Read More: A brief Q&A with Gail Upchurch
I.
This is how it ends.
On a Tuesday in late March, right around midterms, I spot Kwaku Klein at Loyola Northshore in the Cudahy Library, sitting with a horde of white boys who between the seven of them couldn’t scrape together a single beard if they tried. I freeze, running my eyes over Kwaku’s body in this particular context. Loose brown curls. Tanned skin. Clear, liquid green eyes. Pointy nose. No visible muscles. When do boys get real chests? How long before their ribs disappear so they don’t feel like train rails under my hands? When will their necks thicken enough that their Adam’s apples don’t look like they are in a constant process of swallowing a rat?
If Kwaku’s friends are anything like him, they are also disasters in bed who don’t put on enough deodorant but have parents with enough drip to afford Teslas and spring break trips to any one of those all-inclusive Caribbean islands that serve turquoise cocktails with a sloppy pineapple wedge split on the rim of a plastic cup. Kwaku’s parents apparently have money enough to not only splurge on their son’s formal college education but also pay one thousand dollars a night for a highly educated Black woman to help boost his sexual prowess. He had been booking me three nights a week since the start of the spring term, and when we first met, he was squarely in “D-” territory. Nothing came naturally. How could a person so tied to the biological world be so absolutely sex stupid? I don’t mean he watched too many hours of porn and had an unrealistic understanding of coitus. That I could understand. But Kwaku’s astonishing ineptitude at performing oral sex (a bad case of jutting tongue syndrome) and all the energetic pelvic thrusting that made it seem as if he was in competition with himself was otherworldly. I imagine him thinking, How long will it take for me to get off with a human female? One minute? Fifty-three seconds?
I stare at him and his friends with my mouth open long enough for my lips to chap. I have to make nineteen copies of a short article about climate change (the pitiful remnants of my dissertation research about race, the environment, and the body in Twentieth Century African American cultural production boiled down to a two-page reading palatable enough for my students to digest in ten minutes or less), and I’m already late. But no, I’ll project it. Pull it up on Canvas. I’ll figure it out. Once the initial shock of that other part of my life crashing into this one (my real life? I don’t know any more) subsides, I pivot on my heels in a vain attempt to make a hasty retreat.
Then a voice calls out. “Hey.”
Kwaku Klein.
Goddamn my life.
Right after the end of the holiday break, when I told my girl Phaedra that Carolyn Wilson was about to kick my narrow behind out on the street because I hadn’t paid a full month’s rent since November, she said without the slightest bit of jest, “You can always charge these fools for sex, you know.” Phaedra had been known to keep a couple of clients to augment her measly pay as a member of Recognize, a smallish, all Black modern dance company in the city. A dance friend of hers was dating a guy in IT—a real nerd—who knew how to build apps that kept secrets.
Until now, she never really said much about it other than it was the greenest money she’d ever made, whatever the hell that meant. Phaedra’s entire wardrobe consisted of nothing but size 0 black dance leggings, black tank tops, and black oversized sweaters, as if she never knew when she’d have to demonstrate an arabesque for an admiring passer-by. A colorful Dance Theatre of Harlem poster rife with tangled Black bodies and pointed toes hung couple of feet away in her living room where I was stretched out like a patient with a cool wet washcloth on my forehead.
I let her words sink in while she coated a slice of rye bread with the vegan spread she picked up when she drug me to Ella’s Bellas, one of those hippie coffee shops she found on Milwaukee Ave. Phaedra’s apartment was overrun with lush, green house plants. A few hanging over the sink, more crowded around the large window in the living room, most of the leaves slanting in the direction of the light. The leaves on vines pointing toward the floor. I admired her resolve to keep things alive, including me. She came and handed me the sandwich, cream-colored veggie spread dripping over the edges of the bread, and sat next to me. Her body’s scent was a perpetual swirl of sweat and spiced incense.
I plucked the washcloth from my forehead and sat straight on the couch once I had arrived at a reasonable indignation level. “For the last time,” I say, my voice crackly-coarse, “I have a Ph.D.”
