by Lamar Giles
Some doodled while “available grief services” were mentioned. Some did a poor job hiding their “who?” expressions while glancing to friends for some clue about dead kids they never knew. I went full thousand-yard stare during the truncated eulogy, as if the topic was the Magna Carta or frog dissections. Only present what you want the world to see.
With homecoming a week away, the Smart Ones were forgotten before the dirt covered their coffins.
As the sole survivor of the club, that hurt me in a way no one knew, or would likely care about if they did. That pain was freshly revived, given the school’s reaction to Paris’s demise.
How much grief, on average, does it take to break a person?
I tapped the question into my Notes app, almost losing my phone when the school bus bounced on a pothole. There’s probably an equation that could calculate an answer. Jim could’ve done the math, giving me something to code. Phillip would’ve worked out monetization or, as he liked to put it, “how to get that shmoney!” Then Simon would’ve come through with the snazzy title, logo, and rollout plan.
Without any of them here, I was stuck with just the question. The latest in a long Smart Ones list of ideas and problems and wishes I’d started after they died.
I watched the “All Changes Saved” message flash in the header of my digital notepad, the whole time recognizing there might be something terribly wrong with maintaining a list of technical problems for your dead friends to solve. Like, maybe I wasn’t handling this all so well.
How much grief does it take to break a person? Maybe, three to four friends’ worth.
Just a guess.
For the last three days, there were multiple counselors on-site, time slots booked from school start to school end. A tribute Tumblr—ParSec Love—started by a sophomore girl, typically known for her other salacious Cooke High gossip pages, who was quick enough and slick enough to become the top tribute page for the grieving, both domestic and abroad, gaining her valuable, valuable upperclassmen cred. She upgraded lunch tables and everything.
There wasn’t a hall you could walk without sobs, soft and loud, battering you. Paris’s fans repped in force, even if most only became fans as of this week. Guess that’s what could be expected for Cooke High’s most popular student who hadn’t set foot in the school for, like, a year before … what happened, happened.
I’d been watching the group mourn unfold since Monday, back at school so soon not because I wanted to, but because no one got to sit in Mama’s house doing nothing. Even if nothing = grieving.
My usual preferred presentation—invisibility—served me well in the hollow days after this “community tragedy” (Principal Corgis’s words), when I fell into my classes like the school was a shifting box triggered by a periodic bell, and I only ended up wherever gravity dictated. Most people had forgotten any connection I had with Paris before “Calm Down, Turn Up!” blew, starting her ascent. So I didn’t get ordering info on the airbrushed RIP tees featuring a distorted rendering of Paris’s face in soft strokes that made her look more angelic than she would’ve liked, or the black DJ ParSec armbands. None of them knew that I’d seen what was left of Paris, the way she’d been discarded. I wasn’t about to let anyone know, not even the counselors going for pointed eye contact each time I passed their table. Three days of successful avoidance. A new normal developed. So this morning’s distinct “offness” troubled me.
Why was I suddenly seen?
Stepping off the bus, I started my initial locker trek and felt eyes, like rough feathers, brushing over my skin. When I glanced at my observers, they quickly flicked their attention elsewhere. A few held firm with smirks and scowls. My usually purposeful strides became cautious; the dull polished tiles now concealed landmines.
At my locker, hesitant to touch the combo lock, the feathery glances increased in pressure, became the sensation of sinking to the bottom of a pool. I checked the dial for glue, or spit, or worse. “Greasing your lock” was a Cooke High prank staple for reasons I didn’t know and never wanted to investigate. There was no foreign residue present, best I could tell. Pinching the—dry, thank God—knob, I began the right-left-right procedure, when I heard a friend’s voice.
Paris said, “That VA sound, comin’ ’round again!”
I leapt back, terrified, my stomach in my shoes. The mean chuckles in the hall weren’t loud enough to drown a dead girl’s voice.
“We ’bout to take you for a spin!”
Bom-bom-ba-ba-ba-tah! Bom-bom-ba-ba-ba-tah!
