The Shadows Between Us

“You ever think about what it actually smells like?” Alina said. Mona didn’t look up from her laptop. “What what smells like?” “Money. Like real money. Not the two dollars and thirty seven cents at the bottom of my bag. I mean the kind that changes a room when you walk into it.” “Money smells like metal and other people’s hands.” “That’s cash. I’m talking about wealth.” Alina was lying on Mona’s bed with her feet up against the wall. “Wealth smells different. Like leather. Like a room where nothing is broken and nobody is apologizing for it.” Mona looked up. “You’ve been in those rooms?” “Once. I was thirteen. My mom was cleaning a building on the Upper East Side and she let me come one time. I sat in the lobby while she worked.” She paused. “Mona, the lobby had fresh flowers in it. Not fake. Not dried. Fresh flowers just sitting there in a lobby that nobody lived in.” “How long did you think about them?” “About a year.” She said it without embarrassment. “I sat in that lobby and I decided something. I decided I was going to be on the other side of it. Not cleaning it. Living in it like it was normal.” She turned her head. “Don’t tell me you haven’t decided the same thing.” Mona was quiet. Outside the window, the Bronx was doing what it always did on a Tuesday night. A car horn. Someone’s music coming through the ceiling. The kind of noise that never fully stopped. “I think about it differently,” she said. “How.” “I don’t think about the smell. I think about what it would feel like to open the refrigerator without doing math first.” She closed the laptop. “I think about getting sick and not feeling guilty about it. About needing something and just getting it without calculating what it costs somewhere else.” Alina looked at her. “Yeah,” she said quietly. “That.” “That’s what I want.” “Me too.” Alina sat up and pulled her knees to her chest. “And I am going to get it, Mona. Whatever it takes. I am not dying in this zip code.” “Whatever it takes is a big thing to say.” “I know what I said.” The room was quiet for a moment. The space heater hummed. On the other side of the wall, Mona’s father coughed once then went still. Marcus’s door opened and closed down the hall. “I’m going to get out too,” Mona said. “I just want to get there and still recognize myself.” “That’s because you’re better than me.” “I’m not better than you.” “You’re more intact. You know who you are. I’m still figuring out what I’m willing to be.” Alina said it the way she said true things about herself. No apology. No drama. Just the plain fact of it. “That means I’ll probably move faster.” “And I’ll move more carefully.” “Which means between us we have the whole thing covered.” Alina reached over and grabbed Mona’s wrist the way she had since they were twelve. “We are getting out of here. Both of us. The Bronx is where we started. It is not where we end.” Mona looked at her. At the certainty in her face. At the girl she had known half her life whose hunger was the only hunger she had ever seen that matched her own. “Okay,” she said. “Say it like you mean it.” “I mean it.” “The whole thing.” “We are getting out of here.” “Both of us.” “Both of us.” Alina let go of her wrist and leaned back on her palms. The space heater hummed its one note. Outside, the city moved. Down the hall, Marcus’s light was still on under his door. “I don’t hate this place,” Alina said. “I want you to know that. It’s not about hating where we came from.” “I know.” “I just refuse to stay in it.” “Me too.” “No matter what.” Mona looked at her. In the dim light of that bedroom, with the cold coming in through the edges of the window and the whole weight of their lives pressing from every direction, Alina’s face held nothing but certainty. The kind that didn’t come from ease. The kind that came from decision. “No matter what,” Mona said. Alina smiled and looked around the room. The cracked ceiling. The lamp that flickered. The window stuffed with cloth where the cold got in. She looked at all of it with clear, unsentimental eyes. “You ready for tomorrow?” she said. “The panel call?” “Yeah.” “I’ve been ready since Monday.” “I know you have.” Alina lay back and stared at the ceiling again. “You know what I keep thinking about? Ms. Patterson.” “What about her.” “The way she kept asking me to elaborate and then cutting me off every time I started. Like she wanted the answer but not from me specifically.” “She did that to everyone.” “She did it more to me.” Mona didn’t say anything because Alina was right and they both knew it. “I’m going to get this fellowship,” Alina said. Not loud. Just certain. “I don’t care what Ms. Patterson thinks. I don’t care what any of them think. I am getting one of those three spots.” “You prepared as hard as anyone.” “I prepared harder.” “Then you’ll be fine.” “We’ll both be fine.” “Yes.” Alina turned her head and looked at her. “You really believe that?” “Yes.” “Even though there are only three spots.” “Even though.” “Even though we both want first place.” Mona was quiet for a second. “We both want it and only one of us can have it and whatever happens we handle it after. That’s how it works.” Alina held her gaze. Something moved between