In the Silences

by Rachel Gold

  “Sounds right,” she said and uncurled her shoulders.

  * * *

  Our first class after lunch was World History. We got seats together near the middle, left side.

  As the rest of the class crammed through the door in advance of the bell, I saw Eve’s paintbrush-style blond hair beside Trina’s messy brown updo. I hadn’t realized they were in this class; they’d just been part of a mass of loudness before I’d met them today. They settled into the middle of the louder right side, behind two rows of boys.

  Class started: details and lesson plans and a short lecture on ancient Greece. I scooted my foot across the floor until I touched the side of Aisha’s foot. She tapped the edge of her shoe against mine, tap, tap, tap. When she stopped I tapped back. Maybe we should learn Morse code.

  After the bell rang, I hung back and let Aisha go ahead of me, as if I could literally watch her back.

  “Hey Kaz, wait a sec,” Trina said and I stopped in the aisle by reflex. She fished in her purse and held out a pinkish bottle. “I got two of this nail polish in a bag of samples, do you want one?”

  “I don’t much wear it,” I told her.

  She got up and pressed the bottle into my hand. “So give it to your mom or see if Brock wants to pass it on to Lisa. It’s not doing me any good, someone should have it. My mom gets tons of samples, what do you like?”

  “I don’t really…”

  “What do you use for that blue in your hair?” she asked. “Is it Splat?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Great, I’ll score you some. More blue or another color?”

  “Uh, blue. Thanks?”

  With a grin and a nod, she followed Eve out the door. The bottle in my hand was a semi-translucent creamy pink color called “Naked.”

  It wasn’t like Aisha and I never played with nail polish. She’d even gotten me a flat chrome color like Wolverine’s claws that I loved. And it wasn’t like she never wore light colors on her nails. This one would look good on her. But no way would I let anything from Trina touch her.

  And “naked?” Way too close to peach crayons being called “flesh.” Like there was only one color a person could be.

  On the way out of the room, I dropped it into the trash.

  * * *

  We didn’t talk on the bus home except when I asked, “Treehouse?” and Aisha said, “Sure.” I missed when we could walk, but the high school was a half-mile farther from our houses than the junior high.

  The bus dropped us at her house. We went through her yard, across the alley and into mine. I sped up the stairs to the treehouse, Aisha right behind me. For the first time, I wanted us to be younger than we were, just a few months, early summer.

  When she got up the stairs and sat, I held out my hand. Aisha wrapped her fingers around mine and tugged. I crawled toward her, put my arms around her. She held onto me as I pressed my lips to the side of her face.

  Milo must’ve seen us go up the treehouse stairs and let Wolvie out, because seventy pounds of dog love pelted up the stairs and body-checked both of us. We were a pile of human limbs and dog body for a while. Aisha got laughing from the way Wolvie kept head-butting her chest, trying to get even closer, and I realized I hadn’t heard her laugh at all at school the four days we’d been in tenth grade.

  “I want to tell people you’re my girlfriend,” I said. “Is that okay?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered.

  The way she said it sounded so low that my breath stuck in my chest. “But we are, right? We’re going to stay together no matter what…right?”

  She turned her face and kissed me. Pulled back only enough to press our foreheads together.

  “We are,” she said. “Of course we are.”

  “But it’s not safe?” I asked. “And it’s less safe for you than me?”

  She shifted back to sitting next to me, Wolvie now wriggling into both our laps. I put an arm around Aisha and rubbed Wolvie’s belly with my other hand.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Do you think it would be different if I didn’t look so much like a girl? More like a guy?”

  A long quiet followed, only Wolvie panting and Aisha saying “Oof” when Wolvie kicked her in the boob.

  She said, “If you looked one-hundred percent like a guy, maybe, except that you grew up here being seen as a girl and people don’t forget that. You know, that whole history of white women and black men, I think that trumps me being a girl.”

