By Any Means Necessary Read online

  BY

  ANY MEANS

  NECESSARY

  CANDICE MONTGOMERY

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  FOR MY GRAMMA HONEY.

  I LOVE YOU.

  THAT CHIPPENDALES CRUISE IS STILL WAITING FOR US.

  XO, KITTEN

  1.

  There is a special kind of hell for people who wait to open their official-looking mail. People like me.

  It’s not my fault.

  Can I say that?

  Shake the blame, here? It’s the way my aunt Lisa always operates. Having her in my life for seventeen years has ingrained in me a long habit of avoiding bill collectors, debt companies, delinquent hospital bills, and Girl Scouts.

  Those cute little assholes will finesse you for $50 and ten boxes of Thin Mints before you can blink twice. The Girl Scouts, not the debt collectors.

  I like to call this horrific habit a symptom of “Poverty PTSD.” (I won’t trademark that, you’re welcome, have at it.) The avoidance, not the addiction to waxy, chocolate-mint cookies.

  Comes from being broke all the time, from being a Black kid constantly screwed over by the system, unable to catch a break, from hearing your uncle’s been gunned down by the police for no discernible reason.

  So, here we are. Jump cut to me, standing just over the threshold of my new home, my new dorm room at college, duffel heavy on my back, phone to my head as my auntie Lisa yells in my ear.

  “Torrey, did you hear what I just said?”

  Yes, but my brain’s, like, waiting for a jump start or something, and my dumbass doesn’t own jumper cables. I also suddenly have to pee, but I don’t think I passed a men’s bathroom on the way up.

  Lisa, my aunt by marriage, is the one in charge. I put things in her hands as I left for what I naively thought was my way out. My one and probably only chance to walk away from the thin strings holding me to the shreds of my sad excuse for a family. But this, my bees: I trusted her to handle this, and I don’t know how things have already fallen apart.

  I laid everything out. I put the entire operation on a silver platter and said, Here, Auntie, bees, simplicity, money—all you. She isn’t the best at organization. But she’s smart. Capable. A scientist, even!

  But should’ve expected it, you know? The neighborhood doesn’t just let you walk. It doesn’t just let you out sans so much as an ass scratch or a backward glance.

  “Torr. Listen to me.” And then she enunciates, which is probably a good thing. “This letter is talking about shutting down and selling the apiary.”

  Even though I just dropped my bags, I say, “I’m coming home.” Calling it home is such a farce. Home is a safe haven. Baldwin Hills is a place I reside.

  “What? No. You’re not. There’s no reason for you to come home. Yet.”

  Then why the hell would she call me with this letter, all panicked? “Where are you? Where’s Theo?”

  “I’m at Theo’s now.”

  “So he knows? What’s he saying?”

  For a second there’s some shuffling on her end of the line and it prompts me to walk fully inside the dorm room. It’s a double. Not huge but big enough for at least (and at most) two people to breathe in at the same time.

  Aunt Lisa exhales slowly. She mostly does this for me, to help regulate my breathing. “Well. You know Theo, baby.”

  I am very self-actualized. Self-actualized enough that I understand that Lisa is my stand-in for maternal comfort and has been for a while now. She doesn’t have any kids of her own. And she’s only, like, a decade older than me. But still. She’s all I got anymore. And all I want, really. My high school counselor used to say I was lying to myself about wanting more because I never got a “real mom,” whatever that is, and I guess I’m supposed to feel cheated out of that? But like I said, I’m self-actualized. And Lisa’s enough.

  “Titi. Can they really do that?” I ask. Titi. Kinda funny, isn’t it? How universal the nickname is. It’s a term all Black kids grow up knowing their favorite auntie as.

  Her voice gets thick, and I can see in my head, clear as day, that she’s sucking on a cigarette, cherry-red lipstick staining the paper. She didn’t start smoking until her husband, my uncle Miles, died.

  “I haven’t even gotten to make sure you’re settling in okay.” She’s shaking her head right now, I know it. “Technically, yes. They can. The letter states there are unpaid property taxes, and as a result the property is being seized.”

  “Unpaid property—What? But Theo …?”

  “Fell behind. Couldn’t catch up.”

  “Fell behind. That’s some bullshit.” My back finds the wall and I give in, sliding down into a melted heap of boy on the floor.

  “True as that may be, don’t you curse at me, boy. I’m not the one.”

  She really isn’t. “I apologize.” I know better than to say, “I’m sorry.” Not in Black families.

  You ain’t sorry, boy. You ain’t never sorry.

  “Mm-hmm,” she says. “I understand what you’re saying. And I want you to know, Miles never wanted this kind of stress on you. He’d encourage you to save yourself before ever thinking about those bees. But Theo, on the other hand …”

  “Yeah. He never wanted the farm, Titi. You know this. I know this.”

  Theo only agreed to handle the financial end of things because when Uncle Miles died, he left his bee farm to me, and I was underage at the time. But I’m sure to Theo it felt like a way to keep his son with him. It felt that way to me.

  It’s what I thought I wanted—owning and running the apiary. I’ve been working with or learning about bees forever. Working with bees meant working with Uncle Miles. Uncle Miles is—was—the apiary.