Her double strand twists jiggled when she nodded. “Sherita, two things can be true at the same time. Ain’t nobody said you wasn’t the smartest chick in every room. But you also broke-ass broke. Think temporary, okay? Dudes you hook up with usually pay you in dinner and drinks anyway. Tell me I’m wrong.” Phaedra turns her mouth up and gently pushes my shoulder.
Maybe. Sometimes they spring for drinks. I rubbed my eyes with my fingers, suppressing a deluge of tears. I had planned everything down to the cent. Seven classes across four campuses. An ass-kicking schedule, but it was just enough to cover my back rent, car note, groceries, phone bill, Ma’s insulin, and help me whittle down that debt I have with Ricky Brazzle from that time he helped me pay Deonte’s tuition. Then, in an unprecedented stroke of bad luck, one by one, heads of departments emailed me with the unfortunate news. Enrollment was down. Hard decisions had to be made. Classes had to be cut. Adjunct classes are always the first to be slaughtered. So there I was with one class left and the promise of a whopping thirty-five hundred dollars for the whole semester.
I took a bite of the sandwich. The spread was tangy—pulverized cashews blended with unsweetened almond milk, lemon juice, and chives—and it tried really hard to be tasty. My mouth watered like I was about to throw up, but I breathed deeply through my nose and finished it, because I didn’t have any food at home. Who knew how long that sandwich would have to carry me.
Phaedra was right. I had been trading sex for all sorts of things since I was fifteen. Ricky Brazzle didn’t give me four thousand dollars because I didn’t sleep with him. There was always a cost, always a payment.
The app was more primitive than I had expected it to be because of the short turnaround time, but it was intuitive and pretty functional. I stated my fee, and the client paid. Encrypted, identification numbers, no names. If Kwaku Klein was more cautious or paid a modicum of attention to how he transmitted funds, it would have been anonymous on his end, too, but he apparently forgot to book through the encrypted portal available on the app. As a result, all his information was out there like an open-faced sandwich. I found his name after only a couple of minutes of Googling.
Kwaku Klein. Kwaku. Sounded ethnic enough. No white boys running around here with African names. In my profile, I said I was only open to hooking up with Black men. I figured if your only choice is something as desperate as trading sex for money, the least you should be able to do is state your preference. After having sex with Kwaku for the past two months, I know now race preference should have been at the very bottom of my list. Items such as must bathe, must have a fundamental knowledge of female anatomy, must have trimmed fingernails, in retrospect, should have ranked much higher.
Anyhow, when Kwaku Klein approached me at the W bar in January, I mistook him for the lost son of a hotel guest.
“We have a date, I think.” He stood next to the tall, potted plant that I hadn’t noticed until he approached me. He wore a moss green button-down shirt, crisp khaki pants, and scuff-free leather shoes, the plant’s green leaves tickling his face. His body was unsettled—he kept putting his hands on his hips and then taking them off.
I stared long and hard at him before laughing uncontrollably, leaning over my knees guffawing in the direction of the floor. I had shaved my legs, put on the teeny black dress with the lace overlay I got at a deep discount at Macy’s, squoze my tatas in a push-up bra. I put on goddamn lashes, and here was a boy ready for the Pee Wee baseball banquet.
His cheeks reddened. He grinned uncomfortably. “I’m eighteen. . . . And I’m Black.” He pushed greasy, sandy brown curls away from his glistening forehead.
“Oh sure,” I say, trying to pull myself together. “I bet you are, brother. I bet that’s the truth.”
“It is,” he said, like he had had to explain his proximity to Blackness many times before. “My mother’s Ghanaian.” He brushed the obtrusive leaves from the side of his face and sat down, bobbing his knee and perusing a drink menu, which made me crack up again.
He rolled his eyes this time. “What are you laughing for, now?” His voice went up, a little whiny like, like a kid suddenly losing all his money in Monopoly.
“You’re not even old enough to order a drink.”
“Well, you are. I’ll take a whiskey sour with a twist of lime. Go ahead and order for us while I go to the bathroom,” he says, sounding rehearsed, sounding like what he thought an Alpha male would say to a woman at a bar.
Even though I could see through this boy, my laugh shriveled as he walked away. I was really about to do this. I covered my mouth with a few fingers. Plum lipstick stained them, and I tried to rub the color away with the square drink napkin someone before me left behind. I was almost able to get the color off my fingers. Almost.
