We Speak in Storms

by Natalie Lund

  Her mother’s door creaked open at the back of the house, and Brenna muted the TV, bracing herself for a scolding, but she heard a man’s voice mutter something. Brenna dropped to the kitchen floor, hugging her knees to her chest, so she’d be hidden from view by the cabinets. She’d rather hide than have to interact with yet another of her mother’s “friends.” By now she’d met all sorts—the ones who gave her stickers as though she were five, the ones who tried to be her buddy and told her all about their high school escapades, or her least favorite: the ones who stared a bit too long at her chest. She preferred the ones who pretended she didn’t exist.

  There was no telling what sort this particular man would be, but the fact that she could hear him bumping into the walls as he made his way down the hallway didn’t bode well. He paused at the kitchen, and she heard him patting himself—looking for keys? Brenna held her breath. Don’t decide to get a drink of water. Don’t stop to watch the TV. Just leave. The front door opened and closed, and Brenna exhaled. She couldn’t wait to move out.

  * * *

  * * *

  In first period, Brenna sat at her desk, bored, as Mrs. Berk explained their Spanish III project in what Brenna’s grandmother called español gringo, slow and deliberate, enunciated so that each syllable stood alone instead of flowing gracefully from one to the next. Brenna feared her own was nearly as bad because her mother used very little Spanish at home. As a kid, her mom had been chastised for speaking Spanish in school, and her mother—Brenna’s abuela—had pushed her to speak English even though she did not speak it herself, because it’s not enough just to be born here.

  It was why Brenna was taking Spanish now, because it wasn’t enough to be born Chicana, either. Or to spend her childhood in Houston, where the language filled restaurants and school cafeterias. Or to hear Spanish on the phone and at holidays with her mother’s family. Her tongue—no matter how much she willed it—couldn’t shape the words as nimbly as her cousins’. Unfortunately, spending an hour a day reciting vocabulary she already knew with a well-meaning white lady and a bunch of white kids wasn’t helping much.

  Brenna pulled her phone out of her bag and rested it between her thighs. She opened a browser and typed Mercer tornado car news. The most recent article said that police had finally tracked down the owner of the white car: a recently dead guy named Edward Milton in Indiana. The man’s daughter, the executor of his estate, hadn’t noticed it was missing or stolen yet, which might explain why no driver had come forward. But if the white car was stolen, what did that mean for the VW? Two thieves?

  “Brenna, tus ojos,” Mrs. Berk said sharply, and Brenna shoved the phone under her ass.

  A group of girls snickered. They all wore their boyfriends’ letterman’s jackets, black leggings, and boots that looked like paper bags. Brenna didn’t begrudge them their unaffordable bag-boots. She just wondered if the girls cared that they were identical, that there was nothing except subtle shades of blondness to differentiate them. Not that Brenna’s friends were much better. They made such an effort to stand out with hair color and piercings and band T-shirts that they all ended up looking the same too.

  High school was about belonging, Brenna knew. A belonging that—even if she pretended she had in her friend group, or didn’t want at all—was always beyond reach. She was one of just five students of color in the entire school. Three they called brown and two they called black. In Houston, when they’d lived with her father, most of her classmates identified as Native American or Hispanic or Latinx or Mexican or Salvadoran, and, even though she was half white and spoke clumsy Spanish, her skin had made her belonging visible—as visible as the black clothes, hair dye, and makeup she now wore.

  “This will be worth ten percent of your grade, but you can work with partners,” Mrs. Berk said in English. Heads in the room swiveled. Stage whispers. Bag-boot girls clung to the hoods of the bag-booter in front of them, like monkeys holding tails. There was an odd number of them, and the one seated across the aisle from Brenna looked around desperately, bleating like she was about to be eaten by a lion.

  Brenna sank lower in her seat and picked at her cuticles. She didn’t have any friends in the class.

  “Does anyone else need a partner?” Mrs. Berk asked.

