by Naima Coster
He rubbed his jaw where he was sore. His teeth seemed to be vibrating; he could still feel the pressure of them sliding together even when he stopped.
“I could hear you, you know, in the auditorium. Grinding those teeth. If you’re not careful, you’ll crack another.”
“I can’t control it, Linette.”
“Have you tried? You can’t let people bother you so much, Gee. I don’t need to tell you what it might be like for you at this school. You were there. You heard them.”
Linette and Jade were always telling him how hard his life would be, like he could ever forget.
“Those were just the parents,” he said.
“You think teenagers are going to be much better?”
“Can we talk about something else?”
“Fine. Adira was looking cute today.”
“Oh God, Linette. Please. I don’t want to talk about girls.”
“Why not? There’s nothing wrong with a little crush.”
“She’s my friend.”
Linette wiggled her eyebrows at Gee. It was so goofy he couldn’t help but laugh. Linette had dressed up for the meeting in a crisp blue blouse, her nails polished. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen her that way. Usually, she looked run-down, her hair undone, gunk at the corners of her eyes. She spent most of her time watching the television, cooking their meals, and keeping the house together while Jade was at work. She didn’t seem very happy, but she wasn’t miserable either. She was tender with him, and she got along with Jade fine. The two of them orbited each other, ate their meals together, as if this life wasn’t really theirs; it was temporary, filler, and they were biding time, counting down the days until something changed. What? Until he went off to school? Until they were all far enough from what had happened to Ray?
They rolled farther east, down the wide, quiet roads.
“It can be good, you know, to let somebody close,” Linette said.
“Like you and Ma?”
“You mind the way you talk to me, young man.”
“Sorry.” Gee didn’t mean to be rude with Linette, but he had nowhere to put all his bad feelings. He made a point of sighing, fluttering his lips, to ease the tension in his jaw. It made no difference.
Through the rearview, he saw Jade’s turn signal blink. They were still a mile from home. He watched her make a left, and then she was gone. He turned to make a face at Linette, as if to say, See how much she cares? But she kept her eyes on the road.
At home, Linette parked herself in front of the TV. Whatever attention she’d had for him had dried up now, and she went straight for her needlepoint and the evening news. He left her, retreated to his room upstairs. It had been a walk-in closet, but now it was his: a narrow bed, a desk with his computer, big speakers to play music, a hanging light bulb, and a picture of him and Ray.
It was the photograph that had hung in the shrine before Jade took it down. She said Ray was in their hearts; they didn’t need to keep him on the wall. It was the same year his nightmares started, although he couldn’t remember how old he’d been, whether it had started in the old apartment or here at Linette’s. First, he was sleeping too much, then he wasn’t sleeping at all. Then he had headaches, real ones that gave credibility to the fake ones he used as excuses now.
The dreams were all the same at the beginning. He was in a car, riding somewhere. Then he was alone: on a dark street, or in the woods, or the old fairgrounds. They all ended with him being snatched from behind, someone dragging him away, although he didn’t know where. He woke one morning because he felt himself choking; he spit a pearly shard into his hand and saw he’d split his front tooth in two. He didn’t know how much it had cost to repair, but he knew Jade had put it all on a credit card and it took her a long time to pay it off. The dentist said he had other internal fractures in his teeth, and it was only a matter of time before they cracked, too, if he kept grinding. He had said it as if Gee had a choice in the matter, as if he could stop, if only he put his mind to it.
He had retrieved the photograph of him and Ray at the park from a box in Jade’s closet, put it up on his own with thumbtacks. It wasn’t that he liked the picture much; he didn’t. It was the portrait of a stranger, a dead person. And he didn’t recognize himself, either, in the dimpled, sun-lit little boy. It didn’t capture how it had felt to be Ray’s son, to sit with him in the kitchen in the morning to test out recipes, to fall asleep against his shoulder in the windowsill at Superfine. All his memories of Ray were hazy, so it wasn’t that he missed him, exactly, but he thought of him every day. When he saw a boy his age with his father. Or a happy pair of parents with their child. When he ate a good slice of cake, when he saw rusting old sedans, green, like the one Ray had driven. He didn’t remember watching him die, although Linette and Jade had asked him what he saw, and they had asked him, too, in court. He remembered only saying he didn’t know and feeling he had disappointed them, all those watching grown-ups with faces that betrayed there was something more they had hoped to hear.
