Grey

by Aundrea Ascencio

  Grey

  A Novella

  Aundrea Ascencio

  Copyright © 2017 Aundrea Ascencio

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Published in the United States of America.

  Table of Contents

  The A-

  The Wounded Ego

  The Challenge

  Obsession

  Still Powerless…

  Breaking Down Walls

  The Elephant in the Room

  The Subtle Things

  Don’t Scratch

  Outlier

  Collision

  Anti-Hero

  Damages

  Deal.

  57 Minutes

  The Grand Entrance

  Uhmg knah stahna

  Breathless

  The Morning After…

  Ode to Poetry

  Grey

  “Studying”

  Guilty

  Revelation

  The Promise

  Out

  His Side of the Story

  White Privilege

  Truce

  Fighting for You

  Date Night with Mr. and Mrs. Pari

  Killing Me Softly with His Song

  If Love Were Enough

  Princess

  Dream Boy

  Trigger

  Growing Pains

  Perfect

  Liebe

  The A-

  It wasn't that he didn't appreciate a good read, but nothing pleased Eric more than to hurl the book and everything Du Bois had to say about black people over the railing. The pages of The Souls of Black Folk swayed and fluttered to the ground like a wounded bird, smashing onto the concrete walkway.

  The two Hispanic girls sitting on a bench below glared up at Eric, but his outburst was not remarkable enough to rouse them from their phones, and they turned back to their texting, giving him no further consideration. Eric reserved no additional thought for them either, guiltless to the fact that his stunt had narrowly missed putting someone in a concussion. He left the printout lying on the bottom stair at the mercy of impatient and inattentive feet.

  "This is bullshit," he muttered under his breath.

  Summer school was definitely not one of his brightest ideas, and the Southern California heat made it even more of an unbearable hell to endure. By mid-day, he withered and shed like a reptile and no amount of sunscreen could keep his pale, snowy, Colorado hide from tinting strawberry red. There was no good reason why he endured it. Summer school was not for him, but for losers who didn't play their cards right the first time around. He was a character of superiority, after all. Always top in his class. Always a competitor to be reckoned with. He'd gotten straight A's in high school and that competitive academic drive had scored him honors in college.

  Most people would admit he was smart, but he preferred the term genius, and used nothing less of the word to describe himself. Being a genius wasn't easy. In fact, it was a curse, because if he wasn't a genius, he would not be so keenly aware of the fact that he was wasting away at a mediocre university, surrounded by non-native English speakers and first-generation fatherless mutts who leeched off federal aid because their families couldn't afford a decent college savings.

  Seeing them in the halls only fueled his agitation, which was nothing new, as he was usually short of patience anyway. However, he would argue that it wasn’t necessarily his patience that was flawed, but rather that he had no patience for certain things, like Mexicans in college. Or Asians in college. Or Arabs in college. Or Jews in college. Or Blacks in college. Or even some Whites in college, for that matter.

  It was just a pet peeve of his, as he would often say, and everybody is allowed to have at least one of those. You could probably get away with having a maximum number of three pet peeves before people have the right to call you an asshole. Thus, having created this rule, he gave himself leisure to two more pet peeve freebies during his stay in California.

  He decided that the second pet peeve regarding his classmates was the conceited aggrandizement of themselves. They tried so hard to be better than what they were, grasping each rung of the social ladder with one hooking finger, climbing upward to a position that they had neither the knowledge or capability to maintain. It made him sick, and he wished he could tell them all how much better off they’d be picking grapes on the side of the road. The very notion of educated brown people was backwards.

  His third pet peeve was their ignorant, third-world, uninspiring languages, which made him feel ravished when he had to hear them, and whose pronunciations and habits carried over and brutalized every other civilized language. Spanglish, in particular, was like nails on a chalkboard to him. No one in the respectable world would ever hire anyone who pronounced yes with a j.

  Fortunately, for the sake of his sanity, his stay at the university was at a cessation. At least to him it was. However, his advisors seemed to think differently.

  Eric would only be approved to graduate once he completed the Humanities section of his upper GE requirements. Believing that he could make himself exempt from the requirement by merely disregarding its existence, Eric refused to take the class. He claimed that taking some irrelevant liberal studies course for the summer was nowhere in his agenda, perhaps even going so far as to believe that his agenda was above the institution's agenda, and that the university would have to adjust their policies in order to accommodate his schedule.

  The round headed adviser with the tight eyes pursed his lips, either out of calculated patience or to keep himself from laughing out loud. Despite Eric's argument that a Humanities class had nothing to do with his Economics degree, the adviser would not buy into Eric's logic, and continued repeating to the irate, flaking, pink young man that if he didn't take the Humanities class, he would not graduate. The adviser then proceeded to keep his cool when the pink young man called him a "Jap" and stormed out of the office.

