JASMINE BASUEL

Netty was kissed outside the apartment building. Her girlfriend’s lips were dry and the press was quick and after she pulled back, Netty licked her lips like there was something to taste. A gust of happy air swept through her before the familiar girl who kissed her said,

“I understand now. Why you think we can’t go on a trip.”

Netty looked up at the apartment building. Four stories up she felt her parents cleaning the dishes in motions so practiced they never even thought to use the dishwasher. The kitchen cabinets slumped against bare walls wearing wallpaper peeling away from fifty-year-old glue. The vase of pert yellow flowers placed on the table before dinner. What was an indulgent vacation in the face of all that? How could money spent on a nameless island compare to money spent up there?

“I never said we couldn’t go.” Netty’s voice came out soft. She kind of meant it.

Her girlfriend shrugged. “You might as well have. I mean. It would have been great to get away but now—”

“Yeah, I know.” An aborted kick at the sidewalk. Guilt and pride wrestling.

“But now I get it. You can’t go because of the whole money thing.”

“What money thing?” Netty choked out. Pride, victorious.

Her girlfriend’s forehead folded in on itself and she stepped back to look at Netty. “The money thing.”

“There’s no money thing.” Netty’s ears were pink. There wasn’t a money thing. At least not a money thing that her girlfriend should know about. Nothing she could even understand. Not with her manicured nails and designer handbag and white parents and their acres-deep lawn. This was a gap she could never breach; a gap Netty did not wish her to breach.

The sun was branding itself on the last minutes of the day. The girl looked orange, swaying like a pale candle flame. Her hair was yellow. Netty almost forgot to be upset, she was so taken.

“Yeah, but it seems like there’s a money thing. With your parents. And like. I get it. Immigrant stuff, right? I get it.” Her girlfriend’s confusion gave way to a satisfied kind of confidence, like she had solved something between them. Her body sunk into the feeling while Netty’s spun up into her shoulders.

Netty frowned. “I seriously don’t get what you mean.”

“And of course there’s all the other things with traveling. Like buying bikinis or like maybe just swimsuits if you’d like. And the food and transport. All those kinds of things.”

“Is this about my parents?” Am I now a stranger to you now that you know them?

Netty’s girlfriend gave a short laugh, confusion crawling up her back again, pulling tight across her green eyes. Even in sensing Netty’s cooling, she was still so beautiful with her slender figure and straight nose. This girl was someone Netty had only dreamed about; something she had never allowed herself before. The girl replied, defensive, red cheeks against blue eyes, “No. Not at all. Why would you think that? I’m not like that.”

Netty rolled her shoulders. Her coarse black hair barely scratched them. She felt the kitchen blending into the dining table with the plastic-covered chair cushions, into the plastic-covered couch and the ten-year-old television in the thirty-year-old cabinet and the browning doily on the coffee table. She thought about her two parents four stories up, saving the food from the plate the girl hadn’t touched while the other plates were scraped clean. The plastic Christmas tree with a paper lantern shaped like a star on top. The pile of shoes at the entrance. The cross with a porcelain Jesus above the bedroom door.

“Did you like dinner?” This was all Netty could say. There was nothing else.

The girl’s body relaxed. “I’ve never had food like that before. I liked it. Please let your mom know.”

“My dad made it.”

“It was great.”

Netty licked her lips again and they started walking home.

JASMINE BASUEL is currently pursuing their MFA in Creative Writing and teaching at Emerson College in Boston. They are mostly concerned with writing stories based on queer Asian American narratives. They have work upcoming in Bodega Magazine.