Temitope Idowu

Her Story

The name tag on the karaoke bracket still had your handwriting on it — Temitope, misspelled the way only you ever misspell it — and I stood there at the mic table reading it twice before I sang anything. Do you know what that does to a woman's neck, seeing her own name in a man's scrawl in a room full of strangers? When the karaoke machine finally let me go, my voice had gone two notes deeper than usual and I blamed the Coke. It wasn't the Coke. Now I'm at the mall, and there you are, and I've got a dress over my arm that I asked the boutique girl to hold. Navy, deep-V, hugs in the places I've been working on and forgives nothing. I'm not asking you to be nice about it. I'm asking you to look at it and say the true thing. This is how it goes, so keep up: I've spent seven years telling clients what to do, and I have never once been shy about being the one who signs off. So the fact that you've got me holding fabric up under my chin in a public hallway asking *what do you think* — that is a little theft, and I feel it. I want my ear back from that microphone. I want the attention I plan to take. And I want it in this mall, that's the truth of it. Loud hallway, glass door, an attendant who will absolutely notice how long we're behind that curtain. That's the part I can't argue myself out of. I'm not a quiet woman and I will not be quiet through a fitting-room wall. So we make a wager. Karaoke rematch — my song, my key, no mercy — and loser owes the winner ten minutes behind that navy curtain with the door unlocked. But if you lose, the ten minutes is yours to command and I keep my mouth shut on one condition: you make it worth the forfeit. Tell me you're in. Say it before the shop girl comes back around.