Darling Days

by iO Tillett Wright

  TWO DAYS LATER, I call Barbara and ask her if, when I come to feed the cats, I can move into my little room permanently. Shit is too insane at Julia’s place, and I need somewhere safe to be. I’ll trade babysitting Leo every day for rent, because I’ve got no money. She says sure, and that’s it, I pack my duffels, fold up my mattress, and drag them over to her place.

  When I slide the bed in through the door and unfold it, it touches the walls on all four sides, that’s how small the room is, but once I lay my clothes out on the incubator, stack my books on it, and tack up my Aaliyah and Faith Evans posters, I put on my headphones and fall into a deep sleep, knowing that I’m finally safe.

  PART II

  Agency

  Chapter 33

  The Boot

  Karlsruhe, Germany, and southern England, May 1999

  POP AND I ARE SITTING ON THE FLOOR OF HIS STUDIO EATING Chinese noodles when he introduces the idea. He starts reminiscing about the boarding school he went to, and how fun it was to run around the English countryside, free from parents and rules, smoking weed in the trees and making friends independently. It was the seventies, I point out, bored, but he’s insistent on the magic of the experience being one of the pillars around which his personality has been built.

  I ask him, flat out, what he’s getting at. He explains that, well, seeing as I’m having such a hard time with the rules at my new school, since the strict German system seems to not be the best fit for me, and I’ve essentially run away and am living in a cubicle at Barbara’s, maybe we should be thinking about going to a live-away school as an option.

  Gendered uniform. Skirts. Rules. Headmasters. HORROR.

  I become emotional instantly. The hot mozzarella ball that precedes tears coagulates in my chest.

  Why would he want to send me away? I already live at Barbara’s house and require almost nothing of him—he barely ever knows where I am. I get myself up for school, take myself there, eat dinner with Barbara, cover my own rent by babysitting Leo; and I only just got to Germany last year.

  He confides that he and Julia are on the rocks, and he’s thinking of moving into his studio. He says I obviously can’t discuss this with anyone or it could complicate a delicate process, but once he moves into his studio he might also have some money problems for a while, because if she won’t let him work for the company anymore then he’ll have no salary and he won’t be able to take care of me.

  The wreckage of my future whips itself quickly into a frenzy, like a storm wind, burning my cheeks. This is not my problem. He needs to figure that out. He is my father. I already rely so little on him, I don’t think this is a legitimate enough reason to get rid of me. My ma and I didn’t have any money, but she never sent me away.

  “I kind of put the word out, to see if anyone knew of any good places, and my friend told me about what sounds like a really amazing school in England that—”

  “England? You’re sending me to England?”

  My insides are at gale force now. If we were on a ship the sky would have gone black and he’d be shouting at me over the howl of my anger, squinting against giant raindrops of my disappointment pelting his face.

  “Well, I’m not shipping you off. It actually sounds like a really cool place. It was founded by an Indian philosopher and there are no uniforms. I went to a school very much like it and it saved my life, besides being the best experience I ever had and my first taste of real freedom.”

  The ocean breathes, deciding whether to toss the ship, and he steadies himself on the rickety guardrail of my brief hesitation.

  “ . . . They don’t have rules?”

  This thought hooks itself around my hysteria’s neck and drags it down slowly into the general murk of confusion about my future. Images of my dad in bell-bottoms, smoking weed in lush trees, laughing with his friends, overlay grainy, colorless images of what would surely be three more years of brutal clashes with the German school system. Pop’s face looks so much like mine that the image starts to melt my resolve. I’m willing to test the waters.

  WE FLY INTO HEATHROW from Frankfurt and take a car from there.

  You’re in the country pretty quickly from the suburbs of London. I roll the car window down to look at the bright green fields that smell like cow shit and chimney smoke.

  The driver hurtles along macadam tentacles laid out in the mud. Signs warn of ELDERLY PEOPLE CROSSING and FARM TRAFFIC, the latter with illustrations of tractors. We pass blustery men whose rotund bodies look more like gristle around their bones than soft flesh.

