30 Love, page 2
“Well, actually it will be our thirty-first year when you really think about it, since we lived a year before we turned one.”
“Dizzy, you’re such a nerd!”
“But you love me.”
“Yes, I do. To a great thirty-first year of life,” she says, clinking my glass.
She has no idea of how great I want it to be, though.
After we finish dinner, I ask Lailah if there’s anything that she would like to do. She just says she’s along for the ride. For a while I just drive along Peachtree Street before turning off the strip towards Ellison-Wright College. When we pull up on campus, she leans forward.
“Why are we stopping here?”
“I figure we could go for a little walk and just kick back and chill.”
“Okay.”
She could easily put up a struggle if she wanted, but she doesn’t, and there’s a part of me that wonders if she knows what I am planning to do. I had been subtly dropping hints already, so if she has made the connection already, then that would be cool because it would mean that she was already on board. But then I’m assuming that she actually remembers a single conversation that occurred once, roughly ten years ago.
As we walk onto the campus, the night sky is blanketed with so many stars that it feels like we are inspiring a new constellation above our heads. Even the moon, glowing like the tip of a fingernail, casts the perfect glow. The scene feels very romantic, especially since there are hardly any students ambling about the campus.
“How are your mom and dad?” she asks.
“Same ole same ole. Dad claims that he’s trying to cut back on his practice, but I don’t think he knows how. And Mom just started taking French at the local community center. I’m thinking she’s trying to con him into taking her to Paris soon.”
Lailah smiles. “They should do that. Go to Paris. That would be so romantic.”
“Yeah,” I offer. I start to say, “Maybe you and I should go to Paris,” but I’m starting to feel the butterflies building up on me, so I just let the moment pass.
She reaches down and takes off her shoes.
“You sure you want to walk barefoot around here?”
“At this point, I don’t care. My feet are killing me!”
“Well, hop on my back.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
I crouch down and Lailah straddles my back. I hoist her up onto my back, cuffing my arms beneath the backs of her knees. Her shoes bounce off of my left shoulder as she holds them, trying to keep them out of my face.
“Let me know when I get too heavy.”
“Girl, I could carry you all day,” I lie.
I walk us around the campus square and stop at the administration building steps, sitting her down.
“We can chill here, if you don’t mind,” I say.
This is the spot I have selected for the proposal. I figured I should do it on the stairs so that she wouldn’t immediately notice I was kneeling already. My nerves are starting to get the better of me, though.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
“What do you mean?”
“Something’s not right.”
“What makes you say that?”
She rolls her eyes. “I know you better than anyone else in the world. Of course I’m going to notice when you have something weighing on your mind.”
I decide to roll with her conversation.
“You’re right. You do know me better than anyone else on the planet, so I’m curious if you can look into my eyes right now and tell me what I’m thinking.”
I can tell that she likes the challenge because she leans forward attentively, setting her gaze on me with an intensity that she tends to reserve for when she’s in her ultra-writing mode. “Okay.”
As she looks at me, I try to project all of my thoughts through my eyes. I even start to amplify my thoughts, in hopes that she might be able to tune into the vibrations of my soul. I begin to confess how much she means to me as telepathically as I can. Who knows? Maybe she and I are connected in such a way that anything is possible. If we are, I wouldn’t be surprised.
“There’s something you want to tell me,” she eventually says.
I don’t know if she’s fishing for information or if she is really cracking through the layers of my mind.
She turns her head, looking at me quizzically. “It involves me, too.”
I don’t nod or smile. It takes everything to keep a straight face and let her finish chipping away at me.
“It has something to do with us—turning thirty,” she adds.
She is so hot that I almost blurt out everything, but I hold tight, anxious to hear what she will say next.
“You’re appreciative of our friendship,” she says.
She is starting to cool off now. I want to nudge her back towards my thoughts, hoping not to lose this connection that I think we’re sharing.
As if she’s reading my thoughts, she comes back to the subject of our thirtieth birthday. “There’s something important about this birthday,” she says. I can feel in her voice that she’s starting to reach a little. She wants me to give her a sign, but I sit quietly, continuing to engage her gaze.
