Queen Move

“My point,” I say, pausing to let it sink in, “is that me telling you if I sleep with someone else won’t go as well as our conversation about Chaz did, and you know it.”

With perfect timing, or bad timing, depending on how you look at it, Chaz walks into the hotel room wearing a pair of neon board shorts.

“Babe, you ready for that swim?” he asks.

When he’s fully in the room and realizes she’s on Skype, red crawls under his skin. “Dude, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were—”

“It’s fine.” I give him a very civilized smile. “I gotta go prepare for this party anyway.”

“Take lots of pictures,” Aiko says, blinking at tears again. “And video, Ezra. You always forget the video. I’ll

text Mona.”

“Good idea. Have a great swim.” I flick a glance between her and her new lover. “Goodbye, Ko.”

Once I’m done Skyping with her, and then talking with my mother about Noah’s upcoming trip to New York, it’s almost time for everyone to start arriving. I barely have time to shower and change.

“This is not the eighth-grade dance,” I tell myself while contemplating what I should wear. “Just throw on something, man.”

My options are basically cargo shorts…or other cargo shorts. I always look neat at school, usually wearing a suit since the kids are required to wear uniforms, but out of school? I’m not exactly concerned about what I’m wearing.

“It’s just me!” Mona yells from downstairs. “You here?”

“Uh, yeah!” I pull a YLA T-shirt over my head and grab cargo shorts option number one. “Coming.”

From there, it’s a blur of balloons, cake, ice cream, a random piñata Noah insisted on, and lots of people. So many people. His entire class, but also everyone on our street and several YLA students. Barry is here. Mona made sure to announce it when he arrived, lest I forget her genius plan to hook Kimba up with the math teacher.

“You think Kimba’s still coming?” Noah asks.

“I don’t know, son. She’s a really busy lady. Something may have come up that she had to take care of.”

His face falls a bit. “I really like her.”

“Yeah, I do, too.”

I’m in the kitchen lighting candles when she arrives. From the other room, the low, seductive roll of her voice mingles with Mona’s. I freeze, the lighter suspended over the cake for a second. My damn palms start sweating.

“Not eighth grade,” I remind myself grimly.

I walk the lit cake out to the backyard, and Mona starts the birthday song. We cut the cake, and I still haven’t actually seen Kimba, but I know she’s here somewhere.

“Dr. Stern.”

I turn to find one of the seventh-grade girls from YLA standing there. “Hey, Karinne. Thanks for coming.”

“It’s a great party. The step team prepared something for Noah’s birthday. Is it okay to do it?”

“Are you kidding?” Noah will freak out over this. He loves their impromptu step shows. They’re about to start competing nationally. “Thank you. He’ll love it.”

“Okay.” Karinne’s face lights up. “I’ll get the team together then.”

She’s such a bright kid. Her mom got her master’s and opened her own business in downtown Decatur, one of the coolest parts of Atlanta’s changing landscape. Karinne’s father isn’t in her life, so I, and a lot of the other men on staff, make sure we’re providing her good male role models where we can.

As I knew he would, Noah nearly comes out of his skin when the step team does their birthday routine for him. Mona’s recording it and will probably post it to Instagram and TikTok, or whatever they call it, later. We’ve had several videos go viral, thanks in no small part to her. She’s on top of our socials.

“Wow. They’re fantastic.”

I turn and Kimba’s standing beside me, eyes fixed on the step team leaping and clapping and shouting in rhythm like I could never make my body do.