“WHY ARE YOU DRESSED UP?” DREA ASKS, GIVING ME ELEVATOR eyes as I stand up from beside my mother’s garden plot.

I’m sweaty, my tomato vine has withered, and I’m so tired that my mind is playing tricks on me. I’m not in the mood to be judged for my damn outfit.

I point my trowel at her, and she dodges the clump of fertilizer that flies in her direction.

“I’m wearing a T-shirt from our junior year of high school, cutoff shorts, and I have horse crap under my nails from trying to save this tomato plant,” I say with an annoyed shake of my head. “I am not dressed up.”

Drea looks me up and down again. “Yes, an old T-shirt and shorts, but this T-shirt is the one that makes your titties look fantastic and those Daisy Dukes are the ones that show just the perfect sliver of ass cheek. You really think you can fool me?”

“Whatever.” I change the subject and hope she gets the point. “Did you get the VerenTech info from work bae?”

I probably don’t need it, but the way Theo had looked at me yesterday is going to my head a little. I start thinking about how I should include some of this new stuff, too, even if it isn’t history; it’s important, and now that the project has been approved, it will lead to big changes. It wouldn’t hurt to take a look.

She sucks her teeth. “Yes. I got you. I slipped the envelope under your door before I left today.”

“Thank you. I love youuu,” I croon into the trowel.

“Damn right you do.” Her eyes crease at the corners when she smiles at me, which makes me smile even more widely. “I didn’t look at the files, but he said VerenTech got some kind of special dispensation from the city. Same one BVT Realty gets and probably got it the same way—paying off these commissioners so they look the other way as they’re stamping contracts. Meanwhile I can’t even get a business loan.”

“You got rejected again?” I ask. “Maybe you can do a GoFundMe, or . . .”

“Don’t worry about it,” she says. “Here comes your little friend.” She squints and tilts her chin at something over my shoulder. When I turn, I see Theo approaching.

His hair is damp and messy and his stride is confident; he has a coffee cup in each hand. A camera hangs from a strap around his neck, bouncing over a black T-shirt emblazoned with three bold words in white: BLACK LIVES MATTER.

“Good morning,” he says, holding out one of the brown cardboard cups toward me.

I snatch it, then gesture at his shirt with my other hand. “Howdy Doody! Howdy Doody!”

He plucks at the shirt. “Really? This is Howdy Doody?”

Drea looks back and forth between us, hand over her chest as she laughs. “What is happening right now?”

I narrow my eyes at Theo. “Why are you wearing this?”

He blinks a few times. “I saw the posts about Preston on OurHood. I wanted to let people know that I support—”

“Can you change out of that? Please.” I run my hands over my braids, gently because my scalp is still tender. “I don’t want to be known as the woman walking around with the white dude with a BLM shirt on, okay?”

I expect him to push back, but those harsh features of his kind of droop all at once, like a dog that’s being yelled at but doesn’t know why.

“I appreciate the sentiment,” I add.

He nods stiffly, places his coffee down on the chair next to me, then the camera, and yanks his shirt up. It’s nothing I haven’t seen a dozen times through his window, but it hits a little different now that he’s right in front of me. My neck and chest go hot in a flash and I look away.

I should just start building my cabin alongside Fuckboy Creek because obviously it’s where I intend to spend the rest of my days.

“Sydney, was this all a devious plan to get him to take his shirt off?” Drea whispers, and now it’s Theo who’s getting her elevator-eye treatment. “Well played, well played.”

“Dre.” I give her a if you don’t cut it out look, but she’s busy pretending to run her hand over Theo’s chest hair while the shirt is up over his head. She jerks her hand back when his head pops out of the shirt’s neck.

He turns the shirt inside out and pulls it back on. “I’m just gonna hide this important social justice message that seems to be embarrassing Sydney.”

His tone is a little . . . persnickety.

“Was I supposed to thank you? Appreciate it and give you a cookie or two?”

