“The Thing About You”

When they were little, Netty and G spent their prayers asking God why he made them cousins instead of sisters. Why had he made them suffer the cruelty of returning to their separate homes alone after weekend sleepovers instead of giving them a bunk bed forever? They passed notes in the hallway in elementary school, got in trouble for chatting if they were in the same class. But middle school created a wedge between them for many reasons: newfound friends, different levels of tolerance for the teachers’ disappointment, different ends of the fashion spectrum. By eighth grade, that wedge widened into a silence that carried through to high school. They small-talked at the kids’ table on Thanksgiving and nodded across the hallway when moving from class to class, but that was it. They graduated from high school with this distance. Netty went away to college in Albany, and G stayed back, picking up full-time hours at the ShopRite she’d worked at since junior year. Netty loved her freshman year intro classes; G loved the prospect of never taking another test.

Netty had a week back home for winter break and found the nerve to message G and see if she wanted to catch up. Netty’s roommate read her tarot cards, and the readings were full of swords and secrets; she needed to quit lying to herself, the cards said, and take some responsibility for this thing she could not name. On the walk back to the quad, she wept into the wrist of her sweater, and once in the dark dorm room, she rewatched The Fresh Prince and imagined that she and Ashley Banks were girlfriends. What a moron she was, how right it felt.

She hadn’t told her family yet, but G seemed like the right first step. And college Netty had become a better person, someone who could forgive and forget. Someone worldly, with something to teach G about how other people live.

What a coincidence, actually, because G needed someone to join her on a little adventure across the county to visit her online girlfriend, Stazya.

“She got like six hundred friends on MySpace,” G boasted from the driver’s seat of her Camry. She ashed her cigarette out of the small gap in the window.

Netty hadn’t checked her MySpace since she left for school; everyone at Albany used Facebook. “Is that a lot?”

“Yeah, man. She’s like a model.” G pulled on her cigarette. “To be honest wit you, I don’t know what she even sees in me. I mean, I dress good, obviously, and I got a cute face, but Stazya could have anybody. Anybody.”

Netty felt an impulse to tell G not to get so down on herself, to offer some of her other great qualities. But she didn’t really know her cousin anymore. She did look put-together, though, and in better spirits than the last time they saw each other, at Netty’s going-away party.

“Well, I’m happy for you,” Netty said. “Really, that’s great.”

“Thanks, man.” G pulled onto the Sprain Brook Parkway. “I can’t wait for you to meet her.”

Netty waved a hand in front of her face to push the smoke away and rolled her window down a little more.

“G, I’m gay,” Netty said, so plainly and directly, the moment happened and passed more quickly than she could even comprehend.

“This gay-ass family!” G barked out. They were passing the Stew Leonard’s in Yonkers, where they used to get pumpkins to carve on Halloween. Netty almost pointed it out, but it was behind them by the time she finished the memory.

“What do you mean ‘gay-ass family’? It’s just you and me”

“No way. Grandpa? That’s a closeted man if I ever saw one.”

“I don’t know about all that,” Netty said. “He had like ten kids. That’s a lot of sex with a woman.”

“Yeah, but just because people do shit doesn’t mean they wanna do it. I’mma ask my mom what she thinks. Grandpa was a little saucy!”

“Don’t tell her about me!” Netty said too loudly. “Please. I haven’t told my mom yet.”

“Why haven’t you told her? Aunt Linda’s not gonna give a shit. She’s not like my mom. Now, that was a journey. I can still feel that belt sting if I think hard enough.”

Netty knew this to be true, but still. Her mom would likely hug her and ramble about Republicans and bigots and how it shouldn’t matter who you love. She might join PFLAG and start dressing in rainbows herself. Netty wasn’t ready for all that, wasn’t ready for her mom to make herself the protagonist.

“Just don’t tell her, okay?” Netty said.

“Relax, bro, I’m not gonna tell anybody anything. You know how I feel about snitching.”

