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  Sleeping over at Stacy’s house was different. Her parents lived in a big subdivision and were constantly updating and renovating. The living room had surround sound embedded. Her parents’ office had a newer, sleeker computer on a monthly basis. She had a projector screen in her basement where we’d play Guitar Hero or watch a movie I couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen yet, like Back to the Future or Armageddon.

  I could never figure out why she hadn’t seen stuff that had been out forever. Her family moved to Kentucky from California, and so it was put to me that kids out west didn’t watch as much TV. I pitied them. But it wasn’t just movies she didn’t know about. One time we were in her room listening to the Alien Ant Farm version of “Smooth Criminal,” and she didn’t know Michael Jackson sang it first. I had to believe that maybe she was from an alien ant farm because who doesn’t know every Michael Jackson hit? There’s just no excuse for that level of ignorance.

  Every time I spent the night her room had changed. It was either a different color, from red to teal to dark gray back to white, or it was literally a different room because she wanted to switch with her brother on a whim, and/or she had some new hobby her parents had invested in. The first time I came over she had this guitar she would play and sing songs by the Scorpions and AC/DC for me. The next time she had a pet snake she had to feed a rat to satiate it before bed. I could never keep up with who she was. One day she was decked out in clothes from Hot Topic, the next she was deep in the preppy styles from Hollister. All the while I was wearing a few name-brand clothes, but mostly whatever was the second-to-worst thing at Walmart and Old Navy.

  The only constant in my sleeping over was that her family could not cook and never would. We’d eat cereal or butter on noodles. If they ordered a pizza, there were never toppings.

  “I don’t like sauce,” Stacy would complain. I still don’t relate on a human level to hating all sauces. Like, what?

  There was also this bizarre weekend ritual where her mom would wake us up in the morning. On a Saturday. Before ten a.m. When Tiffany would come to my house, my mom absolutely would not wake us up, savoring the moments of quiet before the teen noise drowned out her solace. Same for when I stayed at Tiffany’s. But something weird was going on at this house.

  “Wake up wake up wake up, Stacy!” her mom would sing like a homemade jingle. Then Stacy would groan.

  “MOM! Leave us alone!”

  Stacy’s mom would continue by grabbing Stacy’s toes and singing the song more.

  For the life of me I can’t figure out why this tradition was better than just letting us sleep in our growing teen bodies.

  * * *

  * * *

  Spring break junior year rolled around, and Stacy and I spent the first weekend painting the set for our school’s production of Clue: The Musical. The set looked cheap and bad. Four big wooden rectangles would come out interchangeably and assemble a different part of the iconic game board. The musical is also terrible, though, so it was fine. Volunteering for the crew of the show was an excuse for me to fawn over Mr. Raney. But that weekend was the only public engagement I had planned for my week off school.

  Dipping her brush in yellow paint, Stacy yelled, “My family is going camping this week! You should come! We have a trailer that hooks up to my dad’s truck so it’s not even like we’re really camping. You should come!”

  That was the tip off. The refrain of “you should come!” I knew she wasn’t going to let this idea go. I tried to change the subject, but it just kept changing back.

  “Plus it’ll be fun, we can hike and eat hot dogs and take naps,” she gushed. None of this sounded like what I wanted to do with someone else’s family for the better part of a vacation. If I had my way I’d be waking up around noon to watch Dawson’s Creek reruns on TBS.

  I saw the RAV4 pull up and I got in the back seat. Instead of driving off, Mom rolled down the window to Stacy’s smiling face.

  “Can Akilah come camping with us this week?” Stacy asked, oblivious to the subtext that I hated this idea.

  Looking back at me through the rearview mirror, I’m certain my mom noticed me mouthing “no” and shaking my head. So it can be considered no less than traitorous that she said, “Yeah, that should be fine, I’ll bring her over,” before we started the drive home.

  “What the hell, Marilynn?” I began.