  I shuddered. As a white guy with Aisha, people would think I was experimenting or…worse. But when I was read as a white girl…historically black boys and men got killed if white women even said the men, or boys, had been flirting with them. I felt dangerous, and sad, but that was for me to deal with later because I wasn’t the one who’d get hurt. I was the safe one, the one with superpowers in this situation.

  “You want to give it more time and see?” I asked.

  I clicked my tongue at Wolvie and patted the space next to me so she’d stop squirming in our laps and settle at my side. Then I tugged on Aisha until she sat between my legs. I wrapped my arms around her and she leaned against me. She pulled a comic book over from our to-read pile and opened it on her knees so I could read over her shoulder.

  “I don’t care what people think,” she said. “But I don’t want to hear it and I don’t want to have to deal with it until I know how bad that school’s going to be.”

  I almost said, Maybe it’ll just turn out to be Trina and Eve, but I didn’t believe that.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Mid September 2017

  I got up early and walked Wolvie and Pickles while Aisha was still groaning over a cup of coffee. I walked Wolvie most mornings before breakfast, at least a few blocks, and stopped by Aisha’s back door to get Pickles if I saw the light on in her kitchen. Her mom worked a lot of evening shifts and Tariq had a wild schedule, so I didn’t want to wake them up if the house was dark.

  On this morning’s walk, I told Wolvie and Pickles about lunch and Trina, about the nail polish and hair color. They paused to sniff a tree at the corner and Wolvie looked over her shoulder at me like: That girl is trying to mark you as her territory.

  “Yeah but what do I do about it?”

  Pickles glanced over at Wolvie, both their tails wagging thoughtfully, like neither one wanted to answer. Finally Pickles lifted a leg and peed on the tree roots.

  “I’m not peeing on anything,” I told them. “We have to come up with something else.”

  At home, I changed into good jeans and a heavy button-down flannel. Aisha had on a gray waffle-pattern sweater I hadn’t known she owned and put her hair back in a tight bun. We’d both dressed for a fight.

  Come lunch time, I hauled ass to the cafeteria and saved a spot in line for Aisha so we could have our pick of places to sit. No way did we get stuck with Trina and Eve again. When Aisha came into the cafeteria, I waved her over.

  “Saved you a spot,” I said.

  The heavyset, paste-white guy with generic brown hair behind me in line told Aisha, “No cutting, go to the back of the line.”

  “Hey,” I stepped between him and Aisha. “I saved her a spot.”

  I had to look up to meet his blue eyes. I crossed my arms.

  He crossed his and said, “Then you can go to the back of the line with her. There’s no cutting.”

  “It’s not cutting when you save a spot. Have you never saved somebody a spot in line?”

  He glanced away, so he definitely had, or had someone save him a spot. Brock did it for his buddies all the time.

  Glaring over my shoulder, he said to Aisha, “Why don’t you tell your friend how it is.”

  “Oh no,” she said. “You don’t get to do that.”

  We’d been moving in fractional steps until we reached the trays. I held my ground, making space in front of me. “Go ahead,” I told Aisha.

  He turned back to his group of friends as I picked up my tray. Whatever he said made them laugh. Didn
’t take much to imagine about what it was, even if I hadn’t seen him point from me to Aisha and laugh harder.

  I could roll the video in my mind and see what happened in different endings to this lunch line bullshit. If I’d been perceived as a white guy and it got physical with no-cutting guy, we’d both have been taken to the office, given a stern lecture and probably been let off with that. I’d bet money someone would say “Boys will be boys.”

  White girls vs white guy, he’d have gotten suspended, even if I hit him first. But if Aisha tried to step in and save me, no matter how it ended up, she’d get the worst punishment of any of us. She’d get hit more than me in the fight and then get punished worse than me from the principal’s office. Even when people treated her worse than me, she couldn’t afford to fight back.

