She looked over at me. “What about it?”
“You called me right after y’all made it official. Said that since you had a boyfriend I needed to get a girlfriend so we can double date.”
She laughed. “I did say that.”
“I told you girls weren’t checking for me like that.”
“You had a crush on that mixed girl at your school though,” she said, squinting like she was reaching back for the name. “What was her name?”
“Christy.”
“Christy,” she repeated, nodding. “I remembered.”
“Because of you I actually asked her out,” I said. “She told me I wasn’t her type. Said she liked pretty boys like Chris Brown.”
Nique’s face tightened. “She did not.”
“She did and that set with me for a while. Started thinking girls didn’t want me because I was too dark. That was the first time it really got in my head like that.”
She was quiet for a second. Then she said “That’s when I quoted Tupac at you.”
“Blacker the berry the sweeter the juice,” I said. “And then you started listing every chocolate man you had ever had a crush on like you were reading from a prepared list.”
She grinned. “I was thorough.”
“I never would have guessed you liked dark skin men though.”
She looked at me sideways. “And I never would have guessed you liked me. You were crazy over Ms. Christy.”
“Christy was just one of the few Black girls at my school,” I said. “It was never that deep. It’s always been you for me Nique.”
She looked away, reaching for another piece of fruit. “Why you never said anything then?”
“Because when we first met we had nothing in common except track and our competitive spirits,” I said. “You liked Boosie. I liked B.O.B and Kid Cudi. You liked them thugged out and I was as preppy as they come. I figured I wasn’t your type.”
“That’s not true,” she said, a little too quickly.
I raised an eyebrow.
She sighed. “I liked you. I just felt like I was too much of a ‘ghetto girl’ for you. Like you were going to end up with somebody bougie and polished and I was just.” She shrugged. “Me.”
I looked at her for a second. “So we just spent all those years judging each other wrong.”
“I guess we did,” she said quietly.
The water moved around us. Neither of us said anything for a moment.
“That’s why I needed Howard,” I said eventually. “You told me to apply and you were right. I needed to be in a place where being dark skinned and smart and from the South wasn’t something to explain or apologize for. Where excellence looked like me. I walked onto that campus and something just settled. For the first time.”
Nique was watching me with that soft expression she tried to hide behind everything else.
“I know,” she said. “I could hear it in your voice the first time you called me after move in day.”
“You remember that?”
“I remember everything about you Dex,” she said, like it was the simplest thing in the world. Then she reached for a pastry and looked back out at the jungle like she hadn’t just said something that hit me harder than anything else that morning.
I watched her for a second.