There was a moment of quiet.
“Do your books ever get banned?” Kayla wanted to know.
“Not that I know of. I don’t think books about language or true crime attract the book banners. Not sure why. Isn’t it mostly books for teenagers and children that get banned? Like that one about the two boy penguins who fall in love?”
The class laughed again. I wondered if that was a real book or if he was making it up.
“What do you think?” Lisa interjected, addressing the class. “What is it about writing for teenagers that leads to so much censorship?”
I knew the answer to that one but I didn’t raise my hand. It’s because grown-ups don’t remember what it was like when they were teenagers. Not really. They remember something out of a Disney movie and that’s where they want to keep us. They don’t like the idea of our hormones, or that we can smell sex on one another. That we walk down halls thick with a million different pheromones. We see each other, catch a glance, the faintest edge of one, that sends a shiver through our bodies all the way to the parts of us our parents wish didn’t exist.
Like the glance me and Zach exchanged just then. I shifted in my seat. All nerve endings buzzing. Making me itch. Making me have to run. Run far and fast and wide. With Zach beside me, matching me stride for stride.
Not long after the class ended that’s what we did. Ran and ran and ran.
But after that night I never saw him again.
FAMILY HISTORY
When Mom and Dad told me I was going to have a baby sister or brother I wasn’t upset. I wasn’t happy either. I didn’t really think about it much, to be honest. I had other problems: dealing with doctors, school.
I was seven years old and covered in hair. There were lots and lots of doctors. I was pulled in and out of different schools. Each one worse than the one before. When the medication wasn’t working I wore pants and long-sleeved shirts. (We’d tried waxing, electrolysis, laser. The hair always came back within a day or two.) Sometimes I had to wear scarves and gloves as well. Even when it was ninety degrees. The other kids thought I was weirdo religious or covered in a dreaded skin disease. They weren’t far off. They didn’t want to go near me.
The growing bump in my mom’s stomach wasn’t much on my radar.
I was shocked when Jordan was born. Us racing to the hospital. Dad yelling at the taxi driver. Then hours and hours waiting with Mom’s friend Liz, who insisted that she hold my hand, before I was finally led in to see my dad tired and sweaty and beaming, and Mom, even tireder, holding a tiny blue bundle.
“Hallo, my darling,” Mom said. “You must meet with your brother.”
I looked up at Liz, who smiled at me. Dad nodded. “Check him out, Micah. Your brother, Jordan.”
“Do I have to?”
Mom laughed. A tiny laugh. She looked ready to sleep for a month.
Liz gave me a little push and I took a step closer to the bed.
I took another step and put my hands on the edge of it, standing on tiptoe to peer at the baby.
It was hate at first sight.
Jordan was grayish blue and uglier than sin. His hair pointed in all the wrong directions, but at least it was only on his head. No family illness for this Wilkins child. His eyes were puffy little slits. “Why’s he that weird color?” I asked.
Dad reached down and took the bundle from Mom. “You want to hold him, Micah?”
I shook my head.
“You won’t drop him. See?” he said, demonstrating.
“It’s easy. You make sure you have one hand under his head and one under his body. Isn’t he tiny?” Dad passed the bundle into my arms. I got a whiff of something not right that made the hair on my arms stand on end. Not poop or anything like that. A wrongness. The blue baby didn’t smell right.
I held him, making sure my hands were where Dad said, though now I wish I’d dropped him. He opened his little beady eyes to look at me. I don’t like you, I could almost hear him thinking. I didn’t like him either. Right away he started screaming.
It’s been like that ever since.
AFTER
The funeral goes on forever. I’m uncomfortable and irritable and not just because it’s so hot. Nothing anyone says about Zach bears much resemblance to the Zach I knew.
Everyone is lying.
Everyone is creating an ideal Zach with their words.
A Zach in their own image.
It’s a Catholic church. I’ve never been in one before. Light comes in colored by the stained glass windows.
