Love Out of Order (Indigo Love Spectrum) Read online

  “Hmph. We been up here all day. And you know I don’t like outside.”

  “Well, how about we go down and get some water or something then?”

  “Finally, you’re talking sense. ”

  The three of us climbed down the ladder.

  “How’s the play stuff coming?” I asked as we moved toward a table set up with pitchers and paper cups for us. Astoria had joined a community theater group. They met just a few miles from campus and so the group contained a good mix of locals and college kids.

  “Pretty good. We finally decided on a play for the spring. We’re casting now, which is a mess,” Astoria said. “Remember that one girl I told you about? Wannabe diva?”

  “Yeah.” I took a sip of water.

  “Well, she is a mess. You know she wants to be the lead. How’s she going to be the lead when it’s a musical and the girl can’t sing?” Astoria then went on a tirade about the diva. Suse and I listened, laughing occasionally.

  I was about to ask her what play they’d decided on when I caught something from the corner of my eye that nearly made me drop my cup. John was walking toward us, again with a sleeveless shirt. He had to stop doing that to me.

  I watched him approach, unaware of the fact that Astoria was still talking.

  “Hi,” he said, stopping in front of me.

  “Hey.” My hand strayed up to my ponytail and I realized that he was seeing me in paint-stained baggy jeans and a crumpled red T-shirt splashed with bleach stains that Suse had warned me not to wear, but there was nothing I could do about any of that now. “What are you doing here? I mean, I’m sorry, that didn’t come out right, but I mean I didn’t know you volunteered with us. I mean them. I mean the group.”

  For a moment, John, Suse and Astoria all just stared at me. I couldn’t blame them. I wasn’t even sure what I’d just said.

  Eventually, John cleared his throat and his smile reappeared. “Uh, I talked to Suse yesterday. She said you guys would be out here today.” His eyes flickered to Suse and so did mine. I seriously loved that girl.

  I turned back to John. “So, I guess we should uh, start building something.”

  “Yeah, what are we working on?”

  I smiled, tuning out the rest of the world. He’d said “we”.

  “Let’s go find Darren. He’s allegedly in charge around here,” I said. I was surprised when I caught myself linking my arm through John’s, like he was Astoria or Suse or somebody it was normal for me touch. Then, he surprised me by not pulling away. I caught a sliver of Astoria’s glare before pulling John inside of the house— well, the foundation with lumber wall supports framing what would be the house.

  Darren gave us the job of sanding down the few walls that had been installed and priming them for painting. Astoria and Suse transferred themselves to this job as well. For Astoria, I didn’t know if it was more about getting off of the roof or more about keeping an eye on me.

  Not far into the sanding, John laughed and put his hand over my sanding hand. Heat flooded from that hand and over the rest of my body.

  “Denise,” he said, placing his hand on my back, “have you ever sanded before?”

  “No,” I said, too busy being aware of how close his body was to mine to have time to feel embarrassed.

  “It shows.”

  “Oh, and you have?”

  “Yeah. My uncle owns a bunch of construction companies.” He said this as if everyone’s uncles did and it wasn’t a big deal. “I used to help out sometimes in the summers. Back in high school.”

  “Okay.” I realized we were still in a strange embrace, one of his hands still on my back and the other still over mine, holding the sander to the wall.

  His eyes moved over my face for a moment and I was frozen in his gaze. Somebody shouted about needing more nails and broke the trance. I realized somebody should say something before the awkwardness became any more stifling.

  “Fine. You think you’re so great? Show me how to sand a stupid wall then,” I said, grinning.

  He laughed and actually moved closer. I had never known sanding could be so much fun. He stood with his shoulder touching mine, pointing to the wall and giving out instructions in a low voice. The scent of his cologne, mixed with sweat and sawdust, filled the air around us and I couldn’t get enough of it.

  “So am I doing it right?” I asked, looking back at him, my hand moving across the wall the way he’d shown me.