  It was always just me and Uncle Miles out there, shooting the shit. Talking, commiserating. He met me on his level. Never treated me like a kid who couldn’t understand things. Bothered to take the time and teach me things that were new. Bothered to educate me. Bothered to give a shit.

  Yeah. Just me and Uncle Miles and the bees. I’ve loved bees longer than I’ve loved those frosted brown sugar Pop-Tarts and, for real, that is saying something, I promise you it is. Uncle Miles made sure of that.

  But Theo. He never wanted any of this. Thinks the apiary is a waste of space, time, and money. Commonly refers to it as “punk-ass rich shit.” So I wouldn’t be all that shocked if this nigga fell behind and just decided not to give a single shit about it when things got hot.

  Low-key, I feel like I’m about to cry when a deep voice behind me says, “Hey. This is real heavy, could I get some help?”

  And just inside my open doorway is Desh. Desharu but Desh.

  I recognize his tree trunk of a body and head full of almost too much curly black hair.

  Coming to an immediate stand, phone crushed between my shoulder and ear, I grab the largest suitcase from him. It’s covered in Sharpie tags, doodles, and different stickers but the largest and most prominent of them all—the ones I catch and can dif
ferentiate at a glance—are the two flags. One for Korea. One for India.

  Desh reps his people hard. That’s no secret; just take a gander at his Facebook reposts.

  With his bags “settled” on his side of the room—they aren’t settled; they are thrown haphazardly on his bare mattress, his backpack on top of one suitcase, and the larger suitcase I grabbed is the only one that’s upright—we sit on our respective mattresses.

  “Titi, I gotta go. Lemme call you back.” And I hang up before she can yell at me not to. I’mma pay for that later, I already know.

  Desh pulls his hoodie off, tosses it into a corner.

  When we selected our roommate preferences, I chose the “no preference” option. Meaning, I could wind up with a neat freak or a cyclone of a human, never a thing in place.

  I’m somewhere in the middle, so I figured it didn’t matter.

  Desh is the latter. We’ve spent the past few weeks DMing about it, among other things. But mostly that Desh has zero plans to clean or organize anything because “you think I’m gonna clean shit when, finally, my mother isn’t around to nag me about it?”

  I drop my phone on the floor and it makes a nice thud sound. He takes one look at me.

  Listen. Here’s the thing about Desh.

  He doesn’t know what personal boundaries are. He doesn’t care if asking you about that sore on your lip in polite company is just a smidge too loud. He doesn’t care if the way he eats (he doesn’t breathe, like, not once during the entire meal does he stop to take a breath) is horrifying and probably a little bit dangerous, he doesn’t care if you’re not ready to have his Nikon pointed right up in your grill.

  Desh doesn’t care.

  I’ve learned all this from texts, Facebook messages, and the occasional FaceTime session with him since having been “introduced” two months ago.

  And those are the things that make Desh endearing. The loudness, the devil-may-care, the camera that’s permanently attached to his hand. Those are the things that make it easy to be friends with him. He’s either going to judge you or he’s not. But no matter what, he’s gonna stick around (and probably photograph it).

  Still, even though I like Desh, I don’t know him know him, when it comes down to it. I’m not the kind of person who’s gonna let all my walls down just because you tagged me in some random meme on Facebook once.

  I scrub a hand across my head.

  Desh clears his throat. “Damn, who died?”

  I shake my head. Me. I’m kinda feeling like it’s me.

  2.

  There are a lot of things I need to worry about in life, like, as a Black male teen. A lot of things I have to worry about separately—as a teen and again as a male and then, further still, as a Black person. Confusing, right? Well, try being me. When you combine those separate parts, apparently, I am lethal. I am a problem.

  But on the list of things I didn’t ever think I’d need to worry about was my safe space being snatched right out of my bony-ass dark fingers by “the city of angels.”

  Angels my ass. Let me tell you something: There is literally nothing angelic about Los Angeles.

  The traffic: bullshit.

  The heat: bullshit.

  The price to valet: bullshit.

  And don’t you get me started on the white people moving out to Eagle Rock and Echo Park, and all up in Baldwin Hills.

  But this morning I woke up in my room at Theo’s like always, heat with its thick-ass fingers wrapped around the back of my neck, and I just felt like something terrible was going to happen. I wake up that way a lot. Anxiety is a straight-up PITA.

  Which is why I chalked the feeling up to a case of nerves. Nervous about leaving home, about moving into my dorm, about leaving behind Uncle Miles’s and my bees. Nervous about, just, not knowing anything. Being at the bottom again when I spent all of my last year of high school at the figurative top.

  Well, here the hell we are now.

  Desh stands, pecks around on his phone for a second, then locks it, sliding it into his back pocket.

  “You look bad, my guy,” he says.

  “Not feeling great. So, yeah.”

  “You going to this freshman-mixer thing?”

  Ah. The mixer is supposed to be, like, you get to know the other people in your dorm hall, get to know what the campus has to offer. And I think some of the frats and sororities prowl for fresh meat, too.