Alone in his room, Gee flopped into bed, started tapping his tongue against the veneer. It seemed fine for now, still intact, unlike the mouth guard he used overnight, which was covered in dents. He didn’t know why he did it; he didn’t go to sleep worrying about anything, and the nightmares were rare. But there was evidence of his habit every morning. His jaw ached, and it took a few moments to unseal his teeth, open his mouth, and feel again that he could speak.
It didn’t seem to be a problem in his mind—no matter the kind of day he had, no matter his thoughts, the grinding wasn’t any better or worse. The trouble was in his body. It wasn’t only his receding gums, the blood in the sink when he brushed his teeth. Sometimes, he found himself standing with his shoulders up by his ears, or his fists clenched, or he’d be lying in bed listening to music and he’d notice suddenly that his legs were as rigid as planks of wood. He tried to help himself by discharging the ugly feelings. He did it in the bathroom at school, under a blanket in front of the TV, here in his room. The trouble always came back, but it still helped to snuff it out for a while.
Gee reached up to turn off the light, slid his hands into his jeans. He started working on himself. His skin was dry, but it felt good, and he ignored his routine unease about what he was doing. There was no question that he wouldn’t stop. He rubbed harder, and it became smoother, more fluid. His hand glided along, and he helped himself with his thoughts. These were not his fingers; this breath was not his breath. There were women in his brain, women in his room. Women who were older, women who loved him. Women with no faces, with body parts he’d never seen close up. Women who didn’t exist, except for now. They told him he was perfect. They told him he should come. They told him and told him and told him. Soon he took off, the pleasure where he was holding, and elsewhere, too: his toes, his buzzing skin, his warming face. He was nowhere, free. He felt himself lighten; he felt himself float. Everything inside him flowed into the air, became big energy, rippling around. He was empty. He was wet and spent and fine. His jaw unclenched.
There were some who said the initiative started in the county. The city was changing. People were moving closer to downtown; the business council had a five-year plan for revitalizing Main Street; the old millhouses were being converted into single-family homes. Money was coming back to the city, and they had to get ahead of the changes. If they brought together the city and county school systems, they could redistribute the kids—and the taxes—the right way.
There were others who said the mayor dreamed it up. He was a black man who would be retiring at the end of the term, and this would be his lasting legacy: undoing the white flight that had damned the city schools so long ago, especially on the east side, where he was raised. He was hoping for a plaque in his honor, downtown, catty-corner from the Confederate soldiers’ monument.
And still others said it was a long time coming, overdue, what federal law had required for decades. The school board was finally putting their mo
ney where their mouths were. They were busing the kids, piloting programs in vocational training, computer science, the arts. It was the chance to transfer your child to a school with new programs that got most parents on board.
The first pamphlets used the words integration and equity. There was a slew of op-eds in the local paper threatening legal action, arguing the problem of considering race in public schools. A band of white parents called it discrimination; they cited the inconveniences of busing. They held living room meetings, papered the storefronts downtown with their hot-pink flyers.
When the pamphlets were reissued, they used the words opportunity and choice, laid out quotas for the number of students on free and reduced lunch in two short paragraphs. The rest of the pamphlets highlighted the new programs, the way to apply for a transfer. It was wildly popular, a trick. But they hadn’t fooled Lacey May.