Back at Cudahy library, and after a few seconds of absolute horror, I scuttle away from Kwaku and the table of bros so fast I trip over my shoe, landing me on the gray industrial carpeting flecked with olive green ivy leaves on vines. Kwaku runs up on me, lending a skinny, veiny hand. He struggles to lift me from the floor—the vines that run through the carpeting like arteries nip at my shirt. After a second yank, he manages to place me on my feet. “You okay?” he asks, breathless.
I’m finding it difficult to admit that 1) I’m in this position in the first place; 2) I accepted extra cash from him to blow a load in me and on me two days ago; and 3) I just ate a sizeable swath of this leafy carpeting in front of at least fifty undergraduates. “Thank you.” I try to scamper away from him and those eyes, like aloe infused anti-bacterial gel, but he jogs beside me anyway.
“Wait, hold on. Do you teach here or something?” He snickers into his hand. “Oh, shit. You’re a fucking professor?”
“No, I mean—” I say, trying to think of some plausible other reason for me to be in Cudahy Library in the middle of the day wearing mostly sensible shoes and a Loyola University lanyard with a picture ID dangling from it. “—No.” There, I committed. I shove him out the way with my left arm. “Please, I have to go.” My arm is sore as if I’ve been pinched, and I peer at the floor. The vines flare.
He lowers his voice to a semi-whisper, undoubtedly noticing my reluctance to engage with him at all. “Don’t worry,” he says, strolling to catch up to me. “I won’t tell anybody. I haven’t said anything about us, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Us.
My calves burn in these soft leather shoes with the wedgie heels. If I pump my legs any
faster I’ll be sprinting. I rub my arm, feel a tiny hole in my sleeve. My good shirt. Goddamn my fucking life.
II.
Two weeks after the Kwaku Klein sighting in Cudahy Library, I lie face up, my cell phone buzzing from some distant place beneath disheveled sheets. I plunge my hand into the blanket abyss and touch someone’s leg. Warm, hard, hairy. Startled, I glance over at him. He is a client I take on to replace Kwaku Klein. Lying next to me is a bonafide man with facial stubble and a heap of dreadlocs that fan across the white pillowcase like vines. His mouth is slack, the smallest gap in between his front two teeth is visible. He looks a little bit like the Lord. I sit and watch his chest rise and fall. My head winds itself like a funnel, and the unfinished drink sits in a puddle of water on the nightstand.
The memory of last night is very close. Old fashions in the W lobby. One and another and another and another. After the fifth one, it didn’t matter who I was, who was sitting across from me, or what we were about to do. This earth-colored man and I go upstairs. I hold a drink in my hand, ice cubes clanging against the short glass. Float to room 1018. Place key fob on the sensor. Watch little green lights blink. Enter. Have sex repeatedly. Giggle. Come. And again and again and again. After the fifth one, I’m tired, wrung out like a towel, my legs shaking from the exertion of holding that one position longer than I thought humanly possible in the service of the thick pleasure that ran through me like short steady bursts of electricity.
The sun streams through the room’s sheer panels. I must not have had the wherewithal to pull closed the formidable drapes, which are cluttered with ornate ivy vines. It didn’t matter when the room was bathed in navy blue darkness and star-mimicking street lights. But now, with the bed suffused with light, I see everything clearly. Kwaku, for all of his adolescent faults (a laxed understanding of personal hygiene for starters), knows enough to leave before morning’s first light. The Lord, however, has stayed. When I peer over at him, he rolls over, grumble-snores, but doesn’t open his eyes. My phone buzzes again, this time near the heel of my foot. I grab it. Carolyn Wilson’s name pops up on the caller ID. I groan, tossing my phone on top of the woven fiber comforter. What does she want to do? Split my body up the middle with a serrated knife, reach inside with those chubby hands of hers, and wring my guts till coins fall out? I ain’t got the rent, ma’am. Not today, not last week, not tomorrow. Not yet.