them that neither of them named. “Yeah,” Alina said. “That’s how it works.” She turned back to the ceiling. Mona opened her laptop. The space heater kept humming. Outside, the Bronx kept going the way it always did, indifferent and relentless and completely real. They stayed like that for a long time. Not talking. Not needing to. It was Alina who found the party invitation. She showed it to Mona across the kitchen table on Friday evening with the laptop turned around and her finger on the screen. “No,” Mona said. “You didn’t even read it.” “You’re showing me a party. I don’t need to read it.” “We survived six weeks of panels and submissions and Ms. Patterson. We deserve one night.” “The results aren’t out yet.” “Exactly. Tonight is free. Nothing we do tonight changes anything.” Alina folded her hands on the table. “One night, Mona.” Mona looked at her father’s bedroom door. Then back at Alina. “One night,” she said. The party was on the fourth floor of a building in Mosholu and the music reached them in the elevator. Loud and warm and full of people who had been holding their breath for six weeks and had finally been told they could let it out. Alina walked in like she had been there before. Mona walked in behind her and did what she always did in unfamiliar rooms. She mapped it. Who was where. How people were grouped. Where the energy was moving. She found a space near the window where she could see everything and stood there with her drink and let the room come to her. That was where he found her. He was moving through the crowd with the ease of someone who had never needed a room to like him first and he stopped near the window because the window was where the air was. He glanced at her. She glanced back. “You’re not from the fellowship review,” he said. “I am actually.” He looked at her again, recalibrating. “You don’t look like you’re celebrating.” “I’m observing.” “What’s the difference.” “Celebrating requires participation.” He smiled. A real one. “Derek.” “Mona.” “You make it through all six rounds?” “Yes. You’re not from the review.” “No. I know Terrell from an accelerator thing.” He looked around the room. “I came for the free drinks.” “And stayed.” “Observation opportunities.” He said it without missing a beat. Mona almost smiled. “What do you do.” He told her. Urban logistics. Food access in neighborhoods that got left behind when the grocery chains pulled out. Last mile delivery for people who couldn’t afford the gap. He talked about it the way people talked about things they actually believed in. No pitch. No surface. Just the work and what it needed and why it mattered. She listened the way she always listened. Completely. “Have you looked at CDFI funding?” she said when he finished. He paused. “I haven’t, no.” “Community Development Financial Institutions. Federal index. Grant structures built for exactly this kind of work. Less dilutive than VC at early stage.” She paused. “I can send you the link.” He looked at her with new attention. The kind that meant something had shifted in how he was reading the conversation. “Yeah,” he said. “Send it.” “What’s your background.” “Business. My family is in real estate. I wanted to build something of my own.” He said it simply. Not performing anything. Just the plain fact of why. She looked at him. The jacket. The way he stood in a Bronx apartment like the square footage didn’t register as unusual. The way he said my family is in real estate the way people said things they had long stopped noticing about themselves. She understood the rest without needing him to say it. They talked for an hour. The party moved around them and neither of them tracked it. At some point Alina appeared at Mona’s shoulder, bright and warm the way she got in rooms like this. “There you are.” She looked at Derek with open curiosity. “Who’s this.” “Derek. Knows Terrell.” “Alina.” She put her hand out and he shook it and she smiled and turned the full weight of her attention on him the way she did when something interested her. The three of them talked. It was good. Easy and fast and sharp. Alina was funny. Derek was genuine. Mona said the right things at the right moments and watched the two of them and filed what she saw in a place she didn’t examine directly. The cab home was quiet. Derek sat up front. Mona and Alina were in the back, shoulder to shoulder, the city running past the windows in long amber lines. Alina reached over and squeezed Mona’s hand once. Didn’t say anything. Mona squeezed back. It was a good night. Clean and warm and full of the particular feeling of something just beginning. The cab moved north. The buildings changed. The Bronx came back into view, familiar and indifferent and real, the same streets that had held them their whole lives. Mona looked out the window. She thought about the refrigerator and the math and the room where nothing was broken. She thought about what Alina said and what she said back and the three words left hanging in the cold of the bedroom. She thought about Derek’s voice when he talked about the work. The way he said my own. She thought: this is the beginning. All of it. This is finally the beginning. The cab pulled onto Morris Avenue. Home.