Fresh Out
Nova found out she was being evicted on a Tuesday.
The notice was folded in half and shoved under the door sometime before sunrise. She almost stepped on it on her way to the bathroom. She picked it up, read it twice, set it on the vanity, finished her business, came back, and read it a third time. Then she put the kettle on and started thinking.
By noon she had three solutions. That was just how her mind worked.
She was twenty years old. No real job, no degree, no family that claimed her anymore. What she had was a bedroom in West Philadelphia, a best friend named Reign, and a face that made men forget what they were doing. In this city, that combination was either a death sentence or a starting point. Nova had decided a long time ago it was going to be the second one.
The apartment sat on a narrow block off Baltimore Avenue. Two bedrooms, one bath, walls so thin you could hear Ms. Carol in the next unit changing the channel on her television. Ms. Carol owned the place and rented out the second bedroom for extra cash every month. She was a round, quiet woman in her sixties who wore the same floral housecoat most days and kept a jar of peppermints on her kitchen counter that she offered to everyone who walked through. She didn’t ask questions. She didn’t look too hard at anything. That made her the most valuable person in Nova and Reign’s lives.
The bedroom they shared was small. Two twin beds pushed against opposite walls, a wooden dresser with a cracked mirror leaning against it, and Nova’s vanity — a secondhand find she had hauled up three flights of stairs by herself — wedged into the corner near the window. Every inch of surface space was used. Perfume bottles, makeup palettes, earrings laid flat on a folded washcloth, a small lamp with a pink scarf draped over it to soften the light.
It was cluttered but it was deliberate. Every item in that room had been chosen.
Nova sat at the vanity and started her face.
This was the first real thing she did every morning. Not coffee, not her phone — this. Foundation pressed into her skin in small circles. Contour drawn sharp down the sides of her nose and blended soft beneath her cheekbones. She had been doing this long enough that her hands moved without instruction, her eyes half focused on the mirror and half somewhere else entirely.
Eight months on hormones. Sourced through Treasure, a girl up in New York who knew people and moved careful. The changes weren’t dramatic yet but Nova tracked every single one. The slight give in her jawline. The way her skin held moisture differently now. The small, persistent proof that her body was slowly catching up to who she already was.
Behind her, Reign slept with one arm thrown over her eyes and her bonnet pushed sideways on her head. Reign could sleep through anything — sirens, arguments through the walls, the radiator knocking like it had something to say. She slept like someone who had decided the world could wait.
Nova watched her in the mirror for a second. They had known each other since they were sixteen, met at a house party neither of them was supposed to be at. Reign had walked up to her that night in a green dress and said, you’re doing your makeup wrong, let me show you. That was it. Four years later they were still here. Still doing each other’s makeup. Still figuring it out together.
“What time is it,” Reign said. Not quite awake, not quite asking.
“Almost eleven.”
Reign sat up and pulled the bonnet off. Her hair fell loose around her shoulders, thick and dark. She looked around the room the way she always did in the morning, like she was taking inventory of what was still there.
“We have a problem,” Nova said.
“How much.”
“Eight hundred. By Friday.”
Reign was quiet. She got up and walked to the window and stood there looking down at the street. January in Philadelphia was the color of dirty dishwater. The trees were bare. A man on the corner was selling phone cases out of a folding table, hands stuffed into his jacket pockets between customers. Across the street a woman dragged two kids toward the bus stop, both of them fighting her the entire way.
“Damon texted last night,” Nova said. “He wants to take me to dinner Saturday.”
Reign didn’t turn around right away. When she did, there was something careful in her face. Not quite a smile. Something that sat just behind one.
“Then go to dinner,” she said. “And make sure Ms. Carol gets taken care of before they bring out the bread.”
Nova turned back to the mirror. She picked up her lip liner and held it for a moment without using it.
“You think he knows?” she asked.
The question was small. The weight of it was not.
Reign looked at her for a long moment, the kind of look that carried four years of shared history inside it.
“Nova,” she said. “What does he know that you didn’t give him?”
Nova pressed the liner to her top lip and drew a slow, clean line.
Outside, the man on the corner sold a phone case to a teenager in a red coat. The bus came and swallowed the woman and her two kids. A pigeon landed on the windowsill, looked in at both of them, and left.
Nova finished her lip line. Reached for her gloss.
Saturday was four days away. Eight hundred dollars needed to exist before then. And Damon — sweet, generous, completely unsuspecting Damon — had no idea that the woman he was taking to dinner was carrying a secret that could change everything between them.
The question was not whether he would find out.
The question was who would tell him first.
