YOU ARE NOT GOING TO LIKE THIS

After another roll of smoke and two bottles of Heineken, we agreed that we didn’t have the money to pay the application fee. Tom went into the bathroom to brush his teeth while I lay in bed staring up at the ceiling. The laptop was still open, the bright light illuminating the crumpled clothes in the corner of the room.

Once Tom was done brushing his teeth and showering, he came back into the room and leaned down to press a kiss on my forehead. Despite washing up, I could still smell the cigarette on him. He winced when I reached out to kiss his lips and then he withdrew slowly, the way people do when they suspect danger.

“You should go wash up,” he said. There was something else in the scowl across his forehead, the way each fold rolled around carelessly like an afterthought and when I got up from bed, he flew out of the room.

In the bathroom, the mirror was cracked, and chipped on all four of the edges, as if someone had chewed each end for better luck. The first time my mother visited my apartment and saw the mirror, she pulled it off the walls and hid it in the corner, facing the door. I’ve always known her to be superstitious so seeing what she’d done hadn’t quite bothered me.

Staring at the mirror now, I wondered if there wasn’t some small part of me who believed in the superstition that broken mirrors often led to terrible things

Not being able to afford the application fee for the University of Tennessee was, in fact, a terrible thing. But it didn’t equate to taking down the mirror so I left it there and brushed my teeth. Tom was not in the kitchen when I came out of the room. He wasn’t anywhere in the apartment. I wondered where he’d gone. His cell phone was on the kitchen sink, next to the pile of dirty dishes he’d helped stack the night before after I told him it was his turn to wash. I didn’t want to call him. The cell phone was there where I could see and his sweater was on the brown couch in the living room. I could see that too but I wanted to know where he’d gone.

I had a list of places: his uncle’s barber shop two blocks away from my apartment, the Bread and Sardine shop next to it, the dockyard a little further out but those places were purely impertinent and Tom, being Tom, was a little too unpredictable so I dropped it. He was back ten minutes later, holding a bag full of bread.

And I thought: what a waste.

But he was smiling feverishly, a glow on his mawkish face—a once view I’d never seen before. He seemed proud of himself. He was explaining before I even had the chance to ask. “I figured you’d be hungry so I went down to get us something. As I was buying the bread, I saw Baby. She just started loading my bag full of bread. Can you believe it?”

I could believe it, not the part about the bag full of bread but about him running into Baby. The bread was believable in itself because it was now on the kitchen sink, next to his phone and the stack of dirty dishes but I had to slow my mind down to think of Baby; to even consider them crossing paths. I couldn’t exactly remember Baby but I could remember the smell of her brown skin and the thick, rolled-around softness of her dreads. She always put cowries on the tips of her dread. I liked the sound they used to make when they clinked together. There was a fondness of her in my memory but it didn’t include her buying us a bag of bread.

“Did you take her number?” I asked.

“What for?” Tom was distracted by something in the insides of his palm. He twisted it side to side, squinting down at his very large palm. When he looked at me again, several seconds of unbearable silence had passed and that light, that sweet infectious glow was gone. “I left my phone in the kitchen anyway and she was in a hurry.”

“Did she tell you where she was heading to? Did she tell you where she lived?”

Tom frowned. It wasn’t his usual frown, one where his face twisted up in knots and forced anyone to look away. This one was comical, to a point, as if he wasn’t sure what to do with his face or the questions. “I get that you used to see her but that was years ago. You’ve moved on from her, haven’t you?”

I didn’t realize he was asking me a question until he asked again, "Haven't you?" and I didn’t know what to say except, “Yes, of course.”

“Then, there was no need to find out where she moved out to.”

I could tell, just by studying his face, that he regretted dropping her name in the conversation. I suspected he was thinking he could have used his uncle’s name for the sake of the story. His uncle was the greediest man in the history of greed but it would have made a lot more sense than dropping the name of the girl I used to love. But then, once I didn’t ask about Baby again, we went back to discussing the issue of application fees.

“You could ask them for fee waivers,” he said. “I don’t know if we can add seventy-five dollars to our budget right now.”

“I already checked.” He wasn’t the brightest in the room. “They won’t be waiving the fees for international applicants.”

