After only half a year in Tamaki, Amari had grown sick of rain. It once inspired hope the wildfires wouldn’t burn out of control and rain down ash over half of California, hope the drought that had been on her entire life would finally end. If nothing else, rain broke up the monotony of months on end of “okay” and “too hot”. It was different. Fun, even. Social media feeds were alight with videos, as though water falling from the sky was brand new, and exaggerated elation, as though everyone was seeing it for the first time when really only a year had passed since the last storm. During the few days the sky threatened to burst open, most often just enough water came down to cause chaos on the roads, maybe catch a few people off guard and clear up by afternoon.

     Not so today; Amari could smell rain underneath the smog and smoke and piss of downtown, and it finally let loose when she was only a few blocks from home. Wind picked up the moment she reached Olive and at that point Amari just closed her umbrella and pushed on up the hill, jogging home.

     Amari knew she should have taken off her wet clothes right away but instead, she sat behind the front door, trying to catch her breath and figure out how long she could stay indoors. Nobody in Los Angeles knew how to drive and rain made it worse so she was going to stay in if she could. Granted, that wouldn’t be much different from usual. If it wasn’t groceries or the bank, what did Amari go out for anymore?

     She ignored the blinking answering machine, turned on the heat, and went to the bathroom, wishing she hadn’t gone out in so many layers. Most of her clothes were off before she plopped down on the toilet. Her ankle throbbed; of course the first time in months she needed the brace was the day she had to run home. The sound of Velcro coming undone echoed in the room as she pulled off the brace and flexed her left ankle. She’d need to take it easy for a few days.

     Amari finished stripping and turned on the shower, shifting her weight while she waited for steam to fill the room. She didn’t turn on any music; it was only three in the afternoon but she just wanted a quick shower to warm up and then sleep.

     What was left to do…bills were paid, she’d met with Khadijah. Her last tutoring session before winter break was in a few days. When she could stand to stare at a screen, she’d see if there was anything else she was missing.

     She took her time getting out of the shower, still careful of her ankle though it did feel a bit better. Shaving could wait but she did grease her hair, the only bit of vanity she still held on to.

     The house was warm by the time she left the bathroom, her damp clothes under her arm. She spread them on the drying rack in her room before laying across the bed in only a towel and pulling up a blanket.

    How many more days would pass this way? Amari didn’t know. Maybe they’d never end.

—

Being startled awake was among Amari’s least favorite ways to be woken up. Not five seconds later a flash of lightning turned her black curtains dark gray, and she braced herself for more thunder, soon confirming the noise was what had woken her. She stood and stretched, glancing at the window where the trees outside were whipping in the wind and branches slapping against the glass.

     Fear she couldn’t quite place was a common occurrence and trying to assuage it never worked. Dark curtains might prevent eerie silhouettes from being cast on the windows, but not the scraping noises that made her second-guess herself.

     Her hands shook while she looked through the dresser for underwear, thinking, “I know that’s a tree, not a person,” much in the same way she once thought, “I’m just over thinking it.” Except she hadn’t been over thinking back then and if she’d just—

     Enough, she scolded herself. Just..enough.

     After draping a towel on her head to catch the last of the dampness, she turned on the TV and the PlayStation. As usual, her slew of cousins were on some form of football or basketball game and she was glad she signed on invisibly by default. The jeering and heckling and countering racial slurs that she would be expected to partake in during online matches just wasn’t appealing at the moment.

     One of those ancient fighting games, that kind that had been ported to everything they could run on? That caught her attention. Those sorts of games never changed. Always made sense. Provided a few minutes of clarity when barring a few hours, most of her days blurred together.

     But…was this really it? Going out, looking like she had it together, sometimes not even remembering how she got from place to place, then coming home and seeking distraction after distraction? And it seemed after only an hour, she needed a new one. She shook her hands and flexed them, ineffective against the way her fingers were already beginning to stiffen.

     Bad ankle, weak hands…sooner or later, she would be alone with her own thoughts and no reprieve.

     She set the controller aside after turning on a movie and cracked open her laptop, and started going through emails. She would respond when she could manage typing but a bit of tapping could work for the moment.

     Nothing interesting. A few essay drafts from her tutoring clients, a lengthy note from Mrs. Maynard about McKayla’s upcoming…high school entrance exams? Where was she sending the poor girl? That email was marked unread and she kept scrolling. Maybe later she’d write to people she’d been putting off, mostly other writers and old classmates she always meant to hit up, but when she typed the letter “H”, the drop down menu of suggestions came up. Before Reeve Hastings, who she’d been meaning to talk to for several months, was them. After closing the tab, she slammed the laptop closed and tried to breathe. Later she could go clean her contacts, steel herself for that brief brush with a line of direct contact. Until then, she set the computer aside and curled up on the bed.

     It’s that kind of day, huh?  

     She was too old for this, too old for a mere phantom to be causing this much distress.

     Yet here I am, alone in the rain. Just like back then.

—

Hail pounded against the windows and roof for most of the night and Amari was awake through it all. There hadn’t been a storm like this since she was in elementary school. She lived in a house then, at least a century old yet there’d never been one leak. Her mother’s father (whom she’d never met) had fixed the roof not long after buying the house. The storm took place some ten years after he’d passed, longer still since he actually patched the leaky roof, and his work needed no changes or altering. Amari had yet to craft anything that solid, not with her hands nor her words.

     She was eight or nine that winter but she hadn’t been scared, at least not once she’d hugged her mom when she finally got in from work, not even giving her a chance to set down her umbrella. Then Amari could take turns kneeling on the couch with whichever cousin had been staying with them at the time, staring out at the storm and catching the occasional flash of lightning. Her mom and aunt took turns standing on the porch, watching the palm tree in the front yard sway back and forth, leaning far more than it usually did.

