by Tracy Brown
Sydney rolled her eyes, dismayed that he had followed her.
“Troy…”
“I cut you off again, right? I’m sorry.” He was laughing. “I know, I get distracted.”
“You’re self-absorbed,” Sydney corrected.
Troy stopped laughing. “Me? Self-absorbed? You’re crazy.”
Sydney shrugged and focused her gaze on a group dancing nearby.
“You think I’m self-absorbed?” Troy shook his head and sipped his drink. “Really?”
Sydney nodded with an apologetic look on her face.
Troy smiled. “Maybe a little.”
The DJ switched to Sean Paul’s “Temperature.” A couple was dancing nearby and both Sydney and Troy were distracted by them. The girl was bent over with her butt grinding on the guy’s crotch. She touched her ankles and shook her ass on him as he braced himself against a wall and thrust himself against her. Sydney looked away. But Troy seemed utterly amused. As he laughed, his beautiful teeth seemed to gleam in the dimly lit club. Sydney nudged him playfully and he looked at her, still smiling.
“What?” he asked. “Come on. You know you want to dance like that with me.”
Sydney laughed.
“Come on,” he teased. “Show me what you got, Sydney Taylor.”
She laughed with him and then looked at him questioningly. He knew her last name, too?
Troy looked at the drink in his hand and seemed to catch himself. “I’m sorry. You want me to get you a drink?” he asked.
Sydney shook her head. “No, thanks.” She gestured toward his cup. “What are you drinking?”
Troy grinned slightly. “Bacardi,” he admitted. “I don’t drink all the time. It’s homecoming weekend.”
Sydney shrugged. “Do your thing.”
“So, where you from?” Troy asked.
“New York,” she answered.
“Me, too,” he said. “What part?”
“Staten Island. How about you?”
“I live uptown.” He sipped his drink once more. “I never knew they had black people in Staten Island,” he said.
Sydney chuckled. “Well, we’re definitely out there. Lots of us, too.”
“But Staten Island ain’t really New York City. You know what I’m saying? It’s more like Jersey, ain’t it?”
“No.” Sydney always marveled at how little people knew of the city’s fifth borough. “It’s not.”
Troy shrugged. “I always pictured it like a bunch of houses with white picket fences and all that. You know, real suburban. So you must be rich, then,” he said, smiling.
She laughed. “Please! The struggle is everywhere. Don’t get it twisted.”
Troy’s eyes widened. “The struggle? What you know about that?”
Sydney sucked her teeth. Truthfully, she wasn’t even sure how her mother did it, aside from the men she befriended over the years to keep her company and keep her shopping. But Sydney had practically grown up in Aunt Pat’s home, where money wasn’t always so readily available. She had seen plenty of struggle in her young lifetime.
“I know enough,” she said simply.
“Is that right?” He never would have guessed it. Sydney was different than the other girls. After class, she usually gathered up her things and headed straight to the next one. She never seemed to be hanging around doing nothing and was never found among the clusters of girls who stood around in the hopes of attracting male attention. For that reason, he had watched her. Intrigued by the girl who didn’t bother blending in. She wasn’t in college scouting for a husband. Sydney stood out in all the right ways. He never would have guessed that she came from hard knocks.
The DJ called for everybody’s attention as he introduced the first act. Everybody rushed the dance floor, which was directly in front of the elevated platform serving as the stage. People were pushing and shoving their way to the front. A few exchanged heated words as the pandemonium escalated. The DJ yelled for everybody to chill, and security moved in to calm the crowd. Troy and Sydney stood on top of a nearby platform to get a better view. Lil Jon took the stage wearing an eclectic outfit and hollering the lyrics to his hit song “Snap Yo Fingers.” The crowd sang along in unison.
Sydney rapped along from where she stood atop the platform. Troy bobbed his head, too. But he was more interested in watching Sydney let loose. He was so used to seeing her serious academic side that it was entertaining to see her unwind. Without realizing it, he smiled as she passionately rapped along to the song. Sydney caught him smiling and stopped singing, embarrassed.