  Brenna sighed and raised her hand. The lone booted girl moaned.

  “Jane and Brenna it is,” said their teacher.

  Brenna tried to fortify herself for the eye-rolling, the behind-the-hand whispering.

  “I’ll give you the last ten minutes to work in class,” Mrs. Berk said.

  Partners shuffled their desks so they could face each other. Jane didn’t move. She jabbed her pencil over and over at the top of her paper.

  “Experimenting with pointillism?” Brenna asked.

  “What?” Jane spat the t.

  Brenna sighed and spun her desk so she was facing Jane’s profile. The girl had round cheeks, pink-flushed and marbled like the cuts of meat Brenna’s mother could never afford. The corner of Jane’s glossy lip lifted like that of a threatened poodle.

  “So what should we do?” Brenna asked.

  Jane shoved her hands into her jacket pockets. “Whatever. I’ll end up doing it by myself anyway.”

  Brenna cocked her head to the side. “Why?”

  “It’s not, like, a secret that you don’t do work.”

  “I do work.” She paused. “I just choose to do it differently.”

  “Okay. Whatever.” Jane cough-laughed.

  People were quick to assume that Brenna didn’t care about school because she didn’t always play by the rules—especially in her English classes. But it wasn’t because she wasn’t smart. She was a voracious reader, and being assigned a book she’d already read just meant she could enjoy something new instead. She’d picked up this habit from Colin, who’d argued that he shouldn’t have to do homework if he could prove he knew how to read and write and think. Once, last spring, when Mr. Scott asked for an essay on 1984, Brenna wrote about Crime and Punishment instead, just to show she could. She’d told Colin what she’d done and he’d clapped her on the shoulder, praising her like she was his pet, but Mr. Scott had given her an F. Colin had never received an F in his life.

  Still, she’d approached Spanish class similarly this semester. Why would she write and perform a skit in Spanish about shopping at a mall, as they were being asked to do today, when she could try to read and translate a short story by Jorge Luis Borges?

  “Look.” Brenna sighed. “I’ll be a good partner if you will. Why don’t we meet up after school? I usually go to the Taco Bell for a snack.”

  “Of course you do.” Jane pressed her lips together, barely containing a smile.

  Brenna got the insult, of course. She was Mexican, so, tacos. Never mind that Taco Bell wasn’t even remotely similar to the food her mother’s family cooked. Never mind that it was one of only six restaurant choices in Mercer, and certainly the cheapest. If Brenna responded to insults like this, people said she was overreacting—even her friends. Amy, Dutch, and Jade acted color-blind, like Brenna was exactly the same as them. They didn’t really hear her, didn’t really understand why she was hurt when people said things like that to her. No, but where are you from from? I bet your mom is really young, right? Gross—you’ve eaten cow intestine? There’s that fiery temper. So Brenna had just stopped telling her friends what people said, stopped talking about her family, stopped mentioning her brownness. That, too, was part of perfecting her hard shell, part of belonging.

  Truthfully, Brenna didn’t want to pretend that the words didn’t sting. She wanted to tip over Jane’s desk. Wanted to watch her blond ponytail rainbow through the air. Wanted to hear the crack of her elbow against the linoleum.

  So she stood, pulled on her backpack, and walked to the door.

  “Where are you going, Ms. Ortiz?” Mrs. Berk asked.

  “To the offi
ce. I feel sick.” If she stayed in the room with Jane any longer, she’d end up there anyway.

  Joshua had woken up earlier than usual—more excited for school than he’d been in years. The night before, he’d locked pinkies with Brenna like they were childhood friends, and sworn to secrecy. He’d sensed how important it was for her to believe the VW was something more than coincidence, though he was pretty certain it was all a moot point. Someone else would spot the van in daylight and report it, regardless of their promise not to say anything. Still, he’d been thrilled to share that moment with Brenna. Secrets were rare in a small town like Mercer and even rarer for someone as invisible as him. He imagined invites to sit with Brenna and her powder-faced friends at lunch and to cluster around the drinking fountain every passing period. He wasn’t going to dye his hair like them, but he could paint his nails black and wear red shiny combat boots to end his invisibility. Lawrence would love that.