  “I don’t know, man.” My head isn’t here. It’s at the apiary wondering whom I could yell at next for letting things go to shit, for letting go of the space that belongs solely to Uncle Miles and me. It sure as hell isn’t Theo. He took me in because there was no other choice.

  Ever talk to somebody and literally watch them ignore you? That’s Theo. That’s Theo all of the time.

  Oh, and Theo is my granddad. Theopolis James McKenzie. The name is far more distinguished than the man.

  Still, he’s the money. Or he was. Was supposed to be “the name on the building.” The one whose name is on most of the legal documents where mine couldn’t be. He’s the man who took care of me when pharmaceutical drugs made my mother believe she couldn’t. When the military took my sperm donor to Hawaii and gave him an excuse to never come back, I guess Moms didn’t feel like she needed to be present either.

  My family keeps doing this thing where they just leave Theo other people he doesn’t want. When Moms gave up and went too deep with her prescription love affair, she left Theo me. I like to think that’s why Aunt Lisa and I get along so well. We’re both Theo’s, even though neither of us wants to be and Theo sure as hell doesn’t want us either.

  When Uncle Miles died, he left his wife, Aunt Lisa, in Theo’s care. Not by any legal means. Just … Theo’s all either of us had after Uncle Miles. So, he became her de facto whatever-the-hell-you-want-to-call-it. I don’t know what they are to each other. I guess maybe Aunt Lisa is yet another way for Theo to keep a piece of his son.

  And Aunt Lisa … She’s here because there’s nowhere else for her to go. No family on this coast or the other, to speak of.

  I reach up to rub the back of my head where my barber nicked my neck a little too close. “I think …” I say, then take a deeper inhale than is warranted. I let it go as I continue. “I think I need to head home.”

  Desh is confused. The look on his face screams pretty solidly, I am confusion.

  “Okay, why are we going home?” Everything is “we” with Desh. Why are we going home? How are we doing today? I didn’t know we had seen every version of the Spider-Man films.

  They’re not that bad as a franchise goes, don’t you think?

  “Remember how I told you about my apiary?” I roll my neck. There’s a migraine starting somewhere back there, and if I don’t curb it now, it’s gonna John Cena the hell out of me later.

  Stay tuned for that, should it decide to really stick. My chronic migraines are a whole thing. Insert popcorn.gif here.

  “Yeah,” Desh says. “You and your bee fetish. What about it?”

  Bee fetish. “There’s some stuff going on with it right now, and it could be really bad. If I’m not there—”

  “No,” he says. “You’re not there.”

  I glance at him sharply.

  “Torrey, you are a billion miles from Los Angeles right now. It’s seven o’clock. What the hell kind of superhero shit are you hoping to achieve at this time of night?”

  He has a point. SFSU is not a hop-skip-jump from LA. It’s not across the country like Desh’s weirdo distance calculation would have you believe, but California is a very large state.

  “Here’s my plan.” Desh always has a plan. “I say we head to this freshman mixer. Mix some of the Absolut that I have in my backpack with whatever sugar-free punch they’re serving, scope the party for trade, and just be here tonight.”

  When he can tell I’m about to protest, he says, “Nothing more can fall apart tonight. Nothing can be fixed either. Take the night. You just got here, Torr. Just be here.”


  I hate when Desh is right. It’s rare. But when it happens, it fucking happens.

  “Alright. You got me.”

  “Hell, yeah,” he says, offering me a hand to drag my ass up off the cheap excuse for a mattress.

  “This is about to sound real dumb, but did you know bees pollinate cotton?” Uncle Miles said. I did know, actually. He’d said it to me once before, right when this whole bee thing started happening for him. Maybe ’bout a year back, just as he’d gotten Miles To Go up and running.

  Still, I answered, “Oh, yeah?”

  Excited, and on a tear now, he said, “Oh, yeah.” The family, his new wife, Aunt Lisa, and even a bunch of people from the neighborhood doubted him when he said the word “apiary” to us. Let’s be real, none of us even knew what the hell an apiary was. Uncle Miles, as long as I could remember, had always been adamant about his decision-making, about giving himself the room to think for himself and then feel solid in those decisions and whatever consequence might or might not follow.

  “Without bees, we’d be stuck wearing polyester boxer briefs and shit.”

  “Cotton,” I said. I’d had a year to let this percolate, so my delivery was impeccable when I said, bored, “So … you like bees for their connection to—”

  “Don’t make that joke or I’mma have to—”

  He was gon’ get this joke. “Uncle Miles, they are bee negroes.”

  “Why do I tell you anything?”

  “They’re BEEGROES!” I shouted after him as he walked away.

  I followed him, so it wasn’t hard to miss when he muttered, “Can’t take you nowhere.”

  I take it. Tonight is mine. Some part of my life has got to be mine. Not the apiary’s or Mom’s or even Lisa and Theo’s. Because somewhere along the way, I started taking responsibility for them, too.

  “Where’s that Absolut at?” I say.

  Desh is already lifting the half-full bottle out of his backpack. And somehow, I’m already feeling better.

  3.