At first I stand at the back, not sure where to sit. I watch people filing in. Most of them people I’ve never seen before. Do they know who Zach is? Was?
There’s organ music. Heavy and somber like an old horror movie. It hurts my head. There’s incense, too, as heavy and dense as the music. It doesn’t do much for my head either.
His parents walk by. They’ve shrunk, fallen in on themselves. Grief makes gravity even stronger. His older brother’s face is blank. Looking at them makes my eyes sting. They sit at the front near the flowers and the coffin. I’ve been trying not to look at it, but there it is, dark wood with golden handles. The shape and size are wrong. It doesn’t seem long enough. Zach was tall.
Almost all the seniors walk past, teachers, too. The guys wear suits; the girls, black dresses. They don’t look like themselves. I’m in the same black-dress disguise. The ones who notice me look away, disgusted. Only Yayeko and Sarah say hi. I lose track of Yayeko. Sarah sits down in front with Zach’s family.
Detectives Stein and Rodriguez walk past me. For a moment I am afraid that they will arrest me. They don’t nod. I’m not sure they see me.
The church is approaching full. While there’s still somewhere to sit, I slide onto the edge of a pew two rows from the back. I don’t recognize any of the people near me. That’s a good thing. None of them will whisper and point. The dress I’m wearing itches.
I wonder why I’m here. Zach knew I liked him. It doesn’t matter what any of these other people think of me, or of me and him.
I wonder what Zach would think.
But Zach doesn’t. Not anymore. He’s going into the ground. Or into the flames. I’m not sure which.
I try to remember the last time we saw each other. Once again. I try to pull together every detail. What he looked like. What he wore. I don’t really remember. The details are blurring. It hasn’t been that long and already I’m forgetting things.
The preacher drones a welcome and starts talking about Zach as if he knew him. But I can tell from what he’s saying that he didn’t. It’s easy to block the preacher out. An older man stands up a few rows in front of me and moves up to the podium.
“Scoot over.”
I look up.
Tayshawn. Wearing a suit. I almost laugh even though he looks good. I’ve never seen Tayshawn in jeans before, let alone jacket and tie. He’s always wearing a tracksuit or shorts and jersey so that he can transition into playing ball at a second’s notice. He’s not nearly as good as Zach but he loves the game way more.
There isn’t a lot of scooting space. I turn to my neighbor, a fat old white lady in a black cotton dress. I wonder how she knew Zach. She glares at me, but turns to her neighbor, and they make more wooden pew emerge. Tayshawn squeezes himself onto the last few inches, trying not to press into me, as I try not to touch my neighbor.
“I hate funerals,” he whispers to me.
I nod. Though it’s my first one. They can’t all be like this.
“Some of us are going to hang out after. Drink and stuff. At Will’s place. You wanna come?”
I don’t drink—one of the many things doctors have forbidden me—but I don’t tell him that.
“Not sure,” I whisper back. The woman beside me shifts her body in an I-disapprove-of-you-whispering-at-a-funeral way. I lower my voice. “I don’t think I’m welcome.” Not here. Not at Will’s place.
Tayshawn looks at me. I can see him thinking about lying, then deciding
not to. “I guess not,” he says. He smiles at me. “So you know—I don’t believe any of that shit about you.”
“Thanks,” I say. I mean it.
“Hush,” the lady next to me hisses. “A young boy died.”
I almost tell her that he had a name and if she actually knew him she wouldn’t be calling him “a young boy.” I want to tell her that Zach was my—my what? What noun comes after “my”? Running partner? Friend? Best friend? No, that’s Tayshawn’s. Boyfriend belongs to Sarah.
“You wanna go?” Tayshawn asks. “I really hate these things.”
I look at him, at the cranky lady next to me, at the old guy leaning into the podium, talking about Zach’s unfulfilled potential, his brilliance on the court. Must be his coach, I guess.