  Before the first bell rang, the masses rushed by as usual, clipping his elbow with their books or bumping him into the lockers. No apologies. No acknowledgment—like he was one of Mercer’s ghosts. A few freshmen were talking about the tornado. One mocking his father for insisting their whole family huddle in the bathtub with a mattress over them because their relatives had been unlucky. Another claiming that God or something was sending them all a message, it being the anniversary and all. Joshua rolled his eyes at that.

  As he headed for a desk at the back of Mrs. Crawley’s classroom, Callie’s eyes followed him. Had she seen him the night before? Did she want to tell him something? But before he could stop to ask her, Mrs. Crawley started class.

  While his teacher demonstrated problems on the board, Joshua thought of the white car and the VW. His grandfather would’ve been devastated to see classics like that damaged. He’d always thought Joshua should draw beautiful cars—anything, really, other than men in spandex—but Joshua thought cars were too simple. There was no challenge. No conveying a car’s tortured childhood with just facial creases and expressive eyes. No sculpting of muscles and scars with light crosshatches. But the white car from the night before somehow had an expression—in the folds of the hood, in the smashed glass. There was backstory there and maybe anguish and bravery, too.

  Mrs. Crawley returned his quiz with a large red A+ and Excellent! scrawled across the front. Besides drawing, math was the one thing he was good at. They’d even had him walk across the field to the high school when he was an eighth grader so he could take Algebra II. Those short, daily glimpses of high school had given him the false hope that coming out would change everything.

  High schoolers brought coffee from Bean City wrapped in paper sleeves. They grew facial hair and wore makeup. They’d seemed much more sophisticated than his middle-school peers, and, while he didn’t talk to them much, Joshua had assumed they were open-minded. Until the end of his eighth-grade year, he hadn’t considered the fact that everyone in his middle school would advance with him; there wasn’t some magic spell that turned them all into tolerant intellectuals as soon as they stepped into the high school hallways.

  Joshua had decided he’d come out at school the first day of freshman year. What better time for fresh starts? That summer, he’d imagined it, the open-minded upperclassmen welcoming him: the theater kids speckled in dry paint and the band kids with their instrument cases tucked beneath their desks. Those would be his people, he suspected. In preparation, Joshua watched It Gets Better videos, teary-eyed, rehearsing the language of coming out. He played with different scenarios: just being out. No denying when assholes suggested it, but no proclamations, either. Or maybe he needed proclamations, if he was ever going to start groups and bond with other gay kids. Maybe he needed a T-shirt so he could wear his outness everywhere. Or maybe he just needed to stand up on a cafeteria table, clear his throat, and announce it. The hero. In his new, magic high school, you could do things like that.

  He still hadn’t decided how he’d come out by the first day, but he thought he might recognize the moment when it appeared, that there’d be a call to action, a sign.

  At lunchtime that first day, he stood in line for a corn dog when he heard someone mutter: “There won’t be any food left after this fat fag.” Joshua spun around and saw that the voice belonged to Clayton, a fellow freshman, with greasy brown hair and a scar above his lip from a fight in seventh grade.

  In middle school, Joshua would’ve ignored it. But not that day; it was his call to action. He would expose Clayton as the bully he was and come out to the school.

  “What did you say?” Joshua asked loudly. “I don’t think everyone heard you.”

  A group of upperclassmen walking by stopped and snickered. “Fight,” one of them said softly, like it was a question.

  Clayton, though, wasn’t embarrassed by his audience. “Oh no. Did I offend the little gay boy?”

  Joshua inhaled. He felt it, filling his chest and expanding there, like pride, like courage, like all the voices in the videos he’d watched. This was his moment.

  “I prefer the term queer, actually. Or you can use the adjective gay as in, He is gay.”