  “Oh yeah.” It didn’t sound like John was talking about the wall. He certainly wasn’t looking at it. His emerald eyes burned into my brown ones.

  I stopped sanding.

  “Yeah, you look good. I mean, it. It looks good.” John’s face reddened.

  At that moment, I caught Astoria’s eye; I’d been feeling her stare in my back and finally turned to face it. Her eyes were blazing with anger. Before I could react, a guy called out for help bringing in a load of sheetrock. John hurried off to help, mumbling something about coming right back.

  “What was that about?” Astoria asked, dropping the level she’d been holding onto the workhorse next to her.

  “What was what about?” I dusted my hands off against the front of my jeans and tried to walk around her.

  She blocked my path. “You and your study partner, there. What was that about?”

  “He was showing me how to use the sander.” I looked at her as if she were crazy and I had no idea what she was talking about. I knew she knew me too well for me to get away with that, but it was worth a try.

  “Right,” Astoria said.

  “I have to get something out of my car.” When had I become so bad at this?

  Astoria smirked at me, clearly not buying my excuse, and she let me walk away, but I could hear her continuing to grumble behind me.

  I wandered away from the house, my hand drifting to my shoulder, to the spot where John’s shoulder had been pressed against mine. I knew it was stupid to think about something that couldn’t have meant to John what it meant to me. Wait, it shouldn’t have meant anything to me, anyway. But still. It was nice to remember him leaning in close, his voice low in my ear.

  John spent most of the rest of the afternoon outside, but we did exchange smiles every time we crossed paths. Astoria, Suse and I stayed inside, sanding and priming. Astoria sanded so roughly that I was surprised there was any wood left when she was done. Suse and I kept exchanging glances and looking toward Astoria, but her mood put a damper on the afternoon for all three of us.

  After we were done for the day, Astoria and I went to my cousin Apryl’s to clean up and have dinner. Suse had dinner plans with Charles. He was meeting her halfway so she wouldn’t have to drive all the way up to Louisa.

  Apryl, her husband, and four-year-old son lived in a townhouse near downtown Richmond, so not far from the school at all. I went to her place whenever I wanted a real meal or just to hang out and get away from school.

  Apryl was round and brown. She reminded me of a russet potato, but not in a lumpy, warty way or anything. She was a bubbly, cute potato. And her son, Taye, was too adorable. He followed me around the house whenever I came over, anxious to show me his new toys—he even called the ones I’d seen a hundred times new as if that would entice me to want to see them more. Like I needed coaxing anyway. I enjoyed following him while he hopped around the house, shouting and laughing.

  “Denise. Please call your mama. That woman is driving me crazy,” Apryl said. She stood by the stove, oven mitts in her hand, preparing to check her meatloaf. “She calls me almost every day, complaining about how she never hears from you anymore.”

  I was chopping vegetables for the salad. “I will.” “When?”

  “Soon. She can call me, too.”

  “You know how she is. She worries she’s bothering you. That you’re too busy.”

  “I’m never too busy to talk to her,” I said, the guilt settling in around me. I didn’t like avoiding her, but I didn’t want to talk about the things she wanted to talk about, eithe
r. Most of the time when we did talk, we eventually ended up at that one subject I tried to stay away from. My avoidance issues. Imagine that.

  “I dunno, Denise. You spend an awful lot of time studying. You’re busy a lot of the time with that,” Astoria said, looking up from the lattice work she was laying in doughy strips across the top of the pie. “Real busy.”

  I swallowed hard and sliced a cucumber so quickly it was a miracle I didn’t chop off a finger.

  Apryl glanced back and forth between us, her eyes filled with confusion. Leave it to Astoria to say too much; way more than anybody had asked her.

  “Yeah, who told me to take fifteen credits this semester? With journal and everything else, it’s insane,” I said, trying to laugh off Astoria’s comment. I didn’t know what she was trying to pull, or why she’d been glaring at me off and on ever since John showed up at the Habitat thing, but she wasn’t going to drag me through any nonsense in that kitchen with Apryl. Apryl, who reported to my mom almost every day.