“Yeah,” she says. “You want to tell me something important, and it’s connected with our thirtieth birthday.” As she closes her mouth, she sits back against the steps. She’s done what she can do, and this is where I’m supposed to come in and fill in the blanks.
I finally allow my lips to curl into a smile, and she smiles in return.
“You do have something to tell me,” she says. “Go ahead.”
I am already in a kneeling position, facing her on the stairs, but the positioning of my body is inconspicuous, as far as I can tell.
“Well, I do have something to tell you. And it is connected to our turning thirty.”
She nods her head, urging me on.
“You have always been my best friend, and I have cherished our friendship from the moment I even knew what a friend was. You are my oldest and dearest friend in the world.”
“I’m the same age as you,” she says.
“What do you mean?” Her comment slides right over my head, and my heart starts beating even faster.
“You said that I’m your oldest friend. I’m sure you have friends who are older than thirty!”
“Oh, yeah. You know what I mean,” I say, stumbling to recover.
“I’m sorry, Dizzy. I didn’t mean to interrupt you. Keep going, baby.”
I feign being flustered. “You got me all discombobulated and shit.”
She laughs, and I feel the butterflies begin to swell even further.
“Okay,” I continue. “I have known you ever since you used to wear Afro puffs and suck your thumb like a Monchichi.”
She nudges me playfully.
“I have been spoiled by your beauty, both inner and outer, for these past thirty years, and you have taught me what it means to love someone unconditionally.”
Her look is now serious, and I wonder if she can see where all of this is headed. Rather than try to keep her in suspense, I push forward toward the grand finale.
“I don’t know if you remember this, but ten years ago we were in your dorm room and you had just come out of a bad relationship. It was homecoming weekend over here, but I knew you were going through it, so I went over to see you at Georgia State. That night we talked about a lot things, and we even made a promise to each other. We said that if we were both single when we turned thirty...”
Lailah’s eyes widen and her posture stiffens. “Oh my god, oh my god!” she says.
I can’t tell if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. In all of the years that I’ve known her, I’ve never seen her look like this. It’s a half-crazed look, and I wonder if this is the look right before she explodes in euphoria or if it’s the look that precedes the ultimate destruction of the longest friendship I’ve ever known.
I plow ahead, since the door is already open.
Reaching into my back pocket, I pull out a small costume ring, one that resembles the Cracker Jack ring I gave her when we were little kids playing “husband and wife.” (She would make me propose to her before she would let me kiss her cheek and pretend to be her husband.)
“Cracker Jack doesn’t make rings anymore, but I found this one at an antique shop. It’s just a placeholder and a reminder that I have loved you for a very long time.”
Lailah’s eyes are now beginning to glass over, and I take her hand.
“I believe that we were made for each other, and just like I said ten years ago, I feel our being single in the world right now is proof positive that we were destined to be together. I love you more than I have ever loved anyone, so I am asking you right here and right now, under this beautiful sky, on this night, our thirtieth birthday, if you will do me the honor of being my wife.”
Her hand tightens around mine, and tears trickle out onto her cheeks. I can feel her response coming, and my heart is racing a mile a minute.
With her free hand she wipes her eyes. Time freezes as I await her response.
“I love you,” she finally says.
I feel a relief flood throughout my system, as if the sunshine has sailed halfway around the earth just to dance inside of me at this moment. “I love you, too,” I say.
“I love you,” she says again. “But I can’t marry you.”
3
I can scarcely remember the drive to Lailah’s house, and in the days since our birthday, I haven’t heard from her. I’ve texted her repeatedly and left messages on her voicemail, but she’s gone completely off the grid. It’s been almost a week, and I’m starting to sense that I might have made an irreparable mistake proposing to my best friend. What was I thinking? I should have just left well enough alone.
I have been trying to keep myself busy with work so that I wouldn’t notice her absence, but that’s been next to impossible. I have even considered going out for drinks with some of the folks from work, but I’m afraid that I might actually run into Lailah, and that would make for an awkward situation that I don’t think either of us is ready to handle just yet. Mostly I just come home, open my laptop, and watch this new creepy show I discovered on the FX Network called American Horror Story. Either that or read one of the many sci-fi novels that have been collecting dust on my bookshelves since Lailah gave me an e-book reader two Christmases ago. (Picking up that device now makes me think too much of her, so I’m back to dead trees for the time being.) The only thing I have to do now is stop the incessant urge to check my phone, e-mail, and Facebook messages to see if she’s decided to reach out to me.
