Page 3 of IRL: In Real Life
“She right,” Renee said, lifting one hand. “You be too fine to act this antisocial.”
I smiled despite myself and reached for my phone where it sat facedown on the counter beside my bag. The screen lit with the same thing it had been showing me all week.
The Link Up PGH.
Another flyer. Another reminder. Another little digital nudge toward a room full of beautiful strangers and familiar names pretending they had all gathered for civic uplift alone.
Mena caught my eye in the mirror and smirked like she already knew what my answer was going to be before I gave it.
That was the thing about her. By now she knew my moods almost as well as she knew my hair.
I had met Mena three Decembers ago through a holiday gift drive for children on the South Side. Monarch Row Brand House, the boutique lifestyle and experiential marketing agency where I worked under Porscha Whitaker as senior director of partnerships and brand strategy, had come on as a small community sponsor that year. I saw the flyer in a work threadbefore I ever saw it on Instagram, somewhere between a sponsorship approval, a vendor email, and three other things Porscha would probably ask me about from an airport lounge.
I could’ve moved the sponsorship through, made sure the logo landed where it needed to, and left it there. Instead, I showed up with money, toys, and a Saturday afternoon because little girls deserved dolls with brown skin and soft hair just as much as anybody else deserved a tax write-off and applause.
Mena had been everywhere that day, directing volunteers, fixing bows, hugging kids, somehow still looking pretty while doing all of it. At some point she introduced herself, told me she owned a salon on the South Side, and handed me a card.
At the time, my hair had been recovering from a woman with a license, a ring light, and no reverence. Too much processing. Not enough care. Edges thinning from neglect dressed up as convenience. Mena took one look at my head the first time I sat in her chair and clicked her tongue like I had personally offended her. Then she went to work. Less heat. Better products. Her own homemade oil worked into my scalp with growing hands and real patience. Within a few months, my hair was fuller, thicker, healthier, and I was loyal for life.
Somewhere between saved edges and her annual toy drives, we became friends in that easy, grown-woman way—texts during the week, flyers and voice notes sent back and forth, the occasional event where we found each other drink in hand, already reading the room at the same time.
Her husband was Eli “Maestro” Lewis, which should have made me more nervous than it did. Any woman with ears in Pittsburgh had heard enough stories about Maestro, his fine ass father Smoke, and his terrifying sister Slick to know that family did not bluff when it came to violence. Men disappeared around names like that. Problems got handled. Permanently. But the truth was, every story I had ever heard about them startedwith somebody else bringing blood to the door first. And Mena herself was sweet, practical, and generous in a way that made fear feel almost impolite.
Besides, the only thing I had ever personally seen her kill was a spotted lanternfly with the flat of a sandal and no remorse.
“You going?” Mena asked, like she hadn’t already asked me twice and judged me both times.
“I don’t know.”
That answer earned me a look from both her and Renee.
“You do know,” Mena said. “You just don’t want to say yes because then you’d have to admit some tiny part of you still believes in outside.”
I snorted. “I believe in outside. I just don’t believe in people.”
Renee laughed loud at that. “Baby, that part.”
I looked back down at my phone.
The group looked like it always did. Headshots with folded arms. Event flyers. Some of them the terrible AI kind. Somebody announcing a fellowship. Somebody else looking for a contractor. A nonprofit fundraiser. A brunch recap. A panel photo with six beautiful Black people in expensive neutral tones and the kind of comment section that would be flirting before the hour was up.
That was the real thing about spaces like this.
On paper, it was networking. Jobs. Community. Support Black business. Panels. Mixers. Openings. Brunches. Nonprofit energy. Civic pride in nice shoes.
In practice, it was a dating pool with plausible deniability.
And the flyer was still sitting there in the group chat, pretty as a lie.
For a Monday.
That alone should’ve disqualified it.
Monday was not sexy. Monday was not social. Monday was for getting home, getting comfortable with my bra off and mytitties swinging to the beat of my steps, and not putting hard bottoms back on for nobody unless they were paying me directly. Whoever planned a mixer for a Monday either had too much faith in people or not enough respect for what a workday could do to them.
Still, I kept looking at it.
Which was irritating, because that meant some small part of me was considering it, and I did not enjoy being that woman before dinner.