“Sure,” I say.
Better to be anywhere than here.
AFTER
Sarah is sitting on the church steps. She does not look all right but Tayshawn asks her if she is anyway.
“No,” she says, looking up at us. “But I’m not going to be sick if that’s what you mean. It was too much in there.”
She’s also wearing a black dress. It makes her look older. Mine is my mom’s. I wonder if hers is too. Her eye makeup is smeared from crying.
Tayshawn shifts his weight from one leg to the other and back again. I clasp my hands and stretch my arms out behind my back.
“Where you two going?” Sarah asks.
“Dunno,” Tayshawn says. “Away. I don’t like funerals.”
“Who does?” Sarah asks. “I can’t go back in there.”
Tayshawn nods. I bite my lip, wonder what to say.
“Can I come with you guys?” she asks.
“Sure,” Tayshawn says. “We wasn’t going to do anything much.” He shrugs.
The plan was getting out of there. I haven’t thought beyond that. I think about the time Zach and me walked the whole length of the island. We started down at Battery Park and wound up here in Inwood. Well, not this here, this church, but farther up, on Broadway, at the bridge to the Bronx.
“Micah?” Sarah asks.
“Yeah?”
“You don’t mind if I come along?”
“No,” I say, realizing that I don’t. She knew Zach better than I ever did. Tayshawn has been best friends with Zach since the third grade. They are the two people who knew him best. They are who I want to be with. “Sure,” I say.
“We could walk,” Tayshawn says. “Down to the park.”
Sarah nods, standing up slowly. She has a tiny black sparkly purse looped over her shoulder. “You live around here, too, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” Tayshawn says. “This is the neighborhood. Me and Zach, we used to, you know. . . .”
For a moment the weight of Zach’s death is too much. I feel my throat and chest tighten.
“I could show you. I guess.”
Sarah blinks back more tears. “Please,” she says.
FAMILY HISTORY
One time when Dad was blue he told me that his father wasn’t French after all.
Mom was with the brat at soccer and Dad was sitting at the kitchen table trying to work. When his writing didn’t go well, he got sad.
I’d gone into the kitchen to get some juice. I was thinking about going for a run. Dad looked up and I knew immediately he was going to unload.
“I went all the way to Marseille,” he told me, without any word of greeting. “I was trying to find him. I knocked on the door of every black family in the city, which is way more than you’d think.”
Okay, I thought. He’s talking about his dad. I wondered how he knew he’d knocked on all their doors.
“My mother lied to me,” he said. “Again.”
I leaned against the sink. “Maybe he moved?”
“Ha!” Dad looked at me like I was being crazy. “I found a letter. Upstate. It was in English, not French—American English. Addressed to ‘My darlin Hope.’ Your grandmother’s name is Hope,” he told me unnecessarily. “The letter was asking after their child—after me. It was all about how much my dad missed my mom. How much he wanted to hold the baby—to hold me!” Dad’s eyes are welling. “It was signed, ‘All Yers Always.’ There was no other name unless my dad’s name was Always or Yers Always. There’s no way a Frenchman wrote it.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I waved the letter in Mom’s face. You know what she did?”
He was looking at me. I shook my head.
“She told me not to be so melodramatic. She told me to act my age. I was twenty-two! I was acting my age.”
“Did Grandmother say why she lied to you?”
“She said, ‘You had a good time in France, didn’t you, Isaiah? Found yourself a good wife.’ She wouldn’t tell me who my father is. She said I didn’t need to know. That it’s better to keep the past muddy. That’s her all over, isn’t it? I don’t think my past could be muddier.
“I still haven’t gotten anything out of her. She’s back to acting like my dad was French. So I do the same. Push the truth out of the way. Go on acting like the lie is true. Don’t tell your mom. She doesn’t know.”
He grinned, gave me a wide-open smile that made his eyes crinkle. Dad’s teeth were shiny white. “Just another family secret to add to the pile. This one’s between you and me. Like Hilliard.”