  Thus, the choice had been taken from him. If it were up to him, Eric would have been on his way back to Colorado for the summer, just as he had promised his parents. Instead, he was strong-armed into enduring some "pointless" class on African American literature.

  The decision to take the class was half out of spite for himself, and half out of a personal crisis he could tell absolutely NOBODY about.

  No one.

  He had come to a crossroads in his life, a fork in his path divided into two separate directions, a path for "yes" and a path for "no". Neither direction could promise him any good. It was a hopeless dilemma, like being forced to choose between eating your own crap or drinking your piss, and in the end, you would have to be damned by one of them.

  The problem keeping him awake at night was simply that he didn't know enough black people. In fact, he knew absolutely nothing about black people at all. Yet the God of Irony would so have it that knowing something about black people was exactly the kind of information he needed in order to solve his little "dilemma".

  It was a dilemma that could change the course of his entire life, and he needed as much information as possible. The problem was he had no idea where to get it. He had no background or experience dealing with such a problem. His social network was quite limited to a specific group of non-black people, and he could not bear the embarrassment of stepping outside of that group and asking a random stranger for "that kind" of information. It was also too risky to check out library books on African American history, or google forums about it in his spare time. Anyb
ody could trace that shit. The only way he felt he could find answers without drawing suspicion on himself was to study the subject under the guise of taking a literature class and hope that somehow he would get his answers.

  He never admitted to his parents that it was this particular research project (or more accurately, this particular obsession) that had kept him from coming home for the summer. The clandestine investigation was on such a lock down that not even his friends were aware that the class was on his schedule.

  He had a hard time admitting it even to himself, and went through great pains to keep his mouth shut through each two-hour lecture. If nothing else, he had an impressive capacity for self-discipline, keeping his radical opinions at bay as he skimmed through Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Claude McKay. Only the trashcan by the door knew the full measure of his frustration as he kicked it on his way out of class. Nonetheless, he always came back the next day, punctual and on the hour, as dedicated to his endeavor as a faithful dog waiting solemnly for his master to return and allow him a treat.

  However, despite his remarkable patience for the class, the answers never came. There was a whole lot of ‘poor negro this, poor negro that’, and not enough solutions pertaining to his own problem. How could he look to the blacks to help him solve his problem when they hadn’t even solved their own social problems effectively? The closest the class ever got to addressing his question was “Blood-Rising Moon” by Jean Toomer, but even then, he walked away from the story in bewilderment, unable to decide if he was a Tom or a Bob.

  It only infuriated him more when he realized he was running circles around himself. Perhaps his problem wasn’t the blacks’ problem at all, as he had initially believed. No matter how many stories he read, the solution to his problem never magically jumped off the page, and ultimately he had to face up to it. It was not black people at all that he needed advice about.

  It was girls.

  A girl, actually.

  A scheming, devious vixen who had destroyed everything he thought he knew about himself and the world around him. And she'd done it with a silent but deadly weapon.

  The A-.

  It wasn't that he was an academic fanatic.

  An A- at the end of the day was just an A. An A would always be an A.

  That is, until she came into the picture.

  The Wounded Ego

  In spite of what had happened last semester and what people chose to believe, Eric swore that he had been another victim of affirmative action, an injustice that could only occur outside the white confines of his hometown.

  It was absolutely the only explanation he would ever accept as to why that girl passed a Physics class with top grades. In his mind, it could never have been accomplished strictly by her own intelligence or hard work, because he strongly believed that her kind of people weren't known for that.

  The only other explanation for it that he would accept was that she had somehow mastered enough cunning to cheat her way through the class and cover her tracks. Favors were more than likely exchanged, and bargains were covertly negotiated with sexual bribery between her and the professor. As a result, since his kind were less than popular in that part of the country, his own efforts to expose the witch were undermined by a collective conspiracy against him.

  The whole Physics class had waited outside after the end of that final exam, and what should have been a quick victory for him turned out to be a direct assault on his pride. The hallway silenced when he showed up, and students parted like the red sea as he made his way to the wall where grades were posted. The way they stared him down would have set him on fire, if glares had such power, and he felt the heat of their hatred on the back of his neck as he froze in front of the printed results. There it was, typed in bold black ink. Someone had kindly circled it infinitely in red;

  Chantel Pari...95.3% A

  Eric Brandt-Chandler...94.9% A-

  "She cheated!" Eric declared, slamming the final grades onto Professor Finlay's desk. "There's no way she passed with an A. She got F's on both her first two exams. How is that possible?"

  Professor Finlay did nothing but raise an eyebrow. "You're dead serious, aren't you?"

  "This is discrimination," Eric went on. "I'll be taking this to the dean, and once they investigate your ass, I'm going after your job too. I won't stop until you're destroyed. You'll never set foot on another college campus again. Nobody will want you."

