There You Are

by Morais, Mathea

  Octavian discovered that it was the details of things that made life without his mother bearable. He spent hours making model trains, lost himself in the little towns, the general store, the school house, the railroad station. He abandoned his drawing of Francis and returned to drawing comic book characters and forgot to change his socks. As long as he focused on the gears of the model train, the characteristics of his D&D figures, the arc of Black Panther’s claws, he could make it from the beginning of the day to the end.

  A dark space grew between himself and Francis that summer, and so Francis turned his worries to Octavian.

  “You’re going to middle school at the end of the summer, Tave,” Francis said. “And Brittany ain’t no place for punks. Do you even have any friends?”

  Octavian told him to leave him alone. He had two friends—Dan Conley, a thin white kid with pimples and glasses who lived in the next apartment building, and Phil Johnson, who was the only other black kid that Octavian knew who liked Star Trek. Phil’s parents worked for NBC and they lived in a mansion with stained-glass windows and a separate stairway that was once used by servants. Dan, Phil, and Octavian hung out at Phil’s house sometimes and played Dungeons and Dragons or traded baseball cards. They watched Land of the Lost and didn’t ask each other questions.

  Francis went to Cyrus. “You can’t send Octavian off to Brittany like this.”

  “Like what?” Cyrus asked.

  “Tave is about to become one of those weird black kids none of the other black kids want to talk to. And since he’s black he’s never going to have a real white friend either.”

  “And you think I should do what?” Cyrus asked.

  “I think you need to take him to see someone.”

  “Like who?”

  “I don’t know. A shrink, a priest, a rabbi? Someone to remind him where he comes from. If Mama knew he was dorked out with smelly socks on, she’d flip.”

  “He’s eleven years old, Francis, he’ll be fine. Besides, your mother would be proud he was reading Octavia Butler.”

  Francis shook his head at Cyrus. “You’ll see,” he said. “Just wait. Cats at Brittany do not care what he’s reading.”

  Francis had been right. Octavian’s newfound love of fantasy and sci-fi did not combine well with starting sixth grade at Brittany Woods Middle School. The giant building was a long maze of green sterile hallways lit by florescent lights that hung from broken drop ceilings. At Brittany, cockroaches as big as your hand could be seen flying near the cafeteria and the eighth-grade boys—their voices deep and their bodies long and thin, or thick and hard—loomed large over everyone. Midway through the year, Dan Conley’s family moved out to Brentwood, and Phil’s parents put him into private school.

  Francis sucked his teeth and decided to take matters into his own hands. One frigid night in December, he told Octavian to get in bed with his clothes on and not ask questions.

  When the lights were out and they heard Cyrus brush his teeth and go into his room, Francis threw off his covers and said, “Get up, we’re going to see Prince.”

  Octavian’s brain went directly to some medieval place in middle earth with a court of lords and elfin ladies, but then he stopped himself, remembered his brother was Francis Munroe and said, “We’re going where?”

  “To see Prince. He’s playing tonight at the Arena.”

  Octavian turned on the lamp on his bedside table. “Do you know how much trouble I’ll get in, that we’ll get in, if we do that?”

  Francis let out a long, exasperated sigh. “Tave, sometimes you have to do things even if you know you’ll get in trouble, even if you know you’re not supposed to.”

  Octavian gave him a look.

  “Listen man, I’m not talking about taking you with me to get fucked up. I’m talking about a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Think of it as a trip to another dimension.”

  Octavian scoffed. “What do you know about other dimensions?”

  “Believe me, I know more than I want to know, okay? And I promise you, you won’t regret one second of this.”

  Octavian had never been to a place like the St. Louis Arena. Around him were thousands of people. Different kinds of people. White people, black people, people who could have been girls, could have been boys, but it just didn’t matter—and aside from the expanse of the arena and the crowds, the noise, the lights and the smells, up there on the stage was Prince: tiny, beautiful, masculine, feminine, rugged, and light, singing from a bathtub in a rain shower of purple balloons.

