Playing Hard To Get

“Locked into his hair?”

“Yes. Spiritually. You carry the weight of the things around you,” Malik said. “What about you? Why wouldn’t you cut your hair?”

“It’s too much work. Too much of a hassle,” she said, but that was because she’d heard someone else say it. She’d never once worn her hair natural and had no plans of doing it. It just had no function in her world, and it wouldn’t occur to her until a week later, just before Kali was shaving her head, that this was a problem.

“A hassle?” Malik repeated. “Who you are is a hassle?” He locked his eyes on hers. “I think who you are is beautiful. Without all of the hair. I think she’s beautiful.”

“You think I’m beautiful?” Tamia asked.

“No,” Malik answered, pulling a card from his pocket and waking Tamia from a dream she didn’t know she was having. “I mean, not specifically you—like, all black women. All sisters.” He handed her the card. “Here’s the number.”

If the front of Tasha’s married-and-acting crazy/bachelorette TriBeCa pad was a schoolyard, someone would’ve run by that particular moment and told Tamia to pick up her face.

“Thanks,” she said dryly, taking the card.

“So what is this place?” Malik asked, looking up at Tasha’s building. “I’m not trying to be in your business but…”

“It’s cool. One of my best friends lives here. She has some kind of emergency. She sent me a text last night.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hold you up.”

“It’s no problem…she…she has emergencies…once…twice a week,” Tamia explained. “It’s kind of been that way recently.”

“Maybe she needs to call Baba,” Malik suggested jokingly.

“That’s probably never going to happen,” Tamia said, thinking of the kind of arguments Baba and Tasha might have after sitting in the same room for five minutes.

“Why?”

“She’s…” Tamia started, but then she saw Troy out of the corner of her eye and turned just in time to see her friend grinning and snapping a picture with her camera phone. “What?”

“Who’s that?” Malik asked.

“One of my friends. One of my soon-to-be-dead friends.”

?

“Hakuna matata…and whatever else they said in the Lion King,” Tasha said, looking at the picture of Malik in Troy’s cell phone. She was tucked tight in her bed with empty juice bottles and Lean Cuisine wrappers all over the floor. “Who the hell is this long-lost Ashari king, looking to save a damsel in distress?”

“Ashari?” Troy said, sitting beside her in the bed. Tamia was on the other side. “That’s not an African tribe. It’s Ashanti.”

Tasha rolled her eyes as Tamia snatched the phone from her and handed it back to Troy.

“What’s going on with you? Why did you send out a 3T text?” Tamia asked. “You’re just lying in bed. What could possibly be the emergency—aside from the fact that you clearly need to clean this mess up. And frozen food? This is New York. Haven’t you heard of takeout?”

“Well, if you must know, I called you two here to tell you that I…” Tasha stalled. “I beat both of you! I’m the queen of the 3Ts!” She stretched her arms out but then one of the muscles in her stomach jumped. “Ohhhh,” she cried.

“What happened?” Troy asked, reaching for Tasha’s stomach.

“My plan,” Tasha said wickedly. “I got the operation.”

“What operation?” Troy asked. She hadn’t been at the ESPN party when Tasha mentioned liposuction to Tamia in the bathroom.

“Lipo?” Tamia said. “Your ass got freaking lipo?”

“Full body, baby,” Tasha said proudly.

“I can’t believe you did it…. I mean, I know you mentioned it, but that was like…like, two weeks ago,” Tamia said. “Who does that? Who just gets up one day and gets liposuction…to their entire body?”