     It wasn’t one of the pencil thin ones that covered the beaches and would go almost parallel to the ground in high winds, but rather an astonishingly stout tree that almost brushed the power lines. In the summer months, it provided much needed shade. In winter, it loomed over the house, swaying, but always begging the question of where it could fall. Out into the street, like the one it had spawned from had done years before? Take out a power line, or even cause a fire? Or-

     “It’s not gon’ fall on the house, is it?” her mom and aunt asked each other in hushed whispers, as far away from the children as they could get in a house that small.

     At just over nine hundred square feet and only two bedrooms, it was tiny, often overcrowded with family that was dealing with something or another. She liked it though, drafty autumn days, hot summer nights, and precarious palm tree aside. Said tree survived the storm, though not long after it was finally cut down, and Amari had to admit, she rested easier afterwards.

     It took months for all the ice that fell that evening to melt, and sometimes Amari would dig in the brush underneath the clothesline to see how much was left until one day, there was none, not even mud.

—

More than a day of not having to deal with people face to face and Amari forgot it all, how not to come off…strange. But then again, maybe she always came off that way and no one had the decency to tell her.

Amari knew better than to sit around in silence and try to figure out why they never told her about any problems until it was too late. She reached around for the game controller and pressed buttons until she heard a beep and the TV cut back on. She put in the lock code (why did she still have one on when he lived alone?) and nearly threw the controller when she realized what she’d done. Again.

     She took her time putting in the code again, making sure to put in her birthday, all while ignoring her stomach growling.

    At some point, Amari knew she would have to eat something, mostly since she couldn’t remember the last time she had. These days it didn’t much matter if she did or didn’t. No one was around to comment on her lack of appetite like they had and she didn’t feel particularly compelled to fix it.

     There was no good reason to avoid kitchens anymore. She was out of that hellish flat, where eventually she was glad she never shook her habit of drinking unfiltered tap water. Just like at the house she’d grown up in, where she often eschewed going back in the house for water on summer days, she would make use of the tap in the laundry room behind the flat to fill her water bottles. The water tasted okay enough, not as good as what she’d grown up with, but the most important thing was how far away from the kitchen it was.

     Everyone seemed to congregate there and she didn’t want to make small talk or regale her local classmates with faux shock and surprise at the professors they all knew to avoid while she was trying to make lunch, but she didn’t like being rude. So, she just quit going in there altogether. If Amari had to be miserable, she didn’t want to hear all the tipsy whooping and hollering from people who weren’t. Or, if they were, they could fake it better than she could and that made her sick.

     Most things did back then, and if she thought about them for too long, they still did. Like now.

—

Sometimes, when Amari felt more like a person and less like a ghastly impersonator, she thought about the sorts of kisses she would have liked to experience. Maybe they’d be sitting on a rock on the Malibu coast, just far enough from the water that the spray barely reached their shoes, watching the sunrise. Or they’d be just inside the door to her apartment, sorting out how far things would go before clothes started coming off, breathless. But just as often as she dreamed of the kisses that would leave her light-headed in a good way, she dreamed of teeth and tongue, and sore lips and slobber.

     Her flat was barely half the size of her room at home but she expected nothing more from a dorm. It was there, however, that she found herself alone with them. The meetings (she couldn’t describe them as “hanging out”; that required fully having enjoyed herself) were…strange. Not one foot away yet she couldn’t tell if they even wanted to be there. Then one day, not long after they’d first kissed, she found her back pinned to the wall, their weight holding her in place.

     Neither of them were quite sure what to do with their limbs, but she supposed it was just a part of how kissing went until you knew what you were doing. Her mind often wandered and that she knew for sure wasn’t quite right. There hadn’t been time to think about it though, because not a minute after she tried to lead with gentle touches, tongue was being forced into her mouth.

     It was rough and unpleasant but Amari didn’t know how to simply ask what the hell they were doing. Then the teeth joined in and she regretted ever asking to kiss them that first time. With saliva slightly dripping from the corner of her mouth (…whose was it?) she wondered exactly what she was supposed to be getting out of the experience. But she was certain she wasn’t supposed to feel so…used in a way she hadn’t been before or since. Why had she let herself be…used? What had she gained beyond a check mark or two on her mental checklist of “firsts”, where all she wanted to do now was uncheck them? Nothing, as far as she could tell.

     Amari lay in bed a while longer, taking deep breaths until the nausea subsided enough that she could go to the kitchen. She walked out with a cola and half a roll of Oreos. For whatever reason, she could keep those down and since she didn’t have to go out for a while, she didn’t have to force down anything more substantial. What luck.

     A different window caught her attention, the one in the hallway. The building’s exterior lights were on and water rattled the roof drains, one of which was just outside. If it was too dark for the hour, she couldn’t say; to know something like that, she’d have to know what time it was. An alarm was set to go off when it was time to go back outside; right now she didn’t need to know boring shit like the current hour. Even still, she tried not to linger too long, but not before she caught sight of her reflection in the window and let out an ugly laugh.

     Twenty six, alone, Oreo crumbs around her mouth, and absolutely no timeline for getting out of this particular rut.

     Is there any way out of it at all, she wondered.

     Amari wiped her mouth with the tail of her shirt. She hated how loose all her clothes had gotten; she couldn’t keep any weight on and everyday was glad she’d moved across town a few times. She didn’t want to run into anyone who’d tell her they’d never realized how fine she was back in school because of course they hadn’t realized. They wouldn’t be interested in knowing no, she hadn’t taken up a sport or lost the last of her baby fat.

No, they wouldn’t want to hear the truth. They never did.

Amari liked her job most days. It kept her out of the desert cities. Kept her in an area where she could move somewhat inconspicuously provided she didn’t venture too far into Skid Row. People left her alone for the most part. That also meant she was left alone with her drafts and works-in-progress, the sole arbiter of whether or not they ever saw the light of day. And the draft Khadijah had torn apart? Never should have left her hard drive.

     She wasn’t sure what she was going for with this book. It had no title and was shorter than her first one by a rather wide margin though not for lack of trying. She jotted notes on her phone, had a few ‘Idea’ files on the computer, and even a page or two in a notebook; they reached a few hundred words before the ideas just escaped her. A select few would make it to a thousand, a few to two, maybe even three thousand. There would always be a base for something decent but the means to finish the story always seemed to be just beyond her grasp.

