Page 26 of Exit: Us
I wanted to give him the real answer. I had so much time left to spend on this truck with him that I might as well get deep and let him know why we moved.
“After my dad was killed, my mom started to develop a strong hatred for Miami. It was like the biggest trigger for her. Miami was the city where her husband was taken away from her. I mean, I get it now, but as a kid, I didn’t. I remember being so angry at her because I felt like she wasn’t taking my feelings into consideration. One minute, I’m mourning the death of my father, and then I’m mourning the life that I was getting ready to leave behind. She took me away from my friends, my school, my home. All the things that made me happy. It was super hard to have to leave Gianna. Mainly because I knew that once we left, we would leave for good. We wouldn’t come back for summer breaks, winter, none of those things,” I started.
Gemini had a way of staring at me intensely whenever I would speak to him. He did it as if he was hanging onto your every word.
“But to answer your question, she chose London because she literally always talked about London. Even when I was a little girl, she had so many paintings around the house of London. Paintings of the Eiffel Tower. Paintings of those telephone booths. Just anything that had to deal with Europe, she was obsessed with it. She made the decision to move to London. Putthe house on the market, and it literally sold within a month. We left and she never looked back,” I shared.
Gemini started tossing the rice around, but I knew that more questions were going to come. I took a sip of my wine, prepared to hear whatever his next question was going to be.
“I don’t know too much about London. I’ve never been. What part did you grow up in?” he asked.
“Kensington,” I told him.
“Sounds expensive as fuck. What? That’s like our Star Island that we have back in Miami?” he tried to be funny.
Star island is where the super wealthy lived in Miami. That was a different kind of class, and bougie. Don’t get me wrong, growing up, my parents could have very much afforded a mansion out on Star Island, but I also knew how much they both hated that Miami beach traffic.
“Ha- ha. Very funny. It’s nowhere near as bougie as Star Island. Going from where I came from in Miami to Kensington wasn’t that big of an adjustment. I left one luxury city to going to the next. It was just things that were different. Huge cultural difference. Schools were different. The houses, the people, even the weather,” I shared, and like it made complete sense to him, he nodded his head.
“Is the plan for you to go back out there?” he wanted to know.
“I don’t know what my plan is. Not to even sound reckless, but for the first time in my life, I don’t have a plan. I’m kind of just winging it right now,” I was honest with him.
“What did you tell your job?” for some reason, I knew that question was coming.
“I took an extended leave of absence,” I let him know.
“Cool. From the architecture firm right?” he asked. When he asked that question, I found myself laughing because how the hell did he know that?
“How you know what I do for a living?” I wanted to know.
“Shit, the same way that Gianna tells you all my business, she would tell me all your business too,” he said.
“What all do you know about me?” I asked him the same question that he asked me last night at the carnival, when I told him that his sister would tell me his business.
“You’re an architectural designer. You went to UCL. For you to get accepted into UCL, that means you gotta be a little smart. They ain’t letting just anybody into that school. I don’t know much about London, but I know that UCL is where all the brainiacs go,” he went on to say. Not to toot my own horn, but your girl was smart as hell. Gemini was right about that.
“I guess you pay attention then,” was all that I said in response to that.
I watched Gemini as he opened a bag of frozen vegetables, that held corn, and peas inside. He dropped it inside the rice, mixing it together. He picked up soy sauce too, adding a hefty amount of it onto the rice. The rice instantly changed colors from that. He added just a little bit of salt, and black pepper, mixing that together too.
“Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. Where you meet that lame ass nigga at?” he asked, and without him having to explain to me who he was referring to, I already knew that he was talking about Jacob.
I mean, who the hell else could he be talking about? I’m sure that Gemini has been dying to ask me about Jacob since I got out here with him, but he probably wanted to take things slow. Just start with London, ask me if I was missing it, wanting to know what it was like before he got to the meat of things.
“Jacob?” I asked, just to be sure.
“That’s his name? Jacob? He a white boy?” he asked me. The way he stopped mixing around the rice so that he could look at me, caused me to crack up laughing. He looked shocked. Helooked like he was waiting for me to prove him wrong and tell him that Jacob wasn’t a white boy.
“Yes, he’s white. I can see it in your eyes that you’re about to talk shit, so let me stop you while you’re ahead. I liked Jacob for who he was. His ethnicity is the part that everybody wants to focus on, but that wasn’t the case here. I liked him because he was respectful towards me. He was funny. Very charismatic. He lost his father when he was five years old to cancer, so in a sense, we were able to bond off that,” I shared with him, but Gemini had this look in his eyes as if he still wasn’t buying it, and he wasn’t trying to hear shit that I was saying.
“That’s your type though? You typically go for white dudes?” he wanted to know.
Somehow, this entire conversation shifted. He went from wanting to know how Jacob and I met, to now asking what my type was.
“Are you asking me if he was the first white dude that I’ve ever been with, or are you asking me if I exclusively only date white men?” I asked, picking apart his question to really see what he was getting at.
“Shit, whichever one comes with an answer,” he shot, reaching over for another pan, so that he could start pouring the rice into the pan since it was finished.