She hadn’t planned on getting involved, but all the talk of inequality, giving every family a fair shot, rubbed her the wrong way. There were problems in this life, sure, but they were mostly the result of people’s own doing. You could blame the world, Lacey May thought; you could make up arguments, you could blame the past. But it was like blaming a shadow, searching for a reason, when the reason, at the end of the day, was you.
She was making signs at the kitchen table when Noelle finally came up from the basement. She had shut herself down there after they got home from the town hall and skipped dinner. It was dark now and she slipped in, filled a glass of water at the tap. She halved a lemon and squeezed it in, seeds and all. She inspected the signs her mother had made. Our Taxes, Our Schools! Protect Our Kids! Not Our Problem!
“Feeling sick?” Lacey May asked.
“Well, I do want to vomit every time I look at those signs.” Noelle drained the glass and filled another. “You know we live in the city, right? And your friends are trying to keep city kids out of the county schools?”
“The west side is different,” Lacey May said. “Our schools are the good ones. Why do you want it getting ruined? The least you could do is help.”
“No chance in hell.”
Noelle crossed into the living room, where her sisters were watching a vampire show on the TV. Margarita was swooning over the pale-faced lead, Diane watching with Jenkins belly up in her lap. Hank drank a beer in his armchair, winced at all the punching and grunting onscreen. Noelle crouched on the floor to tie up her boots.
“You going out?” Hank asked. “It’s late.”
“I’ll be back before morning.”
“Very funny,” he said and turned back to the vampire show. He had learned to give Noelle a wide berth, and she had learned to expect it. There was a honk outside, and Lacey May charged into the living room.
“Just where do you think you’re going?”
Noelle went on crisscrossing her laces.
“You think I’m some bigot, but I’m a realist. Do you know what that is, Noelle? It’s somebody who prepares for the future by paying attention to today.”
“Thanks for the lesson.” Noelle clomped out of the room, and Lacey May followed her.
“You think you’re so special, that no matter what happens, you’ll be just fine. Well, let me tell you, this is no land of plenty. When you’re grown, you’ve got to fight for everything you call yours, and no one is going to make it easy for you. Nobody is going to help. I wish I had a mother looking out for me! You go around like your future is guaranteed.”
Noelle spun around to face her mother. “Don’t you worry about my future, Mama. I won’t get stuck marrying Hank.” Another honk. “That’s my ride,” she said, and stepped into the night.
Duke was waiting for her in his car, and Noelle crossed the lawn quickly. She was quaking with rage and embarrassment. Her mother had never cared about school, never so much as baked a brownie for a bake sale. But for weeks she’d been hosting other mothers in the kitchen for coffee and folding mailers. She had even signed her name to an op-ed in the paper. Noelle had been grateful her mother had changed her name and that there was nothing there, in print, that tethered her to Lacey May.
Once she was inside, Duke handed her a beer. She kept the open can between her legs as they coasted through the west side toward the highway. When they reached the cover of speed and darkness on 85, she took a sip. It was warm and flat. Duke slid his hand up her leg, brushed his fingers against her groin. She didn’t move against him. She drank until the can was done, then she crushed it, stuffed it into the glove compartment.
“Are you going to that march?” she asked.
“Maybe. There’s a bunch of us walking over after church.”
“Then you can go with my mother.”
“What’s the big deal?”
“It’s like a movie. People are making signs, trying to keep the new kids from coming in. You’d think it was the sixties.”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Duke said. “It’s got nothing to do with them being black.”
“Don’t be such an idiot. Of course it does.”
Duke turned to her in shock, his face flushed from the beer.
“I’m sorry.” Noelle leaned over to kiss him behind the ear. “I’m not feeling good tonight. I’ve got a lot that’s bothering me.”
Duke looked at her disapprovingly, but he didn’t say anything. He picked his battles, and he didn’t like to disappoint, not his mother, not Noelle. It was one of the reasons he made such a decent boyfriend. He had sculpted his red-blond hair into spikes for the show, put on the Black Sabbath T-shirt Noelle had bought for him at a record store on one of their dates.