     This book started by combining several of her longest notes and as such the styles fluctuated in ways she’d found unpleasant as she tried to tie them together. Jessie probably hated it but Amari knew she would before dropping off the manuscript in the dead of night, when she was out of her office.

     Every section seemed to be doing something different but Khadijah had managed to find the one unifying thread underneath the superfluous prose. And it turned out she needed even more than half a book. She’d crossed out the first pages, only a note to “start here” at the beginning of the sixth. Amari didn’t need detailed notes on that one; the pages before six had too much exposition, too few characters, too little to draw in anyone whose job wasn’t looking for the faint sparks of creativity in what was otherwise junk.

     With her first book, Amari managed to get all the good ideas to the forefront, unencumbered by the messy prose. Back then, all her spare time was spent on writing and rewriting, trying to finish…something. The something turned out to be the first draft of her first book. It was rough as all drafts were but she liked it enough to hassle professors and the people he came across in writing classes to give it a read. The overall feedback was good, even if she still had to do some massive overhauls.

     Writing could work. But it had to go on the backburner while she finished up a bunch of the boring requisites whose actual content she’d never use. For a while she wrote nothing, just plucked away at half finished short stories. Nothing serious. She certainly didn’t have time to look over the five or six marked up drafts of her novel.

     But when she found a break in her schedule, a string of classes that could be done anywhere they taught in English, she thought of maybe going out of the country for a while. There was no reason not to; it wasn’t like she had anything better to do. She hadn’t joined a sorority nor had she tried out for any sports, joined any clubs. She was wholly unattached.

     Going to the info session was a whim so she ended up going alone while Malik, her best friend, worked one of his campus jobs. The theater was tucked in a far off corner, in one of the old liberal arts buildings that was last in line for renovations. They had bad coffee, barely sweetened hot cocoa, and stale pastries, the same as every other campus event. Amari chewed on a dry croissant as she made her way to the front row of the theater, wishing she didn’t have to expose herself so much just for some leg room.

     Amari had drifted into in the cluster of black students that sometimes formed without words, unintentionally, but was always welcome. When the presentations were done, she was wandering around gathering info packets about the various schools she could choose. That was where she noticed them, as they’d not had any classes together in a few sessions.

     “Where are you thinking of going?” they asked.

     “Oh, I’m not sure yet,” Amari said, not noticing she’d dampened her accent and speech to the inoffensive southern California ones, the ones that kept assumptions down and questions to a minimum. She’d always done that with them, even back in high school.

     They texted for most of the semester and all through the summer, not often meeting as their commutes took them in opposite directions. Amari hadn’t questioned why they rarely arranged to meet up, even when they were only a quarter mile walk away on campus, why there was always something going on that kept them apart. It would be different in Tamaki, when all the messy parts of their lives were thousands of miles away; how couldn’t it?

—

Amari flushed the toilet, wishing she’d brought her phone because she still wasn’t done. She was supposed to be editing, revising, rewriting! Not stuck on a toilet, trying to piece together where her life fell apart. On top of that, she was wondering what the hell she even had to shit out when she’d only managed half a bag of pre-hulled sunflower seeds and a few swigs of red grapefruit juice in the last two days.

     Granted it was no different than when she found herself in the bathroom at the flat that was little more than a converted shed that shared a wall with her room, her stomach griping for no apparent reason. The shed-bathroom had proven to be one of the least annoying places in the entire flat, maybe even her favorite. No one disturbed her, she only had to take a few steps outside, and she didn’t have to risk an encounter with a flatmate. There was just her, her phone, the toilet, and the spiders that often made the pipes under the sink their home.

She refused to coexist with spiders now, mostly because her nerves were shot. They were weak after months of trying set dates, waiting for responses that seemed to come slower when she and they were in the same place with less obstacles between them, and wondering exactly how long she’d have to wait, how much their already limited time would be cut down. Amari wondered if she would be stood up more than once, left alone in Britomart. She stuck out even more so than at home, and while she knew it was a transit center and no one gave a damn who was there or for how long, when fifteen minutes passed into twenty and that into thirty, she began to wonder. Try to sit still. Not look around anxiously, fidgeting until they finally decided to show.

     She was never sure how to greet them, why the terms of endearment never fell from her lips with any ease. Even the hugs felt stranger than they had back home, like there wasn’t a show to put on anymore. Who the show was for was something Amari had never figured out. Just like she never figured out why they always felt like a stranger.

     Because they always were a stranger.

    There was no wonder she spent most evenings after a “date” in the shed-bathroom clutching her stomach and trying to keep her legs from falling asleep on the toilet. Unease permeated her entire being, unsure if dinner or the person she had it with was the problem. Surely it was just something odd she’d eaten like the beets on the burgers, she convinced herself.

     I won’t do that anymore, she thought as she finally washed her hands, making sure to dry them well; she hated messing up the paper while she was editing.

     No more lies.

—

“I know you in there. Your ass don’t go outside.”

     Amari set the manuscript and laptop aside, having only gotten through a few pages anyway, and let Malik in her apartment. Better to let him in before he used his key.

     “What?” Amari asked, ready to be grilled over what she’d done and if she’d eaten since their last video call. Malik wouldn’t like either of her answers, but she’d give them. Instead Malik went past her to open the curtains to let some light in.

     “…I don’t care if it start raining, we going outside. Put some pants on.”

     “I was working,” Amari pointed to the coffee table where her manuscript lay in a few piles.

     “Is that the last book you had me read?”

     Amari winced at the way Malik’s nose scrunched up, but nodded.

     “Yeah. I got a new editor and she don’t play.”

     Malik leafed through a few pages, red pen in hand but he didn’t need to add to Khadijah’s hack job.

     “Oh, she really don’t play,” he set the stack back down with a laugh. “I told you it’d be aight…eventually. But still get dressed; that book not going nowhere.”

