“Yes, of course.” Ayanna switched her phone to her other ear. She shifted in the bed, winced at the creak of it. This was the call-and-response of their friendship. Phone calls, glasses of wine, a walk in a beautiful park, filled with “fucked-up things” brimming up to Stephen’s lips and Ayanna’s eagerness for that level of vulnerability.

“Whenever I’m sad like this,” Stephen said, sounding more like his normal self, just a little distant, “where I know I’m feeling the emotion, where I know why I’m feeling the emotion, but still I’m not consumed by it, I think of this messed-up thing a kid used to do in high school. I was in all the nerd classes, and this white kid in my AP English class would call me a ‘tragic mulatto’ whenever he saw me like looking out a window for a minute or listening to my headphones by myself.”

“That’s a very literary way to bully.”

“It started with this really bad lecture by our teacher about Faulkner and how ‘the tragic mulatto was an important literary trope.’ But she was also talking in a way where you could easily think, ‘Oh, this white lady really doesn’t believe in race-mixing.’ It was one of those things that like years later you have the distance to say ‘That was fucked,’ but when you’re a teenager and you’re used to being in a classroom with an adult who hasn’t done much planning for good and bad reasons, and they just need to fill the day, and you’re also just kind of checked out because one thirty p.m. at high school is like being under light anesthesia.”

Ayanna nodded. She remembered he couldn’t see her and said, “Yeah.”

“But for all my senior year, this kid would call me that in passing whenever I seemed a little melancholy, and today, I thought about it again, how I was kind of just looking into the void after hearing about my dad and thought that and started laughing.”

Ayanna wasn’t sure what to say.

“I wanted to tell you because if I told Jane, she wouldn’t care about the circumstances. She would be like, ‘Stephen’”—and he did an imitation of Jane doing a tirade, which while sounding nothing like her actual voice did have her exact cadence and tone—“ ‘finding things like that funny at all feels like you are siding with oppression.’ And Felix is Felix. I tell him something like this and he’s so nice and finds a gentle way to remind me that if I’m carrying things like this with me, maybe I should talk to someone and analyze why this is something I’m still hanging on. But you.”