They were in a quiet cocoon of temporary safety. A stillness after a storm of danger and activity that felt far away.
Roo sat down on the couch and unlaced his shoes. He paused, thinking about something. He stopped. “So … you’re Vy’s girl, right?”
Anika sat on the bed. She would have taken the couch, it was a friendly thing to do. But Roo had done it first, and she was all but drooling at the thought of sinking in between the covers and getting warm and rested. “I don’t know. It’s complicated. We got interrupted, and we barely know each other.”
“So you like girls?”
Anika sighed. In Africa, she’d been a monk outside the city. Conversations like this caused her to tense up. Suddenly Roo wasn’t a compatriot, but a possible problem. “Yes. I like women,” she said. It was a flat statement.
“You ever try it with a man?” Roo asked.
Anika sighed. “Have you?”
Roo continued unlacing his shoes. “No. But if you never…”
“Roo, would you like to take a hot throbbing cock between your lips?”
“No.”
“Neither would I. I didn’t wake up one day and decide I hated men and liked women. I see a woman, I like what I see. I want to be with that. Not the other. It’s been that way for as long as I can remember.”
“Okay.” He lay down on the couch and propped his feet up on the end.
If he hadn’t grabbed the couch first, she’d have considered it a bad pass at her. But he was aware that Vy and she had something.
If it was curiosity, she felt that was
But to be honest, right now, she just really wanted to disappear into this bed and not hold some deep, intimate discussion about the nature of sexual orientation. She was too fucking tired for it.
“Do your parents know?” he asked.
“Roo, do you really want to talk about this right here? Now?” She pulled the covers back, and threw the topmost blanket at him.
Nestled inside, she stripped down to an undershirt and leaned back against the pillows. The bed smelled of someone else: sweat, oil, grime, dirt. But it didn’t matter. It was warm and soft.
Right then, the howling wind of the Arctic, the cold ocean, the people trying to kill her: they were all things outside this little warren of a room.
“Back in the islands, it ain’t the mainland. Not very accepted, you know? Most people don’t come out, and I never felt like I could just ask questions. Other than Violet, no one ever spoke to me as a friend where I could just … ask.”
Her eyes were closed, sleep creeping up on her. “No, my parents don’t know. My father, he is a very traditional Lagos man. He was raised fire-and-brimstone style. He used to watch these Nollywood movies made by the megachurches about the dangers of witches and the devil and so on.”
“Megachurches make Nollywood movies? Serious?”
“Some, yeah. A lot of money in there. Big productions. They even send missionaries to Western Europe and the U.S. to knock on doors.” She yawned deeply and thoroughly.
“And what about your mother?” Roo asked.
Anika snorted. “She probably wouldn’t care. But I haven’t talked to her since I was a child.”
Roo sat up. “You split with her?”
“She split with us. She was a Nollywood actress. Not a lot of white women from England around Lagos aspired to be Nollywood stars back then; she stood out. She was in high demand. She mistook that for something else, and then left to try her luck in America. Then Vancouver.”
“And you haven’t talked to her since then?”
“No.”
“That’s sad,” Roo said.
“She has never, ever tried to contact me,” Anika said. After all, it was just as easy the other way. “Now leave me to sleep, Roo. Please.”
“Okay,” he said. “Just one thing.”
“Yes.”
“Be good to Violet. She been through a lot. She’s a good friend.”
Okay, Roo, she thought. But I didn’t ask her to do all this. She chose to.
“Tomorrow we have to think about changing your appearance,” Roo said through a large yawn.
“Okay,” Anika murmured.
Wait! What?
But she had already slipped under into grateful sleep, though with a frown still on her face.
The next morning Roo woke her up and put two plastic bags down on a foldout table in the corner of the room. One had milk and an assortment of tiny boxed cereals, as well as some plastic bowls.
As they ate a quick breakfast, Roo laid out the contents of the other plastic bag: clippers, hair straighteners, dyes, combs, twist ties.
“We need to change you look,” Roo said, crumpling his bowl up and putting it in a bag. “People looking for you. My advice: stand out, grab a bold look.”
“Bold?”
He smiled. “Most of the eyes on you will be computers using public-classified cameras. Change you hair, change you style.” He tugged on his dreadlocks.
“I wouldn’t know how.…”
“I do,” he said. “That and some glasses. Yes. And I have some combat makeup.”
“Combat makeup?”
“To confuse facial analysis software.”
Anika looked down at the remains of her cereal. “I thought getting locks took years.”
“Real natty dreads, yeah.” Roo stood up and swept everything back into a plastic bag. “But I can back-comb you hair into locks. I did it for my sister once.” He held out a hand.
Anika took it and followed him into the bathroom.
“I always wanted to look like Dakore Egbuson,” she said with a big smile.
“Who?” Roo started lining the lip of the tub with all the items in his bag.
“When I was eight or nine, she was one of the Queens of Nollywood. She was so beautiful. And she had locks. I wanted to have hair like that, but my father said no.”
But he did let her hang the poster in her room. Dakore’s brown eyes looked down at her every night, her warm brown figure in a curvy white cocktail dress.
“Little Anika’s first celebrity crush?” Roo asked from the edge of the bathtub. Anika smiled, remembering closing her eyes and imagining the tips of Dakore’s locks brushing against her shoulders, remembering the feel of her own fingers creeping down to her thighs, the back of her hands sliding against the sheets.
“Something like that,” Anika said, sitting down on the floor in front of him.
Roo began to section off her hair. She couldn’t see what he was doing from her position on the floor, but over the next hour, she could feel it.
After creating sections, he began twisting, rolling, and combing toward her scalp on each section, using twists to hold the lengths in place. Each lock also got waxed.
He worked quickly, efficiently, and with practiced hands.
Which made sense, she realized. He would have experience with his own locks.
When she stood and looked in the mirror, she had to smile. The locks came down right to the tops of her ears, longer than she thought she had the hair for.
After all this time pinning it back for the UNPG, she had to admit she liked it.
Roo held up four bottles of hair color. “Henna-based, it won’t fuck up you hair like the regular stuff. Got it from the hair place.”