     Finding something decent to wear was no easy task; all her nice clothes had been purchased back when she was promoting her first book and had to look decent. Now the only things that didn’t hang off her were basics and the slacks she’d worn to her meeting with Khadijah. But Malik didn’t drag her to the nearest mall when she came out of the bedroom so she must have looked okay.

     “So what we doing?” Amari asked while she lotioned up.

     “Frat party.”

     “Now I ain’t go to them in school; what make you think–” Amari sighed. That was a joke. When would she stop missing those? “Okay where we really going?”

    “Tony’s. Ricky and his lil’ jazz band playing at the bar.”

     “It’s already nine; we gon’ make it?”

     “They got the late set. Let’s go.”

     She left home barehanded, only a pack of tissues, tube of lip balm, and her wallet tucked in her jacket pocket. Nothing to look for if she needed to make a quick exit.

     “I’ll drive,” Amari offered as she locked the door.

     “You still dry?”

     “I’d be fucked up off one beer. It’s cool.”

     There wasn’t even room to take out a phone without bumping elbows in the antique elevator once she rolled the gate shut. No escape route either, Amari noted dimly and for a moment, she thought Malik might let her off easy.

     “You look better,” Malik said, breaking the silence. “I’m glad you out the house, but–“

     “But today we about to go act like these saxophone solos slap,” she patted Malik’s arm as she exited the elevator and started down the hall to the parking lot, confused yet relieved.

     Malik had hesitated for some reason, only speaking when they were one floor from the garage. It wasn’t like him to miss an opportunity to pry when Amari couldn’t run. They would have to broach the subject. Just…later.

     “Won’t need to act,” Malik loosened back up and Amari hoped she could keep him that way.

—

Amari kept a hand on Malik’s shoulder as they walked down the path to the boardwalk, her glasses in her other hand. This close to the water nothing would keep them from fogging up every five steps but without them in the dark? Everything was uncomfortably fuzzy.

     She could still make out a few things, like how the souvenir stands were still in full effect. Light up balloons and inflatable animals went for twice what you could get them for downtown and parents were letting out exasperated sighs as they handed over crisp twenties from the nearby ATMs. All the restaurants served fresh seafood, most of them having their own overcrowded tanks with their wares on display. She couldn’t read the signs right then but knew they were pointed towards the submarine and whale watching rides on the far side of the boardwalk.

     Amari had thoughts of bringing them here before it all went to hell, showing them all the simple things she liked about it, from the section of pier where you could see fish poking their heads out of the water to the decrepit papier-mâché witch in the Fun Factory. All the small parts had their own charm and added up to a place that was suspended in time, where the newest gadgets were credit card readers and Time Crisis II.

     “…and I lost her.”

     “What?” Amari looked around and saw that she’d fallen behind Malik quite a ways.

     “Sorry,” she caught up and tried to focus on the now, on showing her boy Ricky some love, maybe finding some fruity, nonalcoholic blended drink to sip on while he zoned out.

     Ricky was waiting outside Tony’s for the call to set up their equipment. They kept it simple; a guitar, a bass, a sax, and a keyboard. It’d be better than most live dinner bands she’d ever had the misfortune of sitting through, that was for sure.

     “What’s good, stranger?” Ricky embraced her briefly and the near curtness of it stung but it was in line with what she expected. Malik was an outlier; most people could only take so many declined invitations and the caginess when she did go out and Ricky was one of them.

     “Nothing much,” Amari shrugged, “Y’all doing music full time?”

     “Nah, still a weekend thing. Might leave it that way. Less pressure.”

     “Right, right…”

     Before Ricky could say anything else, one of the waiters called them upstairs.

     “See y’all in ten.” The band filed up the narrow staircase and Amari tried to not to look too relieved. She had to start going out more.

     “Now that wasn’t too bad, right?” Malik asked in the same tone of voice doctors used when giving shots.

     “Shut up.”

Feeling alone in a room full of people, even with her best friend by her side was a new one for Amari. When she’d had to travel by herself for work, it wasn’t fine per say, but doable. Half a year in a depressing hellhole where the only person she knew treated her like a burden left Amari preferring her own company. She knew how to exist on her own.

     Long stretches of Malik being the only person she spoke to for longer than it took to get takeout left her out of practice. She stopped hearing Ricky’s band, couldn’t describe what they had been playing. No one was looking at her, either focused on their drinks or the music. But she couldn’t shake the feeling she was doing everything all wrong. She knew she wasn’t because there was nothing to do wrong; how could you mess up standing and listening to music? But if anyone could bungle such a simple task, Amari knew she could. The only option now was to try and save face at the first break in the set.

     “Watch my drink,” she passed her glass to Malik, ignoring the “Where you going?” that followed, and went down the stairs as quickly as her ankle would allow.

     Amari took the long way around the pier, the one with a view of the pitch black horizon, only broken up by buoys and the occasional boat. She sat on one of the concrete picnic tables, a chill making its way through her pants.

     This “being a person”—she wasn’t ready for it. She just wasn’t. Maybe she could go back to–

     “I thought that was you in there.”

     Khadijah. Why her, why now?

     Malik knew how to deal with this: they’d meet back at the car. Amari would sleep it off while Malik crashed on the couch and then made her breakfast the next morning. Maybe they’d talk, maybe not.

     On her own, Amari was lost.

     “…is now not a good time?”

     “No.” She’d done it again, slipped back into the one-word answers, the ones that kept people at bay whether she meant for them to or not. But she had to speak for herself; no one else would.

     “Here then,” Khadijah held out a single-use hand warmer. Amari kept at least two on her most days, as she often couldn’t sleep without holding on to one when she was in Tamaki and had never dropped the habit. Except for today. And her hands were already ice cold.

     “Thank you.”

    Amari ripped off the plastic and waited for it to heat up. If her hands weren’t cold, maybe she would feel just a smidgen less miserable.

     Khadijah sat on the table, several inches away but still close enough that Amari couldn’t feel alone.

