Bitch Is the New Black

by Helena Andrews

  I say “us” like we were a gang. Maybe we were, and jumping was the only way out.

  The girl was offering me a ride to Adaoha’s parents’ house in Maryland. We—the friends who knew her best—were gathering there to console and have council. What happened? Nobody knew, the girl said. She’d been found. Found. She’d done this to herself. Nobody mentioned the word that rhymes with civic pride. We don’t even smoke cigarettes.

  The girl’s voice was still in my head, saying she figured I was ignoring her calls because I already knew. Because I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t. If I said another word, the feeling might come back to my tongue.

  “No, that’s okay,” I said. “Adrienne will take me.”

  Fuck. Now I have to tell Adrienne. I call, and she doesn’t pick up. I text something urgent. She calls back—was coming out of class. Law school. She is laughing with someone. I don’t want to say it, don’t want to change her. I almost hang up. Whoever’s walking next to her is laughing like a maniac. There is the opposite of a pregnant pause. I contemplate hanging up again.

  “Yeah, what’s up,” she said.

  “Adaoha died last night,” I say.

  “What?”

  In times of crisis, what gets the most use out of any of the five W’s. Like fuck, it’s ambidextrous, able to play both sides by way of inflection. What (emphasis on the “tuh”) demands an answer. Whaaaa (with an endless “ah,” almost like pi) is genuine shock and awe. What (with a breathless “whuh”) is deflated, defeated. We practiced each one over the next week, as if rehearsing for something thrown together at the last minute. Everything was hectic, and nothing was patient.

  We’d become walking automated voice systems. No matter how hard you raged against the machine, “What” was the only response, when the obvious prompt should have been “Why”? We didn’t bother to ask until six feet of packed dirt buried any hope of an answer. I probably didn’t want to hear it anyway—I probably would have told Adaoha, Keep it moving, please get it together, do something with yourself, or something like that. Maybe I’d cursed her, killed her. On a church pew, guilty tears threatened my face, twisting it into something so grotesque I was terrified it might freeze that way forever if someone happened by and slapped me on the back.

  Funerals fucking suck. The name itself brings to mind stiff organs, whorish makeup, and venereal disease (for me anyway). To remedy that in civilized circles, the ceremony is renamed a “homecoming,” which itself brings to mind broken beer bottles, communal anger, and matching uniforms. The tailgate was in the bat cave. I went into overdraft buying a dozen white roses to make corsages out of and was blessed with a mindless two hours, wrapping green floral tape around freshly cut stems.

  There is a false sense of accomplishment in numbers and costume. The corsages were for us—her sorority sisters. Standing in my kitchen, each of us pinned one above the heart of another, making sure it wasn’t crooked. The actual ceremony was an ominous afterthought. It was all about the preparation, preparation, preparation. Which of course all went to shit as soon as we saw Adaoha in a coffin. A fucking coffin. Another word in desperate need of a euphemism.

  The flowers had to be white. White like the dresses we wore when we became sisters. When Adrienne, LaKia, and I saved Adaoha from a life sentence of nerd alerts. Despite the pats on the back we gave ourselves, she still turned out better than us. See, we all had the same bag. Note here that I am not speaking in the metaphorical sense, that each one of us tiny human beings has some tiny “bag” of fear and loathing festering on the bottom “shelf” of our “bookcases.” No, I mean that Adaoha, Adrienne, LaKia, and I each have the same exact bag. We got them as presents on the night we were made Deltas. After a nationally sanctioned and predetermined period of learning about sisterhood, scholarship, and service—and also screaming, sit-ups, and sleep deprivation—we put on those white dresses, said a few magical words, and poof, we were related.

  Adrienne I’d known since hating her freshman year. We lived in the same dorm, but not the same planet. It was me, her, this tall guy who played the saxophone like a virgin, and a girl who wore ankle-length jean skirts and Keds topped with tube socks. Those were the blacks on our floor. From a scientific point of view, I took an educated guess that all black people on campus were either geeks or militant (Adrienne wore loose-laced Timbs). I decided to hang out with white people and got hanged for it. Supposedly a mental memo went out to all the Black Student Organization members. I’d been Oreo listed.