This situation is really killing me.
It would be strange if it all ended here, if our thirty years of friendship just evaporated into nothingness. Before I returned to Atlanta from New York, four years had passed since I had last seen her. We had talked on the phone, but she hadn’t made the trip up to see me, and I hadn’t made the trip down to see her.
In those days I was on the grind trying to make something happen in Silicon Alley. Coming from the background of a college English major, it took me a while to get myself into the tech industry. In those days, I was doing some independent contracting work as a technical writer, scribbling instructions for products that the average person would probably never use. After a while, I was able to network with a few game developers who were looking for someone to help design and develop storylines for their games. That’s what I’ve been doing ever since, and I love it with a passion.
Leaving New York wasn’t even my idea, but to cut costs, the team felt we could move to Atlanta and begin angling ourselves to do app development for these new cell phone operating systems. By the time we made it here, the iPhone and Android platforms were catching on fire. The irony is that while we have been doing game development for quite some time, a number of other developers just popped out of thin air with the simplest of ideas and graphics to make what are now being heralded as the highest grossing games of the year. Too much Faulkner and Ellison apparently destroyed my ability to create a game as simple as Angry Birds. Go figure.
Even though my company, JACOPLEX, brought me here, the thought of catching up with Lailah was the icing on the cake. I missed her so much that I wasted no time in reconnecting with her when I returned. We started spending more time together than we had even spent when we were in college. Truthfully, it felt like we were in high school again, hanging out at least once a week (if not more). She would talk about her job, some random bozo she was dating, and where she wanted to be before she turned forty. Marriage never came up, but I sensed that she just hadn’t been in a situation where that was even an option. Instead, she had focused her attention on becoming one of those Forty Under Forty people that magazines credit with being the next generation of leaders. And she is well on her way, having written several novels that have won all kinds of awards. She keeps talking about positioning herself for the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant, and I’m hopeful that she eventually gets what she wants. If I could give her my own Pulitzer Prize for fiction or poetry or whatever it is that she decides to write, I would award it to her every year.
With all of the emptiness of the past few days, I have considered whether or not I should try on a new hobby for size, but honestly speaking, there’s no substitute for the quality time I was spending with Lailah. If nothing happens soon, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to fully recover from what I did.
While in the middle of the latest episode of American Horror Story, I feel my phone vibrating. I grab it, praying that it’s Lailah finally putting an end to this madness. When I check the caller ID, I see that it’s her friend Marcia. I quickly answer it. I know that Lailah has probably been talking to Marcia, so Marcia is going to be the only person right now who can tell me what the hell is going on.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Dizzy. Are you busy?”
“Not at all.”
“Can you meet me at the food court at Phipps Plaza in an hour?”
I don’t even hesitate. “Yes.”
“Okay. See you then.”
Then she hangs up, and I’m left holding the phone with a million thoughts swirling around inside of my head. I’m assuming that this all has to do with Lailah, but I never got a chance to ask. I shake my head. Yes, this is about Lailah, because Marcia’s not the kind of person to push up on her girl’s best friend.
I grab a baseball cap and toss on a windbreaker. The drive will take a little over half an hour, and it takes everything in me to keep my thoughts from blinding me along the way.
When I arrive at Phipps, I immediately head for the food court. I’m there for nearly forty minutes before I see Marcia come up the escalator. She has her weave pulled back into a ponytail. It looks almost natural, but I can still tell it’s a weave—mainly because she is the self-proclaimed queen of weaves.
I wave so she can see me. I rise from my seat and give her a hug.
“Dizzy, Dizzy, Dizzy,” she starts, as she sits down at the small circular table.
“I’m sweating bullets over here, Marcia. Don’t play. Please tell me something. She’s not even taking my calls.”
“Dude, you really came out of left field on her, didn’t you?”
“We made a promise to each other. I just felt it was time to follow through.”
“No warning or nothing? Boy, you’re a bold one.”