     “I lived in another town by the ocean for a while,” she said, just loud enough to hear over the waves.

     “Don’t even know if there were places like this…I was cooped up in what passed for a city almost the entire time. The one time I did go by the water, it was beautiful. Clean sand; even the jagged rocks looked nicer, like even the water wanted them to look good. You could see another island off in the distance. Real picturesque.

    “It was missing something though. There were people there, and I was there with somebody, but it was still…empty.”

     Amari squeezed the hand warmer, waiting for Khadijah to finish speaking. She didn’t know where this was going.

     “There was no…life,” she finished. “At least, not one that would make me happy. Not one worth living. You look like…you know how that feel.”

     Amari didn’t know how to respond, mostly because she was right. What parts of her were even left at this point? Which ones and how much, she couldn’t say.

     But the least she could do was pull herself together in front of Khadijah as thanks for giving her something outside of herself to think about, something she almost felt she could reach out and touch.

     “Somebody looking for you,” she said, pointing towards the figure moving slowly up the pier. “I’mma head out; you get home safe.”

     She left so abruptly Amari couldn’t get out any thanks.

     Her gaze was fixed on Khadijah and she didn’t even flip Malik off when it finally registered what she said.

     “I ain’t seen you with nobody in…” Malik let out a half laugh, “a few years, at least.”

     “That’s not just anybody; that’s my new editor.”

     “And you didn’t run her off for hitting you up outside work?”

     “No.”

     “Don’t give me none of that one word bullshit,” came Malik’s response, a sudden edge to his voice. Amari knew that edge; Malik had missed his chance in the elevator but he wasn’t going to let another slip by.

     “What happened?”

     Amari sighed and shook her head.

     “I don’t know. That’s why I stay my ass in the house.”

     “What now?”

     “I’m ‘bout to take my ass back in the house.”

—

How much longer Amari had before Malik stopped letting her off the hook, she couldn’t say. They were back at Amari’s apartment, their outer clothes changed. Something was playing on the living room TV and though she was looking right at it, Amari couldn’t say what.

     “You know Ricky noticed you left. The bar ain’t that big.”

     She glanced at the clock; not quite two in the morning. Two hours was all Malik was giving up this evening.

     “I know. What’d you tell him?”

     “We got dinner and something didn’t agree with you.”

     A realistic lie if nothing else, but Malik shouldn’t have had to.

     “Mari, what happened while you were gone?”

     “Malik–”

     “Nah, you about to tell me something. You been messed up since you got back and you wasn’t even gone that long. Why?”

     Amari let her head fall against the back of the couch and she stared up at the ceiling. What was she supposed to say?

     “Would you believe me if I said I don’t know?” she tried.

     “No.”

     So she sat, wracking her brain for something she could say, something that wouldn’t give away how bad it had gotten. Difficult, given that after a while she just wanted to sleep until it was time to board the plane home and that point had come far sooner than she expected. But one of the few episodes that didn’t make her ill to think about came to mind.

     “’member my birthday?” Amari started, aware of the light waver to her voice. Malik noticed it too and his response was far more gentle.

     “Yeah.”

     “I had a test that morning. It wasn’t hard just…pointless. Didn’t help me get better at anything. And then I had cramps. Not bad enough for painkillers, just uncomfortable. Shit way to start the day. And it got worse when–” Amari caught herself. No names. Names meant you knew someone and she hadn’t actually known them the entire time she knew them. She certainly didn’t years after the fact.

     “They baked me this cake. Vanilla, even though they knew I like chocolate more. It was dry, flavorless, and had this nasty ass frosting just tasted like salted butter with some sugar in it. Couldn’t spend any time with me but they left me with that.”

     She laughed, a short, acerbic, and ugly sound that she usually tried to hold at bay. But sometimes, it slipped out.

     “That’s what every day felt like after a while. My birthday.”

     Sound from the TV seemed to engulf the room while she waited for Malik to say something.

     “Why you didn’t tell me what was wrong when I asked?”

     Amari thought back to the video calls, where she kept everything brief since she could only play at being a person in short bursts but Malik always knew. He didn’t push, but he knew.

     “Because you couldn’t know. Not back then.”

     “And now?”

     “I don’t have to be ‘fine’ all the time.”

—

Sleep refused to find Amari. Three, four, five in the morning all passed. She didn’t dream but every time she opened her eyes, for a moment she wasn’t sure where she was. Who she was, where she has, who was on the other side of her L-shaped couch all came to her quickly though. She was Amari, she was at home, Malik was on the couch.

     She didn’t try to go back to sleep that last time, though it was because she felt sick. Heat had enveloped herand taking off all her clothes sans her boxers and bra didn’t seem to help. She lay on her side, holding her stomach; that was where the heat seemed to be centered and she just wanted it to stop. Pain soon followed, at which point Amari knew she had to get to the bathroom. She banged her ankle against the coffee table as she struggled to get on her feet. Then there were hands on her.

     When the feverish haze cleared Amari was hunched over the toilet, face to face with a bowl stained by red dye number 40 that still vaguely smelled of fruit punch and acidic bile, her throat burning, not sure how her got there. Her glasses were neatly folded on the counter and her braids tied back, not one loose.

     “Is that all of it?” Malik. Shit.

     “I think–” the second she tried to push herself up, her stomach seized and the last of the nothing that was in there forced its way out. How long she sat there spitting up bile and saliva, she didn’t know. When her breaths evened, Malik spoke.

     “Here,” Malik passed her two glasses, one of warm water and the other of mouthwash and she rinsed her mouth out with them both. Then came a cold towel that she dragged down her face a few times.

     “Do you—”

     “I’m fine, Malik,” she cut her friend off, knowing she had to keep this from going any further. Not tonight, at least.

     “…I thought you didn’t have to always be ‘fine’.”

     Amari let out a hoarse laugh, rubbing at her throat afterwards.

     “Well this time I am. For real. This ain’t nothing new.”

