralph Lauren getup? Or better yet, not pick me up at all?
God. I was a shit daughter even back then.
But it wasn’t the slights to my mom or my secondhand embarrassment that got me to Forresters. It was the incident. The one where the new math teacher swore that I cheated off Felicity Mathis instead of the other way around. That was the final straw.
My mother could take a lot, explode and then move on, but my father wouldn’t give a penny to an institution that questioned our honor. Even though I was never a math whiz like my brother, Dad never questioned me or asked if I’d cheated. He never asked for an explanation. He only said that my overpriced school would miss our money and be sorry when another school had it.
I was glad to be done of it, already on my four-year countdown to graduation and art school in Paris or London and all the things I dreamt about when I wasn’t trying to disappear into the wall cracks.
But once I got to Forresters and after meeting Dawn, I lost that rush to fly away, and even the need to fade into the paint started to dissipate. Suddenly I wasn’t so alone. Finally, I wasn’t the only brown girl in my class. Of course, Forresters was still expensive (i.e., exclusive; i.e., pretty damned white), but the Forrester founders seemed to have had some sort of come-to-Jesus moment or maybe they were low-key class shaded too, so they liked to consider themselves woke before being woke was a thing. Ignore the fact that it still cost approximately $48K to give a kid their form of progressive wokeness.
Still, they were highly philanthropic and had a 15 percent diversity rate, but made sure to show at least 30 percent of the students in all their promotional brochures and literature were people of color. But I wasn’t mad. I was happy to be out of my old school and even happier when I met Dawn on the first day.
“Bobby Brown is sooo cute. Right, Bethany?” Kaitlyn Smith, the upperclassman assigned to giving us our tour of the campus chirped by way of bonding with the Black girls. My Spidey sense went up immediately and I was getting Felicity Mathis (I’ll use you till I abuse you) vibes out the gate with this one, but I stayed chill. Better to not rock the boat.
“And you look a little like Whitney Houston, but way prettier. I think she’s great, but Madonna sings better,” Kaitlyn continued. Dawn and I gave each other immediate wide eyes because (a) blasphemy on that Whitney/Madonna comment, and (b) what the hell was with this chick?
It went on from there—new school, same stupidity, but whatever. It was high school. At least now I had a friend to vibe with and one who understood when these not-so-micro aggressions came up. Dawn and I had something in common, and even better, we were equally silly in our immaturity and over-the-top love of ’80s punk and ’90s pop. B-boys were an obsession, and foreign romance drama heartthrobs were our ultimate crushes.
Always a little quirky, I had done my quirking in relative quiet. Dawn, who was a bit bolder and innately perceptive, picked up on my inner wild child and coaxed her out. There were SoHo shopping trips, sunbathing layouts on her West Village rooftop when we were out of school on the weekends. The best were our long sessions of Fuck, Marry, Kill—Comic Edition. The fact that thirty years later we could still pass time pretty much doing the same things, playing the same games, well, I didn’t know if it was a good or a bad thing.
If Keanu was getting his shit together and settling down, then what did that mean for me and my life?