“You laughing at me?” she asked shyly. She had gotten swept up in the moment.
“Nah,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m enjoying it. Keep going.”
Sydney laughed and sang along with the next verse as Troy stood smiling and nodding his head to the beat. Suddenly someone was reaching for Troy’s hand and pulling him down onto the dance floor. Sydney recognized that it was one of the girls she had seen on the Metro earlier. The girl was squeezed into a body-hugging black dress. She was tugging at Troy, pulling him closer. Lacing her arms around his neck, she danced with him provocatively. Sydney watched for a moment and then forced herself to turn her attention back to the performance onstage. As the other partygoers reveled all around them, Troy danced with the girl for a few minutes. Then he gently peeled her arms off of him and politely shooed her away. Pissed, she stomped off to where her girlfriends stood waiting and frowning at Sydney and Troy. Their looks were so venomous that Sydney looked at Troy in dismay.
“You just made me four new enemies that fast. What did you say to her?” she asked.
Troy laughed. “I told her that I already pissed you off tonight and she was only making it worse.”
Sydney frowned. “Did you really say that?”
Troy nodded, laughing. “It worked, didn’t it?”
Sydney laughed and shook her head at Troy. Lil Jon moved on to a song that she didn’t know all the words to and she climbed down from the platform and stood next to Troy. The crowd around them jostled Sydney so that she was pushed even closer to him. She could smell his cologne and it smelled divine.
“This is why I don’t like parties,” she yelled over the noisy crowd. “All these people … I hate it.”
He leaned down closer so that she could hear him over the music and mayhem. “You want to leave?” he asked. “We can go if you want.”
Sydney was surprised. We? She had been battling a nagging thought all night. What did Troy want from her? Guys like him never noticed girls like her. She wondered what his angle was. “We’ll miss the rest of the show,” she said.
Troy shrugged. “It’s okay. I’ve seen all these people perform before. Nothing new.” He set his cup down on a nearby table.
Together, they left the party. Once outside, the cool October air felt good on their faces. As they strolled leisurely toward the Metro station, Sydney let out a sigh of relief.
“Whew!” she said. “I hate crowds like that.”
“Me, too,” Troy said. “That’s another thing we have in common. Both from New York, both don’t like crowds.” Smiling, he said playfully, “Both good at math.”
Sydney laughed. “I wish.” She flashed Troy a brilliant smile. “What’s your major?”
“I’m majoring in business, minoring in finance,” he answered. “I like working with numbers.”
“Good,” she said. “You can be my accountant someday.”
Troy laughed. He was thinking way bigger than that. “Maybe I will,” he humored her.
They walked in the direction of the train station. They talked about their classmates, about the upcoming midterms, and the differences between New York and D.C. Their conversation flowed freely and never felt forced. Sydney was impressed. Troy was smart, handsome, and very ambitious. He was still boisterous and overly energetic and a bit macho. But by the time they arrived back at their dorm, Sydney was smitten. Troy walked her to her door and bid her good night with nothing more tha
n a wink and a smile. And it was enough to melt her heart completely.
* * *
Troy started tutoring Sydney the weekend after homecoming. Sydney was no quick study. She struggled with the complexities of their statistics class. Even with Troy’s help, it took two sessions before she grasped even the basic concepts of the course. He did his best to be patient with her. But it was a struggle.
On the night of their third scheduled session, Troy and his boys were celebrating D-Bo’s birthday. Somehow, the group got their hands on some bottles of Alizé, and before long all of them were twisted. Unaware that the fellas were out getting wasted, Sydney waited for Troy in the dorm lounge. When he stumbled in at close to ten, she could tell immediately that he was in no condition to study. Troy was even louder and more obnoxious than usual.
“Yo, sing that shit again!” he was yelling to one of his friends. “How that shit go?”
He spotted Sydney and his smile widened. He grabbed her by the waist, and began grinding on her, dancing to “U and Dat,” which his friends were drunkenly singing. D-Bo and the rest of the guys started cheering him on loudly, laughing, whooping, and hollering. Sydney was embarrassed. She pulled away, finally shoving Troy into the couch. He lay there on his back, still laughing. Then coughing. Next he was vomiting all over the psychedelic lounge carpeting.
