The Bylaws of Male and Female Friendships
by Kat Lewis
Lynne Harlow, Locked, acrylic on paper, 7 x 11 inches, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
THE BYLAWS OF MALE
AND FEMALE FRIENDSHIPS
KAT LEWIS / FEB 2021 / ISSUE 5
BYLAWS OF
MALE AND FEMALE FRIENDSHIPS
ARTICLE I — NAME AND PURPOSE
Section 1 — Name: The name of this male/female friendship shall be Jin/Imani (Jinni).
It shall be a platonic relationship incorporated under the laws of the State of Maryland.
Section 2 — Purpose: Jinni is organized exclusively for platonic, schadenfreudic, and non-romantic purposes.
The purpose of this friendship is:
to provide support throughout college that includes, but is not limited to six-hour Call of Duty sessions, 2 AM chicken strips, and laughing at each other’s pain even when that pain is straight vodka coming out of your nose, or you shat yourself just a tiny bit because the girl at Starbucks gave you real milk instead of soy.
to provide companionship while consuming alcohol so that both parties’ alcoholism is plausibly deniable; and
to prevent the existential crises that accompany attendance of The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
ARTICLE II — MEMBERSHIP
Section 1 — Eligibility for membership: Both parties are eligible for membership so long as they
do not violate any of the terms and conditions outlined in Article II, Section 2.
Section 2 — Terms and conditions: In order to maintain membership status in the Jinni friendship, both parties must agree to the following terms and conditions:
Never sit on the same piece of furniture as the other party.
a) In the rare instances in which there is only one couch available, the standing party must always put at least one (1) cushion between themselves and the seated party.
i) In the event that the one (1) seat buffer is not an option or the only piece of furniture available is a bed, you’re going to fucking stand.
Avoid physical contact whenever possible. Never hug when a bro nod would suffice.
No compliments. Ever. If one party wishes to say that the other party looks nice, negging is always the best course of action.
No extended eye contact.
No hanging out alone in each other’s apartments after midnight. This activity is only appropriate if:
a) One party is puking in the other party’s shower again; or
b) One party sprained her ankle at the Phi Delt house and needs help limping home and cleaning her dog’s shit off the floor.
In the event that one party develops romantic or sexual feelings for the other, push that shit way down, like, way, way down to the place where all the memories of your mother spanking you with the buckle-end of the belt live.
*
Jin once told Imani that she walked in her heels the way a cow limped through its own shit. “I don’t know why you bother with those,” he said, looking at her shoes.
Her feet were squished into a pair of Michael Kors that were a half size too small, but the pumps were seventy percent off at the outlet, and she couldn’t afford designer shoes that were full price and in her size.
“I look like a fucking badass, okay?” she said even though her ankles trembled when she put too much weight on one foot.
“Dumbass, maybe.” He took a sip of his Tom Collins. From the way he frowned when the drink zipped up the straw, Imani could tell that it was too strong. She knew he really wanted to order a Bud Light Raz-Ber-Rita, but he wasn’t secure enough with his masculinity to do so.
They were at a standing table in PJ’s, Baltimore’s shittiest bar and the closest bar to Hopkins. They had started coming here long before either of them had turned twenty-one. Back then, Imani was Imani Davis who lived on 123 Main Street in Hollywood, Florida, and Jin was Noah Choi from Washington State. Jin’s fake had a different name because it wasn’t actually a fake. They had found the driver’s license in an IHOP parking lot. At the time, Noah Choi was twenty-three and Asian, and Jin was almost nineteen and Asian. When Imani and Jin lined up to use the fakes for the first time at PJ’s, she had asked him, “Are you seriously going to rely on other people’s racism to buy alcohol?”
“Obviously,” he had said, and he said it like she was an idiot for asking. “If the ID we found had a Black lady with a cheap lace front wig, you’d be doing the same thing.”
“There ain’t nothing cheap about this lace front,” Imani said, pushing synthetic, black hair out of her face.
