The Lesson

by Cadwell Turnbull

  “You need help?” he blurted out.

  Grams continued climbing the stairs without answering.

  Lee moved her eyes between the two, her stomach tightening. She wanted to head to the car, but she wasn’t sure whose car to go to.

  When Grams made it to the top of the stairs, she handed Lee one of her bags. She wore one of her long dresses, with red and blue floral patterns all over. It looked like a curtain, which it likely had been in a previous life. Grams took one look at Derrick before focusing on Lee’s hat.

  “Take that off.” She didn’t wait for Lee to do it herself. She took it off and stuffed it in her old worn black leather bag, cracked and sagging from years of overwork. “And tuck that shirt in.”

  Lee did as she was told.

  “Grams,” Derrick said. “Can we—”

  Grams glared at him. “Lee, get in the car.” She handed Lee two more bags.

  Lee tried to move toward her grandmother’s car, but Derrick grabbed her by the shoulder.

  “I can give her a ride to school,” he said.

  Grams didn’t even bother to look at him this time. “No need, boy. Lee, do what I told you.”

  Derrick’s grip slackened, and Lee pulled away and headed to the car, still listening to the conversation.

  “Can’t we talk about this like adults?” Derrick was asking.

  Lee stopped and turned toward them to see Grams’ face. Grams’ mouth was all twisted up in anger.

  Grams sucked her teeth, walking toward the car. “Get in, Lee.”

  The car was locked, but Lee didn’t bother saying anything. She wasn’t going to be the one to incite any further rage. She simply waited for her grandmother to notice and let her in. When she finally did, Lee hopped in, stealing one last glance at Derrick’s disappointed face.

  • • •

  Driving along Waterfront on the way to school, Grams talked at Lee about everything from her brother to the light bill. Lee mostly ignored her. She stared up at the early morning sky and the birds flying there. She followed a tern as it flew across Charlotte Amalie Harbor and out to sea. For a moment, she saw the Ynaa ship, quiet as sleep, perched on top of a thin white column, casting its long shadow over Water Island.

  And that was when she thought of her.

  • • •

  Lee and Angela had been friends since third grade. They met at Ulla F. Muller Elementary School at the base of Contant Hill, where the kids wore blue-and-gray uniforms. From the beginning, they were close friends. Sleepovers on the weekends. Inseparable during school hours. Even joined majorettes together, teaching each other to twirl the baton in preparation for the Children’s Parade during Carnival. Angela’s mom got used to calling Lee her other daughter. Lee would smile big, remembering the mother she had lost so long ago.

  As time went on, they stayed in each other’s orbit. Depending on the year, the relationship changed. During eighth grade, when Lee was starting to look good to the boys, her curves filling out, Angela revolved around Lee, hoping some of that magic would rub off on her. By ninth grade, Angela had developed a wit about her and started spending more time doing her hair and putting on lip gloss, and by then the boys were singing a different tune. Lee took her place, a moon around Angela’s world.

  Lee thought it best to stay where she was. She got into sports. She started running all the guys on the basketball court, which pissed them off. “Fish!” they would yell out, and Lee would have to land them flat on their ass before a principal or a hall monitor showed up.

  Angela got into older and older boys as time passed. And not the good boys, either. These boys were up to no good: getting into fights, tucking knives into their socks. While the entire world was getting its mind blown by the prospect of superior alien life, these guys were planting flags on school hallways for their respective motherlands. Savan. Ghettos. Round de’ Field. There was a turf war every week. Angela started doing a dance between two guys from rival spots, and things really got scary.

  “I don’t get it,” Lee said after one of Angela’s beaus got stabbed in the side and had to be taken to Schneider Hospital.

  “Don’t get what?” Angela said, not really paying attention. Her eyes were swollen from crying, her lips quivering.

  “These guys you keep dating.” Lee gave her the look she always gave when she thought Angela was being stupid.

  Angela looked back at her, and for a moment it seemed as if some good sense was waking up inside her. But that lasted only a moment. Angela chupsed her teeth. “Of course you wouldn’t get it.”