I undid my lock quickly, yanked my flimsy metal locker door, and snatched the cheap Bluetooth speaker off the shelf inside. Or tried. This particular speaker was the pastel blue of an Easter egg, a kind meant to stick on the walls of showers or tubs for bathroom listening. The suction cup at its base cemented it in place, making me look more foolish as I grabbed it two-handed, attempting to break the seal.
Bom-bom-ba-ba-ba-tah! Bom-bom-ba-ba-ba-tah!
Tinny bass vibrated in my palms as Lil’ Redu’s opening rap verse began. “They say they want us calmer, but we want drama …”
The suction cup gave slowly, peeled gradually. A sudden quick release had me reeling back, colliding with one of the complicit witnesses, a beefy girl rocking a DJ ParSec memorial band on her bicep. As soon as our bodies met, she shoved me at my locker with instigating force. “Watch where you going, shady!”
Paris’s song continued playing from my palm while I processed the insult. It was wrong somehow. Not: “Watch where you going, clumsy!” That shady was meaningful somehow, pointed. What did it mean exactly? Why was it pointed at me?
More laughs, more mean clowns grinning until their faces blurred together. Examining the speaker, I thumbed the proper button until an Android-like tone indicated a power-down. Already, phones were aimed, recording, waiting for a meltdown they wouldn’t get.
Lifting my satchel’s flap, I tucked the speaker inside, ignored heckling about how I was so poor I was gonna trade it for food. I gathered the books I’d actually come to my locker for.
With the show over, my “fans” churned, en route to wherever they were supposed to be with just a few minutes left until first bell. I weaved past them, hoping I could catch an empty bathroom to center myself before homeroom, to reinstate my invisibility. Turning a corner by the cafeteria, I ducked around some breakfast kids, while one girl approached from the opposite direction. When I tried to sidestep, she moved with me. Thinking it one of those awkward we-both-tried-to-avoid-each-other-and-it-didn’t-work moments, I sidestepped again. As did she.
We were now in speaking range, my guard up, ready to—I don’t know—counter if this was some kind of attack. I wasn’t a real fighter, evident by my still-bandaged wrist from when I punched Fuse Fallon. But I wouldn’t back down easily. Ever.
No fists from the gossip girl with the newly popular ParSec Love Tumblr, whose name escaped me.
She said, “You might want to check your Twitter.”
A confusing statement, since I didn’t mess with Twitter. I found the character limit silly and arbitrary. Before I could fully process what she meant, she added, “And transfer.”
She left me with a sinking feeling and a pressing need to add an app to my phone.
Didn’t expect my reintroduction to Cooke High society to be warm exactly, but felt I would not be without a support system. After all, everyone who jammed to, and loved, ParSec’s music was family. #ParSecNation, rise up! All day, every day. I could do this.
My actual family, Dad, didn’t settle for a drop-off, given my extended absence. He marched me into the crowded main foyer, making my insides clench. We sailed past my whispering peers, down the administrative corridor, where student workers paused in their photocopying and stapling duties. More than a few of them wore some sort of DJ ParSec paraphernalia. Not official stuff, and I made a mental note to text Paula Klein about licensing concerns now that I had my phone back.
In the main office, Principal Corgis waited in a stiff stan
ce, like he was the resource officer instead of the principal. Corgis’s preferred mode of dress was golf-course-ready—pleated khakis and a polo shirt. This was in stark contrast to Dad’s custom suits, hundred-dollar ties always cinched in huge knots, with gold and jeweled embellished cuff links, tie tacks, and such. Dad had commented on this a couple of times after PTA meetings, saying his tax dollars should afford better-dressed administrators.
“Mr. Fallon,” Corgis said, hand extended, his cheeks and bald spot a rosy pink.
“Jim.” Dad shook, then led Corgis and me into the principal’s office.
I half expected Dad to pull a crazy disrespectful boss move and sit on the wrong side of the desk, in Corgis’s leather ergonomic chair. My father reined in his alpha maleness and hovered next to the pair of chairs on the trouble side of the desk, waiting until Corgis and I took our seats before proving he wasn’t a statue.