I roll off the bed, falling on a mound of loosely braided sheets. I catch myself and put feeler hands in front of me so I don’t run into the side table. My stomach gurgles (hunger, maybe? burgeoning effects of alcohol poisoning?), and I stumble to the bathroom, sloughing off the remnants of last night’s clothes—a faux satin cami and a pair of strappy panties that don’t hold anything in and don’t keep anything out, like that string game you play with your fingers, where you make a tea cup and saucer or the Eiffel Tower. I run the shower, brace myself against the wall with a hand on the beige and green ceramic tiles. The skylight glass is thick and dirty with silt, green twigs, and water satins, but the sun pokes through somehow, reminding me that this is a new day. Today, I’ve got a chance.
But then, I come out and this man is still asleep, which makes today seem an awful lot like last night. I push his shoulder a few times.
“Hey,” I whisper. A single, audacious vein runs just beneath the earth-colored skin of his forehead. His eyes flutter open, and he seems surprised to see me. He looks around the room before quickly sitting up, gathering the comforter around himself a little tighter than before. Like I’ve caught him. His eyes meet my eyes, a sudden recognition of our current arrangement washing over his face. My cheeks warm at all the things we did to one another, for one another. Somehow, I feel extra human, which isn’t bad or good. It just is.
“So that’s what you look like,” he croaks, grabbing his hair on top of his head then letting it fall.
I nod, uncomfortable. “Don’t be daft. You saw me last night.”
“Not like this, though. Not with this kind of light.” The Lord reaches for my arm. When he moves toward me, I smell him. I don’t mean to, but he smells good. Not like musk or anything fake you can purchase at a department store cologne counter, but really good, as if his body is replete with righteous things like jackfruit and purple cauliflower and deep green leaves.
“I could take a beautiful photograph of you. Right. Now,” he says, slowing the last two words. “Not in a minute, but right now.”
“And what’ll happen in the next minute?”
He shrugs. “You’ll be different. The sun will shift.”
“Hmm.”
“My camera is just over there,” he says, raising his eyebrows. “I could take a few pictures right quick before I go.”
I check the time on my phone. “But I’m different already. The sun has shifted.”
The Lord scoffs, smiles, his eyes squinting. “It would still be worth it.”
I shake my head and ease away from the bed before he has a chance to touch me again. I remind myself that he’s only paid for a night and that he’s not a one-night stand. He’s business. “Uh uh. I’ve got to get going,” I say, even as the crisp white towel I’m wrapped up in threatens to fall away. I’m not very good at business, which is why I only have two clients. “You do too. Check out’s at ten.”
He nods. “Appears so.” A look of disappointment flashes across his face.
I pull on my jeans and green v-neck tee shirt in a few yanks before chugging the contents of the murky, half-washed glass sitting on the nightstand. He flips back the comforter and walks over to his bag, pulling out the camera. I try to pretend that he’s not naked and brown all over the place and that his penis isn’t waggling between his legs with each graceful move. He points the camera at me. I cover my face as a defensive act of resistance. “Stop it.”
“Neck down,” he says, squinting. “Please.”
I sigh and stand still. “Before I change my mind.”
The Lord snaps and then comes behind me to show me the disembodied picture of myself. A body with no brains. That’s about right.
“Can I see you again?” he whispers, standing in front of me now, obviously leaving his modesty in the trunk of his car. His eyes are kind and sad and full of substance that probably spilled over from some other woman’s cup.
“You know how to reach me,” I say over my shoulder, offering him my cup without realizing it.
III.
The Lord hasn’t booked me again.
I wipe Kwaku Klein’s jizz off my lower back with two wads of toilet paper. He booked me to watch him beat off last night, which saves me two days of unnecessary chafing. For now, Kwaku is all I have. When I catch him falling asleep, I slap his cheek a little.
“Hey, buddy. Time to go.” I refuse to have the sunlight catch me in this room with this pubescent boy. It was bad enough the Lord lingered that one time. Kwaku wipes the side of his mouth, his eyes rolling up in his head, and for a second I think he’s on something. Then when he dozes off again, despite my pretty aggressive shakes, I know he’s on something. Goddamn freshmen. I wring my hands. He needs to be out of here before check-out or else I’ll be charged another night, and the W isn’t cheap. I glance at my phone and pull my clothes on, praying his heart doesn’t stop. I reason with myself, He’ll be fine. I’ll call the hotel in a few hours just to make sure he’s left. Everything’ll be fine. Then I head over to Ma’s to take her to dialysis for her 8:00 a.m. chair time.
