“She wouldn’t turn you away either, not if you came all the way with me. Maybe Hakim would let you work in his barbershop …”

“Shivana, you just talking shit… you ain’t trying to go to New York. Your auntie would have your ma on the phone in a minute shutting that shit down …”

“We just can’t tell her we coming,” I cautioned. “We just gotta show up. I mean, we might have to sleep on the floor when we get there, before we get our own place, but who cares … sleeping on her floor better than sharing a room with somebody got AIDS.”

The porch lights flashed on and off several times, the sisters’ signal that the doors would be locked soon. See, I was too grown for all that. At least I thought I was. I focused my attention on my man and some little girls across the street, determined to keep on jumping rope even as the ground became slippery from snow that was reluctant to stick. They didn’t stop until they were called inside like I was now being. I realized The Haven wasn’t the place for who I was trying to be. I was sick and tired of being a girl.

“I bet it’s all kind of fun jobs I could get in New York,” I fantasized as the snow fell harder. I didn’t even care about my hair getting puffy. I was only thinking about the moves I could make if I left all I knew behind. “I could be one of the girls dancing in the videos.”

“My video,” Rasul said, laughing, seeing it with me for the first time.

“I got enough for the train.”

“That’s a thousand miles from here …” He kept talking, stuck in his own dreams. Who knows if I was even still in them.

A thousand miles from me, I thought.

We stared at each other, long and hard, me and him, friends for no other reason than we didn’t have much of anybody else, lovers soon as we could find a quiet, private place to make love. A warmth filled my chest, so strong I was sure I was alive, and like magnets we held on to hearts turned steel and refused to let go. We paid no mind when the porch lights flashed again, as the snow blanketed everything around us in determined sheets. We were too busy holding each other, smiling because it was all we had to do, looking up to the sky through the falling snow, searching for our own light.

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