Tom's scowl got deeper. “Are you reading from the website? Of course, they’ll say that. It’s part of the bureaucracy. They don’t want many people to be thinking of waiving the fees otherwise what good is saying there even is an application fee? You can write them, and ask them to waive it for you. Tell them you’re gay too—American people will eat that right up.”

There were many things wrong with his statement but he seemed to believe it and there was no point arguing it out with him. Tom had good ideas anyway. When I told him I was looking to study abroad, he was the one who suggested I look into schools in the US and said there were some things I could look forward to. The accent for one. His aunt came back home last month after spending three years in the US and now, every time she spoke, she added fuck you to the end. It wasn’t a nice thing to look forward to but her accent was wonderful. He shut down every school with an application fee. I didn’t think there were many schools left, at least in the US but I was going to bring that up later.

I agreed with him. “I’ll send them the email.”

I did send the email but I didn’t add that I was gay.

* * *

Unlike the vicious, screaming tragedy of anger I held dear, Tom’s was docile. He was rarely angry. For the years we’ve been together, I can count how many times I’ve seen him angry. It was why, when he threw the bottle at me, I didn’t dive out of the way. The bottle hit me but very nearly missed so the cut to the side of my head was minimal. It made him even angrier.

The next thing he threw at me was a plate. Either his throw was sloppy or he wasn’t really aiming for my head, I couldn't say, but he missed and the plate landed on the wall, shattering into a million different pieces. There was something distinctly raw about a person who used to be yours but now belonged to someone else. When I looked at Tom, that rawness was there, in bits and pieces, playing around his irises.

His anger was there, charged like an animal, but that look was there too, so dark and piercing it made looking an obvious difficulty. I didn’t know why he was angry. I couldn’t even guess if I wanted to. But asking him, right now, would have made the situation worse. So, there we were, in my kitchen, standing on opposite ends, waiting for the other to make the connection.

“I cannot believe you went to find Baby,” he said. “She got us a bag of bread and you go and scour the internet for her and you—you—“

He looked scared to say the words. To admit that I was growing out of our tiny box of memories, stretching my wings out and flying. I pitied the sadness in his eyes and the anger—especially the anger—because it showed that he cared about this ending because of Baby.

“I wanted to thank her,” I said to him. It sounded like an excuse I hadn’t properly thought of and which just came out of my thought out of shared boredom but it was the truth, in some way. I hadn’t expected to find her. The internet has proven, more times than I can count, to be an unreliable tool but when I searched her name, Facebook offered me thirty Baby Sunday. Her picture was right there. I stared at her for a long time, at the white softness of her teeth, of her dreads draping either side of her face, and the colorful Ankara she wore on her body. It was only natural that I send her a message; natural that she’d respond with an address.

It was natural that I’d go to the bar to thank her for the bread. It was the kiss thereafter that hadn’t felt natural. I couldn’t even remember who leaned in first for the kiss and I doubt it even mattered but we’d kissed, tongue over tongue, teeth grazing lips and my body had fired up instantly and it had felt like I’d been stopped somewhere, just stuck, until Baby. In retrospect, it was the newness of it all that forced that reaction on me. It was the sweet, dreamy ecstasy of doing something wrong, of cheating on someone else for a start that made me kiss her.

“I wanted to thank her but then when I saw her again, I only wanted to catch up with her.”

“And did you?” Tom asked.

“She was different…so much different than the last time I saw her.”

Tom glanced down at the white tiles in the kitchen and the sink, cleaned to a fault. From there, he started to lose the rage which had made him a parent, and he came back down to earth and he said, “Did you send the school the mail?”

And I said yes.

“What did they say?”

“That there was nothing they could do. I need to pay the application fee.”

Tom blinked. Then he blinked again. He picked up the sweater on the couch in the living room. He draped it around his neck. There was a reason I couldn’t show him to my mother. She’d never agree to it. She already started talking to me about the girls in her church. I could choose one from her list and be done with it. But watching Tom take his sweater and his glasses and that old wristwatch his father gave him had me thinking he was saying goodbye in his own way. That the refusal of the school to waive the fees and my deviation from his path was his breaking point.

He smiled with all his teeth out when he reached the door. “I’m just going to take a walk. I’ll be back later.”

“Okay. Want me to cook something?”

He nodded. Then he walked out. The silence he left behind was deafening. It only took a few seconds for the realization to come crashing in: I was utterly and completely lost.