Read Online The Liminal People by Ayize Jama-everett - Free Book Online Page A

else does, I do. She’s at a railing overlooking the Thames. After a minute, I join her.
    â€œThis was a mistake,” she says, holding her hands tight below her chin, praying.
    â€œNo. You made the right call. Just to the wrong man. Bigger man, better man, would be able to put the past aside for the sake of an innocent and all that valiant shit. Me? I’m still more like this face than I’d care to admit. A child playing grown-up games.”
    â€œI need you to be that man now,” she says softly like we’ve never passed a harsh word between us. “You’re the only one I know like her. . . .”
    â€œLike you.” I’m reminding her.
    â€œLike me,” she concedes begrudgingly. “Tamara had just come to her . . . skills, power, whatever you call it. She told me about it.”
    â€œDid you tell her about me and—”
    â€œI told her that I had something similar.” She truly loved her daughter. Once we moved to London, Yasmine stopped experimenting with her fire totally. Not even to light a candle. Whenever I pushed her on it, we had fights that would wake neighbors. I asked her one time what it felt like to start fires. I wanted to know if it was in the realm of possibilities for me to cauterize a wound instead of making the blood vessels just atrophy. She said starting fires was like dropping acid into her worldview. Now I would see that as a sign of problems to come, but then I was too inexperienced in love, too needy to see it as an indication of anything other than my need to compromise more. “It made her feel . . . better.”
    â€œJust because she’s like us”—I wait to hear protestations against any type of union involving the two of us, and smile when they don’t come—“that doesn’t mean she’d be able to fight off whatever came her way. They could have drugged her. If she’s not very experienced. . . .”
    â€œThat’s not why I think it has to do with the . . .” She stops and looks at me. “Can I just see your face? This is so disconcerting. Can you show me what you look like now?” I relax into my own height, skin tone, weight, and facial features, all of it. It takes less than a minute. Any gawking commuters would get a shock, but they’d have to watch for that full minute. People in cities generally don’t look at each other for over a few seconds.
    The transition makes Yasmine sick. I can feel the bile rising in her throat. She wants to throw up. She just stares at me in fascination. “Thank you.”
    â€œIt’s just practice and precaution.”
    â€œI understand. Before she left, Tamara began acting secretive. . . .”
    â€œYou said the two of you were tight?”
    â€œNot with me. With her father. She said things were going on. Things only I would understand, that might hurt him politically if she got involved. I didn’t ask. She’s getting older. I figured she had a right to a certain level of privacy. It’s hard to always be in the public light. If I had known . . .”
    â€œAnd so that’s why you think it has to do with what we do?”
    â€œWhat we can do, yes. She never displayed her . . . gifts. She was quiet about them. Once I had to chastise her for reading her teacher’s mind during an exam. But she already felt so bad about it. In part because the things in a high school teacher’s mind regarding his students are so depraved. . . .”
    â€œI can’t promise anything,” I say, stretching my actual body, realizing the clothes I bought fit better on it.
    â€œI’m not expecting promises. I don’t think this is what you want, but I can give you—”
    â€œI don’t want your money, Yasmine.” I’m trying not to sound hurt by the offer.
    â€œWhat do you want?” The question takes me by surprise. “I’ve told you what I can’t give you. You don’t want