Corgis tapped keys, brightening the light emitting from his monitor, though it was turned in a way that didn’t allow me a view of whatever he was looking at. Could’ve been my permanent record or Powerball. From what I’d heard of Corgis and his little gambling problem, probably Powerball.
He began, “Mr. Fallon, I’m glad Fatima is back. We—”
“Have a situation, Jim. I want to be frank about that.”
Principal Corgis radiated cautious surprise. “Situation? What would that be exactly?”
“Obviously, Fatima won’t be able to finish her high school career at Cooke. The school year, yes, but she will be transferring for her senior year.”
Corgis pressed back into his seat, steepled his fingers. “Okay.”
I read the novel hidden in that one-word answer. There were almost two thousand students at Cooke High. If I’d never come back this year, Corgis’s day wouldn’t have changed by a percent. Where was Dad going with this?
“That girl that got herself killed—”
“ParSe—Paris, Dad.” My tongue had a wicked reflex that I wish I could deactivate.
Dad gave me the don’t-interrupt-again side-eye. Continued. “She hung with hoodlums. Some of them go here. So-called ‘rappers’ ”—the diamonds in his platinum wedding band glimmered as he made air quotes—“who really only write barely coherent poems about violence and debauchery. Under your roof. I’ve heard the school even encourages their activities.”
Hypocrite hovered over my tongue, but I clenched my jaw and foiled its escape. Poems about violence and debauchery? Like he didn’t grow up in the ’80s and ’90s singing along to rhythmic revolutionaries, proud gangsters, and player presidents. Those songs only told what people were really going through. They were journalism, not instructions. He told me that.
And heard from who? Not me, for sure. What had Dad been looking into these last few days?
Corgis didn’t get it either. “I’m not following, Mr. Fallon.”
“I know for a fact at least one of that dead girl’s ‘crew’ leads some kind of slam music club here.”
“Slam poetry.” That reflex again. His side-eye came with a wicked dose of telepathy that time. The message: You’re only going to make this worse for yourself, but that’s nothing new.
My nickname, Fuse, wasn’t one I took. It was given, by my dad. His “Little Short Fuse” because of the tantrums I’d throw as a child and the punishments those tiny blowups got me. But he was wrong here. ParSec didn’t have a “crew,” not the way he was trying to make it sound, like they planned casino heists in their spare time. And the poetry leader he was talking about was Shameik Larsen.
Crap.
“Seaside Poets,” Corgis added, naming the demon Dad was trying to conjure. “It’s faculty sponsored.”
Dad’s head tilted, shrewd. “So sanctioned by you?”
Corgis only managed to catch half of his flinch. “We have many official after-school programs.”
“Do they all endanger your students?”
“Dad,” I said, “slam poetry doesn’t endanger anybody. That’s not even the same thing ParSec did. You know that. You—”
He adjusted his tie knot, waiting for me to finish. Pointless arguments made with zeal were still pointless, as Mom would say.
Dad finally got to his point. “I don’t care that the program exists and that you don’t see anything wrong with it. I care about my daughter and that she is no longer in close proximity with the people involved in whatever resulted in a young girl’s murder. There’s, what, six weeks left in the school year? I’m going to ask that we make some alternate arrangements for Fatima.”
My voice quaked. “What kind of alternate arrangements?”
Corgis, way too accommodating, probably anxious to have a noisy and powerful member of the Cooke High parental community gone, said, “What do you have in mind?”
Dad explained. Corgis nodded, with only the occasional question, and a final, “Unorthodox, but doable.”
My assessment: horror.
By the time Dad and Corgis settled on the arrangements, we were well into second period, and Dad complained about how he was late too. The difference being, when he strolled into his office, it would be with zero scrutiny. His various indentured marketing nerds would probably be scared to look away from their displays. Joys of being the boss. When I made my late entrance into Mrs. Jasper’s American History class, with my principal escort, it was all eyes on me.
