Page 11 of Lethal in Pink

I reach for the small pink leather encrypted logbook tucked inside the wall mounted rack to my right and flip to today's date and begin the familiar ritual of inventory and rotation. Each weapon has its own entry: date of last use, maintenance performed, rounds fired (if applicable), and and condition notes. I rotate the blades first—pulling the set from the left shelf and replacing them with the freshly sharpened ones from the maintenance drawer. The throwing knives go back in their velvet-lined case, the handles polished to a soft sheen. The Glock 19 gets a field strip, a clean, a lube, and a function check. The trigger pull is crisp, the slide cycles clean, and I log it as operational before placing it back in its designated slot. I cycle through, weapon after weapon until finally, I’m done. I place the logbook back into its space, shut off the lights, and exit the small room. The panel clicks back into place and I straighten the hanging clothes in front of it and step back.

The closet looks like a closet. Just a walk-in full of pink clothes belonging to a girl who really, really likes pink. Nothing to see here. Nothing worth a second glance.

Mission accomplished.

Dinner is chicken and rice and broccoli, because sometimes the basics are what you need. I sear the chicken in a pan with garlic and thyme, steam the rice in the instant pot that Penelope bought me as a housewarming gift two years ago (“every girlboss needs appliances that do the thinking for her”), and roast the broccoli with olive oil and enough red pepper flakes to make it interesting.

My true-crime podcast plays through my ear pods while I eat, the host’s voice a low, conspiratorial hum in my ear. He’s covering a case I already know inside out—the 2017 disappearance of a tech CEO whose body was eventually found in a reservoir after his wife’s Google search history betrayed her.

My phone rings. It’s Penelope. I pause the podcast and take my headphones out and place the phone on speaker before shoveling another bite of chicken in my mouth.

“Hello?” I mumble through my chews.

“Amiyah, we need to talk. I cannot wait any longer. I’m damn near bursting.”

“If you’re about to tell me that contestant deserved to go home, I swear to god I will drive to your apartment and replace all your coffee with decaf.”

Penelope’s laugh comes through the speaker like something that has been bottled under pressure and finally found a release valve. “First of all, that is a war crime. Second of all, she absolutely deserved to go home. Her soufflé looked like something that died of shame.”

“Her soufflé had character.”

“Her soufflé had structural integrity issues that would make a civil engineer weep. The judges were being generous and you know it.”

I lean back in my seat and smile despite myself.

We talk about the reality competition for twelve minutes. Bake Off Supreme, season four, the episode that aired last night. Penelope has strong opinions about the judging criteria for macarons. I have stronger opinions about the host’s haircut, which appears to have been executed by someone working exclusively with kindergarten safety scissors and a grudge.

“It’s not a haircut, it’s a cry for help,” I say. “The man needs an intervention, not a baking show.”

“The man needs a stylist who isn’t someone who hates him personally.”

Another hour passes.

Penelope is telling me about her upstairs neighbor, the man with the pogo stick, who has apparently taken up pogo-based fitness as his hobby of choice and conducts his workouts at approximately 6:30 every morning, directly above her bedroom ceiling.

“I fucking swear,” she says. “It’s for forty-five minutes. Every. Single. Morning.”

“Have you considered murder?”

“Every day at 6:31 AM, specifically.”

“I could make it look like a pogo-related accident.”

“Tempting, but no. I’m saving my one free favor for something that matters more than a man with a questionable sense of cardio.”

I laugh.

The sound feels good in my throat, looser than it usually is, the kind of laugh that belongs to a version of me that exists only in these calls, in this apartment, in the particular safety of a friendship that predates everything complicated about my life.

Penelope asks about my plans for winter break.

“I’m thinking about taking a job abroad,” I say. “Something clean. Something interesting. Maybe Europe. Maybe Southeast Asia. Somewhere with good food and better views.”

There is a pause.

“A job?” She asks, unimpressed with my decision.

“That’s what I said.”