     She pretended not to see the anger flit across Malik’s face.

     “Go back to bed. I’ll be fine.”

     The only person Amari could lie to reliably was herself. But sometimes, she couldn’t even manage that.

—

Amari knew there was no way to avoid looking haggard before her tutoring session with McKayla Maynard and she was dreading it. The actual tutoring would be fine. She’d go over some essays, comment on them, and give McKayla a chance to start on revisions before directing her through the rest.

     Sometimes that meant half an hour or more wherein one of the Maynards would drag a conversation out of her. But worse than the talking, they noticed everything. All of them, and she could never decide who was the worst.

     It wasn’t McKayla, who regarded her with the same trepidation all teenagers seemed to regard adults with, especially the ones just old enough to no longer ‘get it’. She was nearly fourteen, her birthday falling in late December. The novelty of being the oldest in her class had worn off after a few days and she was ready for something new.

     “Is high school any better?” she’d asked the last time they met.

     “Hm…” Amari had paused to cross a few words out of the essay she was marking while she thought. “I’ve done worse things,” she settled on saying.

     “But you gotta go to the DMV and file taxes. Most of what you do is prolly worse.”

     “You not wrong,” she agreed, “but it won’t be that bad. Your mom told me where she tryna send you. I’d have loved to go somewhere like that.”

     “Are the people gon’ be weird…?”

    “You about to be what, fourteen? Most people you meet gon’ be weird. But don’t let that stop you from talking to folks.” Sound advice and when Amari had said it, it sounded believable, like she was speaking from experience and not like she wanted to tell the girl to spend months vetting people before even sharing phone numbers.

     There was also Mrs. Maynard and the way she wouldn’t rush McKayla’s friends out when Amari arrived. Though Mrs. Maynard had given up trying to feed her, she would pull Amari aside to take in a shirt or jacket before she set about working, never prying, just knowing. All older people just seemed to take one look at her and know. And it was even worse when Mrs. Maynard would call her over to the sewing table to put the finishing touches on a fitting. Tailors were easy; they didn’t know her, didn’t send her greeting cards she had to figure out how to respond to in kind, didn’t force her to reconcile the fact that people she met might actually grow to care about her.

     But no, Mr. Maynard unnerved her the most. Amari hated being alone with him. Not because he was particularly intimidating or stony faced or mean. But much like his wife, he just…knew.

     How the questioning would play out today, Amari didn’t know. She’d given McKayla forty-five minutes to dig up some existential suffering she’d experienced in her brief time alive to prove how interesting she was to her prospective high school. Meanwhile, Amari sat at the kitchen table making a few minute edits to her book. And it was when she’d nearly banged her head on the table in frustration that Richard Maynard finally made his presence known. The hell could a man that big be so quiet?

     “You alright, honey? Because I have–”

     “No, no. I’m fine,” she said quietly, not wanting to disturb McKayla. She rubbed at her eyes though it wouldn’t help. Nothing but two straight days of sleep would be enough to help her bounce back from last night but she still had to do rewrites and meet Khadijah again and–

     “Is it a boy?” Mr. Maynard asked.

     “Huh? No sir. It was just the kind of night a shower couldn’t wash off.” A shower may have gotten rid of the sweat but it hadn’t changed the fact that she still had to talk to Malik. Didn’t do anything about the book she had to fix either. She wasn’t musty though. There was that at least.

     “You gotta be careful with those,” Mr. Maynard said. “Catch too many nights like that and you’ll never be clean. But…you already feel that way, don’t you?”

     Amari wanted to bolt, would have had McKayla not come from the living room.

     “Daddy, leave her alone. I’m done.” She slid over a few sheets of paper, and Amari had to concentrate on keeping her hands still as she picked them up. She wondered when she’d regained the ability to decipher the barely legible penmanship of school-aged children; at least something had changed for the better.

     “How’d it go?” Amari asked, her voice as steady as she could keep it with Mr. Maynard still at the table. He was thumbing through a ledger of some sort, not at all concerned with the way he’d left Amari feeling exposed.

     “Bad.”

     She looked at the sheets. Every other word was crossed out and there were several short paragraphs on each page, none of which had any connection to each other. Still brainstorming it seemed.

     Looks like my story drafts. That was something she could work with.

The lone scar Amari had, she’d gotten when she wrecked her ankle. She was rushing to a date that evening and was even skipping the lone concert she’d found to go to. Concerts weren’t her first choice of live event anyway and there would be plenty of time for mundane things like concerts back home. In the rush to get down to Park Road, she stepped on the edge of the sidewalk where the concrete met the grass. Her ankle burned as she righted herself but she could still walk and that was all that mattered.

     While she was sitting on a bench on Queen Street, making sure not to put her bare sock on the ground as she slipped on the ankle brace she grabbed out of Stirling Sports, she began to have doubts. Going back to her flat never occurred to her; she HAD to be on time. But…why?

    Was any of this worth it? Uprooting her life to do…what, exactly for half a year?

     Would they have done this for me?

     But like she always did, she pushed the doubts down and slipped on the hideous boots (the only thing she could find when her Converse finally gave out) and went on to the bus stop, dutifully letting them know where she was, despite rarely receiving the same courtesy in return when they were running late.

    These days, she didn’t think of the bench on Queen Street, but rather how long she’d need to ignore the throbbing and make an effort to hide the limp. Malik had never seen the brace, mostly because Amari didn’t want him to know there were any other remnants of that period. That she couldn’t drink, couldn’t dress the way she liked, couldn’t eat, sleep…Amari could hide those things and she could hide mild pain too.

     The question was whether or not she could hide from Khadijah. She wanted to write, not bare her soul to a stranger. But sometimes she wondered if it was even possible to do one and not the other.

     As she walked to Grand Central Library, her phone’s GPS giving instructions in one earbud, she began running down what Khadijah might have to say about her latest revisions. She’d emailed a copy two days prior and refused to look at it any longer. Would the substance Khadijah swore was in there be closer to the surface? Or would it still be buried underneath her stream of consciousness?

