by Randi Pink
“Look at me,” he said.
I lifted my hand to shield my eyes. “Your eyes are too bright.”
He let out a little laugh. “Yeah, I can’t always control that.” He grabbed a pair of Dollar Tree sunglasses from my nightstand. “Here.”
“Much better, thanks.” His eyes were pewter gray like a sheet of freshly waxed metal. More than his face, his skin, his clothes, his hair, those eyes branded themselves into my memory.
“You’re welcome. Now listen: With the exception of your immediate family, everyone will see in you what you wish for them to see. If you need me, feel free to call me. If things get tricky, don’t hesitate to ask. We are giving you the opportunity to be whoever you would like to be. But please.” Tiny veins reddened the blindingly white whites of his eyes, and a hefty tear fell to the carpet. “Don’t lose yourself.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I love you, baby girl.”
And he was gone.
A BRAND-NEW TOYA
“You look better. I was beginning to think you were depressed,” Mom said. “Thank God.”
Thank God was right. I’d been washed clean of that dirty skin and bad hair. From that moment on, I was going to rule that school. It was the first day of the rest of my life, a brand-new Toya. Oh yeah, I probably needed to think of another name.
We packed into Dad’s 1967 Fiat. Along with the empty castle, that car was Dad’s way of proving his worth to the white people. It was a cherry-red convertible, dazzling new on the outside and a broke-down piece of crap under the hood. He’d bought it from a jackleg car salesman for way more than it was worth. When he turned the ignition, the air-conditioner vents kicked four puffs of black smoke into our faces.
“I put up an air freshener for you, Toya.” Dad flicked the green pine tree dangling from the crooked rearview.
“Lord have mercy. You old fool. Now it smells like pine-flavored gasoline, this piece of junk,” Mom hissed.
“Don’t call me no fool, woman!” Dad’s insults were never nearly as innovative as Mom’s.
“Thanks, Dad,” I replied, and he flashed a half smile.
After the twelve-minute drive to school, we smelled like sizzling electrical wires and fuel, as usual. Deanté called Alex and me the Edgewood High Mechanics. “Y’all been working at the shop this morning? You smell like you been greasing engines.” Deanté’s crew would convulse with laughter, slapping backs and stomping their feet. The whole school would stop to investigate their ruckus. How could such a small group make such an uproar? That’s how I felt about the black race as a whole, really. Hovering at around twentyish percent of the population, they made such a large presence of themselves. It was so embarrassing.
Edgewood white people, on the other hand, valued perfection in all areas. Running around the block to shed extra fat and reading books to learn extra things. I knew Edgewood perfection all too well, since Monday through Friday I sat behind its generic sixteen-year-old form—blond, and a size two with see-through blue eyes and baby-pink lip gloss. Perfection got invited to prom by the captain of the football team freshman year and wore a corseted purple chiffon masterpiece topped with a tiara. Under the microscope, Perfection’s hair was smooth and slim, just like her skin and body and her life. Deanté wouldn’t dare make Perfection pinch the dent from his sneakers in the middle of a crowded hallway.
By the time we reached the school sign, my stomach was flipping somersaults, partly from my new whiteness, and partly from Dad’s aggressive gear changes. I hated that car with a passion. At the entrance of the school, Dad missed second gear, stalled out, and gave a snaggletoothed grin. Mom had to let her seat up for Alex and me to squeeze through. When I rose, I could feel the eyes staring me down.
The kids at Edgewood vetted every new student from all sides—family fortune, prior academic accolades, and prestige. The last newbie had transferred from an Atlanta academy. A few weeks after his first day, the entire student body knew that he’d been expelled from his previous school for bringing a knife to campus. He was bullied relentlessly, dubbed the Ripper, and ultimately forced into homeschooling. I couldn’t even remember his real name. He was, and always would be, the Ripper. That’s when I realized I hadn’t thought this thing through at all.
Alex elbowed me hard in the ribs. “What are you waiting for? They’re all checking us out. I told you this would be the day; I can feel it.” Alex bolted ahead. He wore cobalt-blue Converses, faded black jeans, and a green T-shirt that read Don’t Be a Menace, Go to the Dentist. Any other day, I would’ve thought he looked great, but that day, a tingle of embarrassment settled in the pit of my stomach.