  Everyone is dressed in shades of earth, grass, and wood. The people are oddly pink, their jackets green, their corduroys brown. It’s Ichabod Crane’s world. The trees carry spirits in them.

  We drive down the wrong side of a narrow country road, flanked by high hedges and pastures filled with sheep, arriving at a mansionlike white house with deep green lawns stretching from it in all directions.

  As soon as we step in the door we are enfolded in a rich, complex smell, of earth and coziness, of radiators and toast, black tea, oiled wood, and wool sweaters; it smells like a place where people take their shoes off to respect the carpets and speak in quiet tones to respect each other.

  There is so much silence. Silence to allow for the silence of others that blankets all your movements in a kind of slow, deliberate feeling. I notice this as we move down a long, narrow corridor with a low ceiling to check in.

  For my preliminary week, I’ll be staying in a room with two other girls, a Brit and a Greek, at the tippy-top attic of the east wing of the main building.

  When I was first brought up and introduced, they were polite but confused. They took the staff member out into the hall and asked her why a boy prospective was being housed in their room. I could hear through the thin door as she explained: “No, iO is a girl, she just looks like a boy.” That was awkward, but once they adjusted they were super nice. I was nervous to be away from my pop, but the girls plopped right down on the floor and started asking me questions about my life.

  Fuck if it isn’t isolated here. Sheep field on sheep field on meadow on sheep field. At first it’s cramped and scary, every new face is a threat, but the rooms kind of expand as you fill them with life. The whole place starts to slide into being an oasis—a place of calm and stability with a ton of smiling, sweet new playmates from all over the world.

  There are fifty-three kids from twenty-six different countries, so everyone has a hybrid accent—their native speech mixed with a pseudo-British twang. Kids are scattered around, killing time. Phones are not allowed, and the only Internet is dial-up on four old PCs in the computer room in the basement. Everyone reads, plays the guitar, journals, hangs out with each other, goes for walks. Kids run and play soccer in the icy air, which makes me think they’re insane.

  The school kitchen is vegetarian, and twice a day meals are set out in vats. Everyone serves themselves on steel dishes and sits at long wooden tables in the bright dining room together to eat.

  No one knows if I’m a boy or a girl. For the first few days I see kids staring and talking about me. But I sit with my roommates and Malia, a gregarious Syrian girl from Paris. Even if they’re curious about what I am, everyone seems open and nice.

  I’m trying to adjust to getting up for “Morning Meeting.” I’ve never woken up at six forty-five in my life. Eighty people gather together and sit in absolute silence. You can hear every creaking shift of weight in the room. I don’t really get the point, so I use the time to scan people’s faces and imagine what their stories are.

  At seven thirty the green ground is covered in a layer of silvery frost. Like the earth is an aging punk whose green hair is coming up salt and spirulina. The first morning the sky is streaked with blue and pink. It’s so beautiful it stops people as they walk, but by the afternoon it’s hazed over into a dense purplish gray.

  Poppa only stays for half the week. The day before he goes, I see him in the common area and he beckons me to follow him. He leads me
into his little room and points to a white plastic bag on his bed. It’s a chocolate cake. I want to hug him, I’m so grateful. He tells me he made a friend he wants me to meet, an older student he caught smoking on the path out of here, a beautiful German girl he thinks I’ll like.

  That evening, I’m sitting on the steps in the main hallway when the door opens and a blond girl comes in wearing a white sweater. She’s not tall, but she has a commanding walk.

  She looks at me with huge brown eyes, not smiling, but not not smiling. It’s weird. She reeks of misbehavior. She says her name is Nikita, that we were supposed to meet.

  I pop off a few things in German slang I shouldn’t know, in the ridiculous southern German accent that I’ve picked up, and she gives me a laugh in return. It’s a short exchange, but it’s troublemaker to troublemaker.