     However the piece had actually turned out, Amari only had a few more moments to herself. She liked this better, she thought, arriving rather than waiting. She’d done her fair share of waiting, when they finally agreed to see him, she always worried she’d be left alone. But Khadijah was already at the meeting room she’d booked.

     “Bit big for just two people,” she’d noted after their greetings.

     “Only size they got. Plus I wanna spread out.

    A few minutes later, for the second time in as many weeks, Amari saw her book spread into piles with red marks covering the pages.

     “Now I’m liking what you’ve added so far. Way more direction. But there’s still too much distance from the reader. Look here,” she said, pointing out a passage Amari spent hours on and still hated.

     “I don’t get this guy. Why’s he killing people in the first place? Now you don’t need to spell it out, but I can tell that you don’t know. He’s just…doing ugly things, but they don’t feel ugly.”

     Amari scribbled that down-make it feel ugly. How would she do that? Hopefully before she next met with Khadijah, she’d answer that question. The next twenty minutes were more of the same and it all culminated with Khadijah telling her, “Sell me on it.”

     “Dial it back or turn it up, but sell me on it.” And Amari wrote that down too.

     She slumped into her chair, trying not to close herself off. She hadn’t had this much trouble writing in years. She hated her last book, sure, the collection of short stories being the low point of her fledgling career. But it had been easy to write.

     This one made her think. And a lot of how she’d been getting by was avoiding foolish things like thinking. Not about herself, at least. That was the problem with digging through her old notes for story ideas. Every so often, moments she’d spent many nights trying to forget would slip through; she’d make them solid and real for a few hundred words. And in such small bites, she could handle those moments. Turn them into fantastical story nuggets, things she would never touch again. And yet here she was, handling them roughly, breaking them down, trying to make it all make sense to people that weren’t in her head. Maybe…maybe it wasn’t worth the effort.

     “What if…” she tried to find the right words? Scrap it? Rewrite it again?

     “What if you showed your face here?” Khadijah slid her tablet across where there was an email from Jessie pulled up.

     “I’m not doing that,” Amari said the moment she saw the name Reeve Hastings.

     “He sent that invite for you.”

     “Who said I have to accept?”

     “Let’s be real, Amari. Jessie scrambled to push those short stories and we’re lucky your third book wasn’t canceled. You need to start gearing up to push this book. I know it’s a year off at least but you need practice. Just talking to me isn’t going to get you there.”

     “That’s…I know. I know. But is there nothing else?”

     “Nothing soon enough.”

     “Does it have to be him?”

     “What’s wrong with Reeve Hastings? It’s not like you haven’t name dropped him before. And Jessie told me you don’t like nobody so you must actually like his books.”

     Some things Amari planned to take to the urn. Malik was never supposed to know how bad things had gotten in Tamaki and with each passing day, she could see the truth coming closer to the surface. Her mom wasn’t supposed to know why she’d really moved out when she came home and so far, that was still looking possible. But no one was supposed to know about her fling with Reeve.

     “…how far off is it again?”

     “Two months. And it’s not advertised, but they want him to hype up a couple of Clear Isle authors, one of which he chose to be you.”

     He’s messing with me, but even as Amari thought it, she didn’t believe it. She hadn’t told Reeve anything, not about them or Tamaki or anything beyond taking safety measures. It was a few nights over a few weeks, nothing more, nothing less. And it was exactly the sort of thing she swore she’d never do, not after how she wished he could take back everything with them.

     “Did something foul go down between y’all? If that’s it, I won’t ask what but-”

     “No, no. It’s nothing like that. I’m the problem. Just…say yes.”

—

“Wanna be my plus one?”

     “Who catering?”

     “Ion know yet. It’s a book release so…”

     “Who book is it?”

     “Ah…Reeve Hastings,” Amari hoped that rolled off her tongue naturally, that she didn’t–

     “I haven’t seen him around in a while. What he up to?”

     “Releasing a book.”

     It was then that Malik turned his camera on, his expression flat. “Oh you think you funny.”

     “I know you like his books. You wanna come or nah?”

     “Aight. I’ll be there. That all?”

     There Malik went again and Amari felt a pang of guilt. She wouldn’t be lying per say, but she didn’t like splitting hairs like that, not with Malik. Mostly because when her friend had both the time and patience to needle, none of her omissions ever stayed hidden.

     “Yeah, that’s all. I might hop online later.”

     “We’ll see,” Malik snorted.

     “You right. I’ll see you.”

     Amari hung up and turned back towards the new piles her novel was split into and her open laptop.

     None of what she’d written was ugly. She didn’t even think she knew what that meant but she knew Khadijah was right. She wasn’t uncomfortable when she wrote, wasn’t digging deep enough. Sometimes the light pieces she penned came out well. Not everything needed to be so dark and moody and leave her so raw she couldn’t stand to look at her own work. But writing in that light, distant way was how she’d ended up with that shoddy short story collection.

     She couldn’t do that again. So she sat there, digging. It didn’t work too well, which wasn’t surprising. She wanted to get down something that sounded less…depressing. But that was the thing-it was. She did feel awful back then. Maybe she was able to function now but had she ever stopped to sit and think?

     The closest she’d come was the thing with Reeve, where for once she’d at least acknowledged to herself that she wanted to feel better. Maybe long-term it didn’t fix anything, but she had felt better for a while. Not…broken.

—

If Amari was going to attempt to go to the book release, she needed something decent to wear. After taking her measurements and spending a solid two hours on every site she could think of, she ended up calling Mrs. Maynard. She wanted to feel comfortable for once.

     “Look through these,” Mrs. Maynard spread a stack of patterns in front of her. Jackets and pants mostly; she could get by with a white t-shirt but the rest needed to be–

     “Business casual,” she muttered while she sifted through the patterns. She settled on pants that could be made with a thicker fabric; maybe then she wouldn’t need to layer so heavily since the venue was outdoors. The jacket was a loose fitting one that had a removable liner. Both would look fine with Air Forces.