  Astoria didn’t say much else that evening—well, unless you counted all the heated murmuring under her breath. Apryl and I talked about my school and her job with occasional, way off-topic quips thrown in by Taye, creating most of the conversation. Apryl’s husband wasn’t there to join in because he was at work.

  A little while after dinner, we got ready to leave after helping Apryl clean up the kitchen. Usually, I stayed at Apryl’s house for hours when I came over to visit, but I needed to get back to my cite checks, which meant I would be spending the rest of my evening with the footnotes to journal articles, making sure they were accurate. I also didn’t feel like sitting around with Astoria much longer was going to be a good idea that evening.

  Taye held my hand all the way to the front door, babbling about some cartoon character he was infatuated with. I wished I had that much energy.

  “See you later,” Taye said in a high-pitched voice, his “r’s” still sounding like “w’s”. He waved manically to us until his mother closed the door.

  “What was that about? In there?” I asked Astoria. We walked toward the end of the sidewalk.

  “Hm?” Astoria shot me a glance that would have shut me right up if I hadn’t been so angry.

  “All through dinner, the whole time we were in there, you were making cracks at me.”

  “I just don’t understand you, Denise. That’s all.” “Huh?”

  “Why are you setting yourself up to get hurt?” “What?”

  “Look, I don’t have time for you to play dumb. Can you just take me home?”

  I stared at her, still trying to figure out what had gotten into her.

  “Just—let’s go.” She walked down to my car, stood by the door and crossed her arms over her chest.

  I decided to let it go because there wasn’t much else I could do. She wasn’t making any sense. It’s hard to reason with a person who’s already made up her mind about something, especially when you don’t know what it is she’s made up her mind about.

  Chapter 4

  ASTORIA (“JUST CALL ME

  ANGELA DAVIS”) BANKS

  Tuesday at the gym, I found out what had been bothering Astoria so much. I wished I hadn’t. We always took an aerobics class together on that night of the week. And afterward, in the locker room, I confronted her.

  “Okay, I’m tired of all the dirty looks and snide comments from you the past few days,” I said with an angry sigh. “What?” Astoria had been mumbling under her breath again. The only words I caught were “white boy.”

  “What is with you lately?” She was notorious for answering a question with a question.

  “I’m the same person I’ve always been. Wish I could say the same for you,” I said, slinging my towel around my shoulders.

  “Whatever. What was that on Saturday? I’ve never seen you act like that before. And over some stupid boy who has a girlfriend?”

  “I thought this was about John.”

  “What are you doing, Denise?”

  “Nothing. I know he has a girlfriend. We’re just friends.”

  “Really? I’m sure he thinks that. But you were all over him when he was ‘teaching’ you how to use a sander. Which isn’t all that hard to do, by the way. Are you sure that’s all you think is going on?”

  “Yeah. I’m sure.” I turned to my locker and pretended to look through my gym bag. I didn’t want Astoria to see my face. She knew me too well.

  “I don’t want to see you get hurt, Denise. I don’t want you to get your hopes up over this guy.”

  I yanked my bag out of my locker and set it down on the bench behind me. “There’s nothing to get my hopes up over. I know I’m not on his level.”

  “No. He’s not on yours. But anyway, be careful how seriously you take this ‘friendship’ thing. Because John Archer is the kind of guy we make fun of, Denise. The spoiled, white frat boy who doesn’t live in the real world and will never have to. He wants you, all right, but not the way you want him to. Please don’t catch feelings for this pretty boy.”

  “Astoria, I don’t need a lecture,” I said, yanking the zipper on my bag closed.

  “I’m just trying to be a good friend.”

  “Then stop trying to tell me what to do.” I threw my bag over my shoulder. She looked put out by my attitude. I didn’t care.

  “Fine. You know what, do what you want. I’ll just have to be there to pick up the pieces.”