  Nikita comes over that night. I tell her made-up stories in funny accents, and we giggle for hours. She ends up giving me a massage long after bedtime, even though being out of your own room that late is strictly forbidden.

  WHEN MY WEEK IS UP, I have three pages of phone numbers and addresses, and people actually cry when I hug them good-bye. By the time I think of writing them letters, though, I’ve already been accepted into the school, and my plane tickets have been booked to go back.

  My heart has swung the other way now, and I can’t wait to go to boarding school.

  Packing up my life in Karlsruhe is easy. All my clothes go back into my two duffel bags, plus I take the CD player, my music collection, my kicks, and my marble notebooks. Done. Good riddance to this place.

  ON SEPTEMBER 6, 2000, wearing crispy gray cargo sweatpants (left leg rolled up because that’s how the drug dealers do it), black Timberlands, a navy blue sweater, and a gray bandanna keeping my fresh cornrows tight to my head, I perch myself in my new bedroom window right over the main entrance, crank my boom box as loud as it will go, and blast Biggie into the dewy British country silence.

  My roommate is a tiny English hippie with pearlescent skin, who doesn’t care what bunk I take and doesn’t mind my music. She sits down to apply glittery nail polish to her fingers and starts asking questions. Questions I realize I don’t have the answers to. Questions that lead to my own questions. Questions like what the fuck happened? How did I go from my great New York jailbreak plan with my pop, to this? How the fuck did I end up here?

  Chapter 34

  Give Me Life

  Southern England, September and October 2000

  I HAVE NO IDEA WHERE TO SIT OR WHAT TO DO, BUT NIKITA appears across the serving tray at my first meal. She smiles a smirking half smile, asks me when I arrived, says it’s nice to see me, and saunters off to the farthest-back table to sit with the older students. If I were older, maybe I’d read it as something else, but all I grasp is that she sees me. Her nineteen to my fifteen gives her a vocabulary I don’t have yet.

  The first few days I don’t know what to do with all my free time. During the day we have activities, wash dishes together, meditate, weird shit like that. There’s no tour or orientation at any point, you just kind of fall in step and figure it out by watching people.

  Classes are somewhat optional. You have to take a certain number to keep the government happy, but the school approves of independent studies and long walks to “reflect” on your inner workings.

  Nobody seems bothered by the cold here. Boys are on the soccer field panting white clouds in the nippy freeze while I’m bundled up in a hoodie and a scarf. Kids just saunter out onto the lawn and drape themselves onto the damp grass.

  In the evening, students gather in the sitting room, playing songs, chitchatting, learning games. I’m disappointed to find that Nikita is never there. She’s holed up in her garden room, depressed because she misses her boyfriend who graduated last year.

  I want her to come out. I want to play with her. I wish she were there. There’s an emotional current already running under my skin, and close quarters turns up the voltage. Eventually it gives me the juice to go knock on her door.

  “Yeah!” she calls out after a few knocks. I open the door timidly and offer a sheepish smile. She’s in her bathroom, pinning her hair up. She smiles at me in that way of hers, so easy to misread.

  We start to hang out a lot. I’ll drop by, and she’ll come back to have tea with me. Every time I make her laugh it’s a victory. Something swells in me when we end up on the big blue canvas couches in the sitting room, probing each other about our lives. My jokes put her in stitches. But then she says, “Okayyy,” with a little sigh, stretching, “it’s time to go,” and she retreats back to her room off the garden.

  When she doesn’t appear at meals, I bring her food. She pretends not to want it, but when I come back for the plates she’s nibbled at it.

  The whole school gathers once a week in the atrium to share feelings and thoughts about the place. Nikita is always late, and she always leaves early. As soon as she’s gone a part of me leaves with her.

  Something is building. We hang out every minute we’re not in classes. In the evenings I make her laugh so much we both feel nervous, and we tell each other as much. We start to tickle and wrestle with each other to blow some of the steam off. At first it’s gentle, but it gets rougher and rougher. Soon we’re teasing and pinching and headlocking each other until we’re both red in the face and her barrettes have come out.

