Mama smiled but didn’t say anything. She reached across me, grabbed Kristin’s hand, and squeezed it. I swallowed.
The water lapped silently up onto the sand. A few yards away, a group of men were setting up a volleyball game. A black dog ran up to our blanket and sniffed at my sneakers.
“C’mon, Magpie,” a redheaded woman called and, just as quickly, the dog ran off.
Kristin scooted closer to me, wrapped her arms around her knees, and sighed.
“I’m gonna walk,” I said, grabbing my notebook.
“I’ll walk with you,” Kristin said, jumping up.
I started to say something but didn’t. It was a free country.
We walked silently for a while. Kristin kept digging her toes into the sand, then shaking them off.
“I hate sand,” she said, “but I love the beach. Isn’t that weird?”
I nodded.
“I guess I’m weird,” she said. “But it’s so beautiful here. I like it in the winter, too. Have you ever been here in the winter?”
I shook my head.
“We should come sometime. Nobody on the beach. It’s perfect. Sometimes aloneness is so perfect.”
“I wear it like a coat,” I said, and Kristin looked at me like she couldn’t believe those words had come from my mouth. Then she smiled.
“I hate the cold,” I said. “I don’t think I could stand the beach in the winter.”
“Layers. Lots of layers and you won’t even feel it.”
I looked out over the water. The waves were calm today. “I wouldn’t come here in the winter,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Just wouldn’t.”
We continued walking.
“I’ve always wanted a family,” Kristin was saying. “I lost mine.”
“How?” I asked, still staring at the water. Kristin was talking softly. I wondered if Mama was asleep back on our blanket or nervously waiting for us to return.
“They found out I’m queer,” Kristin said, tossing her hair. She looked like a girl then—stubborn and hurt. “They stopped speaking to me. Wrote me off.”
“Oh.”
Had I written Mama off? She must have been afraid. Afraid that she’d lose me. And all the while I had been afraid, too. Of what everybody would think. And of losing her.
The beach was getting crowded. A group of women put down a blanket a few feet away. One of them smiled at Kristin.
“What about Christmas?” I said after a long time had passed.
Kristin frowned, then shielded her eyes with her hand and looked out over the water.
“What about it?”
“Who do you do it with?”
“Family.”
“But I thought you . . .”
“Not the family I was born into,” she said. “The family I made for myself. Close friends.” She took her hand away from her eyes. I stopped and took off my sneakers.
“You have EC’s feet,” Kristin said, staring at my toes.
I curled and uncurled my toes. The sand felt soft and hot against them.
What would Ralphael think if he saw me and Kristin walking along Jones Beach? I guess he didn’t really care. At least, that’s what he said when he called me. Tomorrow we were planning on going to see a movie or something. He said Sean was down South for the next week before school started. Maybe, Ralphael had said, he’ll come back thinking different. Yeah, I had said, not believing for a minute it would happen, but hoping. Maybe.
“Maybe this Christmas will be different,” Kristin was saying. “Maybe we can all go away somewhere. Me, you, EC, and whoever you’d like to bring. That would be nice.”
I could bring Ralphy. He’s cool about Mama and Kristin. Or maybe I’d bring Angie . . . if she was still speaking to me. If she would want to come. When I looked at Kristin, her eyes were uncertain behind her glasses and filled with something . . . hope. I wanted to ask her what it felt like to have a family still alive somewhere and not be able to talk to them. Did it feel like it did with my father? Hollow and empty sometimes, and sometimes it didn’t matter? Or was it like the disappearance of the common toad, just all of a sudden, the last one died and it’s like it never ever was?
“Can we sit a minute?”
I nodded and we sat at the edge of the water.
“You miss them?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Kristin said. She leaned on her knees so that her chin stuck out a little and she smiled. Her smile was nice, I decided, honest and sad. “Sometimes a lot.”
“If you don’t have a girlfriend . . . it’s kind of just you by yourself?”
She nodded. “I still have my friends . . . but it’s lonely.” A sandpiper darted past. “Yesterday,” Kristin said, “I was thinking about buffalo. Can you imagine being the last to die off?”
I shook my head. “I’d want to go in a crowd.”
“Me, too,” Kristin said softly. “Me, too.”
We sat there without saying anything for a long time. People passing by must have wondered about us—how strange we looked together—a black guy and white woman sitting silently, staring out at the water. But I didn’t care anymore what people were thinking. Some part of me was starting to move inside of myself, shutting out all those nosey eyes and nasty things people can think to say.
“If I had to be the last one like myself,” I said, “I’d want to run and run. Hard as I could until I couldn’t run anymore. Least that way I’d have felt the wind on my face once more before I kicked off.”
“And the sun,” Kristin said, smiling.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “The sun.”
Chapter Twenty
Sometimes you have to start at the beginning and work your way back. As Kristin and I sat talking, something began melting inside of me. I don’t know how to say it, don’t know how to write it in my notebooks. But some small closed-up space for Kristin started opening, growing, filling itself in. Like an eclipse—the way the moon rushes out to cover up the sun. That moment with Kristin on the beach was like an eclipse—and quick as it had come, the moon pulled away and the sun was back. No one stops to think, though—that maybe there is a reason for the darkness. Maybe people have to be reminded of it—of its power. At night, we go to sleep against the darkness. And if we wake up before morning, a lot of times we’re afraid. We need it all, though—the darkness and the light. The Melanin and the Sun. Mama and Kristin.
Later on, when we walked back to the blanket, I looked over at Mama. I would be fourteen in a month and a half, and we were both afraid. Groping for some sort of light on the other side of all of this. Something that would guide us somewhere, help us find our way back to each other. We didn’t know how any of this would end. But maybe it didn’t matter. We had each other. We would always have each other.
When Kristin lay back against Mama’s shoulder, I had to look away, tears burning at the edges of my eyes. It wouldn’t be easy. All the hate and gossip and fights and maybes. . . .
I looked at Mama. She was squinting up at me and smiling.
“Hey, Mel.”
“Hey yourself,” I said, trying to smile, walking backwards away from them, toward the water.
I didn’t know what would happen tomorrow or the next day or the next. I didn’t know what would happen with Ralphy or Kristin or Angie. . . . I didn’t know if it would ever stop mattering what people thought. But I was sure of Mama, sure of my notebooks. And for the quickest moment, walking backwards against the sun, I was sure of me.
Maybe that’s all that matters.
About the Author
Jacqueline Woodson, winner of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in writing for young adults, is the author of Newbery Honor winners After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers and Show Way, National Book Award Finalists Locomotion and Hush, and Miracle’s Boys (recipient of a Coretta Scott King Award and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize), among many others. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.
Visit her at www.jacquelinewoods
on.com.
From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun Page 8