Now, amid the smell of damp wood and beer, Imani had to put up with Jin’s jokes to break the news about spring break. They had been planning their spring break trip to Vegas since October, and Imani had been saving her campus job money since the summer before that. It was now February, cold as shit in Baltimore—the gray sky always threatening snow, but never actually pulling through. Earlier that day, as Imani filled up her rat terrier’s food dish, her roommate, Alice, had said that she wasn’t going to Vegas. This meant that Imani would be something of a third-wheel with Jin and his roommate. But she could live with that if she were drunk at a blackjack table.
“Dude, I gotta tell you something,” Imani said.
“I do, too. You first.”
“Alice isn’t coming to Vegas. Her girlfriend invited her to Cabo, so she’s ditching us.”
“Damn, Ryan can’t come either.”
The two of them sat in this moment together with the realization that they would be going on this trip alone, loud and echoing between them. They had to cancel, right?
Just when Imani got up the nerve to say they could cancel, Jin opened his mouth and said in a surprisingly un-asshat way, “That’s okay. It’s their loss. We’d be drinking them under the table anyway.” He smiled his stupidly straight teeth at her in a way that made reassurance blossom in her chest. Yes. The trip would still be fun. Even if it were just the two of them.
*
There was only one bed at Jin’s family timeshare. When they called the front desk for a new room, the receptionist said that the facilities were at capacity, but Jin or Imani was more than welcome to sleep on the couch. This “couch” was a wicker-armed loveseat shorter than a fifth grader with no pull-out bed hidden under the cushions. Neither of them would be able to lay flat on the damn thing.
Imani watched Jin’s shoulders tense up the way they did when he was cut from the squash team, and she could tell he was internally consulting the bylaws for the right course of action. Feeling the nervous heat of him standing next to her, she said, “We’ll switch off. I’ll take the couch tonight.”
*
They Lyfted to the Strip and played five-dollar blackjack at The Linq. Well before sunset, they were drunk and down forty bucks each. They spent the rest of the day ramming children with bumper cars in Circus Circus, dangling off the roof of the Stratosphere, and eating enough Krispy Kreme donuts to take two years off their lives. The day was filled with their normal banter and loving insults until they walked to New York-New York.
A desert sunset purpled the sky. Dodging through the crowd of fellow drunks on the Strip, Jin nagged Imani about how slow she was in her heels, and she switched to a pair of flip flops. They approached a broken escalator on the sidewalk that led to the walking bridge over Las Vegas Blvd. Imani had always thought that broken escalators just became normal staircases, but it had stopped working mid rise and the steps were uneven towards the top. She slipped and the teeth of the step scissored her big toe open. She didn’t feel the pain right away because there were 136 people behind her, and she had just tripped in front of all of them.
On top of the bridge, Jin glanced down at her foot and said, “Mani, what the fuck?” She looked down. There was so much blood; it was like she had been shot. She lifted her foot out of her flip flop, and the skin still hanging on to the cut already looked translucent and dead. Jin offered his arm, and she steadied herself on him. “Does it hurt?” he asked.
“Does it look like it hurts?” The words came out in a growl. She was feeling the pain now—the slicing sting, the warm wetness of her own blood. The blood itself was a cartoonish shade of red, the color of her mother’s favorite lipstick. She had never seen herself bleed so much before.
“We gotta get you inside before it gets infected.” Jin pulled her towards the New York-New York entrance.
When the security guard asked how big a bandage she needed, she showed him her foot, and he laughed out loud like she was some topical meme.
*
Back in the suite, Imani sat on the lip of the bathtub, dumping a jug of hydrogen peroxide onto her foot. Jin called from the living room, “Let me help you.” The Cops theme song echoed from the television.
“Fuck off,” she said. “Just because you’re pre-med doesn’t mean you know what you’re doing.”
“And that film studies degree is helping you in there?”
“I watch a lot of Grey’s Anatomy, okay?” She patted the wound dry with a piece of gauze, and the stinging made her hiss.
Jin leaned against the doorway. “Hurts, doesn’t it?” She flipped him off. “Please let me help,” he said the words softly—softer than anything he’d ever said to her before. Her heart skipped with something like pleasure, something like shame. With this pang of shamed elation came the Starbucks memory. That day, she texted him from the bathroom, confessing she had shit her pants, and without hesitation, he ran three blocks to his apartment to bring her his swim team sweatpants. She stepped into those pants with the same pleasure, the same shame, reveling in the way the pants consumed her, the way that stepping into his clothes felt like stepping into home.