They sat in silence for a minute. The trees were redder down here than in Albany. Netty counted them as they passed.

“Damn, so two months away at college and now you’re all dyke and shit?” G said.

Netty cringed. “I wouldn’t say that now I’m all”, she paused, “dyke,” she whispered, “and shit. I think it just took me a while to realize.”

“Yeah, I feel that,” G said. “I always thought you were a little funny.”

Sure, as kids, Netty held on to her mom’s Victoria’s Secret mailers and hid them under her bed to browse when no one was around. And sometimes when sleeping topless, she rested a hand between her

breasts, wondering, What if these were someone else’s? But G couldn’t have known any of that, so “funny” how?

And yes, there were the best friends she had in high school, always pretty popular girls in need of a sidekick, a minor character to hold their purse while they slid into the front seat of the Dragon Coaster next to a boy they’d met on the pier. Those best friends with their twin beds Netty slept in on weekends, careful not to let her body brush against theirs under the blankets. And those boyfriends of hers, who could touch under her shirt or over her pants, but anything else wouldn’t work. Not that she didn’t try, just that when a hand came to her belt, her thighs clung to each other like magnets, pressed tight so nothing could get in. “Stop fighting me,” the boys whispered, and all Netty could say was “I’m not!,” her eyes heating up with tears. Her body’s disobedience, not hers.

Netty expected more fanfare from G. She thought this might be the bridge that connected the two islands they’d become. But instead, G thought it was all funny.

“If you thought I was so funny, why didn’t you say anything?” “Oh, like what? Let’s go to the mall and talk to that one chick that works at Spencers?” Netty remembered that girl. Would’ve liked that, actually. “We weren’t even cool back then.”

Another silence made its way into the car. G turned up the radio.

*

Netty shouldn’t have been invited to Kenya McGrew’s eighth-grade Marriott sleepover in the first place. But G’s mom made a big stink about including everybody, so she called up the Mother McGrew and demanded that Kenya ought to be a good girl and include Netty. The next day, Netty found an index card in her locker stating the date, time, and location in sparkly purple ink. Perfect handwriting.

Before the sleepover, Netty confided her fears to G on the phone. “Kenya’s harmless,” G assured her cousin. “Like, she’s mean, but it’s just jokes. Once you get to know her, she funny as hell.” “I guess.”

“Do you even wanna come?”

Netty paused. “I mean, yeah. I wanna swim.” Some nerves crept in. “But it’s, like, a pity invite. I feel kinda weird about that.”

“Who cares? It doesn’t matter how you get there. Once you get there, nobody’s gonna give a shit.”

“I guess. I mean, I obviously wanna hang out with you, so, ”

“Exactly, cus! I’mma be there, and Kenya knows I don’t play that shit. She won’t mess with you if I’m there. You think I’m gonna let somebody fuck with my cousin? My own flesh and blood?”

Netty exhaled, then laughed. Relief.

“Damn, somebody calling. One sec,” G said, and before Netty could respond, her cousin put her on hold.

Netty waited seven silent minutes before she finally hung up.

*

G drove up Mortimer Avenue, past two-story houses with well-kept lawns. “Rich people, man,” she said. “Can you imagine?”

Netty could; one of her college floormates lived in a mega-mansion in Voorheesville, about twenty minutes away from the school, and invited some girls from the dorm to stay for a weekend. The friend’s rich parents took everyone out to dinner, and Netty had prepared to order the mussels from the appetizer menu (only fourteen dollars, and she had twenty dollars in her pocket), but as her dorm-mates ordered entrée after entrée, she panicked and asked for the salmon-and-artichoke conchiglie, which she learned she pronounced wrong when the server read it back.

So Netty didn’t say anything back to G about rich people. She knew them personally.

In many ways, college was an equalizer, nobody talked about how much their house cost, and everyone slept in the same-size bed and ate the same dining hall mishmash meals. Netty only realized how poor she was when she started borrowing her floormates’ clothes; the materials were thicker. No dangling threads around the buttons.

