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by Lisa Allen-Agostini

  “You can say that again! How tall are you?”

  “A little under six foot,” I said.

  “With that height and your looks, how come you’re not a model? If you lived in New York you would have been spotted by now.”

  “I know, right?” Akilah yelled. “She’s so pretty and she doesn’t even know it.”

  “Oh, please,” I said.

  “No, seriously. You’re really pretty,” Josh repeated Akilah’s assurances.

  I turned away, scoffing, “Blah, blah, blah.” A boy had never called me pretty before. Tall, skinny, dark girls with short hair didn’t get called pretty at my school. Mostly they got called “black and ugly.”

  Josh was baffled. “Tell me you’re kidding,” he said. I said nothing.

  Akilah sucked her teeth. “I’ve been telling her that forever but she never believes me.”

  “Okay, but don’t say I didn’t tell her so.” He let it drop and turned back to me. “Tell me about your school.”

  “Well,” I said, “I do boring stuff. English, Spanish, social studies, integrated science, geography. It’s coed. The boys do electrical stuff and woodwork and the girls do sewing and cooking. We could do it vice versa but nobody really encourages you to do that, so we stick with tradition. It’s not considered a good school but it’s okay. I mean, it’s kind of rough.”

  “Kind of?” Akilah jumped in. “With some guys selling weed behind the technical block, and some girls getting into fights…they stab each other over boyfriends and stuff.”

  “Fights…like with knives?” he asked.

  “Yeah. It’s rough. But it could be worse: they could have guns,” Akilah said, deadpan.

  “It’s okay, it’s not that bad,” I said, desperate to stop talking about it.

  “Wow. Why don’t your parents transfer you to a different school?”

  “Parent,” I corrected. “My mom’s a single parent. Never had a dad.” He nodded but didn’t say anything, waiting for me to continue. “And with school, well, it’s not that easy to move kids around from school to school,” I said. “There’s this assessment exam you have to do to get into a high school and I failed.”

  “You didn’t fail!” Akilah squawked.

  “Okay, true, I didn’t fail. I just didn’t do well enough to go to a great school. My mom thinks I should live with the consequences of my actions.” I did a good imitation of my mother’s serious voice as I put bunny ears around the words she had so often said. Bitter much, kiddo? I asked myself.

  “So she’d rather you went to a school you didn’t like, where there are drug dealers and violent gangs, so you could live with the consequence of your actions? Sounds crazy,” he said.

  When he said it like that, I had to agree with him. But I had to stick up for my mom. “She means well.”

  “Besides,” said Akilah, “those schools are where the majority of kids end up in our country. It’s normal.”

  “Uh-huh.” He didn’t sound convinced.

  “It’s not that serious,” I said, trying to be casual. “Can we talk about what you heard from your dad? That I might be here permanently?”

  Akilah gasped. “Oh no! You have to come home!”

  “Yuck,” I said, gagging dramatically. “I hate that place.”

  “No, you don’t,” she rejoined.

  “What is there to like?” I said. “Oh yeah, I can’t wait to get back to my tropical paradise. All we ever hear about is how many murders and kidnappings we have every year.”

  “Really?” Josh was shocked.

  “Yeah,” Akilah reluctantly agreed. “Crime is terrible. As a girl nobody wants you out at night by yourself. They say you could get kidnapped, sold into the sex trade.”

  “For real?” His widened eyes were joined by a gaping mouth.

  “Or how about the truly loveable public utilities?” I grumbled. “We get power outages…how often, Ki-ki?”

  “Once a month, maybe,” she allowed.

  “Wow. When the lights go out in New York it makes the news,” Josh said.

  “And let’s not talk about water.”

  “What do you mean, water?” Josh asked.

  Akilah fielded that one. “You know how you open the tap and water comes out when you pay your bill? Well, where we come from, most of the country doesn’t get water when it opens its taps. Not every day, anyway. It’s rationed.”

  “Tuesdays and Saturdays,” I added. “That’s when we get water. All the rest of the week we have to use water from our tanks.”

  “And what if your tanks are empty?” Josh asked.