Troy’s friends stopped laughing and began gasping and making noises of disgust and repulsion. They laughed and grimaced while he threw up all over the floor. Sydney ran to the nearby resident assistant’s room and grabbed rolls of paper towels. Running back to the ugly scene, she sopped up the remnants of Troy’s evening as best she could. Troy’s body was wracked by spasms as it expelled the remaining contents of his stomach. It was his turn to be embarrassed as Sydney took charge and got his friends to help get him to his room. They managed to get him there, tossing him on his bed before leaving to laugh among themselves at their friend’s drunken misfortune.
Troy lay splayed across the bed until he caught his breath. Throwing up had taken a lot out of him and he needed time to gather himself. Sydney looked around his room. D-Bo’s side was messy and disheveled with rap posters lining the walls and clothing littering the top of his bed. But Troy’s side was meticulously neat, almost compulsively so. Everything was in its place. A calendar and a picture of a dog were the only things on his side of the wall. Sydney marveled at how organized he was. Except now as he lay in stark contrast to all of that order, sprawled across his bed on his back with his arms outstretched over his head.
Troy groaned and rolled over on his side.
“I’m never gonna drink again, I swear.” His words were slurred and he was drooling a little. But somehow, he still managed to be kind of cute.
Sydney caught herself grinning at him. Once aware of herself, she snapped out of it and grabbed a bottle of mouthwash from atop his dresser. She poured some into the cap and handed it to Troy.
“Sit up and swish this around in your mouth. I’m sure it tastes like garbage in there right now.”
Troy lay there, willing himself to sit up. It was pointless.
“I can’t.”
He looked like a sick little boy all curled up on his side like that. Sydney shook her head. She pushed some of the debris on D-Bo’s bed over and carved out a seat for herself. Sitting across from him with the mouthwash cap still in one hand, she wondered who Troy really was.
“You got a girlfriend, Troy?” Sydney watched girls flirt with Troy every day. Many of those girls were aggressive. He seemed to revel in it, eating the attention up. But she hadn’t seen him showing any serious interest in any one of them. Sydney wondered if he had a girlfriend back in New York. She did her best to convince herself that she was only mildly curious.
He mumbled something incoherent into his pillow.
“What? I can’t hear you.” Sydney hadn’t realized how badly she wanted the question answered until now.
Troy wiped his face on the pillow and took a deep breath, only to erupt in a loud hiccup. He threw his head back against the pillow in defeat.
“I said”—he hiccupped again loudly—“no. I don’t have a … girlfriend. You want to be my … my girlfriend?”
Sydney shook her head in pity. “You’re so drunk right now.” She laughed. Later she would write in her diary about how relieved she was that Troy didn’t have a girlfriend. She even added hearts at the end. It was so cliché.
“I like you, Sydney.” Troy sat up at last, slowly. He made a weak attempt at reaching for the mouthwash. “Your name sounds like a … like a news anchorwoman. ‘In Canarsie, this is Sydney Taylor, Eyewitness News!’” Troy punctuated his impression with a newsworthy smile, then burst into laughter at his own joke.
Sydney chuckled at him, stood up, and walked over to Troy’s bed. She sat beside him and handed him the cap. He swigged some of the mouthwash and handed the cap back to her. Sydney set it on the dresser, aware that the opened bottle of Scope was the one thing askew among Troy’s perfectly stacked belongings. His neatness was an unexpected surprise. She grabbed a plastic cup from an open pack and handed it to him. He spat out the mouthwash and Sydney was relieved. He still smelled like a distillery, but the stench of his vomit was lessened some.
It took a while before his words began to make any sense. Troy sobered up slowly. While doing so, he went on a tangent, chattering incoherently about high expectations and the black male experience. Sydney listened, piecing together what he was telling her like it was a complicated puzzle.