G pulled into the parking lot of a redbrick high school with a rooster on the weather vane and parked along the edge by the fence. “Now what?” Netty asked as G turned off the car. “She’s meeting us here?”

“She has field hockey practice till four-thirty.”

While it was only a year since they graduated, Netty felt weird about Stazya being in high school. She bit her tongue. She had agreed to this without any questions about the plan. The adrenaline of her news and being so close to her cousin distracted her from the easy questions.

G looked at her phone. “Anyway, it’s four twenty-five now.” “Okay, so we’re coming to watch her practice?”

“We’re coming to find out if she’s who she says she is.” G reached behind to the back seat to grab her backpack. “If she’s who she say she is, she’ll be running off that field any minute now.” G pulled out a pair of binoculars.

“Binoculars, G?” Netty said.

“I’m just tryna see something.” G looked toward the school, to the woods across the street, then behind her toward the row of houses.

“Wait, she doesn’t know we’re coming? What if she is who she says she is?”

“Then I yell Surprise! and she runs into my arms and we hug and kiss and scissor into the sunset.”

“And if she isn’t who she says she is? Or, like, she doesn’t show up?

Has another girlfriend? Anything?”

G shrugged and brought the binoculars to her eyes. “Then she’s just another bitch who let me down.”

*

The Marriott sleepover started well enough, with the five other girls ignoring Netty and fawning over each other’s swimsuits by the pool. Kenya, the birthday girl, hadn’t said a word to Netty until suddenly she stared at her floral one-piece suit a little too long.

“Nice,” she said. “Like something my mom would wear.”

Netty wanted to swim. She’d learned one summer at the Brush Park pool when one of her aunts was visiting from Miami. The woman held Netty up at the waist patiently while Netty claimed, “I can’t!” though she continued to kick her feet and flail her arms until she could.

The girls sat in their tight circle around Kenya’s lawn chair, heads tilted back, eyes closed as if they were lying out in the sun. Netty slipped into the water and flopped around. She swam to the deep end, testing how long she could hold her breath underwater. She did this over and over and lost track of time. When she came out of her trance and remembered where she was, everyone was gone.

At first, she thought, Good riddance and felt relieved that she wouldn’t have to keep this up anymore. She could sleep beside the pool, who would notice?, and go home the next day and never speak to anyone ever again. Then she realized she had no food, and would need to use the bathroom, and where were the towels?

She rubbed her eyes hard to get the water out and swam to the ledge where she’d rested her glasses. In the distance she saw the girls huddled on the other side of the door. She got out and looked around for a towel to no avail, and when she went to join them, they pushed all their weight against the door so she couldn’t open it. Netty saw G through the door’s small window, laughing harder than the rest of them.

Eventually, a hotel worker came by and gave Netty a towel. She found the girls back in the hotel room. Some girls talked quietly; Kenya examined her nails. “I’m bored. Let’s play a game!”

Netty liked games. She liked rules and established turns and winning. You didn’t have to guess when you should talk or what to say. She had been quiet since the prank but now she perked up.

“Truth or dare!” one of the girls said from the bed.

“You just wanna kiss me, you lesbo.” All the other girls laughed, so Netty laughed too. “No, let’s play . . . The Thing About You Is.” The girls squeaked. Kenya looked at everyone’s faces and stopped at Netty.

“Do you know how to play?”

“No,” Netty said. “Is it a board game?” All the girls laughed, so Netty did too.

“No. It’s not a board game. Basically, it goes, ‘I love you, but the thing about you is . . .” and then you say something about whoever’s up.”

“Does it have to be something bad?” Netty asked.

“It doesn’t have to be, but, like, what’s the point of telling someone something good about them? We’re not just gonna sit around and suck each other’s dicks off.” Everyone laughed again. “And since it’s my birthday, I’ll go first!” Kenya hopped up to her feet on the king bed, and the girls’ elbows wobbled while she bounced.