  For two hours he sang directly into Octavian’s bolstered heart, told him to be glad that he was free, reminded him to be careful of the beautiful ones. At the end of the night, Octavian wrapped his arms around his brother, buried his face in Francis’s smooth neck the way he used to when he was younger and afraid. He inhaled Francis’s smell—which was also his mother’s, and fought back the tears that filled his eyes.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you, Frankie.”

  After Francis tucked Octavian into the soft cotton of his sheets, and what was left of the night rang in his ears, Octavian slept heavily and didn’t dream. But while he slept, those things that he’d held deep down, the neatly packaged pains tied up in white paper and twine, unraveled and Octavian woke at dawn to the sound of his own sobbing.

  For the next two days, Octavian couldn’t eat and, aside from moments of pure exhaustion that lasted less than an hour, he didn’t sleep. The only thing he could do was cry. It was if a weight descended into him and pushed up the desire, the grief, the dark loneliness and hard, broken anger, until it spilled out in chest-wracking chokes and sobs. It made him wish for the familiar manic fluttering of his heart that now was too heavy to beat fast.

  Cyrus sat beside Octavian and rubbed his back in big round circles. And when Francis asked him if he thought Octavian was going to be okay, Cyrus looked at him with ice behind his eyes and said, “What were you thinking, sneaking him out like that, taking him to that concert?”

  Francis didn’t answer. He closed the door and sat on the floor outside their bedroom and waited for Cyrus to come out, but he didn’t. The next morning, Francis left without being noticed and got drunk for the first time since their mother died.

  At the end of the second day, Octavian woke from a fitful dream about pulling Francis out of a deep blue pond. Octavian’s eyes felt like they had sand underneath the lids and no longer any water to unleash. His heavy heart bobbed like a buoy in his chest and his brain felt clear and whole. He took a long drink from the glass of water his father left on his bedside table and got out from under the covers. The floor beneath him felt steady and warm and he walked out of his bedroom to find his father and brother disheveled and waiting.

  “I think I’m alright now,” he said.

  Cyrus stood and, with shaking arms, pulled Octavian to him. Francis, who had just come home, was grateful that the sobbing had finally stopped but he felt the dividing line between him and the rest of the world expand even further. He walked over and wrapped his long arms carefully around them both. None of them realized that it was Christmas Eve.

  TRACK 10

  A Love Bizarre

  THE SUBURB OF CLAYTON, parallel on the map to University City, was on the opposite side of Delmar and therefore had no neighborhood equivalent to Eastgate. There were no poor parts of Clayton. In Clayton, the apartment buildings were for young professionals, not families. In Clayton, families lived in three- and four-story mansions with wide manicured lawns that made the biggest houses in U. City look rough and tumble. Kanta’s new house was giant and drafty, with unnecessary bedrooms and bathrooms on every floor.

  A few weeks before school started Mina, told Kanta that if she was going to force her to go to this new school, she needed to at least get her some clothes.

  “It was bad enough wearing boys’ jeans at Delmar Harvard,” Mina told her. “There’s no way I’m going to Wydown in thrift-store clothes.”

 
Kanta shrugged and said, “Well, they did make me partner at the firm, so I guess I can stop thinking we can’t afford things.”

  Mina looked at her in disbelief. “Then I’m buying school lunch every day,” she said. “Because you can’t tell me we can’t afford that either.”

  Wydown Middle School was less than four miles from Brittany Woods, but it could have been in another galaxy. The halls shone and there were murals on the walls. The library had floor-to-ceiling windows and there was a state-of-the-art science lab in the basement. On the first day, Mina wore her brand new Jordache acid-washed jeans with a boat-neck unicorn shirt over a neon green tank top. She put her hair into a high ponytail and sprayed her bangs hard with Aqua Net. She was met at the door by the guidance counselor and a girl named Lisa Norris who was assigned to take Mina around and introduce her to people. Lisa also had a high ponytail, but hers was smooth and blonde, with no need for any hairspray. She wore meticulous Guess Jeans and a monogrammed sweater vest. She had dark-green eyes and delicate peach-and-cream fingernails, and Mina felt immediately clumsy as she followed two steps behind her.