Right there at the entrance, Mom started hollering at Dad. Alex and I whipped our heads around to find that Mom had a baseball-sized grease stain on the back of her skirt. They started fussing, so I leaped back to the car door. “Bye, Mom. Bye, Dad,” I whispered. “You guys can get going now.”
They paused their argument. “Bye, guys,” they said in unison before clanking off.
Alex darted toward the entrance while I hung back.
The first time Alex and I had walked into the double doors of Edgewood High, our shoulders were pressed together. We felt most comfortable that way. That day I could feel the shiver in his left arm, and I’m sure he could feel the same in my right. But now, all I wanted to do was ditch him and step into God’s great purpose for my life. Jesus had visited me. Not as a burnt tree, or a gust of wind, or a bright light at the end of some tunnel. No. He showered his favor upon me, and everybody knows God’s favor comes with great responsibility. I mean, Abraham was told to take Isaac to the top of the hill and stab him. All I had to do was give Alex a bit of breathing room.
“Come on, Toya,” Alex called to me. But none of them could see me as Toya.
I ran to Alex and whispered in his ear. “I have my period—I have to go to the girls’ room.”
“Nasty.” He shook his head and sauntered into the school. I knew that would get rid of him—for whatever reason, guys were truly disgusted by periods.
“You new?” I didn’t even have to turn around. I knew it was Deanté.
“No, Deanté … oh … uh, excuse me.” I felt his eyes beating down on me as I speed-walked to the closest girls’ room. I couldn’t help wondering how he would treat the white me. Did white people get a pass from Deanté’s wrath? Or was he an equal-opportunity a-hole? Either way, in that moment, I wasn’t prepared to deal with him.
As I entered the bathroom, other students ran to make their first classes; still, I checked every single stall for feet. My heart punched my chest so loudly it felt like the drum line took a detour through the restroom. Stress sweat made my pits smell oniony and gross, and telltale white-girl pink targets flushed my cheeks, showing the world my awkwardness. I turned toward the mirror to rebraid my hair for comfort. I still couldn’t believe the reflection staring back at me. My skin glowed golden, and my eyes sparkled like bright blue marbles. Perfection. Sweaty, oniony perfection, but perfection nonetheless.
“Lord have mercy.” I paced back and forth alone in the bathroom when another dilemma plagued my thoughts. Did I sound white enough? “Lawd, hayuv mercy,” I said to my reflection, attempting a white Southern drawl. I threw the back of my hand to my forehead. “Oh, Lawd have mercy.” The reflection was right, but the voice was all wrong, and Deanté could spot a phony from a hundred paces. I started to panic. “What have I done?”
I needed to know if I sounded black, so I decided to call the most honest Southerner I knew. I tiptoed out of the girls’ room and down the empty hall toward the media center. I let out an involuntary sigh after a quick glance at the magazine display. The April issues of Teen Vogue, Seventeen, and Cosmo were in, hot off the presses. All covers featured the blond, the blue eyed, the skinny, and the white, of course. I stroked my own soft waves for reassurance.
Thank God.
I reached the shiny black no-pay pay phone in the far left corner of the media center. It looked like
a pay phone, smelled like a pay phone, felt like a pay phone, but when you picked up the receiver, you got a happy dial tone without depositing any coins. The no-pay pay phone was there for the handful of bused-in students whose parents couldn’t afford to give them a cell. Everybody knew that the old-as-dirt, hard-of-hearing media center helper slept on the job, so she wouldn’t be a bother. I sat on the counter and dialed my evil aunt, Evilyn. I always felt that my grandmother knew what she was doing when she put evil in her name.
“Hello,” she said, her voice deeply twanged with sugar-sweet deception.
“Aunt Evilyn? It’s Toya.”
“Oh, hey there. It’s been a while since I heard from you, little girl,” she replied. Her nickname for me had always been “little girl,” and I’d often wondered if she knew my real name.
“Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry, I’ve been busy with school and stuff.”
“Lies! I know your mama doesn’t make you and your brother go to school. Y’all at home every other day. You flunking out? You must be flunking out. Keep that up and y’all are going to be losers. I don’t want no losers in my family, you hear? You know your cousin Joyce is in her sophomore year at University of Alabama?”
“Yes, Aunt Evilyn, I’ve heard.” She’d bragged on her daughter’s success since as far back as I could remember. In high school, Joyce wore peacoats and pearls year-round to please Evilyn, but she secretly despised her mother. Two days after her graduation, she blazed rubber toward Tuscaloosa, grew a giant Afro, and pawned her pearls for off-campus housing.
“You should model yourself after someone like Joyce. She went a little off the deep end at UA, but she ain’t never been no loser. Of course, your daddy’s a loser, but he ain’t blood. He ain’t—”
“All right! Thank you for that, Aunt Evilyn. I have a question for you.”
“Yes, baby?” she replied. That voice was like Splenda: You might be fooled at first by the sweetness, but it will leave a damn nasty aftertaste and may just cause testicular cancer in laboratory rats.
“Do I talk white or black?”
“You sound like a white girl to me. Your skin is the darkest in the family, but even when you were a little girl, you always talked proper. You get that skin from your daddy’s side, by the way. When you came out of your mama, I knew you would turn black like your daddy, because your ears were darker than the rest of your body. I said, Lord have mercy, that child is gonna be the blackest of all of us, and Lord said it to be true. I was right. You a dark little girl—”
“All right! Thank you, Aunt Evil One, I mean Evilyn.” I hung up.
Aunt Evilyn could inhale the joy from a room and breathe out only bad things. I knew it, Dad knew it, Alex knew it, hell, her own daughter knew it. The only somebody in town that didn’t was my mother—Evilyn’s only real soft spot. Aunt Evilyn treated my mother like a breakable bit of priceless china. Every time Evilyn looked at my mom, her eyes filled up in weird ways like she wanted to cry but couldn’t allow anyone to see it. Evilyn was seventeen when Mom was born, and since my grandparents had no business having more children, Evilyn took on my mom as her own. She’d always loved my mother more than anyone or anything on this earth. As a child, my mother all but belonged to her older sister, and in many ways, she still does.
After one last eye roll at the no-pay pay phone, I gathered my things and tipped past the fast-asleep media center attendant and out the door, only to run head-on into Alex.
“What’s going on with you?” he asked.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
My mouth fell open. Alex had radar that beeped like a garbage truck when I was troubled. I was cast as the only black Pick-a-Little Lady in our over-the-top production of The Music Man. When the teacher found out that I was failing everything but girls’ choir, she kicked me out—beep beep beep! My big brother was there. Or that time in ninth grade when I slowly stuttered my way through a passage from Our Town in English class, beep beep beep! He was in the hallway, waiting to walk me home. I could read, just not in front of all those uppities with their fancy seersucker shorts and Lunchables. Of course my dream in life was to be one of those uppities, but I never claimed to be logical.
As he stared, my palms dampened and dread passed through my belly, resulting in a low stomach growl. For the first time in my life, I was lost for words with my big brother. There he was, brow wrinkled with worry, eyes darting across my face in search of something only he could read.
“You skipped first period,” he said, still squinting, searching my face for valid reasoning. I forced my mouth shut, but it was too late. He knew that was one of my facial tics. “That’s it, let’s blow this Popsicle stand. You got everything?” When I nodded, he grabbed my forearm and pulled me toward the janitor’s exit.
“After what Deanté did yesterday, we should’ve just stayed home, anyway. That bastard. A powerless people turns on itself. That damn Deanté proves it.” Alex’s breathing quickened.
“Wow, Alex. Did you just come up with that?”
“Nope, Cornel West.” He stopped to check around a corner. “Coast is clear. This way,” he whispered.
I followed him closely, eager to shift the attention away from me. “We shouldn’t skip. You’re the one who told Mom we were going to get kicked out if we missed any more days.”
