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The knowledge was disturbing to someone as private as Ledi and triggered a sense of helplessness all too familiar for a woman who’d been bounced through strangers’ homes for most of her childhood.
Ledi had been juggling jobs and school since she was thirteen.
She’d been lucky in that she’d transitioned from foster care to adulthood better than some people she’d been in the system with, but luck wasn’t a statistically significant factor in planning her future.
Making money, on the other hand, was a proven course of action, and having multiple sources of income was a safety net she couldn’t live without. She didn’t have family to turn to when times got rough, and one mistake at work or school could have a domino effect on the life plans she had so carefully been setting up.
Brian was super fun to work with: on her first day, she’d introduced herself, and he’d asked her to take out the trash more frequently—he’d thought she was the cleaning woman. He often stopped to explain basic concepts to Ledi—and Ledi alone—during lab meetings, while asking Kevin, the newbie, for his advice on how things should be run.
Ledi had been fascinated with the cover: a close-up shot of a woman with dark skin, just like hers, peering into a microscope. That scientist had been trying to cure a mysterious disease, and Ledi had gleaned from the image not only that she wanted to do the same thing but also that she could.
Do you think you’re somehow exempt from putting in the work?” Ledi sucked in a breath. She worked hard—so much harder than she should have had to, really. That was the problem. When you worked twice as hard all the time, working at the average rate was slacking off.
**
She’d learned early on that challenging the people who held power over you made you undesirable, and undesirability meant gathering all of your things into a black plastic trash bag and being sent back to the group home.
Being outwardly friendly while keeping people at a distance was second nature to Ledi. She thought of it as her social phospholipid bilayer: flexible, dynamic, and designed to keep the important parts of herself separate from a possibly dangerous outside environment. It had been working for the prokaryotes for eons, and it would suffice for a broke grad school student, which was only slightly higher on the evolutionary scale.
excitement was just another name for expectation, and expectations were the fastest route to disappointment.
The emails were more than mere annoyances. They were a reminder of what she had lost. She
Portia would of course try to fix things because Portia was invested in fixing everything that wasn’t herself.
Ledi had never expected him to hang around to begin with. She was like a faulty piece of Velcro; people tried to stick to her, but there was something intrinsically wrong in her design.
As a child, he’d imagined Naledi in some tower far away, being held by an evil sorcerer. He’d imagined she’d needed saving and he would be the one to do it. FUCK. OFF. Oh no, Naledi didn’t need his help at all.
Nice reversal of fairytale expectations
An unfamiliar annoyance pulsed through Thabiso. He wanted something, and it wasn’t guaranteed he would have it. That was rare, indeed, and it whet his desire to a sharp edge.
entitlement
The finance ministers sent me here to sell our country’s well-being to the highest bidder. But he couldn’t tell her that; she knew his most intimate details, but not that he’d agreed to allow the minerals to be extracted from beneath peoples’ ancestral lands. There would be relocation, paid for of course, but it still didn’t sit well with him. “The
Ick
What had he wanted when he tasked Likotsi with finding her? A reckoning? An outlet for his frustrations? Something, anything, other than the thousand worries that beat at his shoulders like the noonday sun?
American youth that he had studied; jobs were not plentiful in this country, and colleges were not free or affordable as they were in civilized nations like Thesolo.
Nice evocation of his country as the more civilized/undermining of stereotypes of African nations
“I’ve spent more on shoes and you’ve said nothing. Get the young man his money and I will see you at the hotel tonight.” She gave
Hard to reconcile the profligate spending with the desperation that has him willing to sell mineral rights out from under his people
He’d thought of the countless meetings where his initiatives were shot down, called wastes of money. He had the same education, more, than his ministers, but he was the Playboy PanAfrique, after all. Sometimes he still pushed for things. But more often than not, he gave in. Giving in was easier, and he wondered if it wasn’t worse than exploiting. That was at least taking action; he’d grown complacent.
“Only a dog seeks reward for performing lowly tasks for others. Fetch! Pour! Serve! You’re no better than a—than a Saint Bernard!”
Im really getting sick of this prick
Please keep in mind that just because you have the money to do things doesn’t mean they should be done.”
“Why don’t you say no?” His tone was serious, as if he was presenting her with an option she’d never considered. “Because men make life harder for women who say no, especially women who look like me,” she said. “STEM is already hard to navigate—being marked as someone who doesn’t work well in teams or contribute enough could tank my career.”
“My parents expect a lot from me,” Jamal said. Apparently, he was one of those people who found chopping meditative. “They pin their every hope for the future onto me, so they also want to decide everything for me, down to how I do my job and who I marry. But at least I have parents, so I shouldn’t complain.”
Men had looked at Ledi with lust in their eyes before. The way Jamal looked at her was something entirely new to her. No, that wasn’t true. She’d seen it before. It was the look on Charming’s face when Sleeping Beauty’s eyes fluttered open. The expression of awe that Eric sported when he woke to find Ariel cradling him on the beach. It was the look that she thought only existed in Disney cartoons because it seemed so highly improbable that anyone would ever look at her that way.
Happiness. Belonging. The knowledge that she was loved.
The reverence of the ancestors was ingrained into every Thesoloian, whether they were a beggar or a king. The remembrance of those who came before you and the passing on of familial knowledge was something sacred.
night was . . .” Wonderful? Frightening? “Nunya business.” Likotsi snorted, but her smile was sincere when she looked at him.
Apparently, oh-sure-I’ll-do-that Ledi had been incinerated by the flames of her frustration and I-wish-a-motherfucker-would Ledi had risen from the ashes.
“I’m selfish. Entitled. You witnessed that firsthand the day you met me,” he said. “But I’m a prince, Ledi. Before this week, I’d never had to think of anything beyond myself and my people. I saw getting what I wanted, when I wanted, as a fair bargain for a life of servitude.” “Servitude?
He didn’t know how to navigate this new rocky terrain in the geography of their relationship.
“Can I?” he asked. He wasn’t going to kiss her into submission. He had already submitted to the force that drew him to her—he could only ask her to join him willingly. “Um.”
Her breath caught at his words and she wished she had never let her silly Velcro hang-up slip. He couldn’t be telling the truth. She had years and years of evidence to back her up—people might give her a try, but in the end, she was not the kind of person anyone kept around.
That was the thing with people getting past your defenses. They were bound to fuck up, maybe a little, maybe a lot. It was what they did afterward that counted. Ledi wondered if her Velcro was always defective, or if sometimes she was so scared of being hurt that she preemptively ripped herself away.
“That’s the thing, Naledi. That the people who love you will hurt you the most is one of the great conundrums of the human condition. My philosophy tutor said so, and he had about five degrees on the subject, so I guess it holds some water.” She giggled despite the tears burning her eyes,