  Clayton covered his nose and mouth with his hand. He began to laugh, but his eyes were scanning the others in line, threatening them. Joshua could almost see their scared rabbit hearts beating, each thump a warning that they should toss their heads back and laugh too: That kid just said he’s gay. They were dominos, laughing along, falling, for their own safety.

  Still, Joshua was sure that when he stepped out of line and into the cafeteria to share his announcement with everyone, he’d find his place, his people. He hadn’t expected it to be easy. He’d even braced himself for physical violence, and he felt grateful—and disgusted by his gratitude—that they were only laughing.

  So he filled his tray, swiped his card, and marched past the lunch lady. But somehow the news had preceded him, and Joshua felt it there, churning in the large room like a storm. His skin grew hot. The laughter and whispers roared between his temples, reverberating. He saw starbursts of light, and his hands felt as though they’d been asleep, all pins and needles. Then the tiles met him with a hard slap.

  All he remembered after was a teacher’s face, furrowing in concern. A coach helping him sit, then stand, then walk. A cot with a pillow that felt like plastic. A glass of orange juice and a cookie. A nurse’s voice on the phone with his mom. Hunger, probably, she’d said, and Joshua had thought that that couldn’t be truer.

  The next day he pretended to be sick so his mother would let him stay home. He watched old cartoons and berated himself for his weakness. Only tightly corseted women in the 1800s fainted. Not heroes.

  The day after that, he was so nervous that he threw up his breakfast on the way to the bus stop. But at school, no one laughed or stared at him again. He was so relieved, it took him another week to realize that he was being actively ignored by the entire school, like someone had made an announcement over the PA while he was gone. He’d always been an outsider, but there’d been kindnesses, too—shared pens, polite smiles, and small talk. After the fainting incident, though, even his sympathizers were too afraid of being subjected to the same bullying and subsequent invisibility. That was when Joshua started a countdown to graduation and moving out of Mercer.

  Callie’s name over the intercom interrupted his thoughts. He wondered if it had to do with the car the night before. Would he be called too? Did the cops want to talk to people who’d been on the scene? But then Mrs. Crawley stopped writing on the whiteboard, and everyone in the room looked at Callie.

  Of course: her mother.

  WE ARE WOVEN TOGETHER

  We are woven together—the fifty-four who died that night, the rest who came before and after. Our memories braided into a tapestry. Threads of turquoise, mauve, ochre, periwinkle, eggshell. What’s mine is ours. Is us.

  We speak together—as though we have always been thus. We do not remember what i
t means to be an individual, to be our own. And yet, we yearn for it. We want nothing more than to be each and every one of our selves. To speak as only the I, the me. To tell our own stories. To unwind our threads. To unbreak our hearts.

  But this, we know, must come at a price.

  Before her name was called, Callie’s mind was far from pre-calculus. She had tucked her phone into her lap and opened news stories, taking notes on the back of her returned quiz.

  Known

  Tornado touched down approximately 8:15 p.m., Wed., Oct. 7

  Anniversary of 1961 tornado

  Tornado path about 400 meters

  1959 Pontiac Catalina, white

  Wind turbine blade damaged

  Police detected no evidence of person inside car

  Unknown

  Footprints in bean field?

  Car occupied at time of tornado?

  Face spotted during lightning flash?

  Same path as 1961 tornado?

  Whispers?

  Her name over the classroom intercom stopped her pencil. It stopped her heart, too, momentarily, and she was flooded with nausea. She was sure everyone was looking at her, but her vision narrowed, and everything became blurry. Only the door was in focus. And beyond that, she knew: the office, the phone, her dad’s voice. Something had happened with her mother. Maybe it was time. Or maybe the time had already come, and she’d missed it.

  * * *

  * * *

  When Callie arrived, the girl with the red boots and dyed hair was sitting in the office vestibule, a thermometer in her mouth. Her eyes widened at Callie, but then she waved with a flick of her wrist.