  “Salt,” Akilah said.

  “ ‘Salt’?”

  “Yeah. Salt. Nothing, zip, zilch, nada,” Akilah said. “You can use the toilet at the mall.”

  He shuddered. “It isn’t that bad; you’re exaggerating.”

  “I wish,” Akilah replied. “It can be really awful here, compared to some places. But it’s beautiful, too,” she chided me. “Come on, admit it!”

  “Well,” I said, “the hills are kind of spectacular. And the people are great. Sometimes.”

  “When they’re not trying to beat up gay people?” Josh asked sardonically. “Your country sounds lovely. I can’t imagine why you’d ever leave.”

  “But it’s home, you know?” Akilah said. “Your home isn’t perfect either. I mean New York is the most dangerous city in the world!”

  “No it isn’t,” I muttered.

  “Whatever,” she said with a sigh of exasperation. “My point is that whatever is wrong with it, it’s my home. I won’t leave. This is where I belong.”

  I thought about that for a second. Was it where I belonged?

  Josh changed the topic. “My mom sounds like the opposite of your mom. She’s really overprotective of me. I had to go to the best school—it’s public but a charter school, which is like a private public school….It’s hard to explain,” he ended, looking at my befuddled expression. “Whatever. It’s a good school, no knives—or guns. But like I said, I really want to spend some time with my dad before I start college.”

  “Have you ever lived with him before?” I asked.

  “Yeah, when I was a baby, I guess,” Josh said, picking at imaginary lint on his jeans. “But I don’t remember much about that. I mostly know him from spending summers in Canada. I see him every year. It’s hard because I live in the States and he lives all the way up here. This place is like the boonies, man. And it’s sooooo white!”

  “For reals!” I chimed in. For a few minutes he and I traded tales about Trinidad and Brooklyn. At home we’d be just faces in the crowd—in Josh’s case a gorgeous face in the crowd. We of the brown skin stuck out in Edmonton.

  “It’s nice to get a break from my mom, too.” He bit his lip, hesitating, before he spoke again. “She’s depressed and it’s like, every day is a drama just getting her to eat breakfast and take a shower. Sometimes.” He quickly added, as if he didn’t want to be disloyal to her even in her absence, “I love her a lot, you know? But it’s kind of tough to be around her twenty-four-seven.”

  I turned it over in my mind for all of two seconds before I jumped to his mom’s defense—a woman I’d never met. “I’m sure she’s trying her best. Depression isn’t easy to cope with.”

  “Yeah, it’s tough. But she makes it harder. She doesn’t go to her therapist, she drinks too much sometimes, she skips taking her meds other times. She’s a great mom but I just wish she’d realize that all that stuff—the medication, the therapy, yoga—is actually good for her, and not just something we’re forcing her to do because we hate her.”

  In San Fernando, Akilah’s mother yelled at her for being on the phone too long. She made her apologies and promised to Skype me again the next day before signing off.

  Josh and I continued to talk about hi
s mom. “So what’s she taking?” I asked. “Some of the medication can have awful side effects, you know. It can make you fat, sleepy, dopey.”

  “Uh-huh, I know,” he muttered, looking at me strangely. “She’s on Prozac. She says it messes with her sex drive. How come you know so much about this?”

  “How come you think?” I asked darkly.

  “Oh snap! You too?”

  I nodded, without looking at him. I didn’t want to see the look on his face. I didn’t want to see him judging me.

  “Hey,” he said, awkwardly but gently, “it’s cool. I mean…it’s cool.”

  I snuck a glance at him. “For reals?”

  “Yeah,” he said, a small smile on his sweet lips.

  Not only was he cute and smart, but he had great taste in music and he was understanding, too.

  “At least you think so. People at home would never understand. If it ever came out in school that I had attempted suicide, that I was clinically depressed and living with a chronic mental illness, I would be persecuted relentlessly,” I confided. “Where I come from a lot of people think mental illness is either demon possession or deliberate bad behavior.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “My own mom…she thinks I’m just being overdramatic.”