  “Okay,” Lee said, looking away as a strange heat erupted from out of nowhere inside her. She found it hard to breathe.

  Tenth grade brought its share of boys. Lee made no protest. By midyear, Angela had shacked up with a senior. She was smitten. Head-over-heels gone for this guy. He had a car and everything. Had a habit of riding into school with his thousand-dollar speakers blasting. He was old, too. He had spent three years in twelfth grade. His name was Woody. The mythos around his name was true, Angela confirmed.

  Lee started seeing Angela a lot less. During that time, Dian, a mutual friend of theirs, was pressing Lee hard, but Lee wasn’t having it. She remained caught in Angela’s orbit, an ever-­diminishing sliver of moonlight in Angela’s growing world.

  • • •

  “You gon’ see the grave tonight?” Jessica asked.

  They were sitting at their usual spot, a row of benches in an open area right next to the soda machines.

  Lee nodded. “Yeah.”

  “When a’you going?” Milton asked, his face made up as if he’d been hit with a bad bellyache.

  “Wait, that’s tonight?” Dian asked.

  Lee gave him the look of death.

  “Yeah,” Jessica answered, rubbing Lee’s back. “I was going to go around six.”

  “Can’t believe it been a year already,” Dian said, trying to save himself. “That shit feels like it just happened.”

  “For fucking real,” Milton agreed.

  “A’you know if Ms. Robin hear you talking like that,” Jessica cut in, “she would flip.”

  “Nobody cares how many flips Ms. Robin does,” Dian said.

  Lee rolled her eyes. It was lunchtime, and Ms. Robin was nowhere in sight—the perfect time for a guy like Dian to be as bad as he wanted to be.

  Students were everywhere, but the noise didn’t seem to register above a whisper for Lee. She was lost within herself. She felt like a piece of rock floating through space, unanchored and alone.

  There was more talking, but Lee couldn’t hear what was being said. Her heartbeat throbbed in her ears. People walked back and forth in front of them. A girl and a boy held hands and laughed. Dian and Milton continued to move their stupid mouths as Jessica rubbed her back. But Lee was there only in body, the rest of her lost in memories.

  • • •

  Two things had happened at the end of Lee’s tenth-grade year.

  The first thing: a boy from her school got himself killed by one of the Ynaa, on Polyberg Hill, just yards from the high school gate.

  Anthony, already known for getting into fights and being suspended frequently, spotted the female Ynaa ahead of him. She was tall with dark mahogany skin, hair almost completely shaven clean. She looked human, of course—they had looked human from the moment they stepped out of their ships. But there was always a way about them that people could feel and understand if they were paying attention: the walk a little too stiff, the facial expressions a little late and too infrequent, the movements a little too slow.

  Anthony, egged on by his friends, decided he would hit the Ynaa over the head with a stick. His friends watched as he ran up behind her, hitting her so hard in the back of the head that the stick splintered.

  He tried to run away, but the Ynaa responded with unusual speed. She turned and hi
t Anthony in the face with the palm of her hand. There was a sound like a branch buried beneath a pile of wet leaves breaking underfoot, as Anthony’s head snapped back past its natural limits. He fell, his head flailing loose as if attached by rubber tubing. Cars screeched to a stop as the whole street’s breath caught. The trees stirred weakly in the breeze as screams rose up from the quiet.

  The second thing: The night before Anthony’s death, Woody was driving Angela home after a night of partying at Duffy’s out in Red Hook. They were driving fast down Waterfront when Woody took his eyes off the road and missed a swerve in the street. The car went flying straight off the dock and into the water.

  Woody freed himself and swam back up to the surface. Angela, however, was unable to unbuckle her seat belt. By the time they pulled the car out of the water, she was dead.

  What made Lee beat Woody’s ass when she saw him in KFC (thus earning her own personal ass-whupping from Grams) was not the fact that they had found alcohol and weed in his system. What had pushed her over the line was that she knew, no matter what anyone told her, no matter what Woody said, that Angela’s precious boyfriend was hitting her when they drove off Waterfront. This she based on previous signs of abuse, specifically the whole week Angela took to wearing sunglasses despite the protests of all their teachers.