“It’s hardly a secret that I’ve been feeling her forever.”
“Let me ask you this: did you actually expect for her to say ‘yes’?” Marcia asks.
“I don’t know what I was thinking. But I felt for a moment that she was gonna accept. How’s she doing? Is she okay?”
“She’s a’ight. She’s just been playing through all of this stuff in her head.”
“What stuff? Is she still considering it?”
Marcia leans in closer. “I’m not supposed to be telling you any of this stuff, because she’s my girl and all, but on the real, I think the two of you would be adorable together.”
“So what did she tell you?” I ask. I am completely on pins and needles now.
“She called me as soon as she got home, and she went on for the next three hours about what you did. I told her that she should be calling you and telling you all of this stuff, but I’m not sure that she really knew what she wanted to say. Needless to say, she’s been talking about you all week, going back and forth between being mad at you for putting her on the spot and wondering what it would be like if the two of you actually hooked up.”
I can feel my heart starting to race with excitement, but I’m afraid to let myself get too worked up. I’m just glad that I have been on Lailah’s mind.
Marcia continues, “So every day this week your girl has been talking my ear off. Dizzy this, Dizzy that. I told her that she needed to just call you and stop using up all the minutes on my cell phone.”
I smile when I hear “your girl.”
“What should I do then?” I ask. “I don’t want to put any more pressure on her.”
“I remember a few years back when La was dating some jerk who was just toying with her feelings and how you had her back and gave her a shoulder to cry on. As far as I could tell, you were a pretty cool guy for being there for her like that. She even told me how you offered to go put a beat down on the dude, but how she talked you out of it. I even asked her later on why she never tried to get at you, since it seemed like she was using you as the standard for who she dated anyway. She said that it wasn’t like she didn’t want to. She was just afraid to mess up the friendship you two had. And now look at you two. On the verge of something and nothing at the same time.”
“So should I let it go or push on?” I ask.
“I just need to know if you’re serious about this thing. I think that’s the thing she’s most worried about—like this might be a game to you or something. I mean, have you really thought about what it means to be married? Because if all of this is just about some promise you made when you two were still kids, there’s no point in getting her all worked up like this.”
“Dizzy, you’re such a nerd!”
“But you love me.”
“Yes, I do. To a great thirty-first year of life,” she says, clinking my glass.
She has no idea of how great I want it to be, though.
After we finish dinner, I ask Lailah if there’s anything that she would like to do. She just says she’s along for the ride. For a while I just drive along Peachtree Street before turning off the strip towards Ellison-Wright College. When we pull up on campus, she leans forward.
“Why are we stopping here?”
“I figure we could go for a little walk and just kick back and chill.”
“Okay.”
She could easily put up a struggle if she wanted, but she doesn’t, and there’s a part of me that wonders if she knows what I am planning to do. I had been subtly dropping hints already, so if she has made the connection already, then that would be cool because it would mean that she was already on board. But then I’m assuming that she actually remembers a single conversation that occurred once, roughly ten years ago.
As we walk onto the campus, the night sky is blanketed with so many stars that it feels like we are inspiring a new constellation above our heads. Even the moon, glowing like the tip of a fingernail, casts the perfect glow. The scene feels very romantic, especially since there are hardly any students ambling about the campus.
“How are your mom and dad?” she asks.
“Same ole same ole. Dad claims that he’s trying to cut back on his practice, but I don’t think he knows how. And Mom just started taking French at the local community center. I’m thinking she’s trying to con him into taking her to Paris soon.”
Lailah smiles. “They should do that. Go to Paris. That would be so romantic.”
“Yeah,” I offer. I start to say, “Maybe you and I should go to Paris,” but I’m starting to feel the butterflies building up on me, so I just let the moment pass.
She reaches down and takes off her shoes.
“You sure you want to walk barefoot around here?”
“At this point, I don’t care. My feet are killing me!”
“Well, hop on my back.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
I crouch down and Lailah straddles my back. I hoist her up onto my back, cuffing my arms beneath the backs of her knees. Her shoes bounce off of my left shoulder as she holds them, trying to keep them out of my face.
“Let me know when I get too heavy.”
“Girl, I could carry you all day,” I lie.