Ma’s house is choked with sprawling green vines that crawl up the stony exterior. I tussle with a single vine that wraps itself around my ankle as I turn the key in the door. I manage to shake it off, curse at it while rubbing my protruding ankle bone.
Inside is little better.
The atmosphere is strangled with the kind of quiet that comes from lost hope. Once filled with the cacophonous yelling of children, the house is now whittled down to a nub of bad memories and even worse decisions. The living room is a graveyard I traverse on the way to find Ma, who is in her bedroom on the edge of the bed, jamming a needle into her stomach.
“Hey, Rita. I’ll be ready in a minute.”
“Take your time, Ma,” I say. Her room faintly smells of blood.
“I’m going to need help getting my shoes on.”
I nod, grab her soiled Easy Spirits from the corner of the room next to her walker, and place them by her feet. When she’s finished injecting herself, I put all the remaining insulin in the near empty refrigerator.
“Ma?” I call. I move around the old Chinese carryout containers Ma uses as Tupperware. In one, an old piece of chicken is trapped in white, congealed goop. In another, overcooked broccoli begins to grow mold. “Didn’t you tell me Deonte was taking you to the grocery store?”
“Yeah. He taking me after his last class.”
“What have you been eating in the meantime?”
“He brought me some Lem’s ribs home last night, but don’t worry, I didn’t eat the fries or the white bread,” she says, proud, as if the ribs alone are not enough to kill her.
This is why I can’t leave Ma’s care up to Deonte. I close the fridge and walk to the doorway of her bedroom. “Ma, you know red meat is not good for somebody with kidney disease. We talked about this. We went to the classes.”
Ma shrugs and waits for me to put her shoes on. I could say more, but I don’t feel like the back and forth today. She moans as I help her off the bed and place her hands on her walker. Green tennis balls help her glide across the worn oak floors. Step, scoot, step, scoot, step, scoot. When I get her situated in the car, I turn on the gospel radio station.
“How’s work been?” She taps her knee to the music.
There are a number of ways I can answer this, but I stick to what she expects me to say. “Good, I guess. Students seem engaged. We’re starting the research paper this week.”
“Um hm. Meant to tell you I saw Nelson at church. You know she was on the
prayer list for a long time. I think some kind of infection, kept getting green mucus, she said. Ammonia.”
“Pneumonia, Ma.”
“Um hm. She asked about you. Told her you doing real good now that you a professor
and everything.”
“How’s her daughter doing?”
“You know, I don’t get in people’s business, Rita. All I know is she went down there to
U of I and didn’t do much of nothing. I try not to ask people about they kids because they always think I’m trying to brag when I tell them how good you doing.”
I let that dangle out there for a few minutes. “After dialysis, I’ll take you to the store, okay?”
“I already told you. Deonte going to take me. I know you busy.”
“I have a lighter load this semester,” I say, which may technically be true, albeit I’ve never felt more weighed down in all my life.
“Girl, you done got yourself a jelly job where you can set your own hours, huh?” She glances over at me and smiles big. Still so hard for me to get used to her missing bottom tooth. Ma never had dental insurance.
I ignore that. “We’ll stick to produce and try to stay out of the aisles.”
“Right. My doctor been telling me to eat more cabbage because it pull all that water off me.”
“Okay, Ma. We’ll get a lot of cabbage.”
She makes a yuck face. I look out the window. Trees blur as if a painter dipped his brush in olive green paint and pulled it across a canvas. A flash of Kwaku’s body in the W Hotel bed and my stomach knots. No call from the hotel. He must be okay. I need that money. With the grand he’s going to deposit (whenever he comes to?), I can pay the rest of February’s rent. It’ll buy me a little time before Carolyn Wilson starts talking eviction again. I can even put a couple hundred on the money I owe Ricky Brazzle. At this rate, and if Kwaku keeps requesting extras, I’ll be solvent by the end of the semester.
I walk Ma into the Fresnius Dialysis Center. It’s always cold, so she brings her favorite crocheted blanket and one of the mystery novels I got her for Christmas last year. We wait for a few minutes before they call her name.
“Linda Jones.”