  What made it worse was that Anthony’s death, something Lee couldn’t possibly have cared less about, had completely overshadowed Angela’s accident. People took to the streets in protests. Anthony’s mom was all over the local news, tears streaming down her face, begging for justice for her son. The governor put out letters in the Daily News, urging people to calm down while they made arrangements to mitigate the suffering of Anthony’s family.

  Mera, the alien ambassador, apologized for the “unfortunate chain of events,” explaining that her people had a cultural tendency to respond with extreme violence when threatened. “This is not an excuse,” she said, “but an explanation.” Grams and Derrick argued every day because of Derrick’s decision to work for said ambassador, neither of them budging an inch. The whole island echoed Grams’ animosity. They began calling him “traitor.”

  And as all this happened, as people marched and cried and apologized and fought and prayed for the swift death of all Ynaa everywhere in the universe, Lee locked herself in her room, playing the scene over and over in her mind. Angela with her lungs on fire. Angela clawing at her seat belt. Angela screaming but not making a sound, the water bubbling out from her mouth as she struggled to free herself. Angela’s eyes—as her heart stopped, as the nerve endings in her brain expelled their final burst—staring out into the dark. No light. No savior. No moon in her sky.

  • • •

  After school, Lee got a call from Grams.

  “I coming to get you, so stay at school.”

  Lee assumed this had something to do with preventing her from getting a ride with Derrick. “Grams, I going to Gela’s grave today. I was going to get a ride home from Jessica.”

  Grams was quiet for a moment. “I need you home with me. I not feeling good.”

  “Today’s the anniversary, Grams.”

  “I need you. Stay at school. I will be there soon.” She hung up.

  Lee was fuming, of course, but also not surprised. This was the kind of shit she expected from Grams. And though Lee was a second daughter to Angela’s mom, that same fondness, that same unconditional love, had not been present between Angela and Grams. Grams had never approved of Angela. “She’s rude,” she would say. And when Angela got out of hand with the boys and the misbehavior at school, Grams’ dislike grew boundless. In their ninth-grade year, Grams came home and caught Angela smoking a blunt on her porch, and whatever hope remained was dashed away in that instant.

  Naturally, when Lee came to her crying, Grams gave her granddaughter some semblance of compassion. At the funeral, she hugged Lee the whole time. “It’s going to be all right,” she kept saying. “She’s in heaven.” Lee buried her distrust of those words. When she thought of heaven, all she could see now was spaceships. And even worse, she doubted that her grandmother thought heaven was the place Angela would go.

  As if to confirm Lee’s suspicions, Grams’ sympathy for Angela soon evaporated. Before long, Lee’s mourning became an annoyance. Five months after Angela’s accident, Grams opened the door to Lee’s room and stood there staring at her.

  “You think you the only one ever lost somebody?”

  Lee knew who Grams was talking about. Her son, Lee’s father. And her husband, Lee’s grandfather. Lee didn’t bother to mention that she had lost them, too. “Leave me alone,” Lee said, but Grams was already walking back down the hall to the living room. She had said all that she had to say.

  Grams arrived at school fifteen minutes after Lee received the call to stay put. Lee could have pleaded, but pride held back the words. When they reached home, Grams sent Lee out into the yard to pick some lemongrass, to make bush tea. As she escaped into the yard, Lee cursed until the heat welling up inside her made her dizzy.

  The yard was choked with dense bush in every direction. She had to push her way through to reach the lemongrass that grew wild next to a kasha bush. When she tried to rip some lemongrass out, her hand got cut on one of the thin, sharp kasha thorns.

  “Shit!” Lee yelled. “I hate these fucking things.”

  “You okay, girl?” said someone. A woman, but not Grams. Or Aubrey. A light-skinned woman with curly hair stood on the upstairs porch—Aubrey’s porch—staring down at her.