  My mother’s attitude was, sadly, typical. I could count on one finger the number of people who would be understanding and sympathetic to someone with a mental illness. And did Akilah really count in this equation? She was a kid like me. She couldn’t protect me.

  “You really tried to kill yourself, though? How come? What happened?”

  I told him the short, ugly story, ending with my brief hospitalization before Cynthia passed me over to her sister. “When it’s bad, I really hate myself,” I said. “I don’t know why. I just want to die. Like I shouldn’t be alive. Like I don’t deserve it.”

  He looked at the door, not at me, shaking his head. “Word. I feel you. You sound like my mom. It’s not true, though. You do deserve to live.” His hazel eyes turned to me. I felt like I was in a sniper’s crosshairs. “If you ask me, I’m pretty glad you’re alive.”

  If he was the shooter, I was happy to be hunted. Game. Over.

  We talked a bit more, listening to some of his music too. He was deeply into trap, the strange, hectic hip-hop music from the southern US. I knew some trap songs, the ones that had made it to the radio at home. “Oh, I like this one: ‘Baking soda! I got baking soda!’ ” I sang along. But I wasn’t really a fan. He played his favorites and explained what the songs were about—many were about selling drugs.

  “I don’t get it,” I finally admitted.

  “Word,” he said, grinning. “You don’t have to. We can like different things and still be cool.” I fiddled with my fingers. He took one of my hands in his. “Are you nervous?”

  My heart was in my throat. Josh’s hands were warm, soft, strong. Next to his light brown skin mine seemed extra dark. I didn’t know what to do. Should I sit there with my hand limp? Should I touch him with my other hand? What should I do?

  Akilah and I had strategized about this on our last call. She had raised the possibility that he might try to kiss me. I had wanted to dismiss it completely but she had insisted. If someone likes you, no matter where they are from, she said, they’re going to try to kiss you if you two are alone. Her advice was to “be natural.” Since I’d never kissed a boy (or a girl, for that matter), I had no idea what “natural” looked like in this context. My heartbeat raced like tassa drumming.

  Weakly I tried to pull my hand from Joshua’s grasp but he held on, stood up, and gave me a tug, pulling me over to sit on the bed as he did the same. We faced each other with our legs folded like yogis, his sneakers taken off long ago and parked by the bedroom door, and my sandals tossed beside them. Those hazel eyes pinning me down. He leaned toward me and I could smell his cologne, fresh and breezy, and his breath, minty from the gum we had chewed after finishing our burgers. I closed my eyes.

  His lips barely, delicately touched mine.

  And then the door swung open. “Oops!” Nathan chortled, more amused than apologetic for barging in on us at this key moment. “Sorry to interrupt! Josh, I just wanted to let you know we are definitely staying the night.”

  Hastily pulling away from each other, Josh and I dropped our hands into our laps and looked at Nathan innocently.

  “Sure, Dad,” Joshua mumbled.

  “Hey, no funny stuff, okay?” Nathan teased his son, stepping into the room and ruffling his curls. “I know she’s beautiful, but you have to let her get to know you first, son,” he teased. I could tell he was drunk, but under the slurred words and cloud of alcohol fumes I could also tell there was a spark of parental concern. “These island girls will break your heart.” Nathan theatrically winked at me before stumbling out of the room again. Gross.

  Our moment was over. The music played on. I stayed seated on the bed and he slid back to the floor. We faced one another. Before long, both of us lay down, head to foot, he on the carpet, me with one arm trailing off the side of the bed fiddling with the comforter. It was chill. There were no words between us as we listened to songs. Physically, we were farther apart than before…but by the time I fell asleep we were holding hands.

  * * *

  —

  I woke up the next morning with a crusty feeling in my mouth and a great big smile on my face. Josh’s curly hair was just visible under a drift of blankets on the floor next to my bed. Through the open door I heard the blessed sound of silence. I was evidently the first up.

  Or maybe not. I heard the sound of water running in the kitchen and bet myself that Julie was cleaning the mess left over from the party.