After washing his hands, he took the first aid kit from her and held her foot by the ankle. She half-expected his hands to be cold like a real doctor’s, but they were warm. Their warmth made her stiffen. There was nothing in the bylaws about medical procedures or Nightingale Syndrome.
“There, all set,” he said, closing the wing of the bandage.
“Think we’ll have to amputate, doctor?” she asked, and he looked at her.
Neither of them looked away. His smile stamped a dimple into his cheek. Home. She felt it again. Yes, to her, Jin was home.
“No,” he said. “I think you'll be okay.” Still holding her foot, he leaned forward in the wrong way, the bad way that was prohibited by the bylaws. Heart in her throat, Imani leaned in too, and she puked. She puked up all of the donuts and blackjack liquor and her feelings for him right into his face. Her vomit covered him like a veil, like a bedsheet ghost costume. He didn’t wipe it off right away—just let out this deep groan. It was an awful sound like a foghorn. A sound that only dying men made.
*
In the shower, Imani tied a CVS bag to her head to keep her lace front dry. The plastic covered her ears, sounding like the inside of a conch shell. She stood there under the water and listened to the ocean in the plastic. Fuck, it was only their first day. There were still five more days to suffer through. What would those five days even look like?
Jin was still as a corpse under the covers in the blue-hued room. She knew he was awake because he wasn’t breathing—just holding his breath and listening to her hold her own. Five more fucking days of this. She sorted through the activities they had planned, trying to decide which ones required the least amount of conversation.
Her hopes were more drinking and poker playing, more money burning and stomach gorging. And then a small moment in the back seat of a Lyft where their hands share the middle seat, and they feel the heat of each other’s pinkies like an open flame and forget that what warms you can also burn you. In the foyer of the suite, they’re a flurry of falling clothes that leave a trail to the California King of no return.
But the next day, she woke up to reality. There was no eye contact—just a silence sitting heavy over their eggs and bacon. A split check. A blackjack table with just the two of them and five seats in between. His hand staying on fifteen and waving off the liquor-wielding waitress. When the minimum bet flickered from $5 to $15, they slid into their jackets and went to a silent dinner, to Penn and Teller with no discussion of the tricks afterwards, to the spewing Fountains of the Bellagio where the water sounded like something bad on the horizon.
They leaned against the railing at the Fountains as violins swelled “Con Te Partirò,” and water swayed above the pond. Jin stood far from Imani, as if she were a stranger, and she wanted to close the distance the same way she wanted to close the wound she had given herself, the wound she had given their relationship. Her mind reeled for something to say: I’m not that into you. We’re both just so lonely. The water rose and fell before them, its slaps rhythmic as drums. Her toe stung, a familiar sting that she associated with her mother—with love. She looked at him now, gold fountain light illuminating his face. The singer’s vibrato electrified the air. Jin stepped closer to her and said, “Remember that time you shat yourself at Starbucks?”
Kat Lewis graduated from Johns Hopkins University, where she held the Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund Fellowship. In 2018, she received a Fulbright Creative Arts grant in South Korea. Her work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, PANK Magazine, and The Rumpus. She is currently an MFA student at the University of South Florida.
Lynne Harlow is a reductive artist who has exhibited her work internationally for the past 20 years. Gallery exhibitions include shows at MINUS SPACE, Brooklyn, NY and Liliana Bloch Gallery, Dallas, TX. Museum exhibitions include the 2013 deCordova Biennial at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA, as well as shows at MoMA PS1 (NY, NY); Brattleboro Museum (Brattleboro, VT); and Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca (Oaxaca, Mexico). Her work has been reviewed by Artforum and The New York Times, among others. She is a 2020 grantee of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. In 2011 she was awarded the McColl Johnson Fellowship of the Rhode Island Foundation, and in 2002 she was a visiting artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX. Harlow’s work is included in public collections, such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and The RISD Museum of Art.