  Lee stood there for a second, frozen.

  “You were talking to yourself a second ago. Now you got nothing to say?”

  Lee smiled, preparing her most polite self, grateful it was this woman and not her grandmother who had heard her cursing. “Sorry. I didn’t see you there.”

  “No worries.”

  Lee’s hand bled. She brought her hand to her lips and sucked at the blood. Then she realized what she was doing and stopped.

  “I do that, too,” the woman said, smiling. “You need a bandage or something. I’m sure Aubrey has some in the house.”

  “No. I’ll get one when I go back inside.”

  The woman didn’t say anything. She just stood there smiling, arms leaning on the porch railing.

  Lee turned back to the lemongrass. This time, she managed to pull it right out without a problem. Derrick used to cut the kasha away from Grams’ lemongrass. It would always come back after a month. Now Lee would have to do it.

  Lee heard the sliding door open upstairs, and for a second, she thought the woman had gone back inside. Then she heard Aubrey’s voice.

  “Hey, what you doing out here?” Aubrey asked.

  “Nothing, just talking to your neighbor’s granddaughter,” said the woman.

  Lee turned just in time to see the woman kiss Aubrey on the cheek. Aubrey pulled back a little. She touched the woman on the arm, and the woman turned to look at Lee. Aubrey leaned on the railing, putting some space between them.

  “Oh,” said Aubrey. “I didn’t know you’d be home so early.”

  “Grandma is feeling sick, so she came and picked me up right after school.”

  “You eat that passion fruit yet?”

  The fruit was still in Lee’s bag. She had forgotten all about it. “No. But I will when I get back inside.”

  “I’m Alice,” said the woman, a little too loudly.

  “She’s a good friend,” Aubrey said.

  Lee smiled. Alice looked quickly over at Aubrey and then back at Lee. “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “A beautiful age. You must be driving the guys crazy.”

  “No, not really.”

  “We won’t keep you,” Aubrey said, touching Alice’s arm again, quick and gentle. It reminded Lee of the way Aubrey had touched her shoulder that morning.

 
“Okay, okay,” Alice said. “Get that cut bandaged up,” she said to Lee. And they both went back inside.

  Lee stood there staring up at the porch for a few seconds. Then she remembered Grams. She looked at the bunch of lemongrass in her hand. More than enough. She went back inside.

  When Lee came in, she threw the lemongrass onto the counter before heading to the medicine cabinet for Band-Aids. After covering up the slice the kasha had given her, Lee returned to the kitchen, where she slammed some pots around before finding the right one and made her grandmother the bush tea, letting the tea leaves and lemongrass sit in the pot as the water boiled.

  “Come rub me down,” her grandmother said.

  Lee stomped from the kitchen to the bathroom for the vapor rub and then to the living room, where her grandmother had kicked up on the couch in front of the TV.

  Grams moaned in relief as Lee rubbed the overwhelmingly minty goop all over her chest. The icy burn filled her nostrils. As her grandmother groaned, Lee rolled her eyes, pushing back every wave of anger that threatened to rush forth into the world.

  She brought the tea, and Grams drank it down with the loudest slurps known to man before falling asleep on the couch. When Grams started to snore like a motorbike revving up, Lee knew that she was out cold.

  The news played on the TV. The Ynaa had graciously given another piece of valuable technology: a solar cell 40 percent more efficient than the one humans currently possessed. This particular program did not sing praises. Some conservative talk-show host went on about how these supposed gifts were going to be used somehow to destroy everyone. He pointed to the fact that there were now over a dozen cases of contact violence as proof that the Ynaa meant to kill them all, proclaiming, “These ‘gifts’ are just to fatten us up for the slaughter.”

  Lee sat across from her grandmother, in an old leather chair, its arms cracked open to reveal the yellow flesh underneath. She dragged her fingers along the cracks, gently lifting the hard skin occasionally and pulling away little pieces of the hard brown leather. After about fifteen minutes of sitting and trying to figure out how one could ever fatten up a human for slaughter using solar technology, a thought came to her.