  “Oh, come on, Kilah, it’ll be fun!” she said, and then burst into laughter. She knew there was no way I was going to enjoy myself in the woods with little to no cell service for an undisclosed number of days with Stacy’s family. She hadn’t really met them, but she knew I was a frequent guest in their house and that if Stacy was any indication, they were super safe and square.

  The trip was doomed from the jump. For starters: I didn’t want to be there. Additionally, the entire drive to middle-of-nowhere Indiana was a drag. Stacy wouldn’t stop tattling on her little brother so we all lost movie privileges (yes, they were the kind of white people with the TVs on the back of the car seats). I’d already seen Chicago, but it’s really not the kind of movie you can just stop in the middle.

  Once at the campgrounds, things only got worse and more boring. We drove right out of cell range, and while Stacy was a good friend for sitting and watching TV, without the help of background noise she could be too quiet. Between eating our gas station bounty of sour gummies and chips, we’d just nap for an hour or so at a time and then wake the other up to not have to sit alone in the trailer with our thoughts.

  After enough rounds of this, Stacy thought it would be best if we went on a hike.

  “Fine,” I said, when I really meant, “I’d rather get hit by a car.”

  It was muddier than any of us expected, so we all had to pretend we weren’t pissed off that our shoes had been rendered completely unwearable in public. There were more hills and trees than we expected, so walking took forever. Stacy’s brother, Blaine, was struggling hard, and though I’m no outdoorsperson, I certainly will not be pulling up the rear in the event a bear, wild boar, or drunk dude catches our scent.

  “Is this pot?” Stacy asked, holding up a plant she’d found while we waited for Blaine to catch up.

  “Yes,” I lied, hoping that would end the conversation. And it did. Kind of. She ate it. She just shoved it in her mouth. And then, when she didn’t like the taste, she thought she was going to throw up, which caused her great distress. She had a panic attack.

  At that very moment, Blaine decided it would be a great idea to jump in a puddle that was deeper than he thought and proceeded to fall in, get soaked, and start to cry.

  So now I’m in the woods with a damp ten-year-old and a panicking fourteen-year-old when all I wanted was to watch my shows at home in peace.

  When we made it back to the campsite, there was more familial bickering to be endured. Stacy didn’t want a hot dog, but all there was were hot dogs. She wanted s’mores, but it wasn’t s’mores time yet. Blaine wouldn’t stop crying. Their dad took him to the bathroom to presumably yell at him some more.

  This whole time I just toasted bun after bun and made hot dog after hot dog. I didn’t know if we were going to eat a whole pack as a unit, but I wanted the work part of the trip to be over already. Out of the darkness a tiny meow caught our attention.

  A few moments later, a kitten with a broken back leg wandered up to our campfire. It was cute, I’ll concede. Was it pick-it-up-and-let-it-piss-on-your-hoodie cute, Stacy? I don’t think so. So that was a whole thing.

  Blaine and his dad came back from the bathroom, and they both looked like they’d seen a ghost.

  “There were bloody handprints. Everywhere. On the walls. On the door,” Stacy’s dad recounted.

  “Eww,” I said.

  “Oh my god, but I have to use the bathroom,” Stacy said.

  “Pee behind the trailer; none of us is going back to that bathroom!” her dad ordere
d, and now it was back to pouting and hot dogs while a literal murder may have been unfolding just steps away.

  We ate s’mores mostly in silence because Stacy forgot the amp for her guitar (thank GOD). Around what was probably only nine p.m. we got bored of each other and decided we should go to sleep. Unfortunately I couldn’t get comfortable. None of us could. There was rustling outside, and that murderer was probably on to us.

  Plus, it was still kind of cold in the evening, but the bed that Stacy and I shared wasn’t close enough to the heater for it to be effective. Stacy would insist on trying to be the big spoon, but then I’d get sweaty and have to push her off, desperate for this hell-trip to end.