  Aisha and I got a spot at the end of a table. I studied the room as more students filtered in, got trays and food, found tables. This school was really white, more so than our junior high—and that had been pretty freakin’ white. There were some brown faces, mostly sitting together, some with white friends like me and Aisha. All my teachers were white.

  I shoved a pile of peas across my plate. “A, in first grade, did you have black teachers?”

  She had her Spanish book out on the table but wasn’t reading it. “No.”

  “When did you?” I asked.

  “Fourth, we moved to a better neighborhood. I mean more diverse, not better like the folks around here mean when they say that.”

  “You had three years of school with no teachers who looked like you?”

  “Yep,” she said.

  Those same years, I’d had all white teachers. I’d had one black teacher in fifth grade. If I calculated the total number of teachers I’d had first to sixth grade it would be about twenty, and nineteen of them had been white. Almost all of the people that my school system deemed fit to teach me were white like me.

  “Shit,” I said. “And you have all my same teachers this year?”

  “Yep.”

  All our teachers were white. So was the principal.

  I’d seen photos of Aisha in fourth through seventh grade, photos with classmates, friends, the soccer team, class photos. At a guess, about one in six kids in her school was white. Most of the kids were black or Latinx, and there were more Asian kids than white kids.

  But that was only four grades out of ten. What did it feel like year after year, every day to have to go to a school where most people didn’t look like you?

  I had some sense of that from walking around in a world where every single person was clearly identifying themselves as a man or a woman. I’d grown up not seeing people who looked like my gender and that made it so hard to know how to be a person in the world.

  What if I could’ve gone to school with some teachers who weren’t exclusively men or women? What if I could learn from people who were people, where everything wasn’t gendered and distracting? Because gender was a huge deal all the time. And so was race.

  No wonder Aisha still missed California. When she complained about the cold in Minnesota, she didn’t only mean the weather.

  * * *

  Wednesday I wore another heavy shirt and Aisha kept her hair in that tight bun. I waited for her by the cafeteria doors and we joined the back of the line together. We ended up sitting with Trina, Eve and Sofia again because Sofia had saved us seats. At least this time she saved two. Sometimes Trina went to eat with Caden and the boys or Caden came over to eat lunch with us. This became our lunch default for the rest of that week and the start of the next.

  They talked about classes and TV, white celebrity gossip. I chimed in if they said something I cared about, which wasn’t that often. Aisha stayed quiet. I could see why. The first time I brought up black celebrity gossip, Trina and Eve stared at me like I’d sprouted a second head and the table turned coldly quiet until Sofia changed the topic.

  I hated how much of my time with Aisha every day got taken up by the two of us listening to other people talk about topics we didn’t care about. I hated how Trina and Eve ignored her and made her invisible.

  But also, I could see how when we were in a bigger group, with popular girls, the no-cutting-the-line guy stopped watching us. I knew how his bullshit would go with Trina there: she’d cut him down verbally so fast and deep he’d have to slink away for good. Not because she was doing Aisha any favors, but because she liked the power she had, wanted to use it, and wanted to gain more power from knowing Brock through me.

  And if Aisha wasn’t there, Trina would join no-cutting-the-line guy in his jokes.

  * * *

  In World History, in the third week of class, we got rolling on class projects. Our teacher, Konrad Fogg, was a tall, big-handed history buff—a complete geek for historical detail—who didn’t let us call him “Foggy” in the classroom, but didn’t seem to care when we did outside it. He had more brown hair in his beard than on top of his head, not because he’d started balding like Aisha’s dad, but because he kept the sides shaved high and tight. He left a mop of brown bangs flopping over his forehead. His face was so long, you almost couldn’t see his bangs and his beard at the same time. He liked patterned suit jackets over T-shirts. I hadn’t decided if he was trying to be cool and not quite managing, or if he legit had a quirky sense of style.

  The World History classroom featured one wall of old Greek and Roman dudes, one wall of white guys, and one wall that was a mishmash of people of color and women, but that was the short wall. The room carried the wood and graphite smell of pencil shavings along with a toasted ham-and-cheese sandwich odor. How he could be toasting them in the classroom, I had no idea.