  “You are the last one who should be counseling me on guys anyway.” I knew I had dug too deeply. I did it on purpose, angry she was so dead on about my feelings for John. Keith, Astoria’s boyfriend from high school and college, was off limits. All I knew about him was that she’d had to let him go because he kept doing all the wrong things, and him stealing from her friends and family had been the last straw. And he was now married to a stripper. We never talked about him and I knew how Astoria got when the conversation so much as leaned that way.

  “You know what? You know everything there is to know, Denise. Having a boyfriend for a few months once in your life made you an expert on everything relationships, love, and male. Sorry for trying to help. Obviously, I was out of line,” Astoria said. She pushed past me and huffed out of the locker room.

  That wasn’t very smart. Now I would have to walk home. I didn’t admit to myself the real reason I shouldn’t have done what I did; that it was just plain wrong.

  I took the walk home as an opportunity to think about Astoria’s words. I knew Astoria had strong views on the race issue, and that’s probably where a lot of her hostility was coming from. There was no way to be friends with her and avoid knowing. I agreed with her in some respects, but in other ways I thought she was a little too militant, and maybe even off-base.

  I never realized how large a divide there is before I started law school. Even at my huge undergrad school, when I was the only black person in some of my classes. Here, in this small place, it’s probably the way it was in high school, but I didn’t have a high enough level of awareness to process it back then. I was still living in my safe, adolescent, self-centered bubble. I think I believed then what Suse still believes. I thought that since my friends were so diverse, everyone’s friends must have been. However, law school brought me crashing back down into reality. A lot of self-segregation happened on both sides. I thought part of the problem was huge amounts of misunderstanding. Astoria had her own theories.

  I remembered one conversation I had with Astoria on the subject. It happened after a racially charged incident that headlined every news broadcast and newspaper in the country during our first year of law school. That conversation made me more aware of how rotten things really were in the state of Denmark, so to speak. And of the true extent of Astoria’s bitterness.

  The night of the conversation was right after a special report on the news about a rash of lynchings in the preceding two weeks. We were at Astoria’s place. I sat on the floor and Astoria was on her bed. There wasn’t much furniture in her apartment our fir
st year.

  “I just don’t get it. When will this ignorant shit change?” Astoria snapped, flipping the television off with the remote.

  “Will it ever? To a lot of them, we will always be less. We will always be these inferior wastes of space, encroaching on their land, taking their jobs and threatening their way of life,” I said.

  “Yeah, when their way of life wouldn’t exist without us. The damned slaves built this shit up from the ground while they sat on their asses in the big houses. And it was built up on land they stole from the Native Americans.”

  “Some people will never see it that way.”

  “Obviously. With people riding around, swinging nooses out of their car windows and our government over-prosecuting, over-incarcerating, over-condemning our men,” Astoria said, her face clouded with anger.

  This was an issue we both felt strongly about, but I don’t think anyone felt more passionately about it than Astoria. Her brother was wrongly convicted and still served a stretch for manslaughter. Wrong place at the wrong time. And wrong color.

  “Yeah, it’s messed up.”

  “See, that’s why I can’t understand why you like Suse so much. She’s so oblivious and not even trying to get schooled.”

  “She’s a good person,” I said stiffly. I didn’t like to get into to it about Suse with Astoria.

  “Hm. She always takes up for those ignorant, opinionated bigots. I bet her family is like that.”

  “Astoria.”

  “What? You know they are.”

  “I’m not gonna listen to any more of that.”

  “I’m just sayin’. That girl volunteered just a little too quickly in Con Law to take the dissent’s position on Grutter v. Bollinger for me.” Astoria sat up straighter on the bed and narrowed her eyes at me. “Yeah, she would think that case came out the wrong way. She probably doesn’t even think you or I should be in law school. And no way we could get into the same school she got into without a little extra help, right?”

  “It’s not people like Suse you need to be angry at.”

  “She’s ignorant. What? I shouldn’t be angry at ignorant people?”