  And end it did. By three a.m. her father was having a full-blown asthma attack because someone (I really don’t know who) didn’t clean out the heater filter, and dusty air had been blowing at full velocity into this man’s lungs for hours. I let him take a hit off my inhaler, and we began the long drive back to the ’burbs.

  * * *

  * * *

  I will always be best friends with Tiffany. She’s so smart, so funny, so driven. As much as both of our leaves keep changing, she’s the person I call when I get into town, and we pick up where we left off. I was in her wedding, and if I can con a man into settling down with me, she will be in mine. In relationships and friendships, it’s important to really see the other person for who they are, their faults and all. And it’s also important to know when those faults are too much.

  In Stacy’s case, years after we were both out of high school and college, she fell in love with a guy. I never met the guy, but he was good-looking in a way where he was definitely treated better his whole life. With women I tend to think, regardless of how attractive they are, that there was a period when they didn’t know, or they didn’t believe it. Men don’t make it to their twenties without knowing they’re good-looking. So there’s that. As their relationship progressed, Stacy adopted some of his more backward, racist beliefs. We stopped being friends the day I read a post of hers on Facebook claiming that being big and black (in the case of slain teen Michael Brown) was, in its own way, “being armed.” Yeah.

  But it wasn’t easy walking away. It hasn’t been easy watching her get married and have kids with this guy. And the truth is she was always nice to me. Her family never treated me differently and always helped me whenever I needed it. When I think about friendship and love, I think that it really comes down to gray areas; love is the ability or willingness to see the other’s gray areas—the spots where maybe you have to give them the benefit of the doubt, or let them grow into being something else. Love is lost when you can no longer do that. Though I’m aware Stacy really has always just wanted to be in love, and would say anything to be seen as the perfect match, there is no gray area when it comes to my lived experience. I just couldn’t see a way forward for that friendship, and I don’t regret it.

  All this to say that Mindy Kaling is right, and some bitches just don’t make the cut.

  Bad Skin

  You know you’ve had acne when you have very specific memories of zits:

  That one time during the seventh-inning stretch at a major league baseball game, when you raised your arm and a twinge of pain notified you of the planet forming in an ingrown hair. The rest of the game you tried to covertly push your arm fat into your armpit, and by the bottom of the ninth there was a satisfying, almost audible “pop” letting you know that the tyranny was over. At least until tomorrow/the next month/forever. Acne is a life sentence, and it’s one of the only “flaws” that we as a society refuse to embrace.

  I remember my first zit. As a sedentary couch-child, I took a lot of naps on the weekends. My mom usually spent the day running errands, and us kids liked to spend most of our time alone. For some reason I was especially tired that specific Sunday. Perhaps the whole prior day of watching television and eating chips had exhausted me. Either way, I made my way upstairs (with my comforter that I had taken downstairs to the couch, for extra comfort) to my bed and napped on and off for approximately eight hours. Waking up only to relieve myself, I noticed a pearl on the skin above my upper lip in the “snot trough,” as my mom had so lovingly deemed that part of my anatomy. It’s amazing that I knew exactly what had to be done, given my lack of experience, but I pressed both my pointer fingers into it, watching a tiny Silly String of zit goo escape. Convinced my skin inconveniences were behind me, I took my lazy ass back to bed.

  . . . Until the next time I had to use the restroom. I woke up, walked back to the bathroom, and to my dismay, the pearl had returned. Was my earlier triumph a dream? I’d beaten the boss character, what more could he want with me?

  I repeated the pressure technique, but this time I didn’t let up. And the line of gunk just kept coming. My eyes began to water from the pain, but I knew that I couldn’t be bothered by this after my next nap session. My tolerance for repeat performances is incredibly low. Eventually it would be Monday and I’d have to show up in fourth grade with the prepubescent baby skin of my classmates. Despite my completely open nap schedule, I didn’t have time for this.

  Finally a big glump came out, followed by the red blood of a champion. That had to be all. I waddled back to my twin-size bed, proud of having achieved so much that day. Perhaps that doesn’t sound like a monumental day, just naps and zit-popping, but it’s now in a chapter in a book, where it is immortalized forever.

