Contents
1 Dirty Astronaut Diapers
2 Getting My Hair Undid
3 The Beatitudes of St. Clair
4 Riding in Cars with Lesbians
5 Mileage
6 A Bridge to Nowhere
7 Chasing Michelle
8 “Perfect Girl” and Other Curse Words
9 Helena Andrews Has the Best Pussy in the World
10 Walk Like a Woman
11 Dry V-Wedgies
12 RuhBuhDuh
13 Trannygate
14 G.H.E.I.
15 The New B Word
16 Your Sixteen Cents
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
One
DIRTY ASTRONAUT DIAPERS
Dex10 (12:01:10 p.m.): hey
Dex10 (12:01:40 p.m.): stop it!
Dex10 (12:03:10 p.m.): you win
Dex10 (12:05:00 p.m.): AHHHHHHHH
Copy, paste, and send. “Dude, what the eff does he even mean by this? Win what? What, in the name of bearded carpenter Jesus, have I won?”
I’m consulting the oracle Gina, as is my ritual. But instead of divining my future from a mound of discarded hot wings, Gi offers me this:
“Dude, you ain’t won shit.”
He’s the Nigerian E-mail Scam of ex-sorta-boyfriends, trying to seduce me over cyberspace with promises of riches in the real world. Problem is, I’m black and I have a vagina, so my Waiting to Exhale intuition tells me this shit ain’t for real. In the history of the world, black women have won approximately three things—freedom, a hot comb, and Robin Thicke. With a track record like that, it’s obvious that the catchphrase “you win” is exactly that—a verbal fly trap meant to trick me into letting him back in, into loving him again. All Dex10 needs next is my routing number and date of birth.
Too bad my DOB wasn’t yesterday. I refuse to write his ass back. I can’t. And even though I’ve been planning our pretend wedding for the past six months, pressing my would-be ring finger on the keyboard would be even more pathetic. So I’m staring blankly at the blank space in our dialogue box. Maybe we should be dialoguing. Maybe he’ll tell me all the things he couldn’t say when I was so obviously his and so ready to hear them and so not in my PJs with my hair in a topknot. My stomach’s tied up in one too. Maybe he’s come around. Maybe he’s chaaanged.
Maybe I’m an idiot.
If I’m not—an idiot, that is—then undergoing evasive maneuvers makes perfect sense. I’m not ready for Dex10 to boldly go where no man has gone before, flicking the switch in rooms usually kept dark. Usually I’ll try it at least once with the lights on, but not this time. See, he’s done all this before. He’s already made me fall in love, then out, then in, then upside down, and then over it. So now, after having succeeded beyond all odds in ignoring his ass for an entire week, he claims I’ve won something. Get the fuck outta here with that bullshit.
Only Jesus knows how badly I want to fuck him right now.
The cursor is practicing voodoo on me, hypnotizing me with each black flash. It’s like a neon sign pointing to the space where my thoughts are supposed to go. I could write a book about us there. I should’ve blocked his screen name instead of just deleting it. But then he wouldn’t know I was ignoring him, and none of this would count. He has to see nyCALIgrl4 in bold letters at the top of his buddy list and realize that she hasn’t IM’d him in days and that she probably never will again!
The cursor keeps blinking.
“It’s like that McDonald’s game, dude. Monopoly. Nobody ever wins that shit,” says Gi, snapping me back to bitch and snatching my pointer, middle, and ring fingers away from the J, K, and L keys.
“Yeah, man,” I concede in an exhale. But who loses? Have I lost if I leave this skinny blinking bitch alone and never find out what I’ve already won? Or do I win if I do what I (what all of us) always do: keep it the fuck moving? I take a minute to stare at the cursor, to stare at my idle fingertips, to stare at my magical keys, to stare at virtual Dex. And then I ex out of “IM with nycaligrl4 from Dex10” and hope he knows how hard that was.
It’s three weeks until I turn twenty-eight, so three weeks and two years before I hit thirty and my face melts off. It’s been one week since I started my online campaign against Dex10, five months since we broke up in real life, and four days since I met this new guy with a cleft chin, so it’s who-knows-how-long before my next nonrelationship. Call me Kiefer: my life has been operating on