The things about Kenya: Mia noted that she never gave people their clothes back when she borrowed them. Kandida mentioned how

Kenya was really bad at basketball and would probably get picked last if she weren’t so pretty. According to Denise, Kenya wearing J’adore Dior as her signature scent was unfair, since it meant that no one else was allowed to wear it. Eventually, Kenya looked Netty in the eyes, ready for her answer.

“Tell me about myself,” Kenya prodded. “You’re up.”

“I know.” Netty maintained a smile though her heart rattled. Truly, Kenya was mean. A bitch, even. Certified bully. And she turned her friends into lapdogs, G included. She stole Netty’s best friend right before her eyes. Everyone looked at Netty like she really stood a chance. “I love you, but the thing about you is . . . I don’t know you that well?”

Kenya rolled her eyes and scoffed. “Booooring.”

“C’mon, Netty, you got better than that,” G nudged.

“It’s fine, whatever,” Kenya said. “It’s a cop-out, but whatever.” She sat down. “I love you, but the thing about you is you suck at this game.”

No one laughed.

“Since you don’t want to participate, we’ll do you next,” Kenya said to Netty.

“That’s okay,” Netty said. “I don’t have to play. I’m not playing.”

“Just stand up,” Kenya said. “C’mon.” She smiled. “It’ll be good for you. Build some character.”

“I pass,” Netty said.

“Fine, don’t stand up. You can sit. Who wants to go first?”

Netty wanted to run back to the pool or call a taxi to take her home to her mom’s. But part of her wanted to know what the thing about her was. She could name a few.

“Fine, I’ll go first,” Kenya said. Netty looked up from the comforter and at her cousin, then to Kenya. “I love you, but the thing about you is I think it’s weird that you made me invite you to my party.”

“I didn’t, ”

“I mean it’s whatever that you’re here, it’s just, like, weird.”

“That’s not true. It was G’s mom, and I told her not to.”

Netty looked to her cousin for help but was met with just a forehead, G’s eyes on the spot she scratched on the comforter.

“And then it sucks because I’m trying to include you, but you won’t play. So, like, what’s the point? Like, what are you contributing?” Kenya looked at Netty, as if the question had an answer. Then Kenya snickered. “Anyway! This is boring. We’ll do somebody else. Who wants to go next?”

Tiana hopped up and said, “I’ll go!” and the weight of the room shifted off Netty.

She mumbled that she left something down at the pool, and no one tried to stop her from slipping out of the hotel room and giving the party what it had been wanting all along: her absence.

*

The cousins sat in the car in silence, staring at the school, waiting for any signs of life. G lit another cigarette.

“Do you still talk to Kenya?” Netty asked.

G’s eyes widened. “Kenya? Kenya McGrew?”

Netty nodded. “Yeah, Kenya McGrew.”

“Hell nah,” G said. “We ain’t really talked since like tenth grade. Like, I see her around every now and then, and we cool, I guess, but nah. Why?”

Netty shrugged. “I don’t know, I guess just being here with you like this has me thinking.”

G sucked her teeth. “Girl, that’s all in the past.” She held the binoculars up to her eyes again. “We cool as far as I’m concerned. No hard feelings.”

“What?” Netty started. “Why would you have any hard feelings?” The cousins looked at each other for a moment, both with their eyebrows scrunched. Some people said they looked alike, could pass for sisters, twins, even. In this moment, Netty saw it; they might as well have been looking in a mirror.

A knock at the window startled Netty and both cousins jumped. She cranked the window down for the white man who held up his fist. He wore a TRJSHS lanyard around his neck.

“Hey, ladies. You can’t be loitering here.”

G cleared her throat. “Hello, how are you doing, sir, um, I’m just here waiting for my girlfriend. She has field hockey practice.”

