Your Black Friend Has Something to Say by Melva Graham

Author:Melva Graham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Published: 2020-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

SUMMER IN CENTRAL PARK

Two years out of college and Jess had remained one of my closest friends. Still, things did not feel the same in New York as they did in Vermont. The South Hero spell had officially broken and something between us had, too. I could feel each of us pulling away from the other. Something had shifted. It felt like she kept competing with me in a race I didn’t know I had entered.

First, it was body image. I was sitting on my bed, changing my top, when she said, “It makes me so happy that your stomach hangs over your pants like that.” After that, it was about work. She had started babysitting for the family I used to nanny for and found it necessary to remind me of it as often as she could. “I’ve completely replaced you at the Coopers,” she’d say. “The kids love me.” And then, it was boys.

We were on the lawn in Central Park with a spread of sandwiches and assorted snacks between us. Ethan, a guy I had been seeing, was coming to meet us. Unable to give him our exact location, I handed my phone over to Jess, but instead of giving him actual directions she told him to look for her in a short white sundress (something I could have done myself). Then she blushed and laughed, leaving me to wonder what he had said. A little while later, Ethan found us. I can’t remember who he greeted first when he arrived, me or Jess, but I remember my ripped jeans and Juicy Couture purple terry cloth top went unnoticed while her sundress swished and swayed in the spotlight.

I couldn’t stop thinking about how better suited they were for each other. And not because they were two well-dressed white kids with dirty blond hair who looked like they belonged on the cover of an Eddie Bauer catalogue or because of their shared love of skiing—a topic they went on and on about, as if purposefully trying to leave me out of the conversation—but because of the ease with which they interacted with each other, as if they had known each other for years. They talked and teased as if I wasn’t there. As if they were the only two people in the park. Something about me and Ethan felt forced.

He didn’t stay long. When he got up to say goodbye I half thought Jess might get up to go with him, but instead she returned to her spot on the grass, looking satisfied as she watched him walk away. I wondered if I’d see him again. I wondered if Jess was thinking the same.

“Want to hear something awful?” she asked.

Not really. She had just finished flirting with the guy I was sleeping with. I had no interest at all in anything she might have to say to me.

“Before Josh and I slept together…”—Josh was a white guy who had made me a card on my birthday the previous year.

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