I walk us around the campus square and stop at the administration building steps, sitting her down.
“We can chill here, if you don’t mind,” I say.
This is the spot I have selected for the proposal. I figured I should do it on the stairs so that she wouldn’t immediately notice I was kneeling already. My nerves are starting to get the better of me, though.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
“What do you mean?”
“Something’s not right.”
“What makes you say that?”
She rolls her eyes. “I know you better than anyone else in the world. Of course I’m going to notice when you have something weighing on your mind.”
I decide to roll with her conversation.
“You’re right. You do know me better than anyone else on the planet, so I’m curious if you can look into my eyes right now and tell me what I’m thinking.”
I can tell that she likes the challenge because she leans forward attentively, setting her gaze on me with an intensity that she tends to reserve for when she’s in her ultra-writing mode. “Okay.”
As she looks at me, I try to project all of my thoughts through my eyes. I even start to amplify my thoughts, in hopes that she might be able to tune into the vibrations of my soul. I begin to confess how much she means to me as telepathically as I can. Who knows? Maybe she and I are connected in such a way that anything is possible. If we are, I wouldn’t be surprised.
“There’s something you want to tell me,” she eventually says.
I don’t know if she’s fishing for information or if she is really cracking through the layers of my mind.
She turns her head, looking at me quizzically. “It involves me, too.”
I don’t nod or smile. It takes everything to keep a straight face and let her finish chipping away at me.
“It has something to do with us—turning thirty,” she adds.
She is so hot that I almost blurt out everything, but I hold tight, anxious to hear what she will say next.
“You’re appreciative of our friendship,” she says.
She is starting to cool off now. I want to nudge her back towards my thoughts, hoping not to lose this connection that I think we’re sharing.
As if she’s reading my thoughts, she comes back to the subject of our thirtieth birthday. “There’s something important about this birthday,” she says. I can feel in her voice that she’s starting to reach a little. She wants me to give her a sign, but I sit quietly, continuing to engage her gaze.
“Yeah,” she says. “You want to tell me something important, and it’s connected with our thirtieth birthday.” As she closes her mouth, she sits back against the steps. She’s done what she can do, and this is where I’m supposed to come in and fill in the blanks.
I finally allow my lips to curl into a smile, and she smiles in return.
“You do have something to tell me,” she says. “Go ahead.”
I am already in a kneeling position, facing her on the stairs, but the positioning of my body is inconspicuous, as far as I can tell.
“Well, I do have something to tell you. And it is connected to our turning thirty.”
She nods her head, urging me on.
“You have always been my best friend, and I have cherished our friendship from the moment I even knew what a friend was. You are my oldest and dearest friend in the world.”
“I’m the same age as you,” she says.
“What do you mean?” Her comment slides right over my head, and my heart starts beating even faster.
“You said that I’m your oldest friend. I’m sure you have friends who are older than thirty!”
“Oh, yeah. You know what I mean,” I say, stumbling to recover.
“I’m sorry, Dizzy. I didn’t mean to interrupt you. Keep going, baby.”
I feign being flustered. “You got me all discombobulated and shit.”
She laughs, and I feel the butterflies begin to swell even further.
“Okay,” I continue. “I have known you ever since you used to wear Afro puffs and suck your thumb like a Monchichi.”
She nudges me playfully.
“I have been spoiled by your beauty, both inner and outer, for these past thirty years, and you have taught me what it means to love someone unconditionally.”
Her look is now serious, and I wonder if she can see where all of this is headed. Rather than try to keep her in suspense, I push forward toward the grand finale.
“I don’t know if you remember this, but ten years ago we were in your dorm room and you had just come out of a bad relationship. It was homecoming weekend over here, but I knew you were going through it, so I went over to see you at Georgia State. That night we talked about a lot things, and we even made a promise to each other. We said that if we were both single when we turned thirty...”
Lailah’s eyes widen and her posture stiffens. “Oh my god, oh my god!” she says.
I can’t tell if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. In all of the years that I’ve known her, I’ve never seen her look like this. It’s a half-crazed look, and I wonder if this is the look right before she explodes in euphoria or if it’s the look that precedes the ultimate destruction of the longest friendship I’ve ever known.