“Well, you can’t wait here. Students and faculty only.”

“I’m supposed to be picking her up,” G said. “She told me to meet her at four-thirty.”

“Well, you can’t smoke on school grounds, either. This is a finable offense if I was to call security. Save yourself the trouble, all right, ma’am?”

“Wait, I’m not lying. Stazya. My girl, Stazya.” She reached over to the glove compartment, and the man backed up from the window a bit. He had his hands up, suggesting G had something dangerous in the glove.

G pulled out a five-by-seven photo and held it up to the window. “Okay, so one, we don’t have field hockey here. Two, I don’t recognize that person. And I know everyone in this school.”

Netty didn’t know what to say. G looked thoughtful, squinting her eyes at the teacher.

“Let’s just go,” Netty said. She put one hand up to the man and rolled her window up with the other one. “Thanks, we’ll get out of here,” she said. She whispered “Go” to G. G put her hand up to the man too and started to reverse.

“Well,” G said. She took a deep breath.

“Maybe you got the wrong school?” Netty tried. “Yeah, maybe.”

“Can I get a hit of your cigarette?” Netty asked. G handed over the pack.

*

Netty bent down at the edge of the Marriott pool. She tested the water with her toes, then let her body slide in feet first. She trod out to the deep end until the water met her neck, and she swam a little. She headed for the bottom, touched the floor six feet down. She could hold her breath for so long. Most of the other girls at the party didn’t even know how to swim.

One thing she loved about herself.

She did this a few times, swimming to the bottom and back to the top, from one end of the pool to the other, and one of those times when she broke the surface, the Mother McGrew and her boyfriend were on their way in, his arm around her and some towels slung over her shoulder. Netty didn’t dive back down to sneak away from the trouble. She’d already been caught.

“What are you doing down here alone?” the Mother McGrew asked, approaching. Netty pulled herself out and tilted her head down, like a shamed puppy. “Why aren’t you with the other girls?”

“I don’t want to play what they’re playing.”

“Pick your head up,” the Mother McGrew said. “You talkin’ to me, not the floor.”

Netty shivered from the pool water. “I just wanted to swim.”

“You can’t just be down here by yourself like this. What if something were to happen to you? I thought you wanted to come to this party?”

“I just don’t like what they’re playing.”

The Mother McGrew grabbed Netty’s wrist and marched, with her boyfriend in tow, out of the pool room, up the elevator, and back to the third floor.

When the Mother McGrew finally let go, Netty rubbed her wrist. No one had grabbed her so hard before. She stared to see if it might bruise. The Mother McGrew shouted, “What the hell is this!” and Netty looked just in time to see G and Kenya pull their mouths off each other. She watched as their hands fled the other’s cheeks. Netty quickly looked back down at the skirt of her own swimsuit, counting the water droplets that stained the carpet.

*

G hadn’t said anything in the five minutes they’d been on the road. She finished Netty’s cigarette and lit another.

“I’m really sorry,” Netty said. “I hear stuff like this happens all the time.”

“It’s cool,” G said. “I’m a dumbass for falling for it. She didn’t wanna talk on the phone, didn’t wanna meet me. I was just in denial. I told you I don’t know what she sees in me. I guess it was nothing.”

Netty’s throat burned from the cigarette she’d tried to smoke. She counted the trees on the way back down the highway. There must be something she could say to fix this. Maybe they could be friends again, get on the phone and giggle about girls. She could invite G up to Albany and introduce her to some friends. But there were all these exams, parties, and football games. When would she find the time?

“There’s Stew Leonard’s!” Netty said when it popped up on the right.

“Yup,” G said. “Still there.”

“Maybe we should stop and get some pumpkins. Like we used to back in the day.”

“Maybe we should,” G said, but she didn’t stop driving until they made it back to town.

__________________________________

‘The Thing About You’, From All This Want (And I Can’t Get None) by T Clark. Copyright © 2026 by T Clark. Published by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.