by Liara Tamani
Cole doesn’t answer me. He’s still hugging Mom. Cole loves hugs—good-morning hugs . . . good-night hugs . . . happy-to-meet-you hugs . . . happy-to-see-you (even though I just saw you five minutes ago) hugs . . . sorry-you-had-to-spend-the-last-three-hours-detangling-your-hair hugs . . . sorry-you-spilled-water-all-over-your-magazine hugs. He lets go of Mom but still doesn’t answer me. He’s staring at her.
Mom walks over to me, and Daddy backs up toward the window. He doesn’t speak to Mom and Mom doesn’t speak to him. Mom’s eyes are red and puffy, like she’s been crying for a long time. Clearly, they’ve been fighting.
Mom pinches my big toe, poking up from underneath the thin hospital bedding, and briefly wiggles it around. Then she pats my left leg—shin, knee, thigh—as she walks closer to the head of the bed. “Gallbladder attack, huh?” she says. It’s crazy; even with puffy eyes and no makeup, she’s still beautiful.
“That’s what they tell me,” I say, staring at her. It’s weird. She’s my mom and I see her every day, but her beauty still strikes me all the time. She’s tall and slim and has a teeny-weeny ’fro that makes her face, with its high cheekbones and thick lips and dark glowing skin, pop . . . even on what seems to be a sad, shitty day.
“Must be hereditary. I had to get mine removed in my late twenties.”
“For real?” I say, and a forgotten memory of me running my fingers over a scar on her stomach rushes to the front of my brain. I was super young, probably like five.
“Yep, had a gallbladder attack when I was in New Orleans, furniture shopping for a client. Passed out in one of my favorite little antique shops. Had to get rushed to the hospital just like you, you know.”
“No, we don’t know. Why didn’t you ever tell us about this?” Cole asks, but it sounds more like an accusation than a question. He’s clearly still worried about Mom. The boy needs to relax.
Mom shrugs. “I don’t know. Guess it never crossed my mind.”
“While you’re telling things, would you be so kind as to tell everyone what you decided today?” Daddy says in his lawyer voice. He goes from leaning on the windowsill to standing up straight, like he’s readying himself to approach the witness. I hate when his lawyer side comes out . . . always acting like someone’s on trial. But this is not the courtroom. We are not his clients. And Mom is not on the witness stand. He can save the drama for work.
Mom ignores him, not even turning around to look at him. When she’s pissed, she doesn’t curse or shout. She ignores.
And Daddy hates it. “Barbara, please answer the question.” Now he’s standing with his hands behind his back, in serious lawyer mode.
She turns around and gives him a look. “Derek, this is not the time or the place.”
Cole walks around Mom and stands by the head of my bed. Mom and Daddy never fight like this in front of us. They save their fights for behind bedroom and car doors, mostly about Mom working so much.
I wonder if this is about her opening up that new boutique. It’s going to be similar to the one already attached to her interior design offices, only bigger. It’s been in the works for a while, but she’s been waiting on the right time to tell Daddy. Cole doesn’t know about it, either. Can’t tell him anything unless you want the whole world to know.
“Barbara, you’re the one who wants this. So go ahead and tell them.” His emotions are starting to get the best of him and he’s falling out of lawyer mode.
“For fuck’s sake, can somebody please tell us what’s going on,” Cole exclaims, his voice super high and shaking all over the place.
No one corrects Cole about his language. Mom and Daddy are too busy staring each other down.
The door swings open. “Now that the whole gang is here,” Dr. Williams says, walking in, tossing her long gray locs over her shoulder. But she doesn’t finish her sentence. She’s noticing the tension in the room, and we’re all noticing her notice the tension in the room. Can’t get any more awkward. She looks down at her clipboard through her rectangular, red-framed glasses like she’s reading something (she knows she’s not reading anything) and looks back up.
Then she starts talking about the surgery. Yes, the surgery. That’s what she’s here to discuss—what the laparoscopic cholecystectomy (gallbladder removal surgery) will involve.