  Climbing over Josh’s inert body, I crept out to get a glass of juice from the fridge. As I suspected, Julie was scrubbing away at the counters, getting rid of a vicious maroon stain next to the sink.

  “Bloody red wine,” she muttered as I walked in. “Hey, muffin. How was your little party?” she asked with a tiny smirk.

  I blushed. “Oh, it wasn’t like that,” I started to explain.

  She laughed, swatting me with a damp tea towel. “I should hope not! I was kidding, honey. I’m glad you’re making a friend. I was worried that you’d never talk to anybody outside this family ever again.” Her teasing smile was gentle. I felt happy and excited and couldn’t wait to tell her about the whole thing.

  “We just played music. Talked. He’s really nice,” I said. I wanted to explain more, about how easy he was to talk to, how he understood about my depression. How we sort of kissed. Almost. But the words were caught up in my chest and wouldn’t come out. Instead, I mumbled again, “He’s really nice.”

  Her smile told me she understood.

  I poured some juice and drank it, feeling my stomach beginning to rumble with hunger. I glanced at the clock on the microwave and was surprised to see it was after eight already.

  “If I were back home I would have been in church by now, starting Mass,” I told Julie. “Mom insists we go to church every week, and I don’t even know why. It’s not as though she’s all that devout.”

  “Maybe she likes the routine of it?” Julie asked. “The predictability? Could be nostalgia, too. Every time I go to a puja I feel like I’m a little girl, safely back at my aji’s house in Toronto. We cling to rituals, don’t we? Humans are funny.”

  I could kind of understand some of what she said; I liked familiar routines, too. But I didn’t see the point of going to church if you didn’t want to be a real Christian and were doing it only for form’s sake. Or for memories. My memories of church were one long blur of boredom and skepticism. A God might exist. Did he need to be worshipped and adored or was that our shtick? It seemed like a waste of time—but maybe that was just me. I shrugged.

  I was still standing in front of the f
ridge. I opened the door and stared, trying to figure out what was quick and easy for me to have for breakfast.

  “Here,” said Julie, reaching around me to grab a stack of cheese slices from the dairy compartment and a bag of English muffins from a packed shelf. “I’ll toast one for you.”

  “Thanks. Julie, can I ask you something about Jillian?” I was finally ready to ask about that conversation I’d overheard, when Jillian said she wished she was my mom instead of Cynthia.

  She responded with a cautious nod. “But really if you have something you want to know you should ask Jillian herself. She won’t bite,” she teased.

  I opened my mouth to ask the question and flaked. I shoved the muffin there instead. I wasn’t ready for this conversation.

  I ate the crisp, warm bread with melted cheese, mulling over what she had said when Josh’s dad came in, wearing a T-shirt and boxers. He was stretching and yawning and scratching, looking like a man from a movie, obviously hungover. If I wasn’t sure before, I was convinced then that I didn’t like him much. How such a boor could have made such a considerate son was beyond me.

  “Morning, ladies,” he said, in between huge yawns that smelled of sour liquor. “Julie, what has your niece done with my son?”

  I said good morning and looked intently at the fridge and shoved more into my mouth so I wouldn’t have to say anything else. While they talked I took the opportunity to go use the bathroom, washing my face and brushing my teeth and generally trying to look slightly less jacked up than I had when I crawled out of bed.

  I needn’t have worried. Josh was still fast asleep when I tiptoed back into the bedroom. In fact, he slept until nearly noon. His dad woke him right before they were to drive back home. He only had time to give me a quick hug, squeezing my hand and promising, “I’ll Skype you,” before leaving with his dad. I thought I’d probably see him again soon. I hoped I would, anyway.

  * * *

  —

  When Akilah called that evening, we did an exhaustive analysis of the whole three-way conversation, and then further discussed every second of the almost-kiss and the hand-holding that followed it. We agreed we’d have to wait until the next time I saw Josh to make further judgments. But she thought it was a great sign he was going to install Skype on his phone just to message me. I still hadn’t turned any of my social media accounts back on. It took him another day, but eventually I heard from him: Sup. Miss u. Immediately, I formed a group chat with him and Akilah.