![]() ![]() “I got the room? You, uh, you didn’t even ask me any questions.” Just like she does with palm readers under beach umbrellas back home in Jackson Square, she holds her breath and brushes straight past. There’s no way Niko should know-no way he does. Studied diligently from the window of her mom’s two-bedroom apartment. She can pull up a whole Wikipedia page in her head: lilium candidum. “She likes lilies.”Īugust hates when people like him do things like that. A pretty Black girl with a friendly, round face and eyelashes for miles is leaning out of a doorway, a pair of goggles shoved up into her dark curls. “Niko, stop telling people about frog ghosts,” says a voice down the hall. “Uh, I wasn’t worried about … frog ghosts?” Should she be worried about frog ghosts? Maybe this Myla person is a ritualistic frog murderer. Gotta use tweezers.” He must notice the look on August’s face. Does Thursday work for you? Myla’s gonna need some time to clear her stuff out. “Yeah, I’ll get some lilies for your move-in day. He takes the toothpick out of his mouth and sets it on the steamer trunk between them, next to a bowl of gumballs. He taps two fingers on the back of her knuckles and sits back. “Cool,” he says tonelessly, like he’s stuck his head out the window to check the weather. August Landry does not trust people, but she trusts fried chicken. There was no way a $700-a-month room in Brooklyn was going to come without a catch, and the catch is marshmallow Judy Garland and this refurbished Springsteen who’s probably about to tell her she’s got her aura on inside out and backward like Dollar Tree pantyhose.īut she’s got nowhere to go, and there’s a Popeyes on the first floor of the building. Clairvoyant, gifted, spiritist, whatever.” The toothpick rolls down the white line of his teeth when he grins, wide and disarming. “A psychic, yeah,” he says matter-of-factly. The tattoo on the back of his hand is a Ouija planchette. “Sorry, uh.” August stares, stuck on his question. His voice is a little croaky, like the back end of a cold, and he’s got a toothpick in one corner of his mouth. Tattoos spill down both his arms and lick up his throat from beneath his buttoned-up collar. He’s got this black-on-black greaser thing going on, a dark undercut against light brown skin and a confident jaw, a single crystal dangling from one ear. Niko looks at August, hand held out, blurry in the steam from his tea. It’s not recognizable as Judy, except for the sign that says: HELLO MY NAME IS JUDY GARLAND. There’s a five-foot-tall sculpture of Judy Garland made from bicycle parts and marshmallow Peeps in the corner. The windows are the same painted-shut frames of old apartments in New Orleans, but these are half covered with pages of drawings, afternoon light filtering through, muted and waxy. Plants dangling off almost every surface, spindly arms reaching across shelves, a faint smell of soil. Small and cramped, offensive shades of green and yellow on the walls. The place is like that: a mix of familiar and very much not familiar. But when Tattoo Boy-Niko, the flyer said his name was Niko-sits across from her, it’s in a startlingly high-end Eames chair. Most of the furniture is as trash as the trash couch, mismatched and thrifted and hauled in off the street. The quintessential early twenties trash couch. The type you crash on, bury under textbooks, or sit on while sipping flat Coke and speaking to no one at a party. That’s the first thing the guy with the tattoos says when August settles onto the rubbed-off center cushion of the brown leather couch-a flaking hand-me-down number that’s been a recurring character the past four and a half years of college. SEEKING YOUNG SINGLE ROOMMATE FOR 3BR APARTMENT UPSTAIRS, 6TH FLOOR. Taped to a trash can inside the Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen at the corner of Parkside and Flatbush Avenues. ![]()
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