  Other notable zits include:

  1. The one I popped in my purple locker mirror freshman year of high school, right before my crush approached me to ask about the world civ homework, none the wiser.

  2. An ear zit that definitely made a sound after a week of driving me crazy.

  3. A zit on my downstairs area that I only discovered after the most painful wipe of my life.

  4. The pile of blackheads that pushed out of my nose like that Play-Doh hair toy from the ’90s during my first round of Accutane in college.

  5. The one in the middle of my back that I had to do a yoga position to finally eject.

  6. The beauty mark that was never a beauty mark but probably a decade-old blackhead.

  7. The secret eyebrow one that popped as I was filling in the hairs with my brow pencil. Ouch.

  8. Any number of boob zits.

  9. The one that showed up in the middle of my nose that decided to leave a chocolate chip scar there for about a year.

  The truth is bad zits happen to good people. Mine are less for lack of hygiene (my pillow cases are among the cleanest you’ll ever find) and more to do with raging hormones. Every single month without fail I will get a giant pustule on my chin and wonder how it could be happening to me (as if it hasn’t happened every month before for the past sixteen years), and then boom, my period comes to town, ruining sheets and moods in its wake.

  Birth control kind of helped, in the way that gaining weight and crying all the time helps.

  Accutane definitely assisted in drying out everything (everything), excessive joint pain, general lethargy, and giving me a lifetime struggle with night blindness (that’s right, for any teens reading this, the acne prescription you already have to log on to a website and take a quiz to get each month has a LOT of epic side effects your dermatologist may have forgotten to mention). If it’s dark out, my eyes might as well be closed because nothing’s gonna stop me from walking into a ditch or into the mouth of a bear or other things that lie in wait in the shadows. Mostly, though, I just bruise my shins on my late-night walks to the fridge. It hasn’t deterred my ice cream habit, but it sure tries.

  My favorite thing about having acne as an adult (no, acne doesn’t magically go away on your eighteenth birthday, like you may have been led to believe) is the unsolicited advice. People love weighing in on other people’s ailments. Have you ever tried to do anything? There’s someone with a superiority complex just waiting to relate their unrelated experience to yours.

&
nbsp; “I’m thinking of going to the gym more.”

  “You should try CrossFit! You’re wasting your time if you do anything else, honestly. I feel like my full body workouts . . .” blah blah ad infinitum.

  “I’ve been feeling anxious lately.”

  “Yoga!” they’ll scream directly into your mouth. “And acupuncture! Needles will help with your anxiety! Do you drink tea? It’s Instagram’s fault! Stop eating gluten!” etc., etc.

  “I have hormonal imbalances that cause my skin to sometimes get cystic acne.”

  “You should wash your face with . . .”

  “No, I said it was my hormo—”

  “Have you tried glycolic acid?”

  Anyone with legit acne will tell you that yes, we’ve tried everything. I’m an expert. I don’t have any questions. I know exactly what every damn acid does and doesn’t do, which one requires you to wear sunscreen after, exactly how long a mask should be left on (sheet and clay), and I never, ever, ever need to hear from anyone about any new serum. All the serums already exist; they’re just selling you more of the same garbage!

  A guy once stayed over at my apartment and came out of the bathroom, mouth agape.

  “Are all those products just for you? I just have soap!” he exclaimed in astonishment, as if he had walked into the sand tiger from Aladdin, never seeing such wonders before in his life.

  Yes, I have at least five but no more than ten toners, face washes, face scrubs, special face scrubbers, peels, masks, creams, gels, tonics, and exfoliators. I wouldn’t call myself a hobbyist, but I certainly spend more time than I’d like trying to figure out how to clear up my skin. In fact, almost all of my 11:11s and 12:34s have been spent wishing for clearer skin, longer eyelashes, and less cellulite. Sorry, world peace, someone else is gonna have to be less selfish with their wishes.