  Her smile has changed now. There’s something animal in her eyes. Boys sit with acoustic guitars on the chairs behind us and pluck out old Beatles songs while we tumble all over the place, crashing into the furniture.

  A few times I fake an accident to get her to slow down and be tender with me. Once, I say I think she’s broken my finger, and we get Jacques, the school nurse, to take us into town to have it x-rayed. The concern she shows is so genuine. In the car, she puts her hand on my head and when her fingers drift to my neck something electric happens and I jerk away. She looks at me with urgency. She feels it, too.

  My finger is fine, of course, but my old trick pays off. That I might have been injured, that I needed her, has released something in her now and she can’t hide it, even from herself.

  That night, after bedtime, when everyone is in their respective rooms, there’s a soft knock on my door. Nikita has snuck across the entire school, at risk of a serious reprimanding, to see me.

  “Do you mind that I’m here?”

  She says this in her low, throaty voice, her eyes wise pools of amber. I see their depth for the first time.

  My roommate is an enthusiast, and is excited by Nikita’s appearance. It’s actually a kind of honor to have a fourth year in the room.

  Nikita simply asks which bed is mine and then climbs in. She looks at me as if to say, “Aren’t you getting in?” This makes me giddy, almost dizzy, but I climb in beside her. She drapes an arm over me and asks me to tell her a story. I lie there grinning, high on the transgression and excitement.

  Examining the bottom of my roommate’s bunk above me, I make up a story about a baby elephant and a cloud that weaves itself into a braid and drops down from the sky so the elephant can climb up and hop from cloud to cloud and explore the world. He travels the globe and makes all kinds of new friends, the descriptions of which each come with a new accent, which makes Nikita giggle.

  She asks me where the talent comes from, and I tell her that I’ve been acting since I was two. She wants to know more. That eventually leads to Ma and my life in New York. I keep talking until our eyes close.

  When I wake up in the morning, Nikita is gone, but her ring, a naked silver woman, is on my bedside table. At morning meeting she enters from the garden side, as usual, and no one is the wiser. We smirk at each other.

  Afterward, I fold the ring up into a note with a bad drawing of an elephant and tack it to the board with her name on it. The day goes by and I don’t see her much, but later there’s a note with my name on it.

  I miss you.

  —N.

  I don’t know what to do. I don’
t want to leave her hanging, I don’t want her to have to miss me, and the feeling of being missed is intoxicating stuff, but I absolutely do not want her to stop missing me, so I put up a note that says:

  So come find me.

  —Eye-oh

  Malia, my rambunctious Syrian friend, can see that we want to hang out and gives us her room for the night. She says she can sleep at a friend’s.

  We stay up till dawn, me whispering stories about my life in New York. At one point I look over and she’s crying.

  “Are you okay?”

  “It’s just . . . so heavy. I’m so sorry you had to live through that.”

  Confusion persists.

  “What do you mean?”

  The wooden bed frame creaks as I roll over to face her, growing bold and wiping a tear from her cheek.

  “I just have never met someone who has dealt with so much and is so . . . normal.”

  I’m normal?

  She lifts her soft hand up, cupping my cheek, and, ever so softly, leans in and kisses me.

  It’s warm, the softest thing I’ve ever felt, and absolutely terrifying. What do I do? How do I kiss back? I’ve never been kissed before.

  She pulls back and looks at me, checking if I’m okay. I am far too nervous to make eye contact, but I smile shyly.

  “Why are you getting so shy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I’m starting to blush. So is she. I can see confusion in her face. I think she has surprised herself, but at least she’s kissed before. In spite of her hesitation she looks at me and says, “Can I do that once more?”

  “Yup.”

  It happens again, this magical envelopment of my lips in the puddinglike pillows attached to her angelic face. Her hand is so soft on my cheek, gently guiding, then pulling me in to her. Something loosens in me, like an electrical wire burst from its bundle.