No. She was doing that thing again. Finding faults and messing up a thing before it even started.

“These scarves are dope. And they would really take a well-made-up face to the next level,” LeDeya said. WIC smiled that damned smile, and Liza saw every woman in the room’s heart skip a beat.

Except hers.

Bev glanced approvingly at Liza. Bev liked him. Liza had actually done something right in Bev’s eyes, and she’d be damned if it didn’t feel good. But she knew this was going to be her high school boyfriend all over again. Once Bev liked someone, she asked about them endlessly, even when Liza had someone new. This would be the beginning of years of “How’s WIC?” It made her dread messing anything up for fear of hearing “Whatever happened to that nice WIC fella?” every month for the rest of her life. Everyone loved him. WIC seemed to even like her family, and there were no cultural or class translations needed. He would know to eat the damned oxtail. He would have known to do it. Liza would just have to squash her own asshole tendencies and settle into a good thing.

“While I applaud your attempt at modesty, you sound only interested in scarves to highlight the expert application of immodest makeup,” Maurice said.

“While I applaud your attempts at being a thesaurus, you still sound stupid,” LeDeya shot back. Maurice took a scarf and attempted to whirl it around and snap LeDeya with it.

“Leave the girl alone. She knows what she likes,” WIC said.

“She doesn’t know anything,” Liza said.

“I know I look better than you in these scarves,” LeDeya said.

Liza threw a pillow at her sister’s head and missed.

WIC took the family to fifty-second street in West Philly, where Granny bargained for cheap knockoff purses and bought shea butter and bags of incense. Then they went to a café where they bused their own tables and washed dishes in a collective afterward.

He was the perfect freedom fighter. Fist bumping old men and rubbing the heads of young boys with fresh cuts—in her world, WIC made sense. But a slow shadow still slid over the day for Liza. Not just because she was exhausted, but because she was trying so hard to want to like it.

Time is Isaiah’s enemy.

By four p.m. she’d just hit a wall. Janae had fidgeted with her phone all day, and she seemed pretty out of it too.

Liza caught up to her in front of everyone. “Janae, are you ready to leave?”

“Yeah, I guess I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night, and it’s catching up to me.”

“Yeah, me too, you ready to go?”

“Almost.” She looked down at her phone. “Actually, yes.”

“Janae?” Liza held her sister’s shoulders.