Four tiny incisions around my belly button.
A tiny video camera, which she will insert into my abdomen via one of the incisions.
A video monitor (not tiny), which will display the inside of my abdomen via the camera.
Surgical tools, which she will use to remove my gallbladder from my abdomen while watching the monitor.
Insane, right? But apparently it’s no big deal. I should be able to leave the hospital a few hours after surgery. And I’ll only take about two weeks to recover.
Daddy brings up the state championship, the fact that it’s only five weeks away.
Mom and I trade glances.
Cole is staring at the TV, high up in the corner of the room, looking like he’s about to cry.
Daddy wants to schedule the surgery for this Monday, as in the day after tomorrow.
The doctor brings up the necessary presurgery lab work.
Mom brings up school.
The surgery will be scheduled for this Friday.
I’m free to go. In the meantime, if I start feeling another attack coming on, I need to find somewhere to lie down so I don’t hurt myself fainting. I was lucky this time.
REX
First thing I do when I get on the bus is head straight to the back. Doubt anyone wants to sit next to me. But to be safe, I take the very last seat, toss my backpack in the one across from me, put my headphones on, and arrange my face to match the mood I should be in.
Not only did Coach give us (really me) a thirty-minute locker-room speech about the need to focus, he made everybody make ten free throws in a row before we could get on the bus to go home. Mind you, it’s a Saturday night, i.e., date night, and it’s still gonna take us another forty-five minutes to get all the way back out to the boonies. Phones have been blowing up. Nya has already texted me twice.
But I’m not worried about any of that. All I want is some private time with Carli. I want to sit back, with no eyes over my shoulders, and find her on IG to make sure she’s okay. Scroll through her pictures and stare at her face.
Josh, our backup small forward, walks up the aisle and eyes the seat across from me that I’ve clearly already claimed with my backpack.
No music playing yet, but I slide the left side of my headphones above my ear. “Nah, that’s me,” I tell him.
“Well, you’re sitting over there. So which one is it?” he asks, hate smeared across his round, red-cheeked face. Dude stays trying to start some shit. He can’t stand me because I took his starting position when I moved out here this year.
It’s too bad for Josh. Heard he’s been praying for a letter from Michigan State. But graduating this year with the playing time he’s been getting, he’ll be lucky if he gets to play at the YMCA. Jokes, but he probably won’t be playing D1.
But what am I supposed to do? I have goals, too. Lofty-ass goals at that. Your boy is trying to be one-and-done.
“Dude, you got all these seats,” I say, floating my extended arm across the width of the rumbling bus. All I need to add is presentiiiing. Thirteen rows, twelve players, two coaches who always share the first row, and one trainer. Josh was the last one to get on the bus. He’d better find the trainer and double up with him.
“But what if I really want that seat?” Josh says with a hard, directed nod of his big head.
A few players look back to see what’s going on.
“You wanna sit beside me that bad, huh?”
Josh shoves his short, curly bangs away from his face. “Not as bad as I wanna kick your ass.”
All I can do is laugh. This fool must think that because he has the body of a linebacker and I’m on the lean side that he could take me. Clearly, he doesn’t know me
. He doesn’t know about all the scraps I’ve gotten into roaming the streets as a kid in my old neighborhood.
Josh walks off, throwing a weak “asshole” over his shoulder, and settles into a row toward the middle of the bus. The lights lower and the grumbling bus starts rolling.
Finally. I slide my left headphone back on, find Khalid in Spotify, and snuggle up with Carli.
Ten minutes later, thanks to her brother’s IG, I know Carli Renée Alexander is more than okay. Man, let me tell you. She’s perfect. And she’s in the hospital—not dead. It’s not like I really thought she was dead or anything, but it’s good to know she’s alive and well. And I’m playing a game at her school in a week! Doubt she’ll be there with the surgery and everything, but her brother is on the JV team, which plays right before our game. So I can give my number to him.
Twenty minutes later and I’m still digging. I’m not one of those crazy stalker dudes or anything. I just can’t stop looking for new pictures of her face. She has this cute little button nose, sprinkled with freckles, and these dark brown eyes that pop out of her pale brown skin and take hold of me.