She holds up a finger and shuffles to the back, where a chair awaits her, where for three and a half hours a machine will launder all her blood until its squeaks. Nurses give Ma high fives as she approaches the threshold—she’s been coming here for years, two years longer than they probably expected. There’s a new nurse today, a dark brown-skinned woman in navy blue scrubs with small black moles dotting her face.
“Gloria, let me introduce you to my daughter, Sherita.” Ma waves me over.
I sigh and amble toward them. Gloria smiles at me with crowded teeth. “You the one teaches college?” she asks.
I nod and purse my lips.
“Your mama talk about you all the time. She so proud, she got us feeling proud. You better go, professor.”
“Thank you,” I say, feeling not at all proud of myself. I try not to open my mouth too big since I haven’t brushed my teeth yet. “Okay Ma, I’ll pick you up in a few hours.” I want to run out of there, but I keep my composure until I make it to the car. As soon as I shut the car door, I lap up the tears that stream into my mouth, wondering how it came to this, how I came to be in this car with the remnants of a boy’s semen on my skin.
When I pull up in front of my apartment building, Carolyn Wilson waddles out front, arm and arm with her husband Lucius, probably going on one of their weekly dates to Red Lobster. I sink down as low as I can in my seat, but there’s only so much I can physically do with the obstruction of the steering wheel. After a few minutes, fat knuckles beat on the driver’s side window.
“Sherita, I can see you hunched up in there. I know you don’t call yourself trying to hide,” Carolyn says, sounding tired.
I’m always hiding. I sniff, press the button to let my window down. “Hi, Carolyn.”
“You said you’d be getting me the other half of February rent last Friday.” Her voice has this screechy undertone my ears don’t like.
“I know. It’s coming. I’ve been going through a rough patch, but I promise, I’m going to catch up this month.”
“February and March rent now.”
“One hundred percent,” I say. “Promise.” Carolyn glances up at her husband before nodding. As they walk away, I exhale and wait for them drive off before I skulk into building, my dignity somewhere out in the alley in one of the dumpsters.
I plop on my couch and open the app, wondering if the Lord booked me. Still nothing. There has been activity from 0657387, though. Kwaku Klein. He is obviously not dead, but he cancelled all three of his bookings for next week. Relief washes over me immediately followed by panic. Shit. He’s my one remaining client. I need him to keep booking until the end of the term. For a fleeting moment, I think about accepting another client, but then I imagine myself getting naked in front of someone else and decide to stick with the teenager devil I know.
The laugh of all of this is that I was in the top ten percent of my class at Douglass Magnet High School, got a full scholarship to Lisle College and then a TA-ship for graduate school while floundering in deep pools of racial bullshit at every conceivable level to earn a doctorate degree, and all I have to show for it right now is a job that pays thirty-five hundred dollars and the promise of a boy squirting his viscous fluids on me after using my body as a substitute for the palm of his hand.
He pays. He pays. He pays. Just a little while longer, Sherita. He’ll book you again, and then you’ll be finished with all this for good. […]
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Gail Upchurch is a writer of young adult and adult fiction. She is a 2022 Kimbilio Fellow, winner of the 2022 Taint TaintTaintMagazine James Baldwin Award, a finalist for the 2022 Pen Parentis Fellowship, a 2021 Tin House YA Scholar, a 2021 Community of Writers Scholar, a finalist for the 2021 Crystal Wilkinson Creative Writing Prize, and winnerof the 2021 Tupelo Quarterly Prose Open Prize. Besides this, her short story “The Cottage” has been nominated for a 2024 O. Henry Prize. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Binghamton University’s program for writers, an MFA in creative writing with an emphasis in fiction from Chicago State University, and a BA in English from Howard University. Gail has recent short stories published or forthcoming in The Missouri Review, Obsidian: Journal & Ideas in the African Diaspora, Tupelo Quarterly, Taint TaintTaint Magazine, Torch Literary Arts, and is currently at work on a young adult novel and a linked short story collection. When she’s not making up stories, she is a professor at Prince George’s Community College in Largo, Maryland, an assistant nonfiction editor at Tupelo Press, and the chapter lead for the Maryland Chapter of Women Who Submit, a nonprofit organization that empowers women and nonbinary writers to submit their work for publication.
Read More: A brief Q&A with Gail Upchurch