The Eighth Day: Is There More, Pt. 3

“It’s too bad reality checks don’t cover the balances due…”

Man… I was so wrong about Ingrid.

We had gone out on Wednesday night. And here it was Sunday. And nothing.

“Like, I haven’t heard from her,” I said, spread across Dez’s couch like it was my own personal chaise longue. It might as well have been, as I’d found myself on it many, many times, whenever I’d sought out Dez’s advice.

“Have you reached out to her, though?” Dez asked me. She was in the kitchen, frying chicken wings because I had come over. Even though Deziree lived alone, she only ever cooked when she had company. It was one of the many weird habits of hers I’d learned about over the course of our friendship.

“The phone works both ways, Dez,” I replied.

“I could tell you the same thing, though. Like, I don’t understand how niggas complain about women not hitting them up, but they don’t never hit the girl up.”

“I did hit her up, though!”

“Oh, really?” Dez asked. “What’d you do, text her ‘good morning’ and text her ‘good night?’”

“I didn’t text her ‘good night,’” I replied. “I did text her good morning the day after, though, and I asked her how her day was on Friday.”

“Man complains about minimal communication, but offers minimal communication himself. Our top story tonight on Fox 26.”

“Shut up, Dez,” I told her, and I heard her giggle from the kitchen. “I’m trying to be serious.”

“I’m being serious, too,” she insisted. “Your explanation just funny, so I’m laughing at it. You would, too, if someone else were telling you this.”

“I really wouldn’t, though. Anyway… she just stopped talking to me. Like, I thought we had a good night.”

“I thought so, too,” Dez agreed. “But that’s my thoughts and your thoughts. She might not have the same thoughts.” I let out a frustrated groan. Another smell suddenly filled the air, and without getting up from my spot on the couch, I deduced that Dez was making fried rice to go along with the wings.

“So you haven’t talked to her since Friday, huh?”

“Not since Friday,” I replied. I looked down at my phone in my hand and checked the text messages for what seemed like the thousandth time, trying to confirm a time stamp and telling myself something I’d told myself for days already. I just didn’t understand it. Why had she gone ghost on me so suddenly?

“Was your breath kicking on the date?” Dez randomly asked, and that caused me to dart up from the couch and smirk at her. She looked back from the stove and burst out laughing when she saw my face.

“You play too much, Dez,” I told her.

“Oh, come on now! You came over to be cheered up, right? Laughing is the best way to improve your mood.”

“Good to see my love life is a joke to you,” I said. And it might as well have been. Here I was, just hoping to find someone to laugh with me and not at me for once.

“Don’t be like that,” Dez said, as she walked around into my line of sight with a plate of wings and rice. “Food’s done if you want some.”

“I’m not hungry,” I told her.

“Bullshit,” Dez replied, sitting down on the ottoman to the right of me. “You can’t smell the spices in this chicken? Whew.” She bit down into one of her wings and smacked her lips loudly. “Dereck! Boy. I’ve outdone myself.” I rolled my eyes at her.

“So, no advice?” I asked her. “Nothing? Just gonna eat chicken in my face?”

“This is some damn good chicken. You don’t know what you missing. Don’t know what you missin’, shame on you…” she started singing.

“So your advice is Mac Miller lyrics,” I replied.

“Nah. Do you know if she has an Instagram?”

“Doesn’t everybody?” I asked.

“Exactly,” Dez said. “So you don’t follow her on Instagram?”

“Why would I follow her on Instagram, Dez? We just had our first date.”

“You always follow them on Instagram after the first date, D,” Dez said. “Not Twitter, though. That’s the wasteland. You only follow them on Twitter after you really like them so nothing they say can make you unlike them.”

“Wait, are you being serious right now?” I asked her. “About this Twitter shit?”

“As serious as Chris Rock talking about his divorce. I can’t tell you how many times I went digging when I was really feeling somebody. Stumbled onto Bae in Progress’s timeline. Didn’t see anything too harmless. Had a nice GIF game. Didn’t follow Charlamagne tha God. Coast seemed clear enough, right?” She looked at me like she was expecting some kind of acknowledgment to keep going, so I just nodded at her.

“But then” — she paused, and I thought it was for dramatic effect at first but she was taking in a spoonful of fried rice, but it could’ve really been for both reasons — “Then I went into their Likes. Whew. Dereck.”

“What?” I asked her. I had looked on people’s Twitter Likes too, but it was usually because I swiped past their Media tab on accident.

“Hmmpha tweets ima ikes, D.”

“What?” I repeated. She swallowed the food in her mouth first, and then repeated herself.

“Homophobic tweets in the likes!” She shook her head. “Like… how are you gay liking tweets about hating gays? How you liking tweets about ‘homos will never know what it’s like to be Black’ when you Black AND gay? Make it make some fucking sense, because I can’t.”

“That does seem inconsistent,” I agreed.

“Inconsistent ain’t even the word, D. Like… it’s very annoying. I block them on Twitter and then I block their number. I ain’t even doing it. But we were talking about Instagram, anyway, right? Go look up her IG.”

“And how am I supposed to find her IG?” I asked her.

“Search for it, duh.”

“I know that part, Dez, I mean, how do I find her?”

“She’s a mixed girl named Ingrid,” Dez replied. “How hard can it be to find the one Ingrid on Instagram that’s not white?”

“There’s a Black rapper named Ingrid, Dez.”

“Oh, you’re right! I love her!”

“Deziree.”

“Damn, my whole name, huh?” Dez replied. “I guess you like this girl a lot already. Mixed girl named Ingrid with a Caribbean dad… her name is probably something like ‘plantainbabe,’ right?”