“It feels so good to be away from home. All that pressure and shit. They tell me to work hard, but for what? They already have their plans for me. What if I have my own plans?” Troy rambled.
“Who are they?” Sydney asked.
“My father.” He hiccupped and shook his head. He lay back flat on his bed. “My uncle.”
“They expect a lot out of you?”
Troy shrugged. “Yeah. But I got my own plans. I’m not about to waste my life being like them.”
Sydney frowned. “What do you mean ‘like them’?”
He hiccupped again. “When society looks at me, they think they got me all figured out. And if I left it up to my family, they’d let me feed right into that stereotype. But I’m not going out like that. That ain’t my story.”
Sydney stared at him, rapt. “What’s your story?” she asked.
Troy shrugged again, held his breath against the hiccups. Finally, after several long moments, he spoke.
“My mother died when I was thirteen years old.” His voice was low and melancholy. “I’m still not over it. I know that sounds crazy—”
“No, it doesn’t.” Sydney’s heart went out to him. “Doesn’t sound crazy at all.”
Troy was grateful for her compassion. “I was always closer to her than I was to my father. My brother Wes was always Dad’s right-hand man, while I spent the most time with my mother. She understood me completely. My pops … he’s cut from a different cloth. All the men in my family are. But my moms could tell from early on that I wasn’t built for the life my father and my uncle wanted me to live. She shielded me from it.”
Sydney listened. She had never heard Troy sound so serious before, so honest. In fact, she realized, Troy had never spoken about his family at all until now. She wondered what he was alluding to as he described his family dynamic. But she dared not interrupt as he continued to pour his heart out.
“Nobody in my family wanted me to come to Howard. They all tried talking me out of it. But I kept hearing my mother’s voice in my head. Telling me that I’m not like them. That I don’t have to take the easy way out. So that’s why I’m here. To prove her right and to prove them wrong.”
“How did she die?” she asked gently.
“Breast cancer,” he said. “It happened quickly. She was diagnosed and then she was gone.” Troy sighed deeply. “Ever since then, my family’s never been the same. My brother started getting in trouble more often. I felt like I was watching him self-destruct
.”
“Is he your younger brother?” Sydney asked.
“He’s five years older than me. He’s more like my uncle, Don. I’m like my dad.”
Sydney smiled. “What are they like?”
Troy shrugged. “My father is smart. Keeps his hands clean. Uncle Don is … different.” He seemed to hesitate a minute. “He’s not like my dad.” He looked at Sydney then, thinking that he had said more than he should have.
“I bet your mother would be proud of you,” she said softly. “You’re here doing what she always knew you were capable of.”
He shrugged. “I miss her.”
Sydney thought about her own mother and how devastating it would be to lose her. Hearing Troy speak so longingly of his mom, Sydney felt guilty for constantly complaining about her own.
“Sometimes, I picture her face in my mind.” Troy had closed his eyes and seemed to be envisioning her. “I still hear her voice in my head sometimes. Every day she told me that I could do anything. She always told me that I think too small. She said I could be the first black president of the United States if I decided to do it. That all I had to do was stop dumbing myself down to make the people around me feel comfortable.”
Tears spilled forth from the corners of his eyes and Sydney felt her heart break for him.
“I used to always try to downplay my … my intelligence, my talents, and all of that. I thought I was being humble so my friends wouldn’t feel overshadowed by me. But she hated that. I never could fool her.” He sniffed. “She was the only person in my life who ever really knew me.” What broke him down even more was the realization that he would never be fully known, fully understood, and accepted in that way by another human being again. He pulled himself together and wiped his face on his nearby bath towel. He was embarrassed now that Sydney had seen him cry. That was the last thing in the world he wanted. As he wiped his face, it occurred to him that this was the first time he had allowed himself to cry in years.
“I’m sorry,” he croaked.
“Don’t be,” Sydney said. “You needed to get that out. Keeping it all bottled up will make you crazy.” She leaned forward and touched his forearm compassionately. “If you ever want to talk about her, I’m here. I’ll listen. Your mother sounds like she was a great person.”