  "Now that you bring it up, I could use a vacation. My wife has been yapping at me about Greece for years," Professor Finlay replied, reaching into a drawer beneath him. He slammed a spiral bound book onto his desk. "Here is the grade book from my General Physics class containing careful record of yours and Miss Pari's progress throughout the semester. Will you do me a favor and deliver this copy personally when you meet with the dean? Do try to make it worth both our while and negotiate a minimum of three months' suspension, if possible. Make me sound as nasty as you possibly can."

  "You think this is funny?"

  "No, I'm just surprised that you would go this far just so you wouldn't have to admit defeat? It must be so hard for you," Professor Finlay said. "Chantel worked just as hard as you did this semester, if not harder. I'm actually really impressed by how she's taken initiative this time around and stepped up her game. You must be proud of the inspiration you are to people lately."

  "Inspiration, my ass," Eric declared. "This is bullshit and you know it. It's not mathematically possible for her to pass the class with an A if she failed the first two exams. I added the numbers up myself. This is clearly a case of academic dishonesty, and you're either turning your head the other way or you've been in on it from the beginning. What did you ask her to do for you, huh? Did she let you stretch her black ass across this desk?"

  "Watch it."

  "I know what's going on here. You want me out of your school. All of you. Nothing would make you happier than to see me walk out of here crying in defeat. But you can't get me out, can you? I'm undefeatable. I'm above everyone here, including nigga-lovers like you. I haven't sold myself out to them, and that's what makes me strong. And I'm just going to get stronger and stronger. The more you push me, the stronger I'll get. You can huff and puff all you want, but I won't go anywhere. I'll stand my ground."

  "Good. Perhaps you'll learn something around here," Professor Finlay replied. "As for your original concern, I'll repeat myself one last time. I have zero tolerance for cheating and plagiarism in my classes, and there are safeguards in place to prevent such a thing from happening. Chantel's material was entirely original. I monitored everyone for cheating, and no one escapes me. She earned her grade fair and square and she deserves it. You also received an A in the course, Mr. Chandler, which is considered passing. You justly earned that through your own efforts. Therefore, I do not entirely understand why you are here. Do us all a favor and find a more productive use for your time. We’re finished.”

  "This isn't over," Eric swore. "She's got a hell of a thing coming for her. Liars always do."

  "As do people without a filter," Professor Finlay replied. "If you had one of those handy things with you on the first day of class, we wouldn't be here, and perhaps your ego wouldn't be so wounded now."

  The Challenge

  It wasn't something that Eric regarded as a matter of importance, but he remembered the incident clearly. No one, especially her, would let him forget it. It started out as a private conversation with a fellow student, a conversation that was nobody's business in the first place, but somehow it ended up being that way.

  Of course he had a right to his privacy and his personal point of views, but what he didn't have was practice with being considerate of the time, place, and people around him. Never in his life had he been inconvenienced by having to stand down, stand under, stand aside, or stand behind anyone else.

  In fact, he was so accustomed to enjoying the privilege of upper status quo in nearly every situation in America, that he was completely oblivious to the peopl
e within earshot of him. In comparison to his own importance, they were practically nonexistent, and it was easy for him to forget that he wasn't in Colorado anymore attending the University of Denver where nearly 70 percent of his fellow students were Caucasian.

  Nor was he as popular as he'd like to be, as nobody outside the county lines of his remote mountain town appreciated the power behind the name Brandt-Chandler. However, he was Eric Chandler, and obscurity wouldn't last long on him. He would soon regain the prodigious popularity he enjoyed in Colorado, though in California, it would be more accurately described as notorious unpopularity. Everything he said or did blew up in scandal.

  Yet despite Eric's celebrity and the intense scrutiny that disciplined every detail of his interactions on campus, the name of the person he was talking to on the day in question is a detail that nobody really cared to remember. As usual, all eyes in the room were on Eric, waiting for him to spark another revolution of gossip. Thus, the particulars of the young man he was talking to will unfortunately remain anonymous. He has since been called "the nameless guy". All anyone remembers about him is that he too was a white guy in Eric's physics class, and that he was particularly interested in why Eric had moved to a state he clearly and openly despised. It was a burning question that had not yet yielded a satisfying explanation, and everyone who had endured the misfortune of encountering Eric Chandler (which was about 40% of the student body) were eager to find the answer.

  "So you just left then?" the nameless guy finally concluded. "But why?"

  The answer Eric gave him wasn't as glorious as he anticipated and he probed for more information, which only brought him more disappointment. It turned out Eric was just an ordinary guy with radical principles who had no specific reason for relocating to California other than a shrugging reply of "Because I wanted to."

  "Right in the middle of a school year?" the nameless guy pressed on. "Usually people wait out the Spring semester before they make that kind of move. It costs money to just up and leave like that."