Excerpt from New People by Danzy Senna, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He makes a face. Do you like it there?

Then, before she can answer, he says: I hate Brooklyn. I never go there if I can help it.

She feels stung, as if he has just admitted to hating her. She wants to tell him Brooklyn was Khalil's idea, that he got it in his head long ago, before they left California, before they talked all senior year about wanting to join the Brooklyn Renaissance. But she doesn't say it.

There is a long, full silence. He is watching her. She feels his gaze as a physical thing, a heat moving across her skin. When his eyes move away her skin feels cold again.

Hey, you're friends with Lisa and Khalil, right?

She nods.

Right. I remember you.

She pauses. I'm going to meet them.

Don't let me keep you, he says, stepping aside to let her pass.

He is already looking beyond her at something in the distance, and she feels the cold again. She thinks maybe she's coming down with something.

She starts forward, but stops and turns back.

Do you even know my name? she asks.

He scratches his cheek, shrugs. Looks a little caught.

Maybe, he says.

It's Maria. I wasn't sure—because you never say it.

His eyes are amused. Maria, he says. Maria. Maria.

Maria. She laughs, tilts her face down, and walks away, her heart galloping. At the end of the block she glances back to see him still standing in front of the record shop. He is watching her, but he turns away when she spots him looking.

* * *

Khalil and Lisa are already there, at a table at the back with three other people. Khalil is wearing his faded X T-shirt from college. His dreadlocks have long since passed the Basquiat stage but have not quite arrived at Marley.

Lisa is wearing a head wrap of brightly colored fabric, magenta and blue. She says, Maria, as always on CP time.

What took you so long? Khalil says, leaning forward to kiss her. He puts a hand on the small of her back.

A woman at the table, someone she knows, grabs Maria's hand and yanks it toward her.

Okay, I've got to see it. This is the famous ring. Oh damn, now this isn't fair.

It's a family ring, Khalil says. We had it restored, resized.

When he says "we" he means Lisa. She was in on this. Lisa is younger than Khalil by two years. She goes everywhere with him. They don't look much alike. Lisa is darker than Khalil; she takes after their mother. Khalil takes after their father. Khalil is the firstborn, the beloved messiah. Lisa, in second-child tradition, has always been the more difficult one. Khalil once told Maria that his whole childhood was spent watching Lisa be carried out of restaurants, shrieking.

Some facts about Lisa: She has only ever dated white boys. She speaks fluent Italian. She has a framed poster for Fellini's La Dolce Vita on the wall of her apartment. She likes to read film theory in bed. It's still not clear what Lisa is going to do with all of her education, how she will build on all the years of good parenting that have gone into her. She was studying to be a pastry chef when Maria first met her; now she works in a French bakery in Soho, but everyone in the family knows it's temporary.

Lisa has discovered only since Maria became a part of their family that her darkness is something she can lord over people—that it is something superior to her brother's high yellow. Maria was surprised nobody ever told her this before. Lisa is beginning to understand that the very things she hated growing up, her kink and her color, have begun to have currency if you know where to go, who to be around, who to avoid, how to frame the conversation.

Lisa mentions her darkness a lot these days, how much darker she is than her brother and Maria—though really she isn't very dark unless she stands beside them. Maria didn't like Lisa the first time they met. She thought the head wrap made her look like she was either hiding something or trying to appear like an African objet d'art to the willowy white boy she was dating at the time. Maria thought Lisa was the kind of black person she would have avoided in high school. So was Khalil, for that matter. What was it they called those kinds of black people back in the day? Miscellaneous.

From New People. Published by Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Group USA (LLC). Copyright © Danzy Senna, 2017.