The room was dark when we entered, a projector shot a beam of light and levitating lint at a whiteboard-mounted screen. This particular slide featured a painting of a covered wagon moving among tan sands and tumbleweeds, with a header reading “Westward Expansion.” Mrs. Jasper stopped talking, and Principal Corgis motioned to the light switch. “May I?”
Mrs. Jasper nodded, and Corgis flipped the overhead fluorescents on, waking a couple of beauty sleepers. One of the groggy travelers forced from the Dreamlands was the subject of Dad’s earlier, misguided rant: Shameik.
His mouth stretched sideways in an exaggerated yawn, various creases in his sleeve had left a pattern on his dark brown cheek and temple from where he laid his head. His usually pristine fade seemed thicker and less attended to, his hairline as fuzzy as a rough sketch. His skin was dull, ashy. This was a different boy than the one I’d known. He was in the back row, next to my empty desk. He blinked, spotted me, and his mouth turned down. I wanted to go to him, hug him. And kick him. It was complicated. Thanks to Dad, my leash wasn’t long enough for any of that.
Shameik held up his phone, pointed at the dark screen. Even without an app visible, I knew where he was going with the gesture. It was about my early morning tweets. He mouthed, What did you do?
A shrug was all I could manage.
Principal Corgis told our teacher, “A quick word?” Mrs. Jasper joined him in the hall.
Alone with my peers, shuffling my feet while they all stared, the room felt heavy, like gravity shifted.
About forty years later, Mrs. Jasper returned, motioning to the row where I usually sat. “Everyone shift back one seat, please.” With confused grumbling as the initial response, Mrs. Jasper added, “Right now.”
The relocation began, my classmates gathering their things to allow me access to the first desk in the row, my seat for the rest of the school year. In. Every. Class.
Like Principal Corgis told Dad, unorthodox, but doable.
Lunch would be worse. No more cafeteria … or as Dad called it when explaining his plans to Mom, “GenPop.” I’d be eating either in the teachers’ lounge or the in-school suspension room, depending on which was less populated.
With ParSec’s murder, my bougie Dad converted the best public school in Ocean Shore, Virginia, into little more than a medium-security prison. With veiled threats to the principal, he’d gotten me thrown in the hole.
Settled into my new seat, the lights went out, and the monotone lecture resumed. A mere five minutes in, Lacey Barr reached from the desk behind me and lightly tapped my elbow, quickly followed with a folded paper square tumbling over my shoulder
into my lap. I unfolded it between sheets of loose leaf in my binder, in case Mrs. Jasper’s spider-sense went off, and found nearly unreadable chicken scratch that could’ve only come from one person.
Typically this exchange would’ve been done via text with our phones in our laps, and the brightness slider on its lowest setting. My sudden classroom repositioning forced us into a post-apocalyptic analog state.
Shameik had written:
Yo, I didn’t think you were ever coming back. I was scared, Fuse. Nobody’s saying anything about anything other than she’s dead. Over and over, they sorry about her being dead , and we can go talk to the counselors about her being dead. And they’re telling me they’re sorry for my loss. Like, huh?
The only one I wanted to talk to is you! Were you there with ParSec? People saying that. And worse. Then those wild tweets you sent this morning. You really think Kya Caine set ParSec up?!
Look, I know you and me weren’t in a good place last time we really hung out. We had a misunderstanding, that’s all. Hit me back. Soon. I don’t care how. ~S
I crumpled the paper in my fist. The only one I wanted to talk to is you!
Like the last time he wanted to “talk” to me went so good.
A return note—which likely would’ve been a bunch of curse words and a glob of nasty spit, in other words, everything Shameik deserved—wasn’t a possibility when I was this visible. Mrs. Jasper would see it, confiscate it. I heard teachers used to read notes aloud before lock screens made text messages unreachable, and I didn’t want more ParSec gossip getting out.
Then those wild tweets you sent this morning. You really think Kya Caine set ParSec up?!
Is that how he took it?
Not that I cared what Shameik thought about anything, but were other people taking it that way too? Is that what I really thought?
Honestly, I don’t know that I thought much about anything beyond getting people to understand I didn’t cause my friend’s death. Change the narrative, another thing I read about in my marketing books.