Man, I can’t even tell you what I feel when I look at her face. It’s better than stepping into an empty gym before the sun comes up. Better than walking through the pines after it rains and having a stray drop land on my nose. Better than thumbing through Mom’s old poetry books, finding words I can feel. Or listening to her old records. Or staring at her old beetle collection. Looking at Carli’s face, it’s like I get lost to some kind of force. Sounds stupid, I know, but I’ve never felt anything like it before. Anything close.
I look up to grab a Snickers bar out of my duffel bag and notice most of the team crowded around someone’s seat toward the middle of the bus. I slide my headphones off and hear people cracking up.
“It must’ve been that big-ass afro,” someone says in a low voice.
“He likes big ’fros and he cannot lie,” someone else says in the rhythm of that old Sir Mix-a-Lot song.
Everyone laughs.
I think about Carli’s big red hair, about Nya’s natural puff. A knot forms in my chest and I stand up.
“Oh my gosh, Becky, look at her ’fro. It is so big. She looks like one of Rex’s girlfriends,” someone continues in the Valley girl accent from the song.
Everybody busts out laughing again.
More knots, pounding harder. It’s not like it’s the first time I’ve overheard my new teammates talking about me. I usually ignore it. But them bringing Carli and Nya into it is different. It’s like all the air around me, the engine rumbling beneath me, everything inside me is begging me to shut it down.
As I walk down the aisle, I see a light coming from a seat. Closer, and I peep over our shooting guard’s shoulder and see Carli passing out in my arms on Josh’s phone..
Illuminated faces all around and I swear I want to knock the laughs right out of their mouths. Our point guard, Danny, kneeling on the seat in front of Josh, is laughing so hard he’s in tears. Out of everyone, I thought he could’ve been my friend.
Leo, our backup point guard, sees me and elbows Danny. Danny looks up at me guiltily, turns around, and sits down.
Josh (of course it’s Josh) continues in his Valley girl voice. “I can’t believe it’s just so round . . . it’s like out there. I mean gross. Look, she’s just so . . . black.”
That does it. I reach over the back of the seat and snatch the phone out of his hand. “Say something else about my girl and your phone is as good as gone.”
Someone says, “Oh shit,” and everyone ducks off back to their seats.
Wait, did I just call Carli “my girl”?
The hard pounding in my chest answers with a thousand pissed-off yeses.
Josh stands up. “Give me back my phone!” he whines like he’s five years old.
And my five-year-old self knows exactly how to respond. “What phone?” I ask, and slide it into my right warm-up pocket.
“What’s the big deal? I wasn’t even talking about Nya. I was talking about that girl who passed out. It’s not like you know that stupid girl.”
The pounding in my chest shoots through the top of my head, and I can feel the last bit of my sense leaving me. I don’t try to stop it. “So first you want to make fun of her hair and now you want to call her stupid?” I yell. “Oh, you gon’ learn today!” I march back to my seat, feeling Josh close behind me. When I get there, I squeeze the latches on the window and pull it down—cold air rushing in.
“You better stop playing, Rex! Give me back my phone!”
The cold air slapping me in the face gives me a rare glimpse of my anger. He’s like the homie from way-back-when who always has my back but chronically takes shit too far. But what am I supposed to do now? Back down from Josh? Nah. I grab his phone out of my pocket and hold it out of the window.
Everyone gasps. They’re all turned around, kneeling on their seats, staring at who they think they see. The asshole who acts like he’s too good to talk to anybody or hang with anybody. But it’s not even like that. Not even close.
“What the hell is going on back there?” Coach Bell finally gets up and yells.
Everyone sits down and faces forward in their seats.
It takes a lot for Coach to intervene on the bus. It’s the one place he completely removes himself. In the name of team bonding, the one place we get to make up our own rules, settle our own disputes.
“Rex is trying to throw my phone out of the window!” Josh answers, his five-year-old self back in full effect.
