We aren’t idiots. That leaves: strong, black, women. I wish I could say we were goddesses. But the BBF is anything but divine; in truth, she is destroying us.

Helena to Gina: “Dude, I am in these streets right now fighting for survival!”

“What are you doing, dude?”

“Fighting. For. My. Damn. Life. Do I need therapy?” I knew what her answer would be. Gina was a sociologist. “I was watching Sex and the City last night,” I said. “That episode where Carrie sees a shrink.”

“Everybody needs therapy, dude. Especially you. I’m totally familiar with how you get down.”

I had been very down. Adaoha was gone. Adrienne and Stella were studying for the bar, and I hadn’t spoken to them in weeks. Kia was busy with three kids now. Evelyn was getting married. And Dex, the dum-dum, was in Indianapolis for the summer, learning about how not to be with me. But who cares about Dex? We broke up right before he left during a torturous car ride to work.

“So you don’t want me to visit this summer?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think you should. I mean, how would that help things?”

Things? Where are these things everyone keeps talking about? And how do I get rid of them?

I started ignoring my mother’s calls and spent entire weekends in the farthest reaches of the bat cave, not caring that the rats had probably given me the bubonic plague. Rashes broke out on my arms that hadn’t been visible since 2004, when West Point Willy told me he got some other chick pregnant. I was drinking a $4.99 bottle of Whole Foods wine on a good day, two on a bad one. The fainting spell behind me, I was still too scared to walk over the Key Bridge from Virginia to Georgetown because jumping seemed all too doable. I cried at the office twice and refused to look up from my computer screen when someone asked me a question. Emily gave me a sign that read, “Out to lunch: If not back by 5, out to dinner.” I hated everyone, especially this jackass named Jonathan who insisted on saying, “Hello Hah-laaaynuh,” every time he walked past my desk. We’d shared an excruciating slow dance at Emily’s wedding. She forwarded the picture evidence to all the cool kids, and I got mad because my face looked greasy.

In short, I was in a weird place. Every morning, Emily would tell people who stopped by our cubicle that I was “grumpy-pants today.” So they kept walking past without saying “hello.” Most days I appreciated the intervention, but on others I just wanted someone to fucking say “hello” to me! Someone other than Jonathan (and sometimes even him).

“He just wants to flirt with you but doesn’t know how,” she explained. “He’s scared.”

“Why the hell is everybody so scared of me around here? Is it because I’m black?”

“No,” she said. “It’s because you’re a bitch.”

Sixteen

YOUR SIXTEEN CENTS

I might be forced to have Frances committed way earlier than previously planned. The woman’s got a crazy case of “grandbabies.” In her room, nailed up on the wall opposite her bed, is a fucking baby christening dress, white, lacy, and with a satin bow in the middle. Its hem is a little dirty, most likely because she found it in a trash can or maybe stole it off an unsuspecting baby at a baptism—either way, it ain’t mine and it ain’t hers. I refuse to ask about it because the answer might make me an accomplice. A white baby prom gown that needs a good spot-clean is tacked to a wall in my mother’s bedroom like how a teenager puts up posters or prisoners a pinup. I just thought that needed repeating.

I’m not sure exactly when it happened—the metaphysical and temporal shift in my mother’s mind when I went from being her prized only daughter to her only hope for progeniture. When the name Helena became synonymous with her dashed hopes.

It had to have been last fall, when I turned twenty-eight and spent a stimulus check on a purebred named Miles. Her first response was, “You girls nowadays would rather get a dog than a baby!” Significant because it was the first time I’d heard her say the word baby with such craving, such conviction—as if it were a prophecy being revealed to me in pieces she’d been hiding. The word was magic I just didn’t know yet. Each side now revealed, we both laughed that nervous laugh, and I changed the subject