  At lunch Mina sat happily down at the table in the cafeteria and began to eat the pasta and peas dropped onto her tray by the lunch lady with the puffy face and the blue hairnet. The food was overly soft and salty, but she didn’t care. At least she wasn’t eating sprouted bread with sunflower butter. Around the table sat Lisa, Sarah, Jessica, Katie, and Rebecca—who shared a seat with Jessica to make room for Mina. Lisa was obviously the leader of the group and the other girls at the table waited for her before they sat down in their chairs, needing to ascertain who Lisa wanted to sit next to first.

  Katie gave Mina’s lunch tray a look and asked, “Did you eat the school lunch at your school in U. City?”

  That’s when Mina noticed the series of crisp, brand new lunch boxes on the table. Katie pulled an American cheese sandwich on white bread out of hers. And Sarah, who was a little bit heavier than the other girls, apologized for the smell of her tuna fish as she wrenched it out of the can with a plastic spork and talked about being at fat camp that summer. Lisa and Rebecca had matching lunch boxes and also matching salads with bright asparagus spears, deep red cherry tomatoes, and slices of cold chicken sitting next to little green bottles of Perrier.

  Mina felt the mushy pasta rapidly turn to paste in her mouth and she forced a swallow, opened the carton of 2% milk, and drank before she said, “Sometimes.”

  Lisa carefully cut a piece of chicken and said in an amused whisper, “I heard girls have sex with boys in the bathroom at schools in U. City.”

  Mina was glad she had swallowed her bite of spaghetti or else she might have spat it across the table at Lisa or choked on it, she laughed so hard. But when she stopped laughing and looked around, they were still waiting for an answer. “You’re serious?”

  Lisa nodded her thick blonde ponytailed head and the other ponytails nodded too.

  “That’s not true at all,” Mina said. “I don’t know anyone who’s ever had sex, let alone had sex in a bathroom at school.”

  Sarah, with her mouth full of tuna fish, said, “We keep getting new members at my synagogue from U. City. My mom said lots of families are moving away because there are too many black people there now.”

  At this, the ponytailed heads turned toward the table on the other side of the cafeteria where the four black students in the sixth grade sat. Mina looked too and noticed they had lunch trays of pasta and peas.

  “So you liked it there?” Lisa said as the heads turned back to Mina.

  Mina felt the flesh on back of her neck prickle. Lisa said it like she had something in her mouth that tasted bad. And Mina felt protective of the playground and the climbing tunnels and Octavian and Makeba and the other girls playing Double Dutch. She sat up straighter and looked Lisa in her pretty blonde face.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I loved it there.”

  The next day, when Mina exited the lunch line, none of the girls, not even Lisa, looked up, and Mina could tell that no one was sharing a chair to make room for her to sit down. The lunch tray in Mina’s hands felt as if it were laden down with much more than a gray beef patty in a bland, greasy bun and bright yellow corn swimming in a butter-flavored puddle.

  Across the cafeteria, at the table where only four students sat, Mina saw a vacant chair. As she walked over, she felt the pressure of Lisa’s poison gaze, followed by the other gazes as she passed. Mina set her lunch tray down at the table across from Mercy, who was in her French class, and said, “Hey, I’m Mina. Can I sit here?”

  Charles, Mercy, Clarissa and Latif looked at each other and then at Mina. They nodded but said nothing else. Mina took a bite of her burger, which broke apart like sawdust in her mouth.

  The only good thing about their new house in Clayton was Mina’s cozy attic room that had sloping beams and creaky floors. Mina had taken to regularly stealing cigarettes from Hermine and smoking them out of her open window. Now that Kanta was a partner, she had to put in longer hours at work and was never home. From down the street, Mina heard kids playing, but she had no interest in joining them. Instead, she left her bike with the banana seat to rust in the garage and changed out of her Jordache and put on what she liked to think of as her Prince clothes—black-and-white splatter paint t-shirts over cut-up jeans she’d tapered tight with safety pins, and leather booties spray-painted silver.