  I had no clue how bad it was until one drunken night in the elevator to the sixth floor. Hamish, who was Irish or British and smelled like chlorine and foot fungus, was seeing me home after too much “punch” from a house with Epsilon or Chi on the facade. Adrienne, her good friend LaKia, and a bunch of fellow conscious card-carrying black girls were coming from something with “African” or “Malcolm” on the flyer. Buried in Hamish’s pasty neck, my arms wrapped around his concave swimmer’s waist, I never heard what they were whispering about. But when we got out, I saw the looks—disgust, shame, envy maybe.

  After that, Adrienne was just a fancy Bed, Bath and Beyond shower basket in the bathroom, overstuffed with Victoria’s Secret lotions. We never spoke, but I had a speech prepared in case of an eminent showdown. It began thusly: “First of all, I’m from Compton. I have a cousin on death row. I went to public school for a friggin’ entire year. You don’t know my life!” And my ghetto résumé went on from there.

  As fate would have it, though, my oratorical skills would go untested, because one shitty work-study job grilling hot dogs for outside “jams” later, the two of us were inseparable. Adrienne made me go to $3 pajama parties at the Pan African house, saving/drowning me in a mosh pit of black bodies pulsating to the xylophone stylings of “Money, Cash, Hoes.”

  One semester later and I was deemed sufficiently black enough for even the most discerning of palettes. I rebelled by letting Spencer Schulz, a blond Floridian of German descent, lick my fingers in private and hold my hand on College Walk. Hey, I enjoyed white people and delicious Korean BBQ. But the Benetton ads of my teens had been canceled. Welcome to the real world as experienced through four years of voluntary social segregation. Having seen School Daze on VHS, DVD, and BET, I figured joining up with somebody might help simplify things.

  So, Delta. Adaoha thought all we had to do was sign our names on a sheet numbered one through five, and then allakhazam, we’d be in. “Umm, no, honey,” was the thought bubble that hovered above every already-Delta. “Do your research.” That meant going to all their parties, study breaks, and women’s forums on the state of black relationships as depicted in Love and Basketball. Adrienne and I, having done the aforementioned research, knew all the tricks—have at least one intelligent thing to say per run-in with a sister, covet the color red but never think of wearing it, and always stay till the end.

  Adaoha, we thought, didn’t have a chance, seeing as how she was a total weirdo, one of those black folks on campus who do hang out with other black folks, but not the normal kind, so they might as well be hanging out with white people. That was me before Adrienne saved/drowned me with black lip liner and Lil’ Kim. Adaoha should’ve gone first, maybe.

  Somehow she made it in—something to do with a 3.6 GPA. So, it would be the five of us—me, my new best friend Adrienne, her friend LaKia, Adaoha, and her freak of a friend from the women’s college across the street, Darienne. We all lived together temporarily while studying for the DAT—the Delta Aptitude Test, which every candidate for membership had to pass. Grudgingly, the five of us spent Spring Break ’00 in my double in McBain Hall (Stella was gone on vacay). We figured the bigger the room, the less likely it’d be that anyone would have to breathe the same direct air as Darienne.

  This is going to sound extremely elementary, but Darienne picked her boogers and then ate them, according to Adrienne, who knew her from nursery school or something. She could have been reformed, having completed the twelve-step program for chronic nos
e diggers better known as puberty, but we didn’t give a shit about any of that. Adrienne said, we laughed, and Darienne was marked.

  It didn’t help that she still lacked the basic life skills of any human being not raised by benevolent wolves. Deodorant was exotic to her, as were hot combs and the plastic drugstore kind. Then, of course, there was the conspicuous snot mustache we couldn’t rightly make fun of because she was scheduled for functional endoscopic sinus surgery somewhere in the distant future. Since medically diagnosed conditions are by definition unmockable—openly—we instead implied our resentment, hoping she’d infer her way to social betterment. Sometimes I felt sorry for her, but most times I just wished she’d wipe her fucking nose. Being her ace boon coon, Adaoha either didn’t care, was too good to notice, or pretended not to, so it was up to Adrienne and me.