I plow ahead, since the door is already open.
Reaching into my back pocket, I pull out a small costume ring, one that resembles the Cracker Jack ring I gave her when we were little kids playing “husband and wife.” (She would make me propose to her before she would let me kiss her cheek and pretend to be her husband.)
“Cracker Jack doesn’t make rings anymore, but I found this one at an antique shop. It’s just a placeholder and a reminder that I have loved you for a very long time.”
Lailah’s eyes are now beginning to glass over, and I take her hand.
“I believe that we were made for each other, and just like I said ten years ago, I feel our being single in the world right now is proof positive that we were destined to be together. I love you more than I have ever loved anyone, so I am asking you right here and right now, under this beautiful sky, on this night, our thirtieth birthday, if you will do me the honor of being my wife.”
Her hand tightens around mine, and tears trickle out onto her cheeks. I can feel her response coming, and my heart is racing a mile a minute.
With her free hand she wipes her eyes. Time freezes as I await her response.
“I love you,” she finally says.
I feel a relief flood throughout my system, as if the sunshine has sailed halfway around the earth just to dance inside of me at this moment. “I love you, too,” I say.
“I love you,” she says again. “But I can’t marry you.”
3
I can scarcely remember the drive to Lailah’s house, and in the days since our birthday, I haven’t heard from her. I’ve texted her repeatedly and left messages on her voicemail, but she’s gone completely off the grid. It’s been almost a week, and I’m starting to sense that I might have made an irreparable mistake proposing to my best friend. What was I thinking? I should have just left well enough alone.
I have been trying to keep myself busy with work so that I wouldn’t notice her absence, but that’s been next to impossible. I have even considered going out for drinks with some of the folks from work, but I’m afraid that I might actually run into Lailah, and that would make for an awkward situation that I don’t think either of us is ready to handle just yet. Mostly I just come home, open my laptop, and watch this new creepy show I discovered on the FX Network called American Horror Story. Either that or read one of the many sci-fi novels that have been collecting dust on my bookshelves since Lailah gave me an e-book reader two Christmases ago. (Picking up that device now makes me think too much of her, so I’m back to dead trees for the time being.) The only thing I have to do now is stop the incessant urge to check my phone, e-mail, and Facebook messages to see if she’s decided to reach out to me.
This situation is really killing me.
It would be strange if it all ended here, if our thirty years of friendship just evaporated into nothingness. Before I returned to Atlanta from New York, four years had passed since I had last seen her. We had talked on the phone, but she hadn’t made the trip up to see me, and I hadn’t made the trip down to see her.
In those days I was on the grind trying to make something happen in Silicon Alley. Coming from the background of a college English major, it took me a while to get myself into the tech industry. In those days, I was doing some independent contracting work as a technical writer, scribbling instructions for products that the average person would probably never use. After a while, I was able to network with a few game developers who were looking for someone to help design and develop storylines for their games. That’s what I’ve been doing ever since, and I love it with a passion.
Leaving New York wasn’t even my idea, but to cut costs, the team felt we could move to Atlanta and begin angling ourselves to do app development for these new cell phone operating systems. By the time we made it here, the iPhone and Android platforms were catching on fire. The irony is that while we have been doing game development for quite some time, a number of other developers just popped out of thin air with the simplest of ideas and graphics to make what are now being heralded as the highest grossing games of the year. Too much Faulkner and Ellison apparently destroyed my ability to create a game as simple as Angry Birds. Go figure.
Even though my company, JACOPLEX, brought me here, the thought of catching up with Lailah was the icing on the cake. I missed her so much that I wasted no time in reconnecting with her when I returned. We started spending more time together than we had even spent when we were in college. Truthfully, it felt like we were in high school again, hanging out at least once a week (if not more). She would talk about her job, some random bozo she was dating, and where she wanted to be before she turned forty. Marriage never came up, but I sensed that she just hadn’t been in a situation where that was even an option. Instead, she had focused her attention on becoming one of those Forty Under Forty people that magazines credit with being the next generation of leaders. And she is well on her way, having written several novels that have won all kinds of awards. She keeps talking about positioning herself for the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant, and I’m hopeful that she eventually gets what she wants. If I could give her my own Pulitzer Prize for fiction or poetry or whatever it is that she decides to write, I would award it to her every year.