While Ingrid was being foolish, I pulled out my phone and opened the app. I looked up at her, then begrudgingly typed ‘plantainbabe’ in the people search bar. A couple of cute girls did pop up, but — thankfully — none of them was Ingrid.

“Her name ain’t ‘plantainbabe,’” I told Deziree.

“You sound proud about it. Congratulations.” But it was just then that I noticed the red dot under my notifications tab. “+1.” Someone had added me on Instagram. How had I not noticed that? I went to the tab.

“Riceandpeaceandlove,” I read aloud, and Deziree burst out laughing. It was her. Ingrid.

“It ain’t ‘plantainbabe,’ it’s a play on rice and peas,” Dez said, still cracking herself up. “If she don’t have the Jamaican flag emoji in her bio, she a poser.”

She did, in fact, have the Jamaican flag emoji in her bio, along with her age, a bible verse, and a few other things. But I was more focused on the pictures below.

“I’ll be damned,” I said. It was right there. The whole time, it was right there. There was a picture of the menu from the restaurant we’d gone to. But there were also pictures of her, her face and those dark brown eyes and those cute freckles… and another man in the picture next to her. One, after the other, after the other. Captions with heart eyed emojis. “Babe” and “#Mine” in some of the captions.

“She has a whole boyfriend,” I said aloud.

“Aww, damn,” Dez said. “You’re not serious, are you?” I handed my phone over to her and couldn’t help but feel some type of way. Played. I’d been played. Again. At least now I knew why she’d been absent — because she was being present with someone else.

“Why would she even go out with me if she has a man?” I asked, to anyone who would listen.

“I’m sorry, Dereck,” Dez said, holding my phone back out to me. “That sucks.”

“I mean… are they on again, off again? They can’t be.” I went back to her pictures. “She was JUST with this guy yesterday. What the fuck was the point of the blind date?”

“Maybe he pissed her off,” Dez suggested. “Maybe he’s not really her boyfriend and she was exploring her options.”

“She called him ‘babe’ on a picture, Dez.”

“I call YOU ‘babe’ all the time, that doesn’t mean we go together.”

“That’s trash,” I replied. “‘Babe’ should be your partner only.’”

“Nah, anyone can be ‘babe,” Dez said. “But only BAE can be ‘bae.’” The heavy sigh I’d been holding back poured out of me. “But I really am sorry. It’s trash that she did that to you. If you want, I can fire her ass up on Twitter.”

“Wait, you follow her on Twitter?” I asked.

“Sure do. That’s how I met her in the first place! Matter of fact, it was her tweets that made me think, ‘hmm, maybe I should set her and my boy up on a date.’”

“So you had me go on a blind date with some girl you met on Twitter.”

“I thought she was cute!” Dez replied. “She tweets ‘LakeShow’ and all that bullshit, and she tweeted about some of the shows you like to watch. I thought what’s the worst that could happen? She’s never tweeted about a nigga, though. Whew. That single on the timeline ain’t single in real life shit is very real, I guess.”

I was only half paying attention to Dez right now. She’d had good intentions, and I appreciated it, but it ended up with me getting burned. Again. I was sick of being burned. Sick and tired of trying to do the right thing and being a good guy and being made a fool of.

“Hey, are you on Twitter right now?” Dez asked me, pulling me out of my thoughts.

“I might be,” I said.

“Hey. Hey!” I looked up and Dez was looking straight at me. “Close Twitter right fucking now.”

“Why do I have to close Twitter?” I asked her.

“Because you about to link a Drake song or type some shit like, ‘Women never want a good man’ and blah blah or whatever.”

“I am not about to type that,” I replied. She raised a skeptical eyebrow at me. “I was about to type…”

“Uh huh,” Dez prodded. “Go on. You were about to type…”

“I was just gonna say, ‘It’s good men out here looking for a good woman and instead of being honest, they’d rather make it hard.’”

“Ain’t that more than 140 characters?” Dez asked.

“Fuck you, Deziree, the character limit is more than 140 now.” She just shrugged. “It’s just frustrating, man.”

“I know.”

“I’m going to be 30 in a month.”

“I know.”

“And I’ve never once had a meaningful relationship…”

“It’s hard out here,” Dez said.

“And I’m going to be a 30 year old virgin.”

“I mean, if you want to lose your virginity, I got you on some birthday sex.”

“Are you serious right now?” I asked her.

“No bullshit. You’re my best friend. We just can’t cuddle afterwards, you can’t eat my pussy, and you can’t hit it from the back.”

“Wait, why not?”

“One, because it’s a fucking gift,” Dez explained. “Two, because if I throw it back at you, you not gonna know what hit you.”

“Dez, you don’t even have ass like that.”

“Oop! You offer a constructive way to help your friend out of his misery and what does he do? Say you ain’t got no booty. What a charmer. Straight niggas talk themselves out of ass everyday.” I was still trying to process what exactly had transpired in the last few seconds.

“Okay, hold up a second,” I told her. “Were you being serious just now? About the birthday sex?”

“Well, since you had the audacity to disrespect my heavenly peach, I guess you’ll never know. I do know if you don’t go fix you some of that bomb chicken and fried rice I cooked, I’m going to kick your ass, though.” The funny part is, I knew she was serious about the chicken.

I pulled myself up off the couch, went into the kitchen, and fixed myself a plate of food. I tasted a bit of the rice before putting it in the microwave. Dez was right: my love life might suck, but her cooking surely didn’t.

“Hey, D?” Dez called me.

“Yeah?”

“Did you know there’s a matchmaking service in Houston?”