  At the bottom of her hill she boarded the Seventy-Three Bi-State bus and spent her afternoons behind the counter at Rahsaan’s playing with the price guns and bagging records for Bones. On the weekends, Kanta dragged Mina with her to dinners where she told everyone that Mina still had not succeeded in making a single friend at her new school.

  “You don’t got no friends?” Bones said after Mina lamented to him about her mother.

  “That’s not the point,” Mina said. “The point is that she shouldn’t be telling everyone that and even though I ask her not to, she does it anyway.”

  “How come you ain’t got no friends?” Bones asked and put on the new Sheila E record that Mina loved.

  Mina didn’t answer right away. She still sat at the table with Charles, Mercy, Clarissa and Latif at lunch, but she wouldn’t say they were her friends. “Cause I’m weird,” she said finally.

  “The best of us are, baby. Ain’t that right, Freddy?”

  Fred Bosch looked up from where he was replacing the paper in the register and said, “Sure haven’t been called anything else in my life.” He winked at Mina and walked over to talk to Mr. Nance hovering in the jazz section.

  “Come to think of it,” said Bones, “I didn’t have no friends when I was your age neither.”

  “But you have a whole bunch of friends now.”

  “That’s cause I’m a music-man, girl. Music makes the world go ’round. When I learned that, I had a whole slew of friends from any number of places. Everybody loves music. Tell me, who do you want to be friends with?”

  “I want to be friends with Clarissa. She’s cool.”

  “Cool-cool like Thelma Evans?” Bones said and smiled at her.

  “She is kinda like Thelma,” Mina said. “Except she’s real super tall.”

  “What kind of music does she listen to?”

  Mina shrugged. “I never asked.”

  “Now that there’s your problem, Mina girl,” Bones said. “That oughta be the first question come out your mouth.”

  The door swung open, and Mina immediately dropped down behind the counter. She didn’t need to look again. Octavian had just walked in. Bones saw her hiding and raised his eyebrows.

  “I know him,” she whispered.

  “Who? Octavian? I know him too. Comes in here a lot with his brother and his dad.”

  “I don’t want him to see me.”

  “Why not? Maybe y’all could be friends.”

  “No, Bones, no. Not now.”

  Bones gave her a look, and Mina heard Octavian’s voice
say, “Frankie, this is that song I told you I liked.”

  She heard the deeper voice of his brother say, “Pop, Imma go,” and she peered over the edge of the counter.

  The father stopped and said, “Where are you going?”

  Octavian’s brother didn’t look that much like Octavian. He had a box cut and wore a Polo sweater and what looked like new Jordans. Mina bet he had a lot of girlfriends. Octavian also wore new Jordans, but he was shorter and thicker than his brother, and his box cut was not nearly so neat. Mina could see that his brother was clenching his fists. “I gotta meet some friends,” he said.

  Octavian’s father’s face pulled tight as he watched Francis walk out of the store. Octavian stood there, looking like he didn’t know which way to go. Mina was reminded about his funny heart and wondered if it was going to start doing that beating fast thing it did. She remembered that she hadn’t been lonely when Octavian was her friend.

  Bones shuffled down from the counter and over to where they stood. “Afternoon, gentlemen,” he said.

  Octavian’s father extended his hand to Bones with amusement in his eyes. “How are you Jimmy?”

  “Doing great, Professor, how about you?”

  “We’re muddling through,” he said.

  “Well, can I help y’all find something today?”

  “Not sure yet. Octavian is looking to start his own record collection.” Octavian’s father looked like Octavian, Mina thought, but older, and he looked tired. Bones put a hand on the man’s shoulder and they turned and walked away from her. Mina could no longer hear what they were saying.

  Octavian walked into the Classic Rock section and pulled out a record. His eyes lit up. “Yes,” he said loud enough that Mina could hear him clearly. “This has got ‘Maybelline’ and ‘My Ding-A-Ling’ on it! C’mon Pop. Let’s go.”