“Something’s going on with you. I can tell.” We tipped down the hall. “You need a day.”
“’Ey! ’Ey! Where y’all headed?” My heart jumped at the sound of Deanté’s voice.
“My God.” I stopped.
“Keep walking, Toya,” said Alex, without looking back. “Leave us alone, Deanté!”
“Wait up, dude. We cool, I just wanted to ask y’all something.” I could tell from his voice that he was gaining on us.
“Toya, go.” Alex shoved me through the janitor’s exit and stayed behind. I pressed my ear to the steel door to listen. “Look, if you don’t leave my sister alone, you’ll be sorry—I swear it.”
“What you gone do?” Deanté chuckled.
“I don’t want any trouble.” Alex’s speech was sharp and strong, which surprised me, since he hated confrontation just as much as I did. “Leave us alone.”
“That girl is extra fine. What’s up with her?”
“Deanté, stop treating my little sister like Hester Prynne.” Something rose from my brother’s voice that I’d never heard before. “Don’t test me.”
I cracked the door to see a mix of fear and confusion in Deanté’s eyes. He began backing away. “Aight, then, flunk out if y’all want to.”
A few seconds later, Alex slid through the door. “Ready?”
I looked up at him, amazed. “Thanks,” I told him, not wanting to address the threat. “Who’s Hester Prynne?”
He took the books from my hands and mussed my hair. “Wait, you’re serious?” I shrugged and he continued, “Scarlet Letter?”
“Never read it,” I said.
“Toya!” He threw his hands up. “Hester Prynne is the lady who has to wear a red A because she committed adultery in Puritan Boston in 1642.”
“And how am I anything like her?”
“Because the crowd gathers to witness her public humiliation. Toya, I know you’re not a Puritan.” He laughed at his own joke. “And you’re definitely not a floozy. Come on, I have a copy in my room. Let’s go home.”
Our empty castle was a sturdy three miles away, with the last quarter mile all uphill. No Sound of Music rolling hill, either—I’m talking full-on stall-out-a-stick-shift, burn-your-legs-off, heart-attack hill. It was the tallest, most daunting hill in Edgewood—almost impossible to conquer.
When we first moved to Edgewood, I named it “the big hill,” but after a few failed climb attempts, Alex rechristened it after his favorite X-Men character, Colossus. In his comic’s mutant form, Colossus is by far the strongest member of the team. At almost eight feet tall and made of steel, he towers over Wolverine, Cyclops, and of course, Professor Xavier. Alex loves Colossus because he coul
d easily use his height to intimidate or strong-arm, though he never does. Instead he’s soft-spoken, honest, and sweet-natured. Alex once told me he thought Colossus would make the perfect Alabamian. Only he was from the Alabama of the future. Alex said the phrase in passing, but it stuck with me since I knew what he meant. The Alabama of the future: where Deanté’s reign of terror is finally finished. The Alabama of the future: where Alex’s kid sister doesn’t ask God for the power to change her race.
Colossus, the big hill, was an hour away from Edgewood High on foot, an hour and a half if we stopped at Brookland Mall to go fishing for quarters in the fountain. Which meant I had at least a sixty-minute walk to convince my black sibling, birthed of our black mother, fathered by our black father, that I was white.
By the time we’d cleared school grounds and entered the creepy foot trail in the woods, the naked tree limbs cast eerie shadows that made the path floor look alive. I usually quick-walked through, but that day I took my time. “I got something going on that I need to tell you about,” I said, already chewing at loose skin on my fingernail bed.
“I know you’re really a sophomore,” he blurted.
“What?” Alex always attempted to guess the topic rather than exercise patience and listen. He was rarely correct. No, scratch that—he was never correct.
“I know that you don’t have enough credits to technically qualify as a junior, but I’ll fix that. I asked Mrs. Roseland if you could do some extra credit to make up those missed tests. She agreed. I’ll ask a few of your other teachers later this week. I wanted word to get around in the teachers’ lounge that your big brother cared enough to ask. Teachers like that type of stuff.”
“What do you mean I’m really a sophomore?” I asked. “I’m taking junior-level English.”