With all of the emptiness of the past few days, I have considered whether or not I should try on a new hobby for size, but honestly speaking, there’s no substitute for the quality time I was spending with Lailah. If nothing happens soon, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to fully recover from what I did.
While in the middle of the latest episode of American Horror Story, I feel my phone vibrating. I grab it, praying that it’s Lailah finally putting an end to this madness. When I check the caller ID, I see that it’s her friend Marcia. I quickly answer it. I know that Lailah has probably been talking to Marcia, so Marcia is going to be the only person right now who can tell me what the hell is going on.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Dizzy. Are you busy?”
“Not at all.”
“Can you meet me at the food court at Phipps Plaza in an hour?”
I don’t even hesitate. “Yes.”
“Okay. See you then.”
Then she hangs up, and I’m left holding the phone with a million thoughts swirling around inside of my head. I’m assuming that this all has to do with Lailah, but I never got a chance to ask. I shake my head. Yes, this is about Lailah, because Marcia’s not the kind of person to push up on her girl’s best friend.
I grab a baseball cap and toss on a windbreaker. The drive will take a little over half an hour, and it takes everything in me to keep my thoughts from blinding me along the way.
When I arrive at Phipps, I immediately head for the food court. I’m there for nearly forty minutes before I see Marcia come up the escalator. She has her weave pulled back into a ponytail. It looks almost natural, but I can still tell it’s a weave—mainly because she is the self-proclaimed queen of weaves.
I wave so she can see me. I rise from my seat and give her a hug.
“Dizzy, Dizzy, Dizzy,” she starts, as she sits down at the small circular table.
“I’m sweating bullets over here, Marcia. Don’t play. Please tell me something. She’s not even taking my calls.”
“Dude, you really came out of left field on her, didn’t you?”
“We made a promise to each other. I just felt it was time to follow through.”
“No warning or nothing? Boy, you’re a bold one.”
“It’s hardly a secret that I’ve been feeling her forever.”
“Let me ask you this: did you actually expect for her to say ‘yes’?” Marcia asks.
“I don’t know what I was thinking. But I felt for a moment that she was gonna accept. How’s she doing? Is she okay?”
“She’s a’ight. She’s just been playing through all of this stuff in her head.”
“What stuff? Is she still considering it?”
Marcia leans in closer. “I’m not supposed to be telling you any of this stuff, because she’s my girl and all, but on the real, I think the two of you would be adorable together.”
“So what did she tell you?” I ask. I am completely on pins and needles now.
“She called me as soon as she got home, and she went on for the next three hours about what you did. I told her that she should be calling you and telling you all of this stuff, but I’m not sure that she really knew what she wanted to say. Needless to say, she’s been talking about you all week, going back and forth between being mad at you for putting her on the spot and wondering what it would be like if the two of you actually hooked up.”
I can feel my heart starting to race with excitement, but I’m afraid to let myself get too worked up. I’m just glad that I have been on Lailah’s mind.
Marcia continues, “So every day this week your girl has been talking my ear off. Dizzy this, Dizzy that. I told her that she needed to just call you and stop using up all the minutes on my cell phone.”
I smile when I hear “your girl.”
“What should I do then?” I ask. “I don’t want to put any more pressure on her.”
“I remember a few years back when La was dating some jerk who was just toying with her feelings and how you had her back and gave her a shoulder to cry on. As far as I could tell, you were a pretty cool guy for being there for her like that. She even told me how you offered to go put a beat down on the dude, but how she talked you out of it. I even asked her later on why she never tried to get at you, since it seemed like she was using you as the standard for who she dated anyway. She said that it wasn’t like she didn’t want to. She was just afraid to mess up the friendship you two had. And now look at you two. On the verge of something and nothing at the same time.”
“So should I let it go or push on?” I ask.
“I just need to know if you’re serious about this thing. I think that’s the thing she’s most worried about—like this might be a game to you or something. I mean, have you really thought about what it means to be married? Because if all of this is just about some promise you made when you two were still kids, there’s no point in getting her all worked up like this.”