My five-year-old self wants to yell Snitch! But I don’t let him, not in front of Coach.
“Have you lost your mind?” Coach shouts down the aisle. “Give Josh his phone back.”
I pull my arm back in and toss the phone on the seat.
Josh grabs it and storms off.
“Rex, do I need to treat you like you’re my child and make you come sit up here with me?” Coach yells.
A simple rhetorical question, but it shoots deep, pricking the place I’m always pushing further down inside of me. It’s just that the words my child make me want to answer yes. I swear I’m so pathetic.
Where It Hurts
CARLI
When I get home, Cole’s in my room, sitting on my floor, still in his basketball warm-ups. He’s leaning against my bed, surrounded by a ton of old photos. Him and Daddy left the hospital right after the doctor left the room. Mom and I had to wait over an hour for my discharge papers. Looks like Cole’s been in here the whole time.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey,” he replies, but doesn’t look up from a photo he’s holding.
I head to my desk, where I remember tacking up the fact about ancient kisses, and look for it underneath a magazine clipping of a guitarfish. Not there. A charcoal sketch of Mom doing a backbend. Nope. A card of a young girl—eyes closed, hugging a book to her chest, with castles and dinosaurs and ships and cities and birds and trees in her curly afro. Not there, either.
“We have to choose,” Cole says.
I look over at him, and his eyes are red. He’s definitely been crying. But Cole cries at least once every couple of weeks, so I’m not too worried. Still, I stop my search after one last look under a crayon picture of a dark sea.
Then I tiptoe around all of Cole’s photos to the corner of the room where my bed is.
“We have to choose,” he repeats, and hands me a picture as I climb onto my bed.
I cross my legs and look down at the photo. I’ve never seen it before but remember Cole taking it. We were on the suspension bridge at the Bayou Bend Gardens a few years ago. While Mom, Daddy, and I waited in the middle of the bridge, Cole pushed the timer on the camera he’d set up and ran to get in place.
“Cute,” I say, looking at Daddy’s long arm draped around Mom and my head in the crux of Cole’s elbow, one leg up in the air like I’m about to fall over. Real smiles all around. I hand it back to him.
“Did you hear what I
said? We have to choose.” He rips the photo in half—Mom and I on one side, him and Daddy on the other.
“Really, Cole?” I swear he can’t get any more dramatic. “You might as well give it to me now.” I scan my walls for the perfect place to fit the photo. There, I think, spotting the winged Greek goddess, Solange of Samothrace (I gave the Nike sculpture Solange’s head, and in my mind, she thanked me), right above my closet. The Bayou Bend Gardens has a cool collection of Greek goddess statues. The picture will feel at home there.
“Listen,” he says, and places the half of the picture with him and Daddy down beside his long, outstretched legs. “Dad’s moving out.”
The words come at me so straight it’s hard to register them. “Wait. What?”
Then he places the half with Mom and me on the other side of his legs. “They’re getting divorced.”
“Huh?” I wish he would slow down. He’s not making any sense.
Cole turns to face me. “Look, Mom and Dad are getting divorced, and we have to choose who we want to live with.”
My insides start plummeting. I feel like a baby fish who just got dropped out of a plane. A baby fish who’s flapping her fins in foreign air, trying to stay afloat, but keeps falling faster and faster. I read about it in National Geographic last night. About how some states repopulate their lakes by farming fish until they reach a certain age and then they release them into the wild by dropping them out of planes. After hitting the water, 90 percent of them survive. But I don’t know if I’ll survive. I can’t take this new reality Cole is dumping me into. “Will you wait a second!”
But Cole’s not listening. “If we choose Dad, we go to a new school. He’s not sure where yet, but somewhere closer to his job.” His voice is so even, so unemotional, like he’s not even talking about our life, our parents, our family. “We’ll get to see the parent we don’t choose every other weekend.”
“This is our life you’re talking about!” I yell. Something breaks behind my eyes, and tears rage down my face. Strange, warm tears. It’s been so long since I’ve felt them.