  One 3:00 a.m., the five of us were delirious with facts about Delta’s maternity ward in Africa when, predictably, the talk turned to our own vaginas. I thought this would be an A and B conversation with the only two nonvirgins (me and LaKia) hosting a smutty talk show for a captive audience of one (Adrienne). As usual Adaoha had her nose in a book, and Darienne…well, come on. But to our double surprise, Darienne had something to say about double happiness “up against the wall.” “Oh, yeah, that’s the best,” she said, interrupting us with a nasally nonchalance we’d never heard before and would never believe.

  She even went so far as to provide a visual aid, her mouth open and head thrown back to one side in mimed rapture and her arms thrown above that ridiculous scene, stopped short by an imagined wall of sin. Eyes. Wide. Shut. We could’ve just ignored her, as was our usual coping method, but it was dangerously past midnight, when boredom and ridicule become obvious bedfellows.

  “With who?” someone asked, while the others feigned disinterest.

  “A boy from my neighborhood,” Darienne answered neatly, excited to be part of the conversation but still skeptical of whether she was in in.

  “Your boyfriend?” someone else asked, without sounding too interested…or disgusted.

  “Something like that.” She was getting coy.

  “Was iiit…good?”

  The cross-examination continued until we veered off into really dangerous territory—early ’90s R&B. Hypnotized by Darienne’s tall tale of the phantom booty call, we forgot how much we hated her long enough to let her eavesdrop. Listening to us reminisce on the real love we had back in the summah, summah, summah time of our youth, we thought maybe she’d learn a thing or two about how we do it. As luck would have it, SWV’s jam “Weak” was everybody’s favorite. Adaoha, studying, ignored us. Kia, the silent but deadly type, let another one rip from far enough away that it seemed innocent. “Remember the Butterfly?” she asked, talking to us but looking at Darienne. We surrounded her like professionals.

  “Hell, yeah,” I said, skywriting the familiar figure eight with my kneecaps—a dance move that took me three PE’s to learn in middle school.

  “Thanks, Debbie Allen. It’s like this,” sang Adrienne, mimicking me and mocking what we all knew Darienne could never do. These were the pelvises of cool kids. Kids who knew when to wipe their noses and put lotion on. Kids who watched Video Soul after school and copied what they saw in the mirror. Darienne, deflated from the big-chested video vixen that she was just a few minutes before, decided to audition herself back in.

  “IIIIIIIIIII geee-iiitttt sooo, weak in the knees….” she belted, trying and failing to execute the infinite motion of knees and hips that was the Butterfly. On “weak” she dipped as low as her wasted five-foot-long legs would allow and then tried thrusting her allegedly experienced pelvis forward. She was more moth than butterfly—specifically one buzzed off too many granny panties.

  Naturally, we begged her to do it again and again and again. And she obliged, each time singing a lot more off-key and gyrating a lot more like a rusty washing machine. Someone grabbed her knees (a rare moment of physical contact that would only be repeated under extreme duress) and tried to manipulate them into a spectacle worthy of Solid Gold while the rest of us stared greedily, storing the mental image like a squirrel does nuts—this being before digital cameras. And like a twice-deported illegal on an inner tube, Darienne kept coming back for more. Already a citizen, I felt sorry for her only in the most intangible of ways. We were sisters, right? Therefore this was all in good fun under the purview of…sibling rivalry, if you will. If you won’t, then we were just bullies with lip gloss, ready to smack down on anything with less shine.

  “Okay, one more time. Seriously, I think you’ve almost got it.”

  “IIIII geeee-iittttt, sooooooooo…”

  That song would’ve been on repeat all night if it wasn’t for Adaoha scratching up the record with a pointed “Darienne.” The three of us froze in place like how you do in musical chairs, Darienne sitting back down in front of the computer. The only seat left; I guess she won. Adaoha, who we thought had been busy cramming, eyed the three of us with something worse than contempt, breaking whatever spell had been cast. Turning Darienne back into a bumpkin and us, her evil stepsisters. Mood. Killed. We sat down on the floor reluctantly, unwilling to admit our defeat or our crime. Nobody asked her.