He looks down at me, his face flushed from embarrassment and his gaze wounded as he tugs the shirt down around his waist. “I know you don’t need my help, but do you want it? I thought you were just giving me shit for fun, but if you seriously don’t want me around, let me know now.”

“You know, that’s very thoughtful of you to ask, Brad,” Drea says in a surprisingly friendly tone, grabbing my coffee and taking a sip, then returning the cup to my hand. “Sydney does need the help. She’s not a super detail-oriented person.”

“My details for the tour are oriented, thank you very much,” I say as I turn to glare at her, but she has her phone out and isn’t paying me a bit of mind.

I take a deep breath, lowering my hackles and trying not to be the person Marcus always told me I was. “You got a date lined up or something?”

“Line up in progress. There’s this cutie working at the new Jamaican-Mexican fusion restaurant and he slipped me his phone number with my beef patty taco. Might as well make the most of the changes gentrification has wrought, right?”

She wiggles her brows, glances at Theo, and then blows me a kiss as she walks off, navigating around raised garden beds while her eyes seem to be glued to her screen. After I put my tools away and wash my hands, Theo and I head for the heritage center, marinating in the full-on August heat and humidity, and the awkwardness shared by a person who’s committed a faux pas and the person who corrected them.

He slows as we pass the medical center, looking up at the huge sign on the fence with a 3-D rendering of what the VerenTech campus will look like. “What do you think of the VerenTech deal? I used to pass the people protesting, and talked to a few of them, but I didn’t really get why people wouldn’t want it in our neighborhood when other states were dying to have VerenTech choose them.”

I bristle at his use of our but don’t snap at him.

“Well, a big part of it is how people addicted to crack were treated back in the day.” I sniff and start walking. “People acted like those addicts were soulless zombies, or jokes, or problems to lock away and take their babies from. Now white people get hooked on something, and we’re building fancy new facilities to research how to fix things.”

He has the nerve to give me a look. “Do you think Black people are immune to opioids? I’ve seen all kinds of people hooked on them. I mean, the other night, in this very spot a guy who was high out of his mind—”

I roll my eyes. “Yeah, some drugged-up Black dude from Gifford Place is exactly who’s making the cover of magazines and news reports when people discuss the opioid problem.”

“The alternative is not helping anyone, then?” he asks.

“The alternative is not dropping the research center and the adjoining headquarters of a major corporation dead in the middle of a community that still gets overpoliced based on War on Drugs bullshit. It’s gonna be like seeing a middle finger every day for some people. Oh wait, it won’t be, because none of us will be able to afford living here by the time it’s done.”

He doesn’t say anything for once and we keep walking.

“It used to be an asylum, you know,” I say eventually, feeling guilty for snapping. “Before it became a hospital. People always used to say the place was haunted. Like, bad haunted. Ghosts-tryin’-to-kill-you haunted. Supposedly, that’s the real reason for all the malpractice lawsuits they got.”

Theo flashes me a grin—he’s not mad at me. Good.

“I’m sure the doctors backed that theory.”

“Yup. And when I was a kid, there was a rumor that if you stayed out too late, the men in the white coats would get you and you’d never be heard from again.”

Theo looks up at the building, old and with dead vines clinging to the sides of it but still imposing. He rubs at his arms.

“Creepy. Was that like the clown-van-kidnappers urban legend?”

“The what?” I cut my eyes at him.

“When I was growing up, they used to say clowns drove around in a white van and tried to lure kids in. I heard it in, like, six different states. There has to be some truth to it.”

I laugh and shake my head. “That is the worst kidnapping plot I’ve ever heard. Dress like something that will send kids running and screaming from you and try to lure them into your clown van? Not even clown car for consistency? Come on now.”

“Well, it makes as much sense as kids getting kidnapped by hospital ghosts.” His lips are all tooted up like I didn’t respect his clown story enough.

“Well. At least one person who had a relative killed by the Tuskegee experiment lives on our street. It’s not that hard to figure out where the fear of hospital kidnappers might come from.”