“Right,” I said. Dad opened up his laptop. I got myself a glass of orange juice. The end of our father-daughter bonding.
Is it any surprise that I turned out the way I did, with so many family lies?
I’m at least a third-generation liar. Though I bet it goes back earlier. If I could get Grandmother or Great-Aunt Dorothy to talk about it. I wouldn’t bother asking Hilliard. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say a whole sentence.
I wonder if there is a lying gene. If so it runs strong in my family. Which makes me wonder about Dad’s story. Was there a letter? Is anything he said true? The only story I’ve ever had out of the Greats is the one about the French sailor. Maybe Dad lied to me about the letter? Maybe he lied about having gone to France?
No, that has to be true because my mother really is French. Marseille is where they met. Sometimes I think she’s the only part of the story that’s true. I stick to the French sailor story because I’ve heard it so many times before. Because Dad only told me about the letter once. I have no idea which version is true. Maybe neither is.
“Keep the past muddy.” I believe my grandmother would say that. It was something the whole family lived by. Dad, too, whether he admitted it or not.
It leaves me feeling unanchored.
Telling you the truth is my attempt to anchor myself. It’s all I’ve got.
BEFORE
The next time I saw the white boy was in Central Park.
Me and Zach were running. Lockstep. Not talking. Just breathing. My thoughts weren’t anywhere but in the feel of my feet hitting the ground, my elbows at my side, the breath in and out. Zach beside me: feet to ground in unison. Breath in and out at the same time.
The boy came from the other direction. Running toward us in jeans and a T-shirt and beat-up pair of boots. Not regular running-in-Central-Park clothes. And so skinny the clothes flopped around him, engulfed him, slowed him down, almost tripped him. He was still fast though. Even with his elbows askew and his heels hitting the ground.
Zach nudged me. But I’d already seen. Already recognized. The boy was looking at me, too. I didn’t have words for the expression. Intense. Almost like he hated me.
Then he was past us.
“Ha,” Zach said. “Freak.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t help thinking that Zach thought the same of me. Or used to. I imagined him in school, watching me walk past, then turning to Tayshawn to spit out the word: freak.
I had more in common with that boy than I did with Zach, running with his high-knee lift and elbows tucked tight at ninety degrees. No one ever called Zach a freak.
AFTER
This is how it feels n
ow.
Blankness.
Numbness.
Nothing.
Without Zach I’m nothing. I’m not even half of anything, not even the in between I was before. Not girl, not boy, not black, not white.
It’s all gone.
I’m gone.
AFTER
Tayshawn shows us the court where he and Zach first played ball together, the court where they first dunked, the spot in the park where they first got drunk together. He shares a whole series of firsts.
It feels as if Tayshawn’s telling us that Zach was his. That we could never know him the way he did.
I don’t care. I know he belongs to them more than he did to me. Sarah’s been with him—on and off—since freshman year, and Tayshawn and Zach go back to the third grade. I shouldn’t be here.
He takes us to a little cave deep in Inwood. Their firsts here were playing truth or dare with neighborhood girls and smoking pot.
It’s dank and musty. My nose wrinkles. There are lots of cigarette butts, empty beer bottles.
“Classy,” Sarah says.
Tayshawn laughs. “You’re probably the only one of his girls he never took here.”
Sarah stiffens. I don’t. I’m not even offended that Tayshawn clearly doesn’t think of me as one of Zach’s girls.
He sits down a little bit in from the cave’s mouth, where it’s still light enough that we can see each other but not so far forward that people walking by on the path below would know we’re there. Sarah crouches next to him, unwilling to get her dress dirty. She clutches her purse. I sit cross-legged on Tayshawn’s other side, letting the skirt of Mom’s dress pool in my lap.
“I’m honored,” Sarah says. “Clearly he only brought his trashy girls here.”
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