     “These ones,” she passed her selections to Mrs. Maynard, missing when she didn’t have to worry about whether or not she’d freeze if she wore one layer too few. She originally thought the problem was the constant wind and rain in Tamaki but didn’t change when she went home.

     “What’s the occasion?”

     “A book release. Not mine, or you know y’all would have an invite. But I don’t get out too much. I wanna try to look good. Maybe I’ll feel good too.”

     Amari froze. Where had that come from? She didn’t have to dwell on it because suddenly there were fabric samples in front of her, sets for both the pants and jacket. She went for the thickest things that were in black.

     “I’ll see what I can do,” Mrs. Maynard smiled.

     She let Amari go not long after, at which point she had to find something new to do to occupy her mind. Something that would keep her out of the, “I know Khadijah is right but that doesn’t mean I ever planned on confronting jack shit” spiral she’d been in since the moment she looked at the email invite.

     She could write. Or go see Malik. Neither was all that appealing since both required that she think and that was the last thing she wanted to do.

     Instead, she went to the arcade, where she planned to stay until her fingers hurt. P1 was a short walk from home and in the summer, she would walk there. In winter, her fingers would be too stiff to play much of anything so she drove there with the heater cranked up. She spent the drive from the Maynard’s plotting out what games she would play; it was easier to think about than…anything else.

     The black light carpet was welcoming, as was the hug from Nina, P1’s sole proprietor.

     “Where have you been?”

     “Typing, scribbling. Trying not to wear my hands out.”

     “Well, you have fun. I got some repairs to make,” she motioned toward the far corner where an arcade cabinet was open and the repair tech was hunched over it.

     Her evening turned out to be somewhat relaxing as she made her way around the rows of fighting games, only playing through arcade mode once on each game. She always liked the adjustment period between games, remembering if she needed to press a button to block or just stand there, making minute spacing adjustments, and finding her fingers still remembered her favorite combos. Why couldn’t writing work that way? Where every so often it would all just…click. She was by no means a pro so she rarely won the same way. There was no combo she’d ever found to win every match, no guarantee she would win more often than not.

     Writing was the same way. No two pieces were ever the same, they never came together the same way either. Problem was, winning games was easier when she didn’t care but not caring made her writing distant.

      Amari reached into her pocket for more quarters and found it empty. She stood and stretched but stopped when she felt a bit lightheaded, hoping she played it off well. Drinking soda probably wasn’t the best response but it’d make her feel better. She went to the food counter where the lunch rush had just died down.

     Kishawn, the cook and busboy, came to take her order.

     “Medium RC, light ice?”

     “You got it.”

     Amari leaned against the counter, gazing over the mostly empty arcade floor. P1 had to be a vanity project and Amari wished she could afford to run one of her own. But she instead had to use her words to make a living.

     “You need quarters?” The repair tech was back at the end of the counter that gave out change and prizes.

     “I do, actually.” She passed her a ten dollar bill and got a fresh roll of quarters in return.

     “Do you draw?”

     “No,” was all she said at first, trying to mask her confusion. Most days she was so concerned with making sure she looked presentable at a glance that she didn’t fret over the small details. More than once she’d gone out in a Malik-approved outfit only for strangers to ask about a show or band she’d not seen in years. And she’d fumble most of the time. This time, she quickly followed up with, “What made you ask?”

     “Your hands. I worked with a lot of artists at my last job; they could never get all the ink off.”

     “Ah…I write, actually. My favorite brand of pens didn’t quite get the ‘quick-dry’ thing right.”

     “What do you write?”

     “Little of everything. Last one was a thriller though.”

     This was good. She was talking, sounding almost like a normal person, almost like she used to. Sure, a mostly empty arcade was nothing like a book release for her old fling that would be filled with other writers she knew and drinking and who even knew what else. But natural sounding words sounded natural anywhere you said them. At least she hoped they did.

     “Order up. Medium RC.”

     Amari thanked Kishawn and took a few sips, pretending not to see the wordless conversation he was having with the repair tech. She was about to offer up the name of her book when she felt small arms latch around her waist with an accompanying, “’Mari!” She turned around to find Malik’s sister, Cleo, beaming up at her.

     “What you doing here?”

     “I begged Malik to bring me before break is over.”

She looked around and saw Malik sauntering over to the prize counter. He looked tired, but there was no way he’d let on when Cleo was looking at him.

     “You good?”

     “Just got done grading so it was time to hang with baby sis.”

     Once Cleo’s vice grip on Amari loosened, she got her own roll of quarters and immediately dragged Malik and Amari to the air hockey tables.

     “Watch me win!”

     She found a bar stool to perch on while Cleo tried her best to end Malik’s winning streak. After a few failed attempts and with only two points before Malik’s next win, she pulled Amari to the table to take her place.

     “I’ll see what I can do,” she patted her head.

     “You look a lil’ better,” Malik said, keeping his words light and even airy.

     “That could change,” she sank the puck into Malik’s goal, to Cleo’s delight.

     “Do coming here help?”

     “Some days. Today’s one of them.”

     “Good.” The lights around Amari’s half of the board lit up in a panicked flashing pattern, letting her know that one more goal and she was through.

     “You still doing the book release?”

     Amari fumbled then, losing hold of her pusher after a swift goal defense but quickly grabbed it again.

     “Yeah. It’ll be fine.” She managed to land another goal, finally up five to Malik’s six.

     “Fine? You read the book yet?”

     “Nah. Waiting for my ARC. I’m sure it’ll be alright though.”

     The rest of the match went along with the more usual trash talk and Cleo’s cheering and Malik capturing the win.

     “Well, he won fair and square, Cleo. What do we do now?” Amari feigned sadness.

     “How about you get me a lemonade?” Malik passed her a card and she went off to the food counter.

     P1 was never especially full and today was no exception; with Cleo across the building, only the rumblings of demos coming from the game cabinets, she and Malik were almost alone. And that was exactly where Amari didn’t want to be.