“Let me make it up to you,” she said and slipped her hand between his legs.
Duke looked at her, measuring. He had eyes the clear green of pines. She unzipped his fly, untied his belt, and he lifted his hips, which was how she knew she’d been forgiven. She rooted around in his pants, and he was sighing even before she stroked him. He set the cruise control in the car.
“Put your seat belt on,” he told her, then, “Faster.” He kept his eyes on the road.
The club was fifty miles west, and Duke paid their way in. They were checking IDs at the bar, so he got them sodas with lime. Noelle chewed the limes, hers then his, separating the pulp from the rind with her teeth. “My stomach hurts,” she explained, swallowing down an acid taste in her throat.
The stage was in a dingy, windowless room, papered with banners from old shows and black-and-white stickers that said things like Meat Is Murder and Support the Police—Beat Yourself Up. The band was in town from New Jersey, and both Duke and Noelle considered themselves devotees. Their music was loud and simple, the guitar parts easy enough for Duke to imitate on his guitar, the singing mostly shouting. There was fury and energy to their sound, a thumping bass to move your hips, a drum solo to bash your head, breakdowns where you felt your body soar, the music lifting you. The chain store in the mall didn’t carry their CD, so Noelle had downloaded their whole EP over her dial-up connection, waiting an hour for each track.
The first set started, the crowd surging toward the stage to welcome them. In the crush of bodies, Noelle felt herself a part of something, a movement of misfits who weren’t sure what unified them besides that they didn’t fit in anywhere else. It was this feeling of being out that had led her to start wearing black rubber bracelets, stacked a dozen high, and to start painting her lips blood red. It was part of why she’d chosen Duke. His parents may have been deacons in the church, but he wasn’t quite a square.
In a way, it made sense to her to feel adrift, out of place, in North Carolina. The band was from close to New York, where she imagined it was easy to find other vegans and anarchists and feminists, other white boys who wore their hair too long. She screamed and thrashed alongside the teenage boys in eyeliner, the girls with titanium rings pushed through the cartilage in their ears. They batted around blown-up condoms, inflated like balloons. They smashed their bodies together and slid across pools of sweat.
The first set was nearly
through when Noelle spotted a crew of brown kids, all boys, except for one girl, whose face Noelle couldn’t see—she’d tied a red bandanna just below her eyes. She wore a cropped white shirt that exposed her long, hard belly, a large indigo bird rising out of the hem of her sweatpants, flying across her rib cage—a tattoo. Noelle sometimes fantasized about getting a black butterfly on her hip bone, a seashell in the cleft between her breasts. All she needed was the cash, a ride to Charlotte, an artist who wouldn’t care she wasn’t yet eighteen. But here was a girl, not much older, who wasn’t stuck dreaming, who had done it. Noelle watched her windmill her arms, grab white boys by the collar, and swing them around. The girl and her friends made a little protected knot at the center of the mosh pit, and Noelle, at the edge of the circle, held her hands out in front of her to shove away anybody who came too close. The beautiful girl with the bird on her body never did. Noelle would have liked to touch her. Duke kept his arms tied fast around her waist.
The set was nearly over when the nausea came on hard. Noelle felt as if liquid were collecting in her throat, and she went off running, pushing her way through the crowd. When she reached the stall, she threw up.
She sat down on the seat to recover. She felt dizzy and warm. She was at the sink, rinsing her mouth, when the girl strode in, her bandanna pushed down around her neck. She had a wide, beautiful face, her makeup smeared around her dark eyes. She nodded at Noelle.
Before she knew it, Noelle had sputtered her name, her whole name, out at the girl, who smiled at her indulgently. She said she was Alexandra, a student at UNC, and she and her friends came to all these shows. They had started a band of their own, in the style of the Chicano hardcore bands from Chicago and L.A., although they were all North Carolinians, only two of them Mexican. Alexandra was from El Salvador.