  When he told us to get into groups of four, Trina waved at me, saying, “Kaz, come on.”

  She had a gray beanie over her long brown hair and it mismatched her gray skinny jeans in just the right way to show off the verdant green of her sweater. Next to her, Eve wore a dark green sweatshirt and had combed back her bleached hair, which looked almost the same as when she brushed it up.

  We ate lunch with her, Eve and Sofia every day now. I really wanted them to know I was dating Aisha. I got up and tugged on Aisha’s sleeve. She followed me over to Trina and Eve.

  “I’m sorry,” Trina said, making an apologetic face that was heavy on the face and light on the apology. “Caden’s in our group too. We don’t have room for both of you.”

  “Oh,” I said, cheeks burning. “We’ll get another group.”

  While we’d had this brief, unproductive exchange—with me and Aisha the only students standing in the middle of the room—everyone else had clumped into groups of three or four, based on the people near them. I didn’t see a group of two that we could join.

  Mr. Fogg came over. “Problem?” he asked.

  “It’s groups of four, right?” Trina asked.

  “Three or four,” he said. He pointed across the room. “They need an extra student.”

  Aisha walked over and sat down in that group of three.

  “But we study together,” I told him.

  “The whole class is covering the same material,” he said. “This is only one project. You’ll be fine.”

  We only had this class together and Chemistry, so even with lunch that meant more than half of each school day without Aisha. In junior high, we’d had most of every day together. I didn’t want to give up more than I already had. Plus it might be one project, but it spanned the whole semester.

  “No, you don’t understand,” I protested. “We belong in the same group. Take someone out of that group and I’ll join them.”

  “It’s only a project,” Trina said. She stood up and put her fingers on my elbow. “One class. You’ll be glad you’re with us. We’re very accurate. You should’ve seen what we did last year in US History.”

  “Can we have a group of five?” I asked Mr. Fogg.

  “Unnecessary,” he said and walked back to the front of the room.

  Trina leaned in to me, “Are you worried she
won’t do as well without you? You can give her your notes after school.” She was not whispering. Students near us could hear her. Aisha could hear her, even though she had her back to us and acted absorbed in her history book.

  I stared at Trina and said, louder than her, “Aisha’s smarter than me.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short,” Trina replied.

  “I’m not,” I insisted.

  “Take your seats,” Mr. Fogg boomed from the front of the room.

  Trina tugged on my elbow and drew me into a seat. I sank down, glad of the chair even as I hated where it was.

  I scooted the chair back and sideways, further from Trina and Eve, but facing them more fully. “Aisha is really smart. If you knew how smart, you’d want her in this group instead of me.”

  “Sure,” Trina said. “She’ll be okay without you.”

  “I’m not worried about her,” I insisted. At least not the way Trina meant. Is that what they thought about me always being around her—that she succeeded because of me and not the other way round?

  Of course it was. Shit.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Mid September 2017

  World History turned out not to be our worst class together. The winner for shittiest tenth grade class experience fell to Chemistry.

  We had AP Chem fourth period, right before lunch, so Chem should’ve been the start of the good part of the morning. The first few weeks, it was. Our teacher Mrs. Alexander evoked an ad for hearty Midwestern living: big hands, wide hips, lots of long skirts in earthy, solid colors, chunky heels, brown hair that she always wore up.

  I’d met her over the summer because she taught a science camp the school sponsored. I’d gone for two weeks while Aisha was in California. I liked her teaching style: she was big on questions and having us figure things out for ourselves, but she had a good sense about when to step in if we got stuck. Plus she collected practical household chemistry facts about baking and cooking. She made chemistry feel useful and her classroom smelled like someone had cleaned out a dozen apple pie tins with bleach. Plus it was in the quiet part of the school and weirdly dark because it only had windows on its narrow side.