  The story would get mangled over time like a bad game of telephone. We teased her about what a misguided compassionate she once was. How she’d still be stuck living in Plimpton with the lesbians of Barnard wearing Old Navy cargo pants if we hadn’t saved her from being too good. “Adaoha was such a dork before we rescued her,” we’d say.

  When we put on our white dresses, we became sisters. Made Adaoha cool. Made her part of the black girls’ club we’d joined ourselves so many years before. The four of us (Darienne would dump us in a semester) sealed together like Mormon wives. Because eventually everyone joined the club, grabbed a mask, and walked around like their feet and the ground didn’t mix. Playing at being grown is what we were doing. Maybe Adaoha knew the truth. Maybe she was the only one not playing. Maybe she got winded.

  We lost her to the wind in March. We lost her to these intangibles about strength versus weakness and perfection versus reality. We lost her because we never took the time to think about any of that shit before the call came: our good friend—our sister—had slit her wrist, taken a bottle of pills, tried to drown herself, and finally taken a leap of faith off a building. We lost her.

  In these types of situations, old people on TV always say something like “She looks good.” She did not look good. She looked dead, with pink nail polish. I wanted to touch her hand but decided against it. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d touched Adaoha. The last time I hugged her. Adrienne kept saying it would be okay. My throat was too sore to tell her to shut up. Kia let me lay my head on her lap, her pregnant belly taking up most of it.

  Whatever happened next was all snow and static. Unwatchable.

  There was a slide show at the repast, French for force-feeding your sorrow with baked chicken and nonalcoholic iced tea. Through the awesome power of PowerPoint, her life flashed before our eyes like we were the ones dying. Microsoft was never so macabre.

  The last slide was stolen from her Facebook page. Adaoha took the time to change her profile picture before she left. Thoughtful. In it, she looked small. The camera is too far away, making her shoulders seem shy, her face sweet and childish. She is none of these things anymore. Was none of those things. I want never to see this picture again but am too superstitious to remove her from “friends.” While contemplating this, Adrienne leans over to tell me that Paul, one of Adaoha’s two ex-boyfriends and an asshole, told one of us that he alone knew “the real Adaoha.” I tell Adrienne I will deliver a roundhouse kick to his face. This is a funeral, not a who-knew-Adaoha-best dance-off. And if it were, we’d win. Obviously.

  “I’m telling you, it’s harder out here for us than it ever was for our mothers,” I said out loud to no one in particular, the three of us stretched across my bed in our Sunday black. We stared up at the ceiling wit
h our shoes off, watching the water stains as if they were clouds and wondering if we could have saved her somehow.

  “Is it really, though?” asked Evelyn, another one of us, from the doorway. She was getting married in August.

  “I think that shit makes sense,” said Kia, from her side. Twenty-seven and pregnant with her third child (on the ride back to New York, she’d call to ask me to be the godmother), she looked doubly pathetic in funeral clothes. “When there’s so many ways to go, it’s easier to get lost, I guess. I don’t know…”

  What did we know? Like true Ivy League grads nothing worth a good goddamn. A bunch of cocktail-party chatter about the accomplishments of a woman we clearly never saw or would see again. She’d just bought a condo with granite countertops and West Elm furniture. She’d sold a tract of affordable houses out in Baltimore. She’d just gotten back from a trip to Brazil, where she shook her ass with the best of ’em. She’d joined Match.com and went on a date with a short African guy. She’d gone to a bruja once who told her marriage was in her future. She’d told me that Dex and I would work out someday. She’d broken my heart. What did we know?

  Weeks after the funeral, Adaoha’s mother asked her friends in Washington to stop by her new/old condo and help clear things out. She was twenty-seven when she died, so this probably wouldn’t take long. Her mom also wanted us to take some things with us, mementos or something.

  On the twenty-minute metro ride there, Adrienne and I sat in silence. I shut my eyes once we pulled into the PG Plaza station. She asked me if I was okay about a zillion times. Yes, yes, I’m fine. I’d been sleeping with the lamp next to my bed turned on, a red scarf draped over it. The dark simply wouldn’t do. I was as far from fine as any one person could get.