Part One: Hungry
Claude had lived in the city for five years and it still didn’t feel like home. Home, in her estimation, required capacity for mutual understanding between one being and another. Home was a gift she rarely received; a gift her family didn’t teach her how to give.
But her friendship with Astra came as close to home as Claude had felt before.
Both in their mid-twenties, Claude first met Astra three years after she moved to the city. The two met one weekend in the bustle of a farmer’s market when they both reached for the last pre-packaged slice of pineapple upside down cake. She failed to notice anyone next to her vying for the treat until she felt the sting of Astra’s long, red acrylics on top of her hand.
Claude looked into Astra’s eyes, big and dark brown and pleading, and saw a similar set of eyes several feet below her from Astra’s small child, the three-year-old girl who truly wanted the cake. It struck Claude that it may have been the first time she’d looked into anyones’ eyes bumbling through her errands downtown. Her gaze was typically affixed to the sidewalk, long limbs tucked close to her body to avoid bumping anyone in the jostling crowd.
When Claude looked at the young woman, at her pouty lips and dimpled chin and irises like cups of black coffee, she knew she didn’t want to be the bad guy. That would be her worst nightmare. So she not only handed the dish to Astra, but she also paid for it.
The two soon discovered a deep friendship hiding behind their shared interest in justice and fruity baked goods. This came as a welcome surprise to Claude and her new court-appointed therapist — Astra became her first real friend since she moved across the country and away from the past, onward and upward. It was with Astra that Claude rediscovered the fire that inspired her to leave everything behind years ago: perhaps her home, like her destiny, could be chosen.
In the city, Astra steadily introduced Claude to her other friends, including old classmates Tiff and Bee, whose people had lived there for generations. Astra introduced Claude to many things: to the safer streets to walk after dark, to speakeasies with incredible music and piss smelling bathrooms. Secret clearings in forests outside the city riddled with litter and beautiful wildflowers. Smoke sessions with Tiff and Bee on the rooftops of skyscrapers, even though Claude didn’t smoke.
Everything with Astra was new, but the feeling she inspired in Claude was ancient, instinctual. After long nights closing up at the diner and returning to the cramped apartment she shared with roommates who barely heard her speak, Claude would dream about starting a life with the young mother. Claude spent their first two years of friendship sustaining her desire on intoxicating intervals of intimacy shared between old school girlfriends: braiding each other’s hair, sneaking Astra lunch whenever she got a break at work, cuddling Astra after the heartbreaks from the men in her life, including her child’s father, and pretending not to be envious of their hold on Astra’s heart.
Astra’s heart, deep and angry and hungry and raw, which Claude felt matched her own heart perfectly. Astra, with her bouncing afro and glossy sparkled lips, with her even skin and the fine hair on her legs so thin it tickled Claude’s palm when given the opportunity to graze Astra’s thigh. Astra, with her two laughs, the delicate one she used in public and the snort she reserved for the company of loved ones, of which Claude felt honored to be a part. The snort, that came in twos and threes and often accompanied by tears, and once accompanied by an accidental fart, and Claude was honored by it all, to inspire such loss of inhibition in someone so beautiful with one of her worst dad jokes.
Claude had no children of her own but she knew she would make a great father. What could it look like for her and Astra to raise Astra’s daughter Nyla together? For Claude and Astra to embrace not as friends, but as lovers; Claude’s long and lanky body framing the softness of Astra’s like a fence to a garden; protecting Astra, making her laugh always?
This kind of dreaming came quickly to Claude. As easy as it was for her to never speak her dream aloud, it was as difficult to let the dream go. But one devastating night two years into their friendship, after Astra rain checked a movie outing with Claude to go to the park with her child’s father; after Claude responded to the news by finishing a pint of vodka and drunk dialing all of her own past lovers; after Claude threw up in the middle of downtown in front of dozens of people and blacked out; after Claude woke up hungover in the apartment of a dubious stranger with a different stranger’s wallet in her pocket; well, after a lot of things, Claude knew she needed a change.
The twenty-seven year old could no longer afford to linger in delusional fantasies that she knew, based on experiences from her former life, would drown her in heartbreak, hangovers, and legal trouble. Despite her refusal, fantasies kept sneaking into Claude’s psyche in the night. She was a week sober from her bedtime ritual of stalking the social media profiles of Astra’s exes when she heard the news that triggered her relapse: Astra’s baby father Rashid was missing.
A week after the sobering news, Claude joined Astra, Tiff, and Bee for a potluck at Tiff’s apartment while the child, Nyla, stayed with family. It was at this potluck that Astra asked the question, in jest, that changed everything, that would lead to the dissolution of a two year friendship faster than sugar dissolves